Life in Beaufort: Stranger Than Fiction

At approximately 10:26 p.m. the party takes a turn. Shirts come off, Zeppelin's ratcheted up. The boys-who happen to be in short supply-start rolling their own cigarettes. The birthday girl magically procures a henna pen. And as though it's a rehearsed, perfectly natural performance, that henna pen starts curling figures into shirtless skin, the smoke swirling, the music dripping thick from the speakers overhead. In an imprecise instant, everyone has begun to draw on one another. But shadows of week-old designs-smiley faces, crafty phrases, geometric nonsense-seem to suggest that all this faux-tattoo artistry is nothing out of the ordinary.

It's Friday night at the Beaufort Marine Lab, Duke's satellite pseudo-campus 207 miles southeast of Main West. A handful of Duke undergrads slip away each term to the eastern coast of North Carolina, a unique hybrid experience away from Durham, not so much abroad as abreast. The 15 in the Student Center on this night represent a united faction on the island: They've been bonded by a collective desire to blow off some steam. Besides the birthday, a majority of the students have just completed an exam in Sensory Physiology of Marine Animals. There's reason to celebrate.

If it weren't raining, it's likely that everyone would be outside on the quad-a modestly sized lawn, squared in by six quaint summer camp cabins, the dining hall and the boathouse. There's this story that senior Sam Harrington will tell if you twist her oft-decorated arm:

One weekday evening during a warmer month-a time that seems nostalgically foreign as the rain beats down hard and cold-she and the girls on the island get a little crazy. A handful of the Marine Lab's finest femmes carry a stereo down to the dock, a couple dozen yards off the quad, just behind the boathouse. They dance, they laugh, they sing-just far enough from the dorms to observe the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. quiet hours. Sometime during the night, the party takes a turn. Shirts come off, Zeppelin's ratcheted up. Harrington escapes the revelry and climbs to the top of her residence hall, Dorm No. 5, a quick and fearless ascent to the roof as she's feeling invincible. Bare feet balanced on shingles, Harrington looks down upon the scene: a half dozen seminude bodies, certainly dancing and quite possibly even holding hands and spinning in circles. At a relative zenith, Harrington has a revelation. "I was looking down on Matisse's The Joy of Life," she says.

Not tonight. It's raining. It's just now 10:30 p.m.

The Marine Lab is announced by a simple blue-and-white sign-the kind you see all over the home campus-that unmistakably proclaims the island to be Duke's. During daylight hours, the parking access arm permits passage to all visitors. At night, it takes delicate persuasion of the guard. The guest lot is situated adjacent to the Student Center, sixty or so yards from an entrance to the quad.

Harrington is standing barefoot in the soggy grass, fiddling with her ankle-length skirt. She doesn't have class today, but that's not to say there aren't things to do. Several of Harrington's classmates emerge from their respective dorms, taking advantage of the clearing of the clouds, escaping to silent corners of the campus for last-hour engagement with Sensory Physiology of Marine Animals material. The exam, Professor Daniel Rittschof's, is scheduled for the early afternoon.

Harrington ventures off to her invertebrate lab, home to one of the three courses she takes in addition to an independent study. Before making her way to the classroom, Harrington hops back up onto her hammocked porch to strap on a pair of Tevas. "The housekeeping ladies will yell at me if they see me without shoes," she says. The lab is right next door.

"I'm glad I didn't come any earlier because I wouldn't have been able to come back to Duke," she says. "I graduated from Duke and Durham-and came here to play."

Resor and Harrington work in tandem to enrich the understandably lacking nightlife. Taking it upon themselves, the girls are often single-handedly responsible for fêtes so noteworthy that whispers resonate back on the Durham campus. "We try to throw parties," Harrington says. "And by we, I mean like me and one other person, Avery. We threw one big one, the Bacchus-slash-Save Gaia Party."

A bit of context: Harrington has lived in a house in Durham since returning from a semester abroad in Australia last fall. This summer, a dog named Gaia showed up at her doorstep. Through a roundabout deferral of responsibility, Harrington and her housemates were given Gaia's medical records, and they found that nonexistent shots had left her with heartworm and Lyme disease. In an effort to raise money for treatment, the Durham house threw a Save Gaia party in September. And in order to do her part, Harrington did the same in Beaufort.

"We had been wanting to plan a party, like an actual party, so Avery and I got together to make it a Bacchus-slash-Save Gaia party, like a toga party. So we got everyone to dress up in togas and I dressed up as Gaia." Harrington took to the theme diligently: she assembled a brown outfit, tail, ears, a collar, a bone that she carried around in her mouth and a collection dish for humble donations. The Student Center-the forum for just about every after-hours indoor event-was decorated with netting, vines, flowers and paper on the walls for people to doodle on.

"We had a party and I went around to beg for money. And I raised about $35, which for me, I thought was a huge success." In Durham, they raised close to $400. But it's likely more people were talking about the Beaufort effort.

On their way to the water, Harrington and Resor stop by a maintenance garage to investigate the intense grilling preparation that Mike and Dana-two Duke-staff "everything men"-have begun to undertake. They're slicing up and seasoning mullet for a fish fry. The coals glow in anticipation for what looks to be two-dozen sizable hunks of filet.

On the dock, the girls look down at the cold, murky water. They've made a pact to go swimming every day.

"Technically we went at 1 a.m. this morning," Harrington says. "So we don't have to today."

The girls slowly approach the boarding ramp to the Cape Hatteras, a 135-foot research vessel owned by the National Science Foundation and operated full-time by a crew of 10. The ship is docking after a six-month expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. Harrington has met some of the crew at Beaufort's famed-and sole-watering hole, Backstreet Pub.

Mark Smith, the Hatteras's Chief Engineer, invites the girls aboard. They ask him about the engine room, the depth charts and the fully stocked refrigerator of chocolate popsicles. The questions aren't spun from obligatory curiosity; the girls are wholly and genuinely interested in the workings of the boat. Smith has peppered hair, a Temecula Harley Davidson t-shirt, shorts and a moustache that's as thick as his Southern accent. He's been working onboard for 15 years.

Though the Hatteras typically hosts a dozen or so scientists, the coming week brings a rare treat. The Hatteras is heading out at 0700 hours with Navy researchers to track fake mines with new underwater military technology. Smith's disposition glimmers as he describes the venture, and again when he recalls their whale-watching respite in the Gulf of Mexico.

On their way up the slippery grated plank to the dock, a new hand, fresh from Bulgaria, slightly suspicious of the visitors, bids the girls farewell.

"He's our newest guy," Smith jokes slyly. "We smuggled him in."

The Marine Lab is nearly as old as Duke itself. Founded in 1938, the facilities have been available to undergraduates since the lab's inception. Though the undergraduate culture is tied closely to the heritage of the educational center, the Marine Lab is renowned most widely as a hub for graduate studies and professional research. Roughly 50 to 60 graduate students take courses at the Marine Lab each term, divided evenly between master's and PhD candidates. The two-year professional master's degree in Coastal Environmental Management typically consists of one year in Durham and a second year at the Marine Lab. The five-year PhD program provides a venue for intense research.

From fresh undergraduates to veteran professors, a culture of intellectual curiosity thrives, if for no other reason than as something to do.

"Pretty much anything big that's happening, the entire community goes," Harrington says. Whether that's the Informal Seminar Series-where students and professors gather in the boathouse, drink beer and entertain discussions about oceans, in the setting of a "happy-hour-plus"-PhD lectures or extracurricular activities that are tied to the classroom, Harrington, Resor and company are incessantly tuned in to the investigations and discoveries of the more advanced island dwellers.

This afternoon, Resor's "Green by Design" instructor Leigh Torres is presenting her research on predators in Florida Bay before she defends her dissertation. Prior to the lecture, Harrington and Resor meet up with friends for lunch in the dining hall. Given no other option than to eat three meals a day, all in one-hour windows, several students marvel at rare gems of variety.

"Oh my God," a graduate student exclaims, "We never get blue cheese." The fare is standard-sandwiches, salads, soft drinks-as if The Marketplace were jerrymandered into a sparse selection of its least ethnic dining options. Duke cards abound. The woman swiping students through even takes FLEX.

On the way to Torres's lecture, Harrington bumps into some friends preparing for the Sensory Physiology of Marine Animals exam. A curly-haired boy hobbling on crutches and one shoe hugs Harrington.

"Good luck on your exam," she says.

"I'm going to go drink," he replies.

The lecture hall has fish on the walls. Whoever hung them up mixed parts of real fish-a fin from that albacore, a tail from that red snapper-with the artificial moldings. The room also serves as a sort of Hall of Fame for Marine Lab professors. Photo collage shrines to each-a portrait, images of teaching, some research action shots-liken the displays to the basketball Player of the Year tributes in Schwartz-Butters. Torres is illuminated by the glow of her PowerPoint presentation, which is projected for the local audience and the simulcast to Durham. At one point, the power cuts out. When she gets it up and running, Torres looks at a camera across the stage. "Are you all good there in Durham?" she asks.

Torres has researched predator behavior in Florida Bay for the last several years of her life. She refers to papers including, "How Many Mullet Are There in Florida Bay?" Though impressed with her conclusions, audience members smile more for the sincere pride and pleasure that Torres will at last be able to put her ambitious endeavor to rest.

Torres's thank you's drive her to tears.

Everyone in the audience is her friend.

Every man over 25 wears a flannel shirt.

During the summer, the Marine Lab experiences an influx of students, particularly during the first session when pre-med students come to take physics. But during the fall, the 26 total undergraduates living on the island board in one of two dorms. Harrington's room is colorfully decorated-international flags, a tie-dye shirt from her Joe College Day visit to Durham, and some other laundry that needs to be washed and dried on the clothesline outside

Junior Jillian Ziarko is the RA in Dorm No. 5. She's preparing to brave the rainstorm to tend to the snails she's researching. Ziarko is wearing a yellow rubber hat that could have been appropriated from the The Salty Dog Café.

Ziarko is not the kind of Marine Lab inhabitant who parties in the Student Center and frolics on the quad late at night. "I'm not your typical college student," she says. "I go to bed at 9:30 and wake up at 5:30."

Social life, she says, is a particularly interesting phenomenon. "There's not much to do here.... But there's still cliques, even though they're not [strong] cliques."

Ziarko does yoga every morning. On her way out the hall, Ziarko passes by an open door through which scattered weed and a pipe are in plain sight on a student's desk.

She pays no mind.

"Have fun playing with your snails," Harrington says, without so much as a trace of sarcasm.

The girls in the dorm begin preparing for a birthday. Colleen Kannen, a senior from Wittenberg University-which sends three marine science students to Beaufort every term-finishes up the Rittschof exam and is greeted warmly by her friends. Kannen talks excitedly about the test. She actually enjoyed the experience ("The exam involved psychedelic mushrooms and goat urine," another Wittenberg student says later).

Her friends aren't surprised. They've said all along that Dan's tests are a blast. Harrington is excited about the celebratory dinner. "We do birthdays well," she says.

Beaufort-by-the-sea is notable for its rich history. Founded in 1709, it's the third oldest town in North Carolina. During the early eighteenth century, Blackbead, the notorious English pirate, ran aground and spent significant time there.

In the popular coffee shop, Taylor's Big Mug, a man reads the local newspaper while he waits for the rain to let up. He is wearing a mullet fish shirt. There's justsomething about the mullet fish.

On the bathroom wall of a restaurant across town, a plea is printed in ink: "Do not write obscenities, please. Thank you, The Management." It's the only thing scrawled above the sink.

Near the Beaufort Inn, at a distant end of Front Street, the town's main drag, a wedding carries on fervently through the storm.

The Marine Lab students choose to bypass the downtown scene. It's at El Zarape, a Mexican joint off Highway 70, that the gang toasts Kannen's birthday. The party accounts for more than half of the restaurant's total business this evening. It's the kind of place that serves 24-ounce Dos Equis and IDs students on their honor.

"What is your date of birth?" the server asks one of the guys. The young man's answer is the right one, and a frosty amber lager appears.

The Duke and Wittenberg students are joined by some of the UNC friends they live with. The Blue Devil-Tar Heel rivalry is rather diluted at the Marine Lab. UNC senior Luke Myers is slowly tackling his beer. He says he's happy to be away from Chapel Hill for a semester.

"I don't miss it all that much. It is what it is," he says. "It's not worth the drive to go up there. I just love the beach.. But if you want to go to a nightclub with a shit-ton of people at it, it's not going to happen here."

Halloween is on the horizon. Kannen has an idea for a costume: "I'm going to dress up really slutty and put coat hangers on my arms, and call myself a closet slut." Shortly after sharing her light bulb moment, El Zarape's servers sneak around behind Kannen and slam a piece of birthday cake in her face. Everybody sings.

Before heading back to the Student Center, the dozen knock back the last ounce in each of their margarita glasses. Harrington spots two unpopular graduate students. Because they often take courses together, a grating but often unspoken tension exists between the two groups of students.

"They just hate the idea of undergraduates," Resor says. "Even though they usually ask dumber questions than us." The table performs a collective glare.

"Go play with your fucking ecosystem," Resor says under her breath.

After two or three drinks, no one can speak an ill word of the Marine Lab. Not that there is much to complain about-but when the social void is filled by music, alcohol and henna, the fluorescent glow of the Student Center starts to seem like heaven on earth.

"With these professors, it's just typical Duke," says senior Andrea Ricaurte. "Small classes and world-renowned professors." Every one is the best in their field. Intellectualism is on high. But Ricaurte lets the real crux of her enthusiasm slip out.

"There's 25 undergrads living on an island with no supervision, so there's lots of drunken skinny-dipping," she says.

The Student Center is home to an elliptical, exercise bike, StairMaster, ping pong table, foosball pitch and pool table. At one point in the early evening, every fixture of entertainment in the room is being utilized. Ping pong paddle in one hand, a forty in another. Working out on the exercise machinery so that net caloric exchange is negligible.

But at approximately 10:26 p.m., the party takes a turn. An hour later, Harrington steps back from the carousing and notes, "This is the group, give or take a couple, that hangs out. We got along right away. It was very easy. This definitely isn't everyone, but no one is singled out. Which is good. The others do what they want."

As the party begins to move outside onto the porch, away from the music, into the rain, Myers methodically, naturally, begins to collect empty beer cans in his freshly henna-ed arms. He carries them over to the overflowing recycling bin and slips through the door.