Forget the crowded tourist boardwalks. If you drive down to the very end of Pleasure Island, the pavement just stops and turns into six miles of wild, wind-swept sand where you can actually drive your four-wheel-drive truck right onto the beach. You just need a permit first. Most people come for the salt spray, but you should definitely hike the Basin Trail to see the damp concrete bunker. Robert Harrill, the famous Fort Fisher Hermit, lived there for seventeen years. He survived by foraging for local oysters and digging up marsh clams in the swamp. Pretty wild.

Watch your step during the summer. Giant loggerhead sea turtles crawl out of the Atlantic at night to bury their eggs in the dry sand. Rangers flag off these nests. They do this so tourists don't accidentally trample the hatchlings before they can scramble to the ocean. It gets noisy, too. Threatened piping plovers whistle from the tidal mudflats while anglers pull heavy red drum and flounder straight out of the frothing surf.

Long ago, the peninsula was just a lonely stretch of shifting sand dunes. Local fishermen built rough shacks. In 1861, Confederate soldiers arrived and threw up massive earthen fortresses to protect blockade runners sneaking supplies into the river. The Union navy bombarded the shore. They fired over fifty thousand artillery shells in a single weekend. Massive explosions ripped the beach apart. It was the largest naval bombardment of the war. But the fighting ended. Decades later, the federal government took over the peninsula again for training during the second World War. They poured concrete bunkers. Soldiers practiced shooting down targets over the ocean.

After the global conflict, the military walked away from the coast. A strange thing happened next. In 1955, a man named Robert Harrill moved into one of the abandoned military bunkers. Locals called him the Hermit. He fished, trapped marsh crabs, and talked philosophy with curious visitors who walked the trails. He stayed for seventeen years. Eventually, developers wanted to build hotels on the spit. Conservationists fought back to save the nesting loggerhead sea turtles and the rare maritime forest. So, the state acquired the surplus federal property in the 1980s. Today, you can still find the hermit's concrete shelter rotting in the salt marsh. History sits right in the mud.