Jeri Rowe

As the sun begins to set, the fading light wraps the city’s skyline in shadow. The moon appears, the stars blink above center field, and Chris Ivy takes it all in from the best seat in the house, his elevated cocoon of wood and steel behind left-center field. “It’s a gift that no one knows about,” he tells me.

Charlie Smith loves what he sees. So do his two older sisters, McKinley and Mary Greaves, MG for short. We all stand steps from one another in the watchtower atop the Cape Lookout Coast Guard Station. With eight windows around us, we take in a sprawling view of a coastline untouched by development and kissed by Mother Nature.

Beside the historic Dismal Swamp Canal, the oldest operating man-made waterway in the United States, Tammy Barnes sees in the distance what to me looks like two white toothpicks between an alley of trees. But not to Tammy. “We got a boat! And we got to get to work!” she shouts. “This is when the fun starts!” We slip on life jackets, and Tammy begins a process she knows by heart. At a windowed shed nearby, her hands seem to dance as she works various toggle switches to open the lock chamber’s gate.