Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

I didn’t realize I’d timed my trip to Carolina Beach to coincide with a king tide, one of those higher-than-usual tides not churned up by a storm but caused by the pull of the moon. That evening, I stood at the window and watched the ocean creep over the dunes and slide across the sand, spilling onto Canal Street like it knew the way.

The water came without fuss. No crashing waves, no drama. Just this slow, steady tide claiming ground, inch by inch. Before long, the road outside the house was closed. People who’d parked too close shuffled out in their pajamas to move their cars. I went out, too, wading ankle-deep through the water, the boundary between ocean and land erased.

The ocean is always in motion, either arriving or leaving, and both matter.

Low tide is my favorite. That’s when the sea draws back and shows what it’s been holding — moon snails and shark eye shells; pieces of driftwood; ghost crabs, finally visible, scuttling from their pinhole tunnels. The beach stretches wide and flat, packed down and firm underfoot, perfect for walking. For building castles.

At high tide, the waves push harder, the surf grows louder, fizzing with foam that runs over your feet and up the beach, sending the plovers and sanderlings skittering in some choreography they’ve practiced a thousand times before. Reminding us to move, to make room.

Still, we build our castles. We scoop and shape and pat the sand into towers and trenches, with little plastic buckets and our bare hands, knowing full well that the ocean will return. And yet, when the tide rolls in and smooths it all away, it doesn’t feel like a loss but a marvel. A reset. A clean slate.

At the beach, we live between two forces: the pull of the moon and the ocean’s response. Between them, we learn when to stay and when to let go. Even the turtles know. They follow the moon ashore in the dark, crawling up onto the sand the way they’ve done for millennia to bury something fragile, to leave something precious behind.

Carolina Beach has weathered its own tides. The boardwalk has been rebuilt; the pier, beloved, has faced decades of storms. Just up the road in Wrightsville Beach, the Lumina Pavilion once lit up summer nights, its dance floor glimmering under the stars, couples swinging to big band sounds as waves lapped against the pilings of Crystal Pier. And in 1954, on the hour of the high tide, under a full moon, Hurricane Hazel arrived and swept the coastline nearly clean.

But not forever.

The tides keep coming. They ask us to pay attention, and so we do. We check the charts. We time our walks. We know when to hunt for shells and when to head for shelter. When to sit still and when to move our chairs. When to let the sea wash over everything, carry off what it will — and eventually make its way back.

And maybe this is why we return, too, year after year, to our favorite spot, to our stretch of North Carolina sand, not just for the sun or the salt air or the peel-and-eat shrimp from the tiki bar at the end of the pier, but for the comfort of constancy. For the way the tide reminds us that what ebbs will flow. That what is washed away may come again.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief