SUNSET BEACH, North Carolina -- Sunset Beach is a summer resort town that appears to have achieved its full-blown status only about a dozen years or so ago, just about the time we started spending our two-week vacation in the beach house of our poet friend Grace Gibson. Photos taken when she built the house, in 1983, show few buildings in much of the surrounding space that today is filled with "summer cottages."

With much of it built on a barrier island at the southern end of the North Carolina coast, the town so far has not acceded to construction of a large, high-arch concrete bridge to link it with the mainland. Instead, for car traffic it continues to rely on a narrow, rusted, creaky drawbridge spanning the Intracoastal Waterway. This allows it to retain more of the air of a littoral village, which is lacking in the adjacent beach town to the east, Ocean Isle.

I said a "barrier island," but what today appears to be an island may not have been one before the Intracoastal Waterway was built, as it was contiguous to the continent with a marshland in between. What gives it the appearance of independence is the waterway, plus a simple set of canals built to give summerhouse owners as much access to the water as possible.