Local tradition holds that the Shackleford Banks horses descend from Spanish stock that swam ashore from sixteenth-century shipwrecks. Whatever the truth of that origin, the herd has lived feral on Shackleford for so long that they are genetically distinct - Banker horses, the breed is called. When the National Park Service took over the islands and ended open grazing of livestock by December 31, 1985, the horses were allowed to stay. They roam the southernmost island of the seashore in small bands, drinking from rain-fed freshwater ponds and grazing on cordgrass. They are wild in the literal sense - the Park Service warns visitors to stay back at least fifty feet, and the horses occasionally enforce that rule themselves. The Corolla Wild Horses Protection Act, introduced in the 113th Congress, was written in part to ensure genetic viability across these isolated barrier-island herds.

Cape Lookout Lighthouse has stood since 1859, its tower painted in a black-and-white diamond pattern designed to make it instantly recognizable from sea - each lighthouse along the Outer Banks chain bears its own day-mark, so a captain glancing toward shore can pin his position without consulting the chart. Hatteras has the spiral. Bodie Island has the horizontal bands. Cape Lookout has the diamonds. The light still burns from 163 feet above the dunes, marking the cape where the killing shoals reach southeast into the Atlantic. The Park Service has been working through its Centennial Initiative to rehabilitate the lighthouse and restore the historic district that grew up around it - the Coast Guard station, the keeper's quarters, the lifesaving station that have all watched the same water for generations.

At the northern end of South Core Banks lies Portsmouth Village, and what you find there is a ghost town - whitewashed cottages, a church, a one-room schoolhouse, all standing carefully preserved on an island with no permanent residents. Portsmouth was a working port through the nineteenth century, when ships transferred cargoes from oceangoing vessels onto smaller boats that could cross the sound. The population peaked at over 600. Then the inlet shoaled, the deep-water trade moved elsewhere, and the village emptied house by house. The last two residents left in 1971. The Park Service maintains what they left behind. To walk Portsmouth's grass-grown lanes in summer, when the cicadas are loud and the heat presses down through stillness, is to feel the slow weight of a place that simply ran out of reasons to exist.

Cape Lookout sits in the open Atlantic with nothing east of it but water, and the weather knows it. Tropical Storm Gabrielle made landfall directly on the cape near noon on September 9, 2007, with sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Hurricane Irene came ashore here on August 27, 2011, as a Category 1 with 85-mph sustained winds. Hurricane Arthur followed, a Category 2 with 100-mph winds. The barrier islands absorb these storms the way they have for millennia - reshaping, eroding here, accreting there, rolling slowly westward as the sea rises. Cordgrass and yaupon and sea oats hold what they can. The horses stand to leeward of the dunes. The lighthouse takes whatever comes. After each storm, the islands look slightly different, and the rangers map the new shoreline against the old.

Because there are no roads and no settlements and no lights, Cape Lookout has been designated an International Dark Sky Park. On a clear night with no moon, the Milky Way arches overhead so brightly you can see it reflected in the wet sand of the beach. Brown pelicans and laughing gulls and American oystercatchers work the shore. Loggerhead sea turtles haul out at night in summer to lay their eggs in the dunes - the Park Service marks each nest with stakes and tape and counts the hatchlings sixty days later. This is what the East Coast used to look like, before the boardwalks and the high-rises and the four-lane roads. Cape Lookout is the long thin line where that older coast still lives.