Hunting Island State Park; A Changing Coastal Ecosystem
Watching a set of stairs that had been ripped out from underneath a beach house’s deck because of the force of water that’s flooding the shore float by your own porch is something that is stained into my memory of the last time I visited Hunting Island State Park in Beaufort, South Carolina. Dark, enormous clouds had been inching towards the shoreline for days and I can remember the palmetto trees getting whipped around more forcefully as the wind grew stronger. Towards the end of the week, the weather started getting dicey and I had finally started to understand how hurricanes get their energy, because the winds had picked up, and the air was hot and soupy. I’d never felt anything like
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I remember waking up to a completely different beach. Some of the trees that were once shading our house and the hammock that overlooked the beach were now on the ground, their leaves tattered and splattered every which way. And although the ocean was calm, the previous night hadn’t been so promising in that regard. Hunting Island has given me so many childhood memories, so many of which bring a smile to my face thinking about them today. Ones like building “sand forts” with my uncle by the water’s edge, or crawling all over the beach house floor late at night with my cousin, leaving with a sun kissed face and hundreds of freckles that I didn’t know I had, or even the one time I got stung by a jellyfish (although not my favorite memory, still one to remember). This giant state park was my home for the summer, and gave me a little piece of it to call it exactly that. That being said, my family and I had watched the conditions of the beach get worse and worse for years. Storms would pass through it, ripping beach houses out from underneath their foundations and eroding the sand, making it harder and harder to rebuild in areas that were once populated. It has gotten so worse, that the area that my family and I once