The Outer Banks, North Carolina: A Long-Awaited Visit to the Wright Brothers National Memorial

All my life, I've had a vague desire to visit the seaside field near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wright Brothers achieved the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. I got there last week, and it was worth the wait.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial and associated Visitors Center -- with its re-created flying machine, exhibits and paintings, and park-ranger presentations on the history of the event -- were touching, instructive and an example of what daring pioneers are able to achieve through study and self-education.
 
The Wright Brothers monument, overlooking the vast field on which they made four flights on that momentous day -- three flights of 12 seconds apiece, and then one go-for-broke effort of 59 seconds -- is actually in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, and not in Kitty Hawk to the north; Kitty Hawk was reduced in size in later years and a new municipality called Kill Devil Hills was created on the land where the flights actually took place. For an admission of $4, you enter the area, hear the rather long but fascinating and serious presentation, view the exhibits and paintings, walk to the field where everything took place, and then ascend the large rounded hill on which a marble monument to the two brothers has been erected by the United States.
 
Kill Devil Hills is in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, an almost absurdly-narrow, 150-mile-long strip of land in the Atlantic Ocean alongside the coast of North Carolina. The area is best reached by plane to Norfolk, Virginia, and then a two-hour-long drive by rental car due south.
 
Both sides of the Outer Banks are almost uninterrupted stretches of white sand beach attracting a mammoth and similarly-uninterrupted number of summer houses and resorts alongside it, making up a major vacation facility of North Carolina and nearby Virginia. The towns along those beaches -- Corolla, Carrituck, Duck, Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Manteo, Hatteras, among them -- have exploded in size in the past 30 years and account for a considerable population, transforming what used to be a rough and undeveloped barrier island into something far more commercial and urban.
 
This comes as a bit of a disappointment to the first-time visitor, but once you revise your expectations and accept the Outer Banks as a typical vacation area similar to heavily-developed beaches elsewhere in the U.S., you enjoy the area's chief attractions: the wild horses near Corolla, the Wright Brothers monument and exhibits, sites commemorating the "Lost Colony" of Sir Walter Raleigh on Roanoke Island halfway off and along the Outer Banks, numerous other historic structures, the North Carolina Aquarium, and more.
 
But back to the Wright Brothers: what is most striking about their feat of flight is the meticulous planning for it. Their many handwritten notebooks on display contain page after page of mathematical calculations relating to the two propellers at the back of the craft. Other calculations (reflecting years of advance work) deal with the mathematics of weight; proper alignment; the ability to turn the aircraft, to lift or lower it in air; and the effect of wind upon the flight. The feat they performed was not simply one of determination and daring, but of education and study -- a lesson to latter-day inventors and innovators. I found the visit to the Wright Brothers site to be not simply uplifting but sobering, and believe that more Americans should make the trip.