Many denizens of the Outer Banks will spend large portions of their lives chasing waves in other parts of the world. But most of them come back, not so much for the surf, I don’t think, as much as for the personality of the place. Not the culture, for there is little of that here. I’m talking about the personality of the spirits that inhabit this place: the wind, the clouds, the sand, the seagrass; the stumps of driftwood and the weathered cedar shakes on the houses that would tell some killer storm stories if they could talk