It was so bloody hot I slept spread eagle and naked with every window in the rig wide open because there were no electrical hook-ups in the National Park Campground on Bodie Island. I fell asleep on my back with a portable battery-driven fan on my chest. I had dreams of someone having a smoky campfire next to me. In the morning the whole setting had changed. A scarlet sun rose above the line of dunes and smoke hung like Canadian west coast fog. This was big time. I had to find clean air and cooler temperatures so with my Jetta A/C giving me life, I headed south toward the famous Hatteras Lighthouse. This was amazing; the smoke was so dense from the mainland fire you could only see a half a mile ahead. People had their headlights on. About 45 minutes down the island chain the smoke finally thinned. The rangers said that there was a lightning struck in the wildlife refuge last weekend that started the wildfire and it had gone into the peat bogs. It will probably burn for months and nothing short of a continuous heavy downpour would put it out. Its size was now 50 square miles and with the off-shore breezed and a temperature inversion the Outer Banks were getting it all.
The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest brick lighthouse in the world at 210 feet with 269 steps. For ten decades the lighthouse sat on the beach and every storm threaten it. After years of planning, the world’s best house movers working with civil engineers picked the entire structure up and moved it back from the coast a distance of 1,600 feet over a period of eleven days. It was billed as “The Move of the Century”. Tens of thousands of people came to watch. Many were emotionally attached to its light and its spiral color pattern. As one of the workers said, “This lighthouse is America’s Lighthouse”.
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