No Day at the Beach

Three classes. An internship that'll glow on your resume. Every Friday, a field trip — airplane rides, boat rides, bird watching. Ten minutes from the beach.

If it sounds like the college you always dreamed of, then before you run out and sign up, you might want to know that to several upperclassmen, this is one description of the toughest semester they had at Carolina.

"I definitely thought I'd see the beach more than I did," Denise Woodward said. "And I definitely didn't think I'd be taking my books every time I went to the beach."

But let's be real — it's not an autumn spent on the 10th floor of Morrison and in the basements of Venable Hall and the Undergraduate Library, either.

To a student interested in environmental science or policy, it could be a career springboard like nothing to be found in Chapel Hill. To an isolated area of North Carolina, it also is a curious Carolina presence in a small town with connections to the state university that have faded since the days when Frederick Koch '33 and Paul Green '21 brought The Lost Colony to Roanoke Island.

The Albemarle Ecological Field Site, an extension of the four-year-old Carolina Environmental Program, is one of the new faces of undergraduate study at the University. Technically, it's part of UNC's Study Abroad program, although it's only four hours away in Manteo, just inland from the Outer Banks on the state's northern coast.

The 10 students sleep, eat, study and socialize together, and there's no one else on Roanoke Island who does what they do. Part of the faculty is in residence, part commutes weekly, and guest lecturers drop in from all over the Coastal Plain.

When not in class, the students are immersed in the real, often wild world of coastal ecology. Woodward, a junior from Delaware who'd never eaten an oyster, studied oyster gardening as a solution to depleted oyster beds in the sounds and wetlands. Senior Sennai Habtes researched the impact of tourism on the ecology and economy of the coast. Junior Joany Snider had the decidedly less glamorous job of working with the town of Nags Head on ways to improve the performance of a new approach to septic systems.

The Banks area can be slow to accept outsiders poking around in the ways of the water people, and college students sometimes are held suspect by surf fisherman who vie for space with nesting turtles and by land developers who covet maritime forests.

In fall 2002, the second year of the Albemarle program, the Carolina students were conspicuous in Manteo. As they worked and socialized, they met people on different sides of sensitive issues, and coffee shop proprietors got to know them. The local newspaper covered the students' intern projects in a feature story each week. There was a mutual curiosity. When the class returned in February to give public reports on their projects, about 70 people showed up--a sizeable crowd on Roanoke.

In the Great Dismal
It's one week until Thanksgiving and the semester's pressure is building — projects to wrap up, reports due, exams looming — much as it does back home on campus. Thursday was class day: a 1 p.m. course in the literature and history of the North Carolina sound country, followed by an environmental policy class, and after supper, an ecology and conservation biology course. The guest lecturer for the policy class drove from Elizabeth City; the biology course was taught by an associate professor who alternates with his teaching assistant in the eight-hour weekly commute from Chapel Hill.

But Friday is a long step back from the books. A morning's drive transports the students into a vast stretch of wetland on the border with Virginia.

There's no reason the Great Dismal Swamp shouldn't look about the same as it did when the first English-speaking settlers tiptoed around it. Its unspoiled wildness makes it inviting to visit, yet forbidding to anyone with ideas of molding it to human utility.

The class has been reading Great Dismal by Bland Simpson '70, and today students will see what Simpson meant when he wrote that where nature makes all the rules, "one must return to the same place again and again if one would see into the heart of the matter, or even come close." On this Friday, they will get a taste.

It's a little more than three miles of paddling along the feeder ditch, one of a matrix of canals that make parts of the swamp accessible, to the place Simpson wants the class to see. Even in late November, the swamp seems very much alive, and the banks of the ditch expose its history — ancient oyster beds left over from the time when all this was under the sea.

The ditch opens eventually into a wonderland of water-bound cypress and juniper, the gateway into a sort of centerpiece for the Great Dismal, Lake Drummond. The 2001 AEFS class had glided out into dark, shallow water as calm as a bathtub. Today the wind has whipped up enough chop to suggest that shallow-draft boaters who want to stay dry might take just a quick look and beat it back to the ditch.

On dry land at the locks that separate the ditch and the lake, Simpson, director of the English department's creative writing program, gathers the students and tries to convey an appreciation of the waters and forests he has explored since just after he graduated from Carolina. The literary element of the program is intended to overlay the science and the ecological issues with a sense of time and place.

The Nansemond Indians made their home in the swamp in the early 1600s. They thrived off land rich for farming and bountiful to the hunter; later, timber harvesters thrived, too. Outlaws found it a great place to hide. It is at once a desert and a land of plenty, which has much to say about the evolution of an ecosystem. The children and grandchildren of the Great Dismal old-timers can't hunt and trap there anymore because the area is preserved now.

"I think, in broadest terms, what we're doing is putting students at the center of the initial English awareness and exploration of the then-New World, the place from which our first portraits of North America in the English language emanated, and asking them to consider in both scientific and cultural ways what's happened in the intervening 400-plus years, and what's happening today," Simpson wrote after the first year of the AEFS.

"Albeit with considerably less effort and covering considerably more ground, the students are fanning out weekly to a variety of environments and historical sites around the sound country, as did Lane and the original pre-Lost Colony explorers. It's hardly just an exercise in history or nostalgia, either, what with issues involving inlet policy, beach 'renourishment,' and liquid natural gas shipping on the coast all up in the air at this very moment.

"I don't want to overstress the idea of historical resonance — some feel it much more than others -- but there is something very symbolically powerful about sending our own colony, some of our best and brightest, out to the place where it all began and asking them to see it anew."

All in the family
Kellogg House feels like home, like a tiny dorm where you know everybody intimately, where the stuff in the refrigerator is common property, and you park in the driveway without any permit. The AEFS students call their professors William, Seth and Brian. They take all their classes in the big living room. They bring in food, and they put their feet on the furniture, or they lie flat on the floor. But the one who comes here unprepared for class cannot hide — everybody knows it.

Actually, they don't live here. They bunk a few blocks away in a dorm built for the Lost Colony cast to use in the summer. AEFS Director William Stott '98 (PhD), who teaches the lit course; and Bryan Giezma '99 (JD), who teaches the policy class, live in Kellogg House. The big house, which also has overnight room for guest lecturers, is leased by the University from Thomas White Jr. '60, the nephew of Martin Kellogg '29, who was one of the first lawyers to open a practice on the island.

The students are majoring in environmental studies or environmental science, both only four-year-old degree programs at Carolina; or geography. They applied for the Albemarle program in winter 2002, and the class was picked that March.

Besides UNC support, the program receives $10,000 a year from the Burch Field Research Seminars, part of the fellowship program set up in 1993 by Lucius Burch III '63. The rest of the cost is borne by the students; for in-state students, tuition and fees are $3,200 — more than twice what they would pay for a Chapel Hill semester; for an out-of-state student, that's actually less than the on-campus rate.

The program is structured around a "capstone" research project that all environmental majors complete. In the AEFS, this is an interdisciplinary examination of water resources in the region through individual internships.

Stott said he and other faculty worked to head off a negative reaction to a college student invasion of Roanoke Island by asking local agencies where student placements would yield the most value. "We've been really careful that we not be perceived as the cocky Chapel Hill people coming in here," he said. "We connected with ongoing research."

Stott also set up a service element for the community. Every Monday, he brought in a speaker — historians, scientists and business people — for a public lecture.

The students spent each Monday and Wednesday working their internships. Tuesdays and Thursdays were class days. On Fridays, they fished on Hatteras Island, sampled the isolation of the abandoned Portsmouth Village, and roamed maritime forests at Nags Head Woods. They continuously compared the work from the internships, and at the semester's end they collaborated on the capstone report. They were graded with the University's standards in the three courses, were required to attend the Monday speakers series, were evaluated on the writing of their case studies, and got a pass/fail designation for their internships — 17 hours credit in all.

The program was designed to anticipate potential problems for 10 students living and working so closely together, isolated from everything they were used to at Carolina. For a week in Chapel Hill and for the first week in Manteo, they took seminars in group dynamics, professional behavior, conflict resolution, and writing.

"I was really surprised — people really got along well with each other," said senior Marirose Pratt. "Also sometimes it felt like there was no way to escape the family."

Seth Reice, an associate professor of biology, taught the ecology and conservation course. He also camped out with the students at Ocracoke and swam with them in the ocean. "I'm having a closeness to these students that in all my years I've almost never had with students," he said.

Several of those who have been through it say they were inspired in ways they never would have been in Chapel Hill classrooms. Senior Staci Shaut steered away from laboratory research and toward environmental education, teaching at a children's camp in the Florida Keys. Jason Kemp, a senior and Morehead Scholar, was so drawn to the oral histories he did with charter boat captains that he set out last summer to be a mate on a boat. After Joany Snider produced an educational program for elementary school students on the town septic project, a town official asked if she could stay on after the semester ended.

Wary of a 'vacation'
William Stott finished up the last meeting of his literature class, and as the AEFS students turned their attention to environmental policy, he threw a kayak on top of the car.

"Anybody who thinks this was a semester tanning and surfing at the beach, you ask any of them," he said. "This was a very bright group, and they were squealing. They were pushing the envelope."

These days, more students don't want confinement in Chapel Hill for four years. They want a taste of what's out there in the fields they're studying. Stott is wary of the Albemarle program being perceived the way some Study Abroad programs have been — as a vacation in an appealing place.

He added a third course in the program's second year, believing the policy component was important to students who were headed in that direction rather than toward pure science.

As he dropped a paddle into the black water of Milltail Creek, he said he was starting to wonder. The program has turned out to be more rigorous than anticipated. He also doesn't want to scare people off. The program is not yet in high demand. Eight students were accepted for fall 2003; they are the only ones who applied.

Although he believes the Albemarle program is on solid ground, he's tinkering with the curriculum. He is considering either backing off course work to give students more time with the internships or possibly adding an oceanography course and cutting back some course work to a half-semester format. He kept the three courses for this fall.

Albemarle is one of five field sites of the Carolina Environmental Program. Others concentrate on mountain biodiversity conservation at Highlands; marine science in a program starting this fall at Morehead City; and environmental issues in other parts of the world in a summer program in Salzburg, Austria; and a 6 1Ž2-month program in Bangkok.

They all operate on the same basic model. But Stott has grander plans for northeastern North Carolina, which often is synonymous with "underserved" in education and economic fruits. He envisions AEFS as the start of a broader intellectual center for the northeastern coast, one in which science will not overshadow the humanities.

"What I see is a place where artists, policy people, scientists, writers can share their work. I think it's very important that the arts have a place in the study of the coast — expressive activity as well as analytic activity." Stott thinks it's vital that anything the University spawns in one place have clear connections to other maritime research organizations along the coast. He's open to the idea that non-Carolina students could be admitted to the Albemarle program — say, an Elizabeth City State University student.

For its part, the University, he says, will have to commit to a level of support that will entice tenure-track faculty and graduate and professional students.

"For an assistant professor chasing tenure," he said, "this is a waste of time."

But such ventures are nurtured by those who are dazzled by what's in the swamps and the backwoods, and find the questions there worth exploring — things more important than tenure.

Milltail Creek empties into Sawyer's Lake, named for the once-thriving timber industry of nearby Buffalo City. On this pre-winter day the lake was quiet, and the call of the pileated woodpecker was as clear as the sky. So, too, at intervals, was the shriek of jet fighters practicing overhead.

In this watery corner of the world, tourism is up, fishing is so-so, and Buffalo City is barely on the map. But nothing stays the same for long.

Story by: David E. Brown '75

Photos by: Brian Naess '01

(originally printed in the Carolina Alumni Review September/October 2003)

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