Coasting

We like to organize and clean before the Christmas season. It’s a good way to feel ready for the new year. As life continually seems busier and more complicated, the only way to bring new things into our life is to actively make room for them. This year, after purging the house of outgrown and unused possessions before the influx of grandparent gifts and holiday decorations, I was going through my various online subscriptions. I found that we were paying for a “Calm” app that I wasn’t familiar with and didn’t have on any of my devices. I was asking Tiffany if she knew about it and Jude popped up with “Oh, mom put that on my iPad after you made us watch that movie about the giant underground worms that eat people.” While I stand by my judgement that “Tremors" is an excellent movie and some of Kevin Bacon’s finest work, I do acknowledge that each of us has a different relationship with fear and what provokes it.

On a recent trip to the North Carolina coast for new years, we crossed paths with some friends from the neighborhood. Tiffany and Crawford had grown up spending time near oceans and were talking about the pleasures of ocean swimming. Nik and I, both having grown up in Kentucky, had less enthusiasm for the turbulent, inky, carnivorous, unknowns of maritime hobbies. I’m a forest dwelling mammal. I love a river or a lake. But seeing me gleefully swimming in the ocean is as likely as seeing a family of squirrels body surfing. Let’s face it; a squirrel in a wet suit looks a lot like a rat once you get all the tail fur tucked in. Tiffany always rolls her eyes at my hesitancy for brining myself and frolicking in the ocean. This brings me to a brief discussion of the Portuguese man o’ war.

We took the park service ferry from Harkers Island to Shackleford banks to walk the beach and see the wild horses that roam the island. Dotted along the thin strip of sand between the winter grasses and gentle waves were hundred of Twinkie size luminescent blue blobs. We recognized these from our time in Ecuador when Tiffany was stung by one and spent three days wrapping herself in wet towels and scratching and moaning in a light Benadryl induced coma. We were careful to avoid their tentacles as we walked along the beach and the boys took some brief delight in deflating them with sticks.

*Shell hunters and coffee shop connoisseurs*

Contrary to what I’d always thought, Portuguese man o’ war are not jellyfish. They are a unique critter, alone in their genus and family; a long skinny branch of the evolutionary tree held far away from the trunk and other branches. For good reason, really. They are not even a single organism, but composed of four separate organisms cooperating to endanger the rest of the world. Their tentacles sting upon contact involuntarily (or at lest they consistently claim innocence) and are capable of killing humans and other large animals. A notable exception is a type of octopus, immune to their venom, that tears off their tentacles to use for hunting other fish. I guess when you’re used to managing eight arms, a couple of extra deadly appendages is no big deal. The swim bladder that Portuguese man o’ war uses to rise or sink is filled with poisonous gas. No one has ever observed them mating or reproducing. And these things live everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean. So when someone suggests gleefully splashing about in waters next to spooky zip-loc bags full of poison gas with rattlesnake legs, I gotta offer a dissenting opinion.

The beach, however, was stunning. In the winter, the east coast is devoid of tourists, ticks, and no-see-ums. Shackleford Banks and Cape Lookout are both accessible by the park service ferries although it seems most people pass up Shackleford Banks and stay on the boat to get to Cape Lookout. The boat captain drove the boat directly into the sand of Shackleford Banks and explained to the passengers that DNA studies had revealed that the wild horses on the island were descended from Spanish horses who escaped from early explorers. I found this fascinating. Horses evolved from Eohippus on the Colorado plateau millions of years ago but left North America via the Siberian land bridge and were absent from the continent for millennia, only to return to these shores from the opposite ocean thanks to misguided violent explorers trying to get pepper from India.

As our group left the boat, I asked the captain, “So we just show back up at this beach in two hours to get picked up?” He looked around, looked at his watch and and said, unconvincingly, “Yeah, I guess so.” I imagined a distant future where boats would arrive and their captains would urge the passenger to witness the majesty of wild Kentuckians roaming the sands along with the horses.

*Cape Lookout and two things worth looking out for*

We slowly wandered the northwest side of the island, following the thin high-tide beach and stopping to examine shells, some beached needle fish, frequent Portugese Man O’ War and other engaging flotsam. There were several stream crossings and, due to the various footwear choices of our group, several piggy back rides as well. Small tight-knit flocks of birds flew over the tide pools, their wings turning silver in the sun when they banked and rolled in unison.

*The adult size teenager who replaced our little girl at some point*

True to his vague promises, the captain returned and we took the ferry on to Cape Lookout. In general, it has seemed to me that people who are fascinated by lighthouses are the same people who wear expensive sweaters and collect porcelain knick knacks, leaving me to think that lighthouses mainly guide tourists to gift shops these days. Cape Lookout, however, is a wilderness. Accessible only by ferry, it is possible to take a 4wd vehicle to the northern end, where it an appears that a short paddle could get you to several empty islands; a clear reason to return for further exploration. This trip, we walked a long loop around the southern end and found some of the largest whelk shells I’ve seen and in some of the strangest colors. We spoke with a Swedish woman who found a beached whale and her calf further south on the island.

*Cape Lookout with its distinctive diamonds showing the cardinal directions*

Beaufort NC, where we stayed, was founded in 1729 and one of its small overgrown cemeteries has graves from revolutionary war soldiers. It was the site where Blackbeard’s famed pirate ship, '“The Queen Anne’s Revenge” ran aground. The Outer banks of North Carolina are the site of more than 500 shipwrecks, including a German submarine sunk during WWII just off the coast. The Maritime Museum in the center of town does a nice job of showcasing history from colonization through modern times, but offers little perspective on indigenous presence prior to that period. The intricate models of pirate ships and sail boats are mind bogglingly detailed and there’s a cross section of a whale heart, which isn’t something you run across too often.

*I find this approach to “buried” somewhat disconcerting*

With the wintry weather, we spent a lot of our time in the house we had rented, playing games, working puzzles and cooking. I always find it interesting to see what things a group of people have in common when stuck together traveling. For this trip it was a mix of long books, warm beverages at coffee shops, and breakfast casseroles, with a bit of hide and go seek thrown in. The teenage girls did an excellent job of sleeping in while the younger boys garnered an inexplicable amount of enjoyment from hiding in pillow forts and wrestling them into oblivion. The lives of rental house pillows could make for an interesting set of memoirs, I imagine.

The house was at the end of gravel road on a small bay of a tidal river that flowed into the Atlantic. The tide intermittently exposed muddy oysters and an occasional car tire while sea birds and herons fished in the shallow waters. There was hot tub facing the sunset, but the strong winds kept blowing the lid closed leaving me to feel like a Josh chowder in a lidded pot. When I was a kid, I watched a James Bond movie with my parents where he dives through a hole in an icy river and has to swim beneath the ice to find another opening. For some reason, it has always been a memorably terrifying scene for me. The first time the hot tub lid blew closed over my head and I found myself breathing in the small dark space between the water and the cover, it was the first thing that came to mind, even though I wasn’t wearing a tuxedo or withdrawing from a vodka addiction.

We took a cool windy day to check out the aquarium in Atlantic Beach which was impressive and focused on the wildlife native to the area. The water used for filling the giant tanks is cycled from the bay and they have a short system of trails meandering through an adjacent brackish marshland with nice platforms over the water for viewing birds and marine life.

*She likes those tall, dark, and handsome types*

From the aquarium, we headed to Fort Macon at the northern end of the Emerald Isle and enjoyed crawling in and out of its sunken fortifications and imagining the noise that the massive cannons must have created. Places like this alway baffle my emotional radar; created for war and a site of countless deaths, now a place with laughing, running children and a gift shop. How can one stage host so many different plays? As I rode a onewheel around the curving and banked sandy trails to the beach, I felt more like someone else’s distant future than my own present self. Maybe this is the value of travel to historic sites; the brief juxtaposition of past and future separated by the thin but impermeable curtain of time.

The beach south of Fort Macon was beautiful but it was a cool day with steady winds and we left after some shell hunting and a mad dash into the waves by Stella who apparently lacks either cold receptors or a proper respect for hypothermia.

The trip was a nice beginning to the new year. Adventures and meals with friends and family are really my main life goals anymore and I hope this trip sets a trend for the year. I enjoy the coast in the winter for its solitude and raw beauty as well as the cold’s excuse to avoid tempting the beasties lurking beneath the gentle inviting waves.

Preachin’

Domestic Vignettes