Kirk Ross
Like a lot of you, I clocked a few hours watching Hurricane Irene roll up the North Carolina coast last week. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a storm that large and threatening, and I guess I hadn’t noticed in the interim how much more attached I’ve become to the water’s edge.
It started with some writing assignments several years ago, which led to an incurable spate of wanderlust. Then for the past year, the Mrs. and I fulfilled a lifelong dream and managed to scrap up the pennies to lease a little place down on the coast with some friends. We get there when we can, and each time we do it feels a little more like home.
She grew up landlocked in the Hoosier flatlands. I escaped and enjoyed the shore in many places – climbed palms in Miami, fished off the seawall at Gloucester, lolled on the pink sands of Bermuda, camped out among frisky spring breakers and fully clothed Mennonites on the fine white sands of Siesta Key, waded in water the color of weak tea off Bay St. Louis, followed the Russian River into the sunset and scampered into the cold surf at Old Orchard in Maine (and back out as fast as I could).
None of them, friends, compares to that stretch about 200 miles to our east where the land and sea and sky all meet. I like some of those other coastlines; I love ours.
I’m just starting to figure out how to do it justice with words, so pardon me if I wait a few years before getting all purple over spartina grass and decaying oyster boats.
I love it for all the same reasons every weekly newspaper columnist in North Carolina ever cited while getting all sappy about the natural beauty of the place. Billy Arthur, Holley Mack Bell, Sam Ragan – you should read ’em sometime, they were geniuses at it.
And I love it because at its heart the coast is small-town North Carolina, full of some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. Even the gruff old sailors. Especially the gruff old sailors.
The rest of the state probably thinks of the place now a bit too much like the rest of the world does, as a touristy spot and a fair-weather destination. But in relative terms, the vacation paradise thing is fairly new – barely a hundred years old at best – in the thousand or so years of human history there.
And although the tide of development has taken its toll, each year as the vacation season melts away, the older ways still stand out. You look down the street at the collection of condos and cottages and there’s just a couple of lights burning and a TV or two flickering. Traffic is rare and almost no one’s walking the beach with flashlights blazing. The climate can be unpredictable, rough and with relentless wind. It’s not a natural place for year-round human habitation. So in the little spots where the tribe does gather, hospitality is interwoven with a sense that we’re all in this together.
There’s a local knowledge that what exists on these shifting sands is impermanent; no argument really over whether man or nature rules in the long run.
I watched Irene roll up the coast noting her track, the storm surge and the wind speed, like I always do. But more than ever before I worried over the people in its way. They’re no longer strangers. They have names. They have kids and grandkids. They have little dogs, favorite barstools, new trucks and old stories – lots of them.
And I hope everybody came through OK.