WENONA, N.C. — Even people who adore the mushy expanses of the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge admit it can be a mighty inhospitable place when the eastern North Carolina days turn steamy. Mosquitoes rule the air, and only a fool would tromp among the loblolly bays without snake chaps to fend off the rattlers.
But winter is a time of transcendent beauty here, a time when the very surface of Pungo Lake, on the edge of the refuge, appears to lift into the air in sudden, shuddering, spectacular bursts. Massive flocks of migrating snow geese and tundra swans camp on the lake for months at a time, grazing on the tender tops of winter wheat and the sweet corn laid out in abundance in the nearby fields.
The farmers are so accustomed to the swooping and high-pitched honking that they joke about “tithing” 10 percent of their crop to their winter visitors for the right to do business next to one of the East Coast’s most stunning annual nature shows. Mortal enemies in most places, the farmers and the birds are stitched together as allies here in the land that the Algonquin Indians called “the swamp on the hill,” in what is fast becoming one of the most contentious ecological battles in the country.
The nemesis of the farmers and the bird-loving environmentalists is as formidable as they come: the U.S. Navy. The Navy is making an appeal to patriotism and arguing that it is justified in buying — or, if need be, seizing — more than 30,000 acres of farmland near the refuge to build a landing strip to polish the skills of pilots for its snazziest new crop of planes, the supersonic F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. The landing strip would be the first major new Navy facility since the 1960s and would break ground at a time when bases across the country are closing.
The plan, years in the making, has sparked a furious court battle and entangled the competing interests of communities stretching from Virginia Beach to the low-lying bogs of coastal North Carolina. Few dispute the Navy’s need to train its Super Hornet pilots on an “outlying landing field,” or OLF. But no one wants the landing strip next door: not Virginia Beach, to the north, where eight squadrons of the jets will be based; not Havelock, N.C., to the south, where two other squadrons will be housed; and especially not Washington County, N.C., a spot picked, in part, because it is about halfway between the two bases.
The feud has left the Navy with few friends in North Carolina, at least when it comes to the OLF: The big newspapers are against it, as are a slate of groups that might seem genetically predisposed to counter each other, such as the National Rifle Association and the National Audubon Society.
Country music entertainer Willie Nelson lent his fame to their cause by writing a letter to President Bush to oppose the project. Asked recently for referrals to OLF supporters, the Navy could not offer a single person.
“It’s not a very popular position to take down there, so they’re probably not saying much,” said Dan Cecchini, the Navy’s OLF environmental planner.
The fight has taken a hotly personal tenor. Many of the 70 generational farming families that could lose their homes and farms periodically camp in protest on the OLF site in “tent cities,” or ambush unsuspecting politicians at campaign stops. The Charlotte Observer editorial page dubbed the OLF a “stupid” plan. Adm. Robert J. Natter, then-commander of the Atlantic Fleet, responded with a letter that ended with a zinger: “I hope in the future your editorial writers will refrain from using the word ‘stupid,’ at least before looking in the mirror.” Not to be outdone, the paper amended its assessment, saying OLF was not only stupid but also “nuts.”
The Navy said it needs the added training capacity of an OLF because of its commitment to a new “surge” approach to warfare, which requires it to have seven or eight carriers ready to quickly deploy from U.S. ports. The Navy wants its East Coast-based Super Hornet pilots to fly groups of planes to the OLF from Naval Air Station Oceana, outside Virginia Beach, and from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Havelock. The jets, which can make the trip in minutes, would execute about 30,000 touch-and-go landings on the strip each year, cutting loops in the sky before each descent as if they were racing along a stock car track.
The normal flight pattern avoids the refuge, where 100,000 migratory birds live in the peak winter months. But the eastern approach and one of the scripted holding patterns, used during congested periods, skim within a mile and a half of Pungo Lake.
Joe Albea, host of a North Carolina public television outdoors show and an avid hunter who has camouflage seat covers in his SUV, said the heavy swans and geese are sure to slash through the same airspace as the jets because their feeding range can be 15 miles or more.
Bird problems are common at civilian and military airfields throughout the nation, and the risk is measured by a “bird avoidance model” known — aptly — as “BAM.” Cecchini said he can handle the birds by scheduling missions when the swans and geese are least likely to be feeding and by managing crops in the area to divert them from the landing strip.
But skeptical environmentalists describe the birds as the most unpredictable of creatures, taking flight in irregular, impossible-to-fathom sequences dictated by everything from moon phase to barometric pressure.
Howard Phillips, the Pocosin Lakes refuge manager, routinely dispatches photographers to one field or another where the birds have been spotted, only to have the photographers return, sour-faced and saying that “they never showed up.”
Looking out over the swarms of birds — flying in rigid chevrons or lovely, fluttering ribbon patterns — many here have wondered why planes based in Virginia would fly to North Carolina to practice. The answer is simple: noise complaints in Virginia, where Oceana and its auxiliary landing field in Chesapeake, known as Fentress, are increasingly hemmed in by residential development.
Virginia Beach, where homeowners must sign noise disclosure statements before finalizing real estate deals, has an active and influential anti-noise lobby. The city also has a powerful friend: Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who has said he will support the Navy’s decision.
The economics of the deal are troubling to political leaders in Washington County, one of the poorest in the state. The home bases of the squadrons stand to reap tens of millions of dollars per year, but Washington County will get only a few dozen maintenance-related jobs. It also will lose 30,000 acres of farmland from its tax rolls, erasing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
The roads leading to the possible OLF site are dotted with protest signs: “Danger: Falling birds and 57 million $$$ jets,” “No OLF.”
“This is God’s country,” said Gerald Allen, whose great-grandfather planted tobacco on land that would be part of the OLF. “It belongs to God and me and farm credit.”
Allen, though, sees glimmers of faint hope. Last month, U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle in Raleigh, N.C., issued a scathing preliminary injunction, stopping the Navy from moving ahead with land acquisition. “Nature lacks a voice with which to speak for itself,” wrote Boyle, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and has been nominated for an appeals court seat by Bush.
Brian Roth, mayor of the town of Plymouth, near the OLF site, said sometimes he feels as if his struggling county lacks a voice, too. He wants Plymouth to become a tourist magnet for bird watchers and fishermen.
But, he said, a pack of noisy jets could ruin it all.
Roth, who spent 10 years plotting courses for Navy Prowler jets, never thought he would spend his fifties fighting the force he once served.
As Roth talks, he fiddles with something on his right hand. It is a heavy gold ring and it is engraved with a set of Navy wings.
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May 3, 2004 at 11:39 am