When I was a boy, my family used to vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. These islands are masses of shifting sands, and their exact topography can vary from season to season, year to year.
When you’re a child growing up somewhere deep in the interior of the country, the salt sea and the sand and all the attendant creatures associated with these environs are exotic. For me to come out of the mountains and the forests of oak, hickory, and maple was to step into a new universe,
I came to revel in the foliage in scenery changes as we crossed the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge, then rambled along the Piedmont for what seemed an eternity, and the came to the flat land of the pines, Along the roadside, the subtropical pine forest seemed to stretch on for an eternity, but suddenly, you’d a long patch of cotton fields and corn. And when I was a really young boy, the tobacco fields would also stretch out on both sides of the highway. Acres and acres of cancer and emphysema, bright leaves shining in the summer sun, white flowers spreading like a fine ornamental.
But then, we’d cross a causeway or two and drive over the some sound, where the saltwater laid heavy and black and where there would always someone fishing along the bank, and we’d get all excited because we’d seen saltwater again.
When I was a young child, I accepted the usual beach decorum of lying around on a towel in the sand and charging out into the waves for a bit of fun. The real joy would come when we’d go to the hotel pool and swim for seven or eight hours.
But as the summers passed, I got the wandering spirit. I think I initially got this idea to avoid potential family conflict, but I would go in the early morning on the beach and walk where the sand was still pounded down from the receding tide.
I would walk past all the places where people were sprawled out catching rays, past the places where lifeguards sat on high towers to watch for mischief, and within just few hundred yards, I’d step onto the wide beach that rested just beyond an old Civil War fort.
And there, I would walk into a sort of wilderness. Where the terns festoons the sand, and the black skimmers would descend along the foamy waves and let their long lower bills dip into the water in hopes of snagging a wayward baitfish. The little shorebirds, too difficult for my adolescent mind to identify, would scamper in and away as the waves crashed into the beach sand.
The only people about where those either letting their dogs off-leash to run into the surf or the true seashell aficionados, who were scouring the tidal zone for perfect scallop and oyster shells. And then there would be a few old me standing shirtless and sunburned as they cast their long fishing rods into the sea.
I would walk into the subtropical heat, and the sweat would pour from my skin. The sunscreen would run into my eyes, and I’d wipe my forehead with a paper towel I remembered to bring with me.
And I would enter into this Zen-like state, one that I can only attempt to describe with some difficulty, but that I would feel at one with the heat and the salty wind and the crashing waves.
And my eyes would cast about and watch the brown pelicans dive down into water beyond the waves, and occasionally, bottlenose dolphins would make an appearance in the surf.
And I would become transfixed with them. I would wonder about what it would be like to be a dolphin living in the sea, frolicking the whole day with my pod as I chased the the little fish up into shoreline.
I would sometimes follow a pod along the coast and then totally forget where I was on the beach, but beaches being linear things, I knew that all I had to do was remember whether I had been heading out or heading back to correct my course.
I would cross back over the boardwalk that carried me over the dunes, and the green anoles would flit about and show their dewlaps. And I would be reminded of what an exotic place this truly was, and I would then return to the hotel or the condo for a nice shower and then preparation for the evening meal at some restaurant.
On dark winter nights, I often will have dreams about the Crystal Island, and into my mind will filter the crashing waves, the cavorting dolphins, stench of the ocean, and that Zen-like state of walking in the subtropical heat.
And I will remember it for my encounters with a wildness I rarely got to see. I was in a place that was just far enough off the beaten path as not to have been turned into a corporate hellhole, where I could still see a bit of the wild Atlantic with my feet still in the sand.
I know that someday I will return to this island, and I will feel a bit of sorrow. I bet the dolphins don’t come in close to shore there anymore. Climate change and the sea level rise will have altered this spit of sand, too, and I know it will never be the same place I knew as a child.
But it still resides. It is deep within my psyche, and my occasional flits of nostalgia will bring it back for a little while.
And maybe that’s the best I can do.
