Rising seas will force North Carolina beach towns to move. The idea of leaving isn’t easy.

It took her breath away the first time she laid eyes on it. Its white clapboards glistening in the sunlight, pelicans soaring above — there it was, Glenda Browning’s dream home. She named it Pelican Point, even though she didn’t own it.

For the next 18 years, nearly every weekend, Browning stepped onto the sands of Ocean Isle Beach and walked a quarter of a mile to land’s edge, stopping at Pelican Point to admire it. She was in love.

“The first thing out of my mouth looking at that house and the view it saw every day, was ‘Oh those are lucky people,’” Browning said. “It just sat there like some kind of magical thing.”

Pelican Point perches at the far eastern end of Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina.

The story of what's happened to the house is just a taste of what American beach towns up and down the Atlantic Ocean are going to face in coming decades. Sea-level rise has swallowed entire blocks of this town. Ocean Isle Beach residents are digging in while their property value, and the land itself, diminishes like sand through their fingers.

On a July morning, the pelicans haven’t taken flight yet from nearby Holden Beach. Beachgoers are picking through the various seashells that’ve washed ashore. A strong breeze feeds a storm cell offshore.

The house was specifically designed for its location, said Tripp Sloane, who built "Pelican Point."

Large windows on all three stories let morning light flood the house. Decks in the front and back offer perfect viewing areas for sunrises and sunsets. Palm trees surround the pool in the backyard, which provides a refreshing alternative to the salt water of the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean to one side, an inlet to another.

The landscape surrounding Pelican Point is one of a kind, at any time of day. It also will doom the house eventually.

Pelican Point was four rows back from the ocean when it was built in 1978. Today it’s oceanfront real estate.

Beachfront emotion is no match for reality of rising sea levels

The science is clear. Parts of Ocean Isle Beach can’t be saved from sea-level rise amid a manmade climate crisis roiling the planet.

It is not alone. There are vulnerable places along the East Coast with working families who don't have the income or savings to weather what will happen to them from climate change. As a vacation or retirement spot for the upper middle class, this is not quite one of the of those places. But it is a town that captures the imagination of a region in the Carolinas, signifying a vacation or lifestyle dream for many.

Does it represent a particular kind of East Coast living that won't ever really be the same again?

Approximately 90% of North Carolina’s 320 miles of coastline are bordered by barrier islands. Unlike manmade fortifications, they don’t stay in place, and never have. They move constantly, growing and shrinking, even disappearing, depending on conditions such as sea levels.

“For some people, it may be that moving is truly not something that they can conceive of because of cultural ties,” said Miyuki Hino, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in land use and environmental planning.

Ocean Isle Beach residents aren’t ready to say goodbye to a luxury dream or to their houses. Homeowners here seem to understand the risks they face but aren’t willing to part ways with the seaside paradise they’ve created.

Managing the risks of sea-level rise, however, will require communities like Ocean Isle Beach to reconsider their place alongside the ocean.

Sea levels are predicted to rise 11 to 13 inches along southeastern North Carolina by 2050, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Communities like Ocean Isle Beach try to counteract these forces by freezing their islands in time through beach replenishment or building sand trap systems called "groins."

Experts rate it a losing battle.

Stopping barrier island movement won’t work because “you’re pouring sand in the top of the hourglass as the sand continues to flow out the bottom,” said Robert Young, director of Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.

“Most oceanfront communities spend huge amounts of money trying to defend what is ultimately indefensible,” Young said. “Those are the places that are by far the most vulnerable. That's exactly what Ocean Isle is doing.”

Ocean Isle Beach is an island by accident

Ocean Isle Beach isn’t a natural barrier island. The construction of the Intracoastal Waterway separated it from the mainland in 1934.

The community was incorporated in 1959. It’s home to 867 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but each summer thousands visit the island for vacations.

Ocean Isle Beach is flanked by Tubbs Inlet to the west and by Shallotte Inlet to the east. Inlets can exacerbate the erosion of barrier islands — oceanfront shorelines near inlets erode five times faster than other shorelines in North Carolina.

First Street and parts of Second Street were devoured by the ocean at the eastern end of the island in the past few decades.

Since Hurricane Hazel reoriented Shallotte Inlet in 1954, the shoreline around Pelican Point eroded as much as 15 feet a year. Since 1971, the tide has crawled over and covered roughly 200 yards of the shoreline.

Up until Ocean Isle Beach built a terminal groin this year, essentially a wall emerging from the sand running perpendicular to the surf, the shoreline was held in front of Pelican Point by sandbags placed there by homeowners.

Coastal life slowly wearing away

When Tripp Sloane built Pelican Point, two blocks separated him from the ocean. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Sloane noticed the worsening erosion.

"I knew that I was near the inlet and that that was a more dynamic area, but I was far enough back at the time that I felt comfortable (it) would not be a problem,” Sloane said. “That turned out not to be correct.”

The erosion became a major issue. By 1997, when Sloane sold the house, the shoreline had crept 128 yards closer, according to the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management.

Third Street in front of the house used to be paved then. And a neighboring house sat on the other side of the road. Today, the other house is gone, and Third Street is just a gravel road ending at Pelican Point.

Sloane sold the house to Eli Gold, an American sportscaster known as the voice for the University of Alabama college football and NASCAR for many years. Gold reportedly called some races from Pelican Point, Browning said.

Eventually, erosion concerns and having to rebuild after storms became too much.

He sold the home to Glenda and Bill Browning. The couple was living outside Wilmington at the time, but they were ready to sell off their tire store and move to Ocean Isle Beach full time.

Glenda finally had the home she had spent so many years thinking about.

Even as a bystander back then, she had given the home her own name for it, attaching it to the stunning brown pelicans with wingspans as wide as 6 feet who use the home as an artificial cliff to gain lift in the ocean breeze.

But the house was a wreck when she bought it in 2016 after Hurricane Matthew.

Rebuilding it took several months. Finally, in December 2017, the couple moved in. Glenda Browning had her dream house.

Then Hurricane Florence hit.

Florence flooded the house and tore off all the siding. Every wall in all rooms except two had to be redone, Browning said.

“We had to start over with a remodel. That took eight and a half months,” Browning said. “We moved back in and then Dorian hit us that next summer. It went through the garage.”

The Brownings rebuilt again. Hurricane Isaias blew through that next summer. This time the home was nearly destroyed.

The hurricane’s 100 mile-an-hour winds disintegrated the foyer and a bathroom. Four to five feet of storm surge engulfed the home. The Brownings rode out the storm at Pelican Point, thinking the hurricane would weaken into a tropical storm before it made landfall.

When it didn’t, the couple escaped to the third-floor bedroom.

Glenda and Bill huddled together in darkness as angry seas ate away at the house’s foundation, the blare of the fire alarm warned them that smoke was filling their house and the wind screamed outside.

“Your windows are bowing, you hear crashing under your house, and you don't know if the pilings are going to hold you,” Browning said. “You can't know what's going to be left until it's over.”

Trying to save the island and its homes

Through Florence, Dorian and Isaias, the Brownings never lost faith in Pelican Point.

Browning’s faith was founded partly in her unflinching optimism that her bad luck would eventually break. She also believed in the project. She attended meetings, read the research and talked to experts on how the long wall pushing out into the surf, once built, would work to maintain the shoreline.

The project was scheduled to start in 2016, she said. “That's why we bought the house that year,” Browning said. Each year, she said, was supposed to be "the year" that their dream house would finally be protected.

In theory, the project would preserve a wider beach at the end of the island, allowing the town to build a dune system to protect the homes there, said Mayor Debbie Smith.

Scientific research into the effectiveness of terminal groins has found that the projects aren’t cost-effective and might cause more harm than good with the threat of sea-level rise.

North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission found in 2010 that they can protect some properties at the end of barrier islands, but it recommended they be used “after all other non-structural erosion control responses, including relocation of threatened structures, are found to be impracticable.”

Giving up on the dream of coastal living

By the completion of the project in April 2022, a structure over 1,000 feet long starting 300 feet behind the shoreline jutted out into the surf. The beach in front of Pelican Point now stretches hundreds of feet out in front of the home. But Browning and her husband no longer live at Pelican Point.

The project came too late for them.

Isaias shook the couple. Following a king tide that nearly washed away the foundation of the home, the Brownings decided they could no longer keep protecting Pelican Point.

In 36 months of owning the house, the Brownings lived in it for 14 months because of all the storms, she said.

Browning had joked with friends that the only way she’d leave that house was in a box. But Isaias and the tides made Browning realize that the risk of Pelican Point outweighed its beauty.

“When I came out of the fog of what had happened, I realized we just can't keep doing this at our age. Trying to rebuild it,” Browning said. “We're not rich people, and insurance did not pay for one penny of the last round.”

The Brownings still live in Ocean Isle, but away from the beach now.

For a long time, Browning avoided the eastern end of the island. The memories of what she and her husband went through were too difficult to relive. Until a sunny, breezy day in July, when she and her husband stepped out onto the beach, walked down to the eastern end of the island and looked toward Pelican Point once again.

“It's kind of silly in a way because you know a house is a thing, but you see something and you talk to it in your mind,” Browning said. “You're just so grateful to get the chance, and I am very grateful that I got to be there.”

This article is part of a USA TODAY Network reporting project called "Perilous Course," a collaborative examination of how people up and down the East Coast are grappling with the climate crisis. Journalists from more than 35 newsrooms from New Hampshire to Florida are speaking with regular people about real-life impacts, digging into the science and investigating government response, or lack of it.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Rising sea levels threaten homes, communities along NC shorelines