December is traditionally a time to recognize people or events that occurred during the year that impacted our lives or showed us what we could be but rarely are.
Submitted for your consideration: an example of personal courage in the best tradition of North Carolina’s contrarian and storied history, mostly overlooked in 2013 because it occurred at the relative obscurity of the Outer Banks.
Today, it takes more grace than most of us have to stand up to the might of the federal government, but that’s what Keith Matthews and Ed Nunnally, manager and owner of the Avon Fishing Pier, did Oct. 5 when they took the radical step of opening the doors of their business.
They’d been warned by the National Park Service they couldn’t open because of the government shutdown. Because part of the pier crosses a Cape Hatteras National Seashore beach, NPS apparently believes it controls the entire enterprise. It’s interesting that in 2012, Nunnally spent $60,000 to repair damage to the pier from Hurricane Sandy, but NPS didn’t seem to mind nor was anxious to share his expenses.
So Matthews, on Nunnally’s order, opened the pier.
At 5:30 the next morning, Matthews found NPS rangers and a cable across the pier entrance with a sign that read “Closed by National Park Service due to government shutdown.” A half-hour after the rangers left, Matthews removed the barrier and sign and re-opened the pier.
The rangers, reminiscent of Mad magazine’s Spy-vs.-Spy cartoons, returned two hours later and took pictures of the pier.
Matthews returned Monday morning and again found a chain and sign across the pier entrance, plus two rangers who warned he’d suffer dire consequences if he reopened. They said charges against him were imminent.
But proving the right hand of the NPS doesn’t know what the left is doing, the agency had shut down Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway Oct. 3 but had changed its mind on Oct. 4 in return for inn owner Bruce O’Connell dropping a lawsuit. In addition, the Virgin Islands National Park also reopened. These two events happened before NPS blocked access to Avon Pier.
However, the saga of Matthews, Nunnally and the pier ended long after the N.C. Beach Buggy Association and Outer Banks Preservation Association’s legal team got involved with the U.S. Department of the Interior.
While talks were ongoing, the federal shutdown ended, and rangers went back to ticketing folks for walking too close to turtle nests. But when they stood their ground for their employees and OBX anglers and against NPS, Matthews and Nunnally didn’t know the Washington shutdown was going to end.
They climbed onto the wall to face overwhelming odds, bolstered only by knowing they were doing the right thing. That is rare courage and requires our admiration and support.
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