Last Summer, Michael Ray Dart — a 63-year-old native of Chesterfield, Virginia, drove his 2024 Nissan Rogue over the bulkhead in downtown Southport, North Carolina, and plunged into the brackish abyss where the Cape Fear River, Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean converge and commingle.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t an isolated act of boneheaded bizarreness.
Four months later, a woman drove her Toyota Tundra over the same bulkhead. Even crazier, almost a year to the date prior, another driver had done the same exact thing, except in a 2006 Lexus ES350.
I said that to drive home a point (pun intended): Geographically speaking, there aren’t many places in the state of North Carolina farther east than my itty-bitty, seagull-infested-yet-charming hometown of Southport.