The Atlantic

Small bites more often is what the doc recommends -- I'm going to plate the rest of this 2001 road trip one day a week. Herewith, we move on from the mosquitoes...

 

September 5 

I open one eye as Brian urges me awake with pokes at my earlobe and buzzing noises. There’s something wrong with how infallibly spry he is every morning, completely rebooted. He’s got the video camera going again. The van windows are fogged with dew, an illusion of cool, but as I sit up and rub my eyes the dew is already evaporating, glinting in the ruthless sun as it goes.             
             “Tell the folks at home how your night was, Honey.”

I put one middle finger against the camera lens.

“Do you still wanna go on the trip with me?”

"Do I have a choice?”

“I could drop you off here; you could hang out with Billy Joe and Bobby Sue.”

The rock stars in the trailers next door are on the move, quickly filling coffee thermoses and revving their own engines. I’m relieved to think that Rocky Mount was not a destination for them, but merely a pit stop on the ’01 reunion tour. I avoid eye contact as I swing open the back door of the van, gather shower supplies, and slip into my flip flops before hitting the grass. The impending heat slinks out from the meadow behind me and follows me to the showers. 

            For the first time in my campground life I have the bathroom all to myself. A few mosquitoes loiter in the corners of the ceiling, but the counters are clean, the floor and benches are dry, and a pop radio morning show is coming through a speaker somewhere. Under the tepid water, I wash away yesterday's irritation while Madonna bounces against the linoleum. The sneaky optimism of morning does its work. I dance myself dry with the towel and smile around the toothbrush, knowing this is an exceptional day. I am going to see The Atlantic.

When I emerge in a tank top, my last clean pair of shorts, and rinsed-off flip flops, with the towel still around my head, the van is parked outside the bathroom door and Brian is peeling a banana in the driver’s seat.

"Where'd ya get the banana?"

“Complimetary fruit basket in the office. This place is not too shabby in the sunlight. Ready to roll?”

It must disappoint him that I’m not smiling the first second I awake to his face, that it takes 20 minutes of time to myself, with regenerating soap, water and pop music to draw a day’s worth of exuberance out of me. How converse we are from this angle. Like laser-cut puzzle pieces, maybe? I shake out my hair, and it’s already almost dry as I grab my juice box and blueberry muffin, and climb into the cockpit.  

            The sun floats up over the windshield as we drive east; the windows are all rolled down and warm air thick as sea spray obscures the boundary between inside and outside the van. My bare feet are propped on the dash. We inch along the one lane road behind a mailman in a gray sedan with a police light strapped to the roof over his door. We're in no hurry. Inspired to roam, Brian ruminates about where I might want to take my first trip off the continent.

“Austria, Germany?”

“No, that’s where you want to go.” That’s where he went to high school while his dad was stationed overseas. "I don't love beer and mustard and muscles so much, you know?"

            “Indonesia, Australia?”

            "Not so much. How about Barcelona, Morocco, Istanbul?"

            "Reykjavik, Russia, Japan?" he coaxes.

            "Ireland, Scotland, Paris," I counter. I'm sure that if I had enough time, or perhaps just patience, Brian would take me around the world. But I don't actually want to go everywhere. I feel a funny knot under the hollow of my throat, and focus back on how splendid it is to be here, now. Congestion and redundancy are behind us as we turn onto Route 64, which paves a path across the top of the Swiss cheese peninsula that leads to North Carolina's Outer Banks.

At the Port of Plymouth we reach the water. I can’t see it yet, but I can smell it—bright stew of salt, fish and seaweed inhaled straight to my heart, taking me back across any number of years to my first baby steps on the dull gold Santa Monica sand. Patting bucket-shaped domes of that wet sand into tiny cities under the pier, watching gray-whiskered men in green slickers haul their morning catch out of metal boats. When my single mom couldn’t sleep sometimes, she’d pack me into the car and drive us to the beach at dawn; we’d curl between two old quilts and nap beside that pier until the fishermen’s work roused us. I spent early Thanksgivings in the foam at Laguna Beach, intrepidly popping the foul brown pods on the kelp ribbons until they were suitable scarves. The undertow once grabbed 40-pound me while I was wading, and I got snarled below the surface just long enough to learn the primal lesson of powerlessness. I am afraid of the sea, and I want to always be watching it, hearing the roll and break of waves in my sleep, breathing its vapor. It is the foremost smell of being alive to me, and life-affirming today to smell it from this other coast.  

The terrain we're in now does not take the smooth line of the western seaboard, but is rather a broad tangle of channels carving through frayed capes, as if the land were a scrap of cloth torn carelessly from the bolt. A long stray thread of it stretches from Virginia’s Back Bay all the way to Bald Head—barrier islands trying to corral everything against the assault of colliding currents that earn the nickname “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” My first look at the water is through a cluster of magnolias at Ft. Williams, the last Union post to fall in April 1864. We see the inscribed tin sign so we follow a side road and that dead ends by a row of rusty Southern Railway cars. Since we have found only a little inlet instead of an ocean panorama, I spend a mere five minutes outside the van, and take just one picture of the battle plaque and the anglers who shuffle along the dock.

We return promptly to the road, which soon becomes a Main Street connecting a series of towns time forgot. There are junkyard auto body shops and corner groceries, and a roost of residents like Union and Confederate sentinels who have remained to monitor a reconstruction still in progress. They are out on their sagging porches right after breakfast, beating rugs against the railings and cutting back the dead jasmine vines. Nestled throughout their neighborhoods are old army barracks and hideaways, left to the vegetation or converted to community centers or schools, each with its own commemorative plaque. Brian pulls over next to a few sprawling churchyards. More formal than the roadside burial grounds of Tennessee, these are bordered by brick walls or iron gates tipped with fleur-de-lis, and the lawns are crowded with elaborate headstones. Through the camera’s telephoto lens I read the faded inscriptions. Most occupants were interred before the twentieth century, some before the nineteenth.

It finally occurs to me: the inordinate number of graves on this side of the country is the product of not only a civil war, but of Christian people just living, dying, and getting burried here for hundreds of years longer than they have been doing so west of the Mississippi. It’s a no-brainer, I know, but it’s another pause as the borders of my private universe recede.

            When, glancing up from the map at a stoplight, I notice a detour to Pettigrew State Park and the Somerset Plantation, I redirect us. Our first certified antebellum excursion. We take a dirt road lined with poplar trees, each with a wide yellow ribbon sashed around its trunk. I can’t think of a topical call for the ribbons—we haven’t been at war for ten years, and that last one in the desert was only a few days long—so I suppose the ribbons have always been here, and the wars have never ended.

I did pay attention in history class, but still, most of what I know about war I learned from music and movies. I have heard those of us born in the early 1970’s called ‘Nam Babies, but we were too little to see it live on the nightly news. We’ve never been chilled to the bone by the sound of an air raid siren, never poured over a newspaper list of the week’s dead neighbors. We haven’t really lived through what every American generation before us has. A yellow ribbon around a tree is just a Perry Como song my grandfather would sing after his second scotch. Looking at this long row of remembrace poplars is surreal, like shrinking into the sweet musty pages of an old novel. We come into marshy fields with sprinklers clicking across them, and then see several white outbuildings collected around a neoclassical mansion. On the side of the mansion a woman in a hoop skirt and a floppy bonnet is leading a tour.

"So?" asks Brian as he kills the engine.

"I just wanted to see one."

"Well then here we are." He tilts his seat back and closes his eyes. According to the best intentions of our pact against almost all blatant tourism, we will stay in the van instead of pursuing the tour. Content, still not in a hurry, just listening for a minute to history’s hot breath swirl around us. I wonder if the belle in the bonnet is telling her group how some plantation owners lined their mile-long driveways with slave cabins to show off their wealth, though the cabins were slapped together less soundly than the horse stables. Is she pointing to a hollowed-out log on legs in the back yard, the trough from which servants might have eaten their midday meal of milk-soaked bread; or to the kitchen, detached from the main house to substantiate the separation between master and slave, and to keep white people, waiting for dinner in the dining room, safe from potential fires; or to the smokehouse which doubled as the jail where punishment was meted out. Does her tour examine how this plantation’s slaves somehow made homes of these bleak spaces, and made an uncredited legacy of American hope and fortitude in the process? 

I suspect not. Though North Carolina is not waving Dixie, this tour probably upholds the whole Uncle Remus mythology, judging by the guide's bonnet. Aside from what you can supposedly find in the National Civil Rights Museum, it seems to me that most guided tours tend to avoid the more complex parts of the story. And considering that, it’s less and less clear to me why Brian and I don’t take guided tours.               

In the late morning we are listening to the Peasall Sisters and blinking at the Unlawful to Feed Bears on Road signs, when the townships fade into highway. There are more dips and crests of the concrete, and more tropical trees in the distance. I sense that the big water is at last all around us. We cross a series of bridges built like roller coaster tracks to carry us over Alligator River and Pamlico Sound. 

Roanoke Island is made of brick cottages and dark-shingled bungalows covered with pink Bougainvillea, and the full nosegay of salt water. Goosebumps bloom on my arms as I conjure the lost colony that once lived here and cut their cryptic messages into rocks and trees. After choosing this protected site for Elizabeth's expanding empire, Walter Raleigh was forbidden by her to return for a second trip, as she could not spare him in the case of a Spanish assault. A substitute captain came back with soldiers who were overcome by starvation or savagery by the time a third boat arrived, now full of regular citizens ready to invent the new world. But their leader left them before the first winter and never returned, maybe lost in the treacherous breakwater beyond the Sound. In his absence the colony eventually dissapeared. Maybe they left a note to clue in the next wave of colonists; maybe the natives were not to be trifled with, and left their own note in the rocks and trees to mark their stronghold. The island's summer theater version of the story implies that the colonists went native themselves in a show of true self-determinism. In any case, among the missing from Roanoke those four centuries ago was an infant named Virginia Dare, allegedly the first white child born on American soil, or as our trusty history textbook would say, the first American.

            After Dare County, we sweep over one more circuitous bridge and onto a four lane road with sand on both sides, piled into dunes or shoveled against the stucco of shops and cafés. The water is steps away on the east side and a half-mile away on the west; sand spills onto the road. It’s the best road I’ve ever seen in my life. I put my hand on Brian’s knee and squeeze. 

“Wow.” 

North toward Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills, the day has settled on slightly overcast but plenty of people are enjoying the end of the season, biking down the road in bikini tops, unloading wakeboards from the back of a jeep. There is no city, parking structure, or smoke puffing up from a plant, no shopping mall. Everything is adorned with whales, shells, ships and mermaids; rainbow flags flap in the wind. Pulling my hair back into a rubber band, I look straight ahead and see something I know Brian will like.

            “Get ready to turn to the right, Buddy.”

            “What is it?” he asks, trying not to cruise into carefree pedestrians.

            “Well, it looks like a car wash, but the sign says Brew Thru.” Growing up in old Pasadena, we had a drive through mini-mart (actually called the dairy) where mom would grab milk and bread after work, but I’ve never seen such a thing in the Pacific Northwest, and I don’t think Brian has ever seen one at all. He cranks the wheel and we swing into the driveway.

It’s a hangar with coolers lining both sides. Through their glass doors we see six-packs of every known brand of domestic beer. There are also some standard sunny weather imports, and a large section of local brews, which are described in detail on a giant chalkboard. Cases are stacked in crooked towers and t-shirts swing from ceiling wires. It could be dark in here with no windows, but it glows from the fluorescent cooler lights, or maybe from Brian’s eyes. Good thing no one is waiting behind us. He takes his time picking a half-rack of something local and light, and decides on another pint glass as a souvenir. 

“We’re tourists,” I laugh apologetically across Brian through the driver’s side window, but the surfer girl who hands us our loot just nods; we are no surprise to her. 

           

We keep driving in the opposite direction of our next campsite, north toward a national monument. I am thinking what a strange setting this bohemian sand bar is for it. Then the land expands such that water is no longer visible on the west side, and we find Kitty Hawk—the commemoration of Americans in flight. As soon as we hop out of the van the logic of the venue is clear—the brawny wind is driving steadily across a flat meadow of grass.

Next to the parking lot are two barns, inside which we find remnants of the process of crafting the original airplane: Orville and Wilbur’s camp quarters, ancient flight simulation machines, tools, prototype wings, wheels and props. For all the hype this accomplishment has engendered, for how colossally important flight has become to our daily life, the initial operation looks slapdash. Surely for some it highlights the great lengths to which humanity can advance, literally and figuratively, when it has the gumption. For me, it stirs the dilemma between the fear of taking flight and the need to see what lies beyond.

            Outside the barns is a replica monorail track; the soft sand here prohibited launching with conventional wheels so the first flyer slid down the rail with its landing skids resting on a wheeled truck. Past the monorail a line of boulders leads to a hill, atop which sits a marble monolith. The boulders mark the spots where the ambitious Wright Brothers took turns in their dream bird on December 17, 1903—where it left the ground and where it landed after giving all it had in terms of altitude. There are four such sets of markers, and each tells the date, time, distance and height of the flights. Wilbur made the first one, at 34 mph for 120 feet, as well as the last one, which has only the take-off boulder; the landing point of that most successful try is the monolith, 852 feet away. 

So we start up the sandy path, which is tangled with beach grass and thistles that stick in my flip flops. When I stop to dislodge them we are passed by other couples and children led from the end of leashes by excited dogs. My arm is getting tired from holding my hat on my head against the wind. I reach the hilltop as Brian, who gave up waiting for me, ponders the memorial statue. It reaches 60 feet into the gray sky and has sculpted wings on two sides. The patriotic promises inscribed at its base were unveiled in November of 1932 to a rain-drenched crowd. A courtyard and benches have been added, and I take a seat to watch my fellow tourists ooh and ah, leaning against the monument to have their picture snapped. I am more interested in what spreads out below us.

Past the wisps of towns that look like toys, the ocean stretches out and up to a horizon at my eye level. This water is my monument. Brian sits next to me eventually and we just stare for awhile, elbows entwined. The Atlantic looks the same as the Pacific, and then not the same at all. It is smaller, but feels bigger from here. It is gray like the sky, churning with the doomed, despicable and triumphant passages of centuries.

After Kill Devil Hills we get back on the same road, seemingly the only road. A sign in the window of Mulligan’s, a faded yellow eatery in Nags Head, claims to have The Best Burger on the Beach so we stop there. Feeling as light as I have since the trip began, I stride in and choose a high table against a wall of surf memorabilia. The bliss continues—we can smoke and we can drink Mike’s Hard Lemonade, the latest malt liquor (a must for the hip non-beer-drinker) which is fairly hard to find. Instead of the famous burgers we go rogue and enjoy a huge basket of clam strips, because we’re on The Atlantic, and assume we have found the best everything.

If we really knew where we were, we'd detour north a bit further still, to find wild horses romping on the beach near the Virginia border, and two extra lighthouses at Bodie and Currituck. But we're following our own hastily assembled guidebook, so we continue south, headed for Hatteras Island and the most publicized lighthouse on the Banks. With little else flanking the road now, I am mesmerized by the houses. Built from rough, ash-colored wood, they stand on pilings in the sand with cars parked underneath. Each is several stories high and shaped like a display of hat boxes or a wedding cake, topped with crow’s nests that have telescopes poking through the windows. Some residents have imported plots of sod or built low fences to keep the sand off the Adirondack chairs. These houses are so special they have names, like Boardwalk and Park Place, Pelican's Perch, and The Jolly Roger. Brian points back and forth and we each put a favorite in the memory file, alongside the Mexican villas and Whistler chalets we've stored for dreaming once we’re back in our boring Seattle rambler.  

For the first time in four days the sun completely disperses the clouds, welcoming us into the entrance of our Cape Hatteras KOA. It has a big swimming pool next to a big registration building, which has not only an office but also a camp store, three washing machines and dryers and a room full of billiard tables. I thumb through the postcards on the spinning rack while Brian gets the site map. The campground is a wide-open sun-drenched grid, with neat sandy lanes and several bathrooms with indoor and outdoor showers. Not all KOAs are created equal, not even close.  This is delux. The spot circled on the map for us is beach-side; next to an eight-foot sand dune. I walk behind the van as Brian drives in, and as I get closer I can hear surf crashing on  the other side of the dune. There’s a set of wooden steps at our spot and I climb them before he is out of the van. At the top I pause and sway for a minute with the breeze. There’s nothing on this beach but blonde grainy sand and clumps of sea grass. In the distance to my left, which is oddly north, an empty pier reaches toward the horizon. My new ocean, beginning to glimmer in the afternoon sun, laps at the shore. I run toward it with Brian behind me.

“It’s kinda warm,” he declares when his toes reach the water.

“It’s awesome.”

“You realize it’s Wednesday.”

“Yep.  It’s four o’clock.”

“Everybody we know is at work.” He seems to be talking himself into it.

“Yep. And we’re here." And for the first time in decades there has been a rash of shark attacks here too. On Saturday a ten-year-old surfer named David was killed by a bull shark south of Virginia Beach while his father and brothers watched. On Monday, 28-year-old Sergei and his girlfriend, Natasha, were swimming in the breakers off Avon, Hatteras Island, when an 11-foot tiger shark assailed them, killing Sergei and seriously wounding Natasha.

Even though a month ago the cover of Time Magazine christened this the Summer of the Shark, from a distance it had smelled like media frenzy. But standing here, on a beach that certainly looks like Amity in Jaws, the story comes to life: two notes, E and D, circling in the awful dark below the placid surface. A wrinkly brown man with red shorts and white chest hair lays his book down on his blanket, rises, and wades in to the surf.

“Playin’ with fire, Old-timer,” Brian portends. Based on the absence of any other swimmers, I guess there might be a genuine fear. Holding my gaze on the waves just beyond the old man, I do believe something is trolling along the edge of our adventure, letting us in but keeping us at arm’s length. Good thing I’m content to do my swimming in the pool, where there’s never any species but mine, and no riptide to entangle me.

We explore the campground neighborhood in full, refreshing our feet under cool spigots that appear every few blocks and aimlessly batting around a tether ball next to the swing set. When it's time for dinner we head down the road, in the van, to the “classy” restaurant the KOA clerk told us about, and when we arrive three minutes later, feel stupid for not walking. It took a lot of mileage to get us from Memphis to the coast, and I guess all those van miles drew us into an inertia trance. I realize how glad I am that the daily mileage will be minimal for awhile now, and more of our exploring will be on foot and ferry. Waterside for most of the remaining journey--my favorite setting. Graceland feels as far away as home now.

The classy restaurant is on the west side of the road, next to a fish-trap warehouse, and like everything else on this road, it has a spectacular view. We order wine from the hostess. A young waiter floats down a stairway to us, out from under a stuffed Marlin. He has arresting blue eyes, messy chestnut hair and a stoner’s drawl; a local whose life I long to be a bigger part of. I am aware that my assumption about young people has shifted over the last few hundred miles: thanks to my self-centric priveleging of the beachlife, I'm sure those reared at the beach, even in the smallest of towns, are glad to stay here forever, unlike those from deeper in the heartland, always looking for the first ride out.

Blue-eyes brings platters of just-caught halibut, mussles, asparagus, and hot apple cobbler. As at the Top of the Hill—was that last night?—we eat uncharacteristically slowly, but in this less populated place we ultimately have to remind the waiter that we need a check, and we note that the number on this check is much lower. After dinner Brian takes a picture of me and the amber Pamlico Sound. The sun is setting into it. The ocean is across the street.

Home at the Kampground, we park the van next to the main building and I sort dirty clothes into white and color piles. Brian gets rolls of quarters from the night clerk and I fill two washing machines. Once they’re spinning, it’s time to swim. This pool is clean, quiet, and warmer than my shower this morning; I’m crazy about it. I drift on my back and watch the clouds, pause at the cement edge to flip over and rest my chin on my forearms, feel the breeze on my shoulders. From one side of the pool I can see across the campground to the darkening sky above the sea; the light from a bonfire glows over the dunes. From the other side I can see across the street to the western water, where the sun has disappeared and left a willowy pink blanket behind.

After 20 minutes, I dash inside to switch our clothes to the dryer and then get back to the pool. Brian has finished an end-of-West-Coast-work-day phone call and is now in the jacuzzi. We spend almost another hour out here—all by ourselves—until there is no light left in the sky. These are the magic hours of the trip, not planned or mapped, no monument or museum, just making perfectly composed use of sumptuously free time. I don’t know yet that these aren’t even the quintessential hours, and I’m grateful.

When the laundry is finished and we’re dried off and parked at our four-star site, we peel off our bathing suits and hang them over the half-down front windows. We put on pajama pants and I add a clean tank top, thrilled that the temperature's mild enough to sleep in clothes. After arranging the bed as usual, we make another quick pilgrimage to the top of the sand dune. Bonfires and conversation still crackle into the sky. I look up at the stars and find them backwards, and cannot look down. When I finally do I’m a little dizzy; it’s time for bed. But I don’t want to slide the van’s side door closed tonight, and I don’t have to. No flying bugs at this venue. Let the sharks have the ocean, I have the whole beach and its sky. Under a sheet that is now cozy, Brian is snoring immediately, and I fall asleep as if on Christmas Eve.