- Coming up on Best of Our State.

UNC Wilmington students set off on a poetic river odyssey paddling through one of Earth's most ancient forests.

And travel to the edge of our state where maritime history still stands watch.

Poetry in the trees, heroism in the surf.

That's next on Best of Our State.

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor-in-chief of Our State Magazine and your host.

In eastern North Carolina, a group of UNC Wilmington students embark on a poetic river odyssey through one of Earth's most ancient forests.

Guided by a poetry professor and a seasoned river guide, they paddle into the heart of Three Sisters Swamp to meet the oldest living cypress trees in the world and write verse born from the roots of our state's past.

♪ - When you go to the Sisters, the trees are talking to you as long as you're ready to listen.

- For me, it's a place of awe and wonder and emotion.

And my tours through here bring in all kinds of people from all over the world.

- I knew I wanted to bring my students to the natural history, it's the human history, it's the geography.

- Trees that are standing in a swamp for 26 centuries, cypress leaves that are 8 and 10 and 12 feet tall.

- There's something almost subversive about this place that exists in the in-between of land and water.

- It's so extraordinary.

It's just so different.

And there's nothing else like this in the world.

♪ - Three, four, five, six... I am Charles Robbins.

I have a guide service here on the Black River in southeastern North Carolina through a section called the Three Sisters Preserve.

Owned by the Nature Conservancy, it has in it the oldest living cypress trees in the world by far.

We think there's trees in here well over 3,000 years old and maybe much older.

It's a long time for an organic anything to stand in a wet environment like this and drought, but still making seeds and still alive, still making history as it is.

- We must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.

They've been on the earth far longer than we have been and have had time.

My name is Kimi Faxon Hemingway.

I am a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and I teach classes about place-based writing, creative nonfiction, and food writing.

I visited Three Sisters a year ago with a group of writers and naturalists and was utterly overcome.

How did I not know this existed, like, right in my backyard?

How do we tell the stories of places that are important to us?

Because the experience was so powerful for me, I knew I wanted to bring my students into the swamp as I was teaching this writing about place class.

Observe, pay attention.

I'd heard or read once that we call a place wilderness and we do not yet know the stories of that place.

And if we can love a place, we will always protect it.

And that feels really important in this moment.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I think it's really important.

- Yeah, I think I'm just going to have that be one of the very first things.

- Oh, hey, folks.

- Oh, hi.

- Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm Charles.

- I'm Charlie.

- Charlie, nice to meet you, C.R.

Camille.

- Camille.

- Justine.

- Jacob.

- I want to thank you all for coming.

And I know you're a special group of writers.

If you can transfer this place and its time and its whole being into words, that's incredible to me.

You know, it's like, it's my church, you might say, in a way.

I've always called them the cathedrals.

It's just such an emotional type of a thing for some people.

So go ahead and sit down in it, and let's get your foot rest adjusted.

- I was very excited to go on this trip.

Thanks, Sam.

I love nature.

I love adventure.

And this brought everything together in a very cool way, and the chance to write about it.

You couldn't have asked for a better day.

I mean, it was blue skies, birds were flying, insects were buzzing, the frogs were chirping.

- Once we turn the corner up there, we're going to have to go slow, pick our way through, and we're going to try to cross over right here.

- The students were mostly ahead of me.

They were boisterous, and they were laughing and making jokes.

And suddenly, there was this deep hush.

- God.

- I could almost feel them taking it all in.

- Oh my gosh.

What?

Isn't that incredible?

- You feel suddenly like you're in Jurassic World.

- Oh, that's so cool.

- The trees stand like sentinels over you.

- Look at this tree here.

- The moss is the color of green that I have never seen before.

- Ah!

- It just, everything settles and you feel alert and awake and alive and fully present.

- Isn't this beautiful?

- It's unbelievable.

- CR, can you tell me again how cypress regrow?

- Well, everything lives off the root systems.

The fact that they're all connected underground.

So in drought, they'll support each other.

The north side of this swamp will get dry.

This side is wet, but when it dries up, because they're grafted together, they're one big system.

- We're hearing about the science of how these trees share a connection with one another and that helps them weather droughts, but also weather extreme flood events.

And I'm just thinking about all that they have endured, but also what they teach us about ourselves.

- So we have sandbar, so we can get out here.

Welcome to the magic kingdom.

- Wow.

Never ceases to amaze.

- Okay, we are here, so everybody just follow me.

From this spot, it's hard to believe that it gets better, but down river here, things seem to get older.

The knees get taller, the artwork, I call it, gets more dramatic.

- If you're adventurous, you can wade through the deeper waters and stand beneath the trees and marvel at their knots.

- These trees were as they are now, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, the tops were blown off in some millennia ago storms, lost their canopies, and then through frequent flood and drought, the fungi will rot out the bottom.

And so they were not cut.

Everything else was cut down in the colonial days.

And these were saved because of their demise of age saved their life.

That's sort of how we see that.

- Okay, guys, come over here and I will show you this tree here with the two antennae out the top.

It's BLK number 227, and it's the oldest cypress tree known at 2,632 years old.

There's lots of trees in here that we think are older.

We're pretty sure they're older, but they're hollow.

We can't core them.

- How did you discover the age of the tree?

- Well, you know, these trees, we're working here with Dr.

Dave Staley, a dendrochronologist from the University of Arkansas.

And the way they determine the age of a tree is by coring it.

- So it's about dendrochronology, the study of tree rings for the application and study of climate.

So you have to core the tree to the center of the tree.

So you need all of the tree rings to do the study.

And the wide rings would be a wet year.

This would be a little drier, a little moisture, and then it also shows you drought.

And most of these trees, I'd say 90% of them, they're all pretty much hollow at the bottoms and the tops.

So we had trouble finding some solid wood.

We had worked through the swamp for four and a half years, didn't find what we wanted.

I go to Wilmington, take a 36-foot extension ladder apart and bring them in here on the side of a canoe and we started climbing.

So we went back through this swamp as much as we could for three and a half years and found that tree, the last one.

So we now have a climate footprint 2,624 years old in southeastern North Carolina, this area.

And it all is done through dendrochronology.

Yeah, it's quite a thing to be standing in this environment, survived all this time.

That's uplifting.

Gives me hope.

- Yeah.

- I've heard CR say that, you know, they're not beautiful in the way that we think about beauty.

And I love that idea that like, if you look a little closer and you understand the way these trees have survived and the way they work and operate, then I think you can't see anything else other than a miracle, even if it is a chimney, as CR says, this empty, hollow vessel.

- So the exercise I'm going to invite you to do is to just write for 10 minutes without stopping.

We're thinking about attention to the sounds we're hearing, the smells, all of the sensory detail that bring this place to life.

So observation, awareness, specificity, and just maybe they'll find a seed for a poem or a story or an essay they feel compelled to write.

- I'm thinking about how old these trees are.

- Cypresses, like titans waiting, waist deep.

- Black water swerving ancient columns, a two-way mirror.

- The captain, CR, calls it a church, a cathedral.

- I'm touching the rough bark wedged in my kayak between its trunk and a few knees.

What can I learn from their story?

- Today was such a success for me and my students.

It just has this sort of magic and they allowed for the place to wash over them.

- Whatever you believe in, I promise you it's here.

- Inhale the murk and thank the tree for its divine canopy.

- For me it was a really deep moment of reflection of my own life, of the stories that I want to tell.

And when we immerse ourselves in a place like that, I mean that's a feeling that you carry with you for the rest of your life.

- Are you worried about this place surviving the changes in climate we're seeing now and that are anticipated?

- The way I look at stuff like that, I'm pretty old, but I'm just 75 and that's not much considered 2,600, you know.

So they're here, they've been here, they'll be here.

But the threats of climate, we're having stronger storms, more flooding in here.

And then that package extends on into clear-cutting.

Down river and above us, that brings the water table up.

There's a seedling right there, there's four right there that are about this tall.

There will be a habitat loss, there will be a habitat gain.

So this is just a little speck in time.

We just get to enjoy it.

And there's not much else around like it, you know.

It's just, that's just nature.

That's the fact of what it is and we enjoy it now and hope for hundreds of years to come.

They're resilient.

- Goodbye trees!

- Bye trees.

- See you later, cypresses.

- Goodbye swamp!

- I think seeing the Three Sisters Swamp gives me hope.

You know, this is a place of the most miraculous things that you can see.

This ancient gem of knowledge, of history, really just right in our own backyard.

Maybe we learn from the story of this cypress grove how to be better humans.

- I feel so proud of my students, inspired and grateful to CR.

I think we will always fight to protect the places we love, but we can't love the places we don't know.

- Before the Coast Guard, there were the surfmen, soldiers of the surf, ordinary men with an extraordinary mission to save lives.

Discover the history of these coastal guardians and the life-saving stations that stood with them through every storm and rescue.

Meet the modern-day keepers of that history, many of them descendants of the brave surfmen who worked tirelessly to preserve the traditions, restore the structures, and honor the legacy of those who came before.

♪ - The Life Saving Service is actually known as America's Forgotten Heroes.

It was used in the attempt to rescue 178,000 people.

They rescued 177,000 of them.

- This was not a plush assignment.

They drilled and drilled and drilled.

So when the bell rang and it was time to go to sea, they had it.

- There are over 600 documented shipwrecks along the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

That's just the ones that we know about.

So the number of people that were finding themselves in trouble out here was huge.

- These guys were very pragmatic and their reputation was absolutely stellar.

So you had some level of comfort if you were on one of the ships coming by here that if the weather was going to turn off, there was some competency on shore.

And those stories abound to prove that.

- There are too many people, way too many people that don't know what these just ordinary guys were able to pull off.

And I don't think I'll really ever be happy until they all know about what they did here.

- I'm Larry Grubbs.

I am the president of the Historical Association here at Chicamacomico Life Saving Station in Rodanthe, North Carolina.

My mother's a Midgett and the Midgetts have ties to this station.

My fifth grade grandfather was buried down here in waves.

I go back generations here on Hatteras Island with ties to this life saving station as well as other life saving and Coast Guard stations.

Chickamacomico was the first of the 29 stations commissioned on the coast of North Carolina.

Our original life saving station was opened up as the first station on December 4th of 1874.

It's the most complete U.S.

life saving service site in the country.

And it's the only one in the country that has all of its original buildings.

It's also one of the only places in the country that you can see the beach apparatus drill that we do on Thursday afternoons.

- When wind and wave combined to threaten the lives of those who dared to travel upon the seas, the men of United States Life Saving Service and then Coast Guard left the comfort of their unwindy, sturdy stations and entered into the battle with little more than their wooden boats, cork-filled life jackets, oil-skinned foul-weather gear, and the tools you see here today that led to strength, bravery, and most importantly, training lead the way.

- The beach apparatus drill is not actually a reenactment of a rescue.

It's a reenactment of the training that these guys did in order to be able to perform a rescue.

We wear period uniforms to the late 1870s and we go out there with the beach apparatus cart.

We'll fire a small gun called the Lyle gun, which is a line throwing gun.

It goes very quickly.

There's a lot of moving parts to it.

And at the end of the drill, we will rescue a kid that's picked out of the crowd the same way that they used to do it back in the 1800s to pull them in off a shipwreck.

- All ashore!

- Wow!

Let's hear it for Annabelle!

- It's inspiring to know that we're doing something that they did seriously and would do over and over again to get it right because they had to do it during a storm.

You didn't use this breeches buoy as a rescue apparatus on a nice day.

You could just row the boat out.

This was to be done when you couldn't get your boat cart past breakers and your only way to rescue them was either they jumped into water and got swept away or you use this breeches buoy.

- We're about 90 miles due west of what everybody knows as the Bermuda Triangle.

The southbound cold water Labrador currents and the northbound warm water Gulf Stream currents meet off of Cape Hatteras.

So when you combine that with the shoaling, you've got diamond shoals, you've got Wimble shoals, plus the weather that is created by that warm and cold water mixture and just Hatteras being out in the ocean the way it is, it's just a recipe for shipwrecks.

The life-saving service was formed because of public pressure on Congress from the wrecks of the Urana Metropolis.

Those shipwrecks cost almost 300 lives and the country just went mad over the loss of life because the rescues that were attempted were ineffective and it was a disaster.

Congress took Sumner Kimball, who was basically a lifetime bureaucrat, and they said, "We're going to put you in charge of the life-saving service."

Sumner, instead of making political appointees of station keepers and crews, he would go into the communities and say, "Who's the most capable waterman in this community?

Who's the man that when the chips are down, that the local guys will trust him to get them in and get them back out alive?"

And that was when the life-saving service really started to shine.

The most famous rescue that was ever performed here from Chicamacomico was the torpedoed British tanker Merlot on August 16th of 1918.

The tanker Merlot was carrying a load of aviation fuel and was torpedoed about five miles off the coast of Rodanthe.

Captain John Allen Midgett and five surfmen took surf boat number 1046, which is on display here at Chicamacomico.

They had made three attempts and on the fourth attempt finally managed to launch and rode out into that flaming sea and rescued 42 of the British sailors that were aboard the Merlot.

It remains one of the most decorated maritime rescues in American history.

All of them received the gold life-saving medal, but Captain John Allen Midgett was also awarded the Loving Cup by the King of England.

That's kind of a big deal for the King of England to award a sort of middle-of-the-road U.S.

naval officer with such a prestigious honor.

Before this station was, sort of, being brought back to life by the Historical Association, these buildings were sitting here.

We've got some pictures here of the place when it was, sort of, overgrown and the buildings were sort of becoming dilapidated, falling into disrepair.

They didn't really have a whole lot to start with down here.

You know what the ocean weather does to any structure, especially one that's just sitting empty.

Since the late '70s, early '80s when they really got up and running, there's been a lot of progress made around here.

- I'm Chris Thompson.

I do historic preservation work, so I'm taking it back to the original look.

I do a ton of research before I touch a tool, so I kind of have to go to photographic evidence and then other things that I find and try to piece the whole thing together and try to make it work.

It is the first open station of the 1874 type in the state of North Carolina.

It's considered a carpenter gothic structure, and this building has so many elements to it.

There is an enormous hammer truss, and they have panels that are inset that are cut out, and those little images are referred to as mythical dolphins.

And then this structure has projections through the roof line.

The center one that was referred to as Poseidon's Trident.

We went back to the full-width ramp, which most of them didn't have, but that photograph I found from the Nags Head Station, same builder, same year, the ramp was full width of the structure.

They are the original colors.

So there's a gentleman up in Baltimore, Maryland.

He does historic paint analysis.

Paint had seeped in behind these different types of architectural elements when they painted it originally, so I was able to pull samples off of those areas that hadn't seen weather.

So I have to go to sources all over.

I drive four or five hours each way just locating materials, trying to find pieces here and there.

I only have one chance to get it right, because those that follow me will look at what I did and assume, "Oh, this could be the original piece.

We have to replicate this."

So I have to do my best to get it exactly the way it was so that it's correct for the future.

- I always sort of get this sense of awe when I walk up the steps, and the steps are so worn from the men running up and down them all the time.

You can literally feel their footsteps.

People talk about walking in the footsteps of history.

We really get to do it.

And when I put on that keeper's uniform, I'm very careful to make sure that my uniform is not an exact replica, because I'm not a station keeper.

I'm lucky that I get to portray a station keeper, but it's important to draw that line between the guys that really did it and what we're doing now just to keep their history alive.

The first couple of years, we struggled to get volunteers, because as with anything, people are skeptical.

They're like, "Are they really going to be able to pull it off?"

But now, if you were to try to come in and take one of these guys' positions on this team, good luck to you.

I mean, we're all just so proud of being able to do what we do.

And to be able to do it here, with all the history of this place, and this place being so magical, I can't think of anything better.

- You know, growing up in North Carolina, biscuits were more than breakfast.

They were part of the rhythm of my life.

I still remember those frigid school mornings, running late, jumping into my old Nissan Sentra as the heater sputtered.

I'd skip the cereal and swing by the biscuit company drive-thru, roll down the window into that icy air, and order a warm, buttery country ham biscuit.

Back on the road, that biscuit rode on my lap, wrapped in crinkly paper, doing its best to catch the crumbs.

By the time I slid into AP English, it was long gone, but the comfort stayed with me.

Honestly, I think those mornings are where my love for books began, a biscuit in hand, and a stack of paperbacks riding beside me.

My grandmother made a different kind of biscuit, softer, meant for jelly and slow mornings, and I loved those too.

Even now, I'll go out of my way for a good one, from Flo's in Wilson, to Sunrise in Chapel Hill, to Biscuit Head in Asheville.

Because here in North Carolina, biscuits aren't just food, they're comfort, they're memory, and for me, they'll always taste like home.

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