The dune line used to be where the lifeguard stand is. Now the lifeguard stand is the dune line. Everyone here can point to where the beach used to end, the way you point at a scar.
Storms are not new to this coast. What is new, the old-timers will tell you, is how little time the beach gets to recover between them. After the last big one peeled thirty feet of dune off the barrier island, the official response moved at the speed of official responses. So the neighbors did what neighbors here do. They organized a text chain and showed up with shovels.
“Nobody’s coming to save the beach for us,” says Linda Okafor, a retired teacher who has become the unofficial general of the dune-restoration effort. “It’s our beach. We plant the sea oats, we build the fence, we do it again after the next one. That’s the deal you make for living here.”
“You can love a place by complaining about it, or you can love it with a shovel. We chose the shovel.”
By the end of the weekend, four hundred volunteers had planted twelve thousand plugs of sea oats and rebuilt a quarter-mile of dune fence. It will not survive the next storm intact. They already know this. They have already scheduled the next planting.