
{"id":20549,"date":"2011-09-01T10:01:30","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T14:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=20549"},"modified":"2011-08-31T16:44:28","modified_gmt":"2011-08-31T20:44:28","slug":"big-city-goodnight-irene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2011\/09\/01\/big-city-goodnight-irene\/","title":{"rendered":"BIG CITY: Goodnight Irene"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Kirk Ross<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Like a lot of you, I clocked a few hours watching Hurricane Irene roll up the North Carolina coast last week. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been a while since we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen a storm that large and threatening, and I guess I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t noticed in the interim how much more attached I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve become to the water\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s edge. <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>She grew up landlocked in the Hoosier flatlands. I escaped and enjoyed the shore in many places \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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).<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you should read \u00e2\u20ac\u2122em sometime, they were geniuses at it.<\/p>\n<p>And I love it because at its heart the coast is small-town North Carolina, full of some of the nicest people you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d ever want to meet. Even the gruff old sailors. Especially the gruff old sailors.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c barely a hundred years old at best \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in the thousand or so years of human history there.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a couple of lights burning and a TV or two flickering. Traffic is rare and almost no one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s walking the beach with flashlights blazing. The climate can be unpredictable, rough and with relentless wind. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all in this together.<\/p>\n<p>There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. <\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re no longer strangers. They have names. They have kids and grandkids. They have little dogs, favorite barstools, new trucks and old stories \u00e2\u20ac\u201c lots of them.<\/p>\n<p>And I hope everybody came through OK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong> by Kirk Ross<\/strong><br \/>\nLike a lot of you, I clocked a few hours watching Hurricane Irene roll up the North Carolina coast last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20550,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20549\/revisions\/20550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}