w i n t e r
steam dog
It's been months since I just pointed the car in a direction and went. Many more months than that since I've been anywhere completely new.
I think the soul needs that and know that mine requires a certain dose of the unknown. For all the sitting around and tinkering I do, there is quite a bit desire to be anywhere but here and what's more than that, anywhere but someplace I've been before. So of course I accepted the invitation to the beach this past weekend.
I've thought about how to write about what happened there for awhile now. In fact I remember once being called "ghostly and evocative" and actually thinking I had something to live up to other than the audience that is always out there, which is to say the entire world.
For awhile that bothered me and I'd let my writing slip.
I'd digress like I'm doing now. I was afraid of losing me to something bigger than that. The writer being overtaken by his audience. I thought about quitting. I thought about writing more. I tried both and neither worked to my satisfaction and so I'm back where I was before, except where I used to turn out stories that were little more than autobiographical tales told in the third person I now write as if this were a diary or I were actually talking to someone.
I guess we all go through cycles, but I wanted so much for this one time to be able to come home, sit down and write like I did a couple years ago, or a few years ago, or even that one piece I never did anything with last week. Basically I wanted to come home and find that groove waiting for me. I wanted to drink my cheap Miller beer and float over the dirty, yellowed keys.
Instead I can't think of any better way than to just write it out. Borrowing a little technique from a friend of mine I've been wanted to try for a while. Percy, I hope you don't mind.
The Ferry
I pull the car into the sand lot at 10:55 a.m. and jam the stick in second gear while pulling up on the break. The engine dies quickly and ticks after spending almost four hours on I-40 until it ended, then turning onto 133, then 17, and finally 87. You can't go any further than that. 87 ends right in the little town and fishing village of Southport, and that's where the Ferry is.
White clapboard Victorians dot the landscape and peak through the Southern Live oak dripping with spanish moss swaying in the breeze.
I've only got a couple bags and it's a damn good thing because it's a quarter mile to the Ferry and the whistle just blew.
I pick up speed and I'm not even halfway there when my feet start killing me from running in my Doc's. But I can see the pier and I can see the white and blue ferry pulling away as a fellow at the bow unties the last of the ropes from the steal cleat on the deck. They've already closed the gate but the luggage ramp is still open. I jump the turnstile, slide under the chain dividing the passenger ramp from the luggage ramp and tear ass down the rubber mat...jumping at the end and easily catching hold of the ferry rail before swinging one leg up and over. No one really seemed to notice. None of the crew paid me any mind and this time of year I was one of three passengers, the other two were inside the cabin and probably didn't even know I'd jumped aboard, but I've never jumped onto ferry before. For that matter I've never been on a ferry and it's been a good start. Exactly what I was looking for. Somehow, walking down a ramp with a half-hour to spare and handing a fellow my ticket wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I'm not saying I did it on purpose, but I wasn't dissapointed it happened.
The Island
The island is almost as far east as you can get without going to Maine. It allows no gas powered engines, most people travel by bicycle or golf cart, and it has a light house built in 1817. It was torn up pretty bad in the hurricane (Floyd for those of you who are not still feeling the effects one way or another) and still has a lot of damage but they've got water again, and gas, and power. For as desolate as the island is, life is pretty much back to normal. Only about 100 people live on the place year round and right now the count couldn't have been any more than 150.
I get off the ferry and grab a golf cart ride with a buddy already on the island.
"Thought you were gonna be on the 10:00."
"Change of plans," I say, looking over the dunes as we turn left onto a small road shaded by the same Southern Live oak I saw back in Southport. The sea breeze feels good and I grab a beer from the cooler between us.
"Couldn't have picked a better weekend."
"No man, you couldn't have made it any better. Not if you had the power to try."
The island is crossed everywhere by the little track roads just wide enough for a golf cart. Names pop up like East Beach, Old Baldy, The Captain's place. We pass them all and keep on driving. I haven't seen a person since leaving the ferry save my friend. It's like it's our island.
And after almost 20 minutes of wandering around the roads we stop, just like that, walk up a small wooden planked path and sit on the most barren strip of beach I've ever seen in my life. I look to my right and laying there in the sand about ten yards away is a fist sized conch shell. It reminds me of a skull in the desert, bone white and dry, the sand blowing over it in little hazy waves, stinging my legs.
I smile the first real, honest smile I've been able to muster in weeks and something leaves. I mean it takes off, right there on the coast. No alcohol induced temporary forgiveness. No nightmarish sweaty and fitfull sleeping reminder. Just gone.
The better part of the afternoon is spent right there until we leave to get a better vantage point (and a jacket) for the sunset.
The sunset
I look out over the ocean. Yeah, being on an island I'm in one of the few places on the east coast where I can actually see the sun set over the ocean. It looks as though the ships have all gathered for the show, but really we're just off the main shipping lane out of Wilmington. There are two cargo ships piled high with containers well above the deck, a tanker, a few trawlers, and a Navy frigate. They all seem completely stationary, in fact the only thing moving in the huge orange glow just over the horizon.
I have to squint to stare at the sun and its reflection off the water. It hurts a little and when I blink I of course see only the round shape, but what damage I do to my retina is worth the price for the thing I'm seeing now. The sun is actually moving. I mean its moving fast enough to count, or fast enough if you turned away and then back you notice a difference.
Like moon flowers down by the lake, you can watch them open; well this particular sun I watched set. It only took a matter of minutes before I took the last pull off a tall boy and the sun was gone with a brief green flash over the water. Somebody behind me said, "psssss" and that was it.
Just like that.
Steam Dog
The day could've come from a fairy tale. Right out of a paper back grocery store novel but it didn't. It was actually a day where everything worked out right. Where nothing went wrong at all and where I was constantly amazed at every thing right down to, and even past, the moment when the sun set.
A friend of mine once mentioned to me actually seeing a real mushroom cloud from an above ground atomic test. I could only imagine standing there on a ridge overlooking the valley where the test took place. In utter awe and terror but at the same time feeling some little bit proud at being there. Happy to be a part of something that big and horribly finite.
It may be a hard thing to grasp, why I'd feel that way, and that's not at all how she put it, but if I'd been there as I imagine it, I'd feel like that. Perhaps precisely because I have not been there and never will be, so I can distance myself from the fantasy and it becomes what that day was. An utterly perfect moment frozen in time.
See, the day happened to everyone. All of North Carolina was under clear, unlimited viability and abnormally warm temperatures. Everyone, from the antique dealer in Southport, to my grandparents several hundred miles away on High Rock, to the roofer working Saturday in Tarboro putting a house back together after the storm, to the train conductor pulling CSX cars through Pomona on the last stop before the mainline to D.C. Everyone.
I was but one.
But for that one day. That one moment in time. I was able to stop and pay attention to every last detail, and it was all beautiful.
goodnight 12.8.99