Thursday August 6, 2020 7:28 am Atlantic Beach, NC
Yesterday was a perfect day. I woke at 6:00 and went for a run; I borrowed my son’s earbuds (which he threw out into the hallway for me so I could get them in the morning while he slept) and listened to a new playlist while I ran along a beach-house-lined street and smelled ocean air.
After my run, I joined my husband for a morning walk along the sandy shore. We talked about our kids and their dreams and the future and our dreams. Later in the morning we were out at the beach again to play in the waves with our 14 year old daughter. They were perfect waves to dive into and bob over. We all stood in chest deep water facing the ocean. We watched the swells as they came in, and we reacted however we felt like, and the waves were spaced enough and even enough that they didn’t knock us over; we could recover between them.
The best part of the day was the afternoon, though. Once our 16 year old son was up and we’d all eaten and lounged around and watched Spongebob together, we piled into the car to go to the beach at Fort Macon State Park a couple of miles up the island from where we stayed. There was hardly a breath of wind, the tide was out, and we walked down the beach to grab a spot all to ourselves. There were no people within 50 feet of us. We slathered sunscreen on, then all four of us were out in the surf for hours. We laughed and talked about the kids’ college, and we jumped over and dove through the waves, and my husband disappeared underwater and scared us all because we thought he was going to grab our feet and we never knew which one of us he was coming for.
We also body surfed. I had forgotten how amazing body surfing is. It requires no equipment, just timing. When you catch the wave right, you can ride on it with your head and shoulders out of the water like a figurehead on a wooden ship. After the first time I got it right, I didn’t ever want to stop. The ocean lifts you up out of itself like a deity emerging from from the surf in a myth.
When we got home, I showered, poured some cold white wine, and started a light dinner. My husband played Protoje on our portable speaker, and I stirred risotto and sipped wine while aloe cooled my sunburn.
Tuesday, August 4, 2020, 7:54 am The morning after Tropical Storm Isaias Atlantic Beach, NC Weather: sunny, windy
During the day yesterday, I was happy we came on vacation, despite Tropical Storm Isaias. This morning, I’m glad we came. But last night, as the storm passed through in the dark of night, I was scared. When the wind first gusted and rammed itself against this tall skinny condo, barely better than 3 Lego bricks stacked one on the other with no stabilizing base, I thought my husband was tossing and turning in the bed because the bed kept shaking. But my husband slept soundly, without movement; the bed shook each time a gust buffeted the house.
And that was just when the storm began to make itself known, around 10pm. The full force wasn’t predicted to arrive until 2am.
The sounds of the storm filled me with anxiety. The rain on the windows sounded like gravel thrown at glass. The slap and rattle of wet palm fronds outside was constant, and wind swooshed as it pressed against the house and around its hard corners. The storm filled my ears, as did mechanical sounds inside the house, like the whir of the air conditioner and the hum of the dishwasher. The sounds all seemed thunderous, and they blended together so that I couldn’t tell one from the other as the bed shook in the dark. The maelstrom of noise built until it sounded like a train chugging towards us, and I imagined a tornado slamming into this matchstick condo, ripping the roof (and maybe even the sides!) off the building, and sucking our kids out from their third floor rooms into its funnel of wind and garbage cans and palm fronds and timber from houses it had already torn apart. But it was dark out, and I couldn’t see, and this was only a tropical storm, right?
To stave off a panic attack, I named US cities in alphabetical order in my head: Anchorage, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver… I must have gone through the alphabet six or seven times during the night. Around 11 or so, I smelled something burning, as did my husband, as did our son. We smelled it all over the house, top to bottom, after the air had cut on. We could not locate the smell’s origin. My husband went outside to check the heat pump, and while he was out there in the dark of the stormy night, a neighbor raced to their car with their luggage. He and I both wondered, where would you go? There’s nowhere to escape to. You’re going to drive in this? Drive over a bridge in this?
We turned off the air, the smell went away, and we all tried to go back to sleep, us on the ground floor, our son back up on the third floor. At some point my husband got out of bed because he couldn’t sleep. I must have drifted off because soon I was startled awake by someone in the room: our daughter. My husband was moving them down from the third floor. It was about 12:30am and the house was really rocking at this point. If I could feel it flexing with the wind on the bottom floor, I can’t imagine what it must have felt like on the third. Our daughter climbed in bed with me and I started again with the cities because at this point, everything was shaking and slamming, and I expected some sort of projectile to come through the window at any moment, shatter glass everywhere, and I needed to be strong for our kids. In the night I wished for home and wished for the storm to be over and wondered if we had made a stupid decision, and I thought, we’ve weathered plenty of tropical storms, and none of them felt like this. This isn’t even a hurricane. Imagine adding 20, 30, or 60 mph of wind! It probably feels worse than it is because these places are built to flex in storms; they’re built so that we’ll feel the wind. Lord have mercy.
I finally fell asleep. I remember looking at the clock around 3am and thinking, uggh, it hasn’t abated; I thought it would be better by now. But I woke later and it was better; the house wasn’t shaking as much, and I could still hear the whistling onslaught of wind, but it no longer sounded like it was trying to push the house over.
I woke around 7am and came up to the middle floor where the living room and kitchen are to look out the window and assess the damage. There was none. Not even a twisted stop sign. Not even a palm frond down. A bunch of sand had blown into areas it hadn’t been yesterday, and a few garbage cans were on their sides, but I didn’t see so much as a missing shingle from a roof.
My husband was asleep on the chair with the ottoman stretched out before him for his legs, and our son was asleep on the couch. The tall floor lamp lay on the carpet, and the Dutch ceramic jars that had been displayed on little shelves above the couch were also on their sides on the carpet, deliberately placed there. The lamp and the jars had rattled and swayed so much on their perches, my husband and son feared they’d crash to the floor, so they preemptively laid them down.
I walked out to the beach and the Atlantic Ocean was white breaking surf as far out as I could see. The early sun shone bright on the white froth, and mounds of sea foam scudded across the beach in wind that pressed my clothes against my body and threatened to blow my hat from my head. The lenses of my my glasses were coated with sea spray in minutes, and my heart thrummed with joy at the sight of the stormy sea. The rest of our trip was glorious.
The day before Tropical Storm Isaias
Sunrise before Isaias: single red flag
Morning before Isaias: pier and surf
Life guard stand in the morning before the storm
Calm before Tropical Storm Isaias
Beach warning flag system
Afternoon: warning increased to double red flag and life guard stand closed
The surf in front of me, just 50 feet away, curls gently into white froth. It crashes, swishes, sighs, then effervesces in iridescent foam bubbles. The wind is from the southwest, from the sea. I feel it on my right collarbone; it dries the sweat from my run. Seagulls cry. Beachcombers in straw hats pick their way through the swash zone, heads down, scanning for shells. I sit at the edge of the tide line, with my butt in dry soft sand and my bare feet on the smooth wet pack. My coffee steams next to me, and dark clouds build in the southwest over the ocean. The sun rises over my left shoulder and pinks the surface of the Atlantic.
Brightly colored houses
Up and down the beach are boxy houses painted in cheerful yellows, turquoises, peaches, seafoam greens — Caribbean colors — all with fresh white trim. They are bright and happy and beachy against the blue morning sky, white clouds, and light sand.
Skimmers fly into the wind
Just above the break point of the waves, three compact white birds with angular, black-rimmed wings fly into the wind. They rise and dip with the wind currents, headed toward the darkening storm. Waves rise under them then fall forward. The skimmers make steady progress down the beach and out of sight.
Sandpipers run from water
Our daughter and I giggle when we see fat sandpipers on their tiny little legs run quickly from incoming ripples, desperate to avoid letting the water touch their feet. It’s as if they don’t realize — despite being sea birds who feed in the wet sand of the swash zone — where they are, and that waves wash in and out where they eat. They’re tiny and hyper. They constantly stick their bills into the sand to nose around for crustaceans and worms, probe, probe, probing. They get lost in it, dashing from spot to spot on their short little legs, then an inch-high wavelet washes towards them, and when it’s a centimeter from touching them, they panic and flee. Their little stick legs are a blur, like cartoon character legs, under the pipers’ fat little bodies.
Shadows on the sand
The morning light is slanted and golden. It makes my seated shadow long on soft, caramel sand. The beach is full of footprints, each with its own shadow from the leading ledge of the indentation. Dark clouds in the distance, billows of grey clouds with ran falling beneath them, cast shadows I can’t see on the ocean beneath them. A cloud has moved over the sun; the breeze is fresh and cool, waves curl and splash, and shadows have disappeared until the sun emerges again.
The Atlantic Ocean
Under a blue sky nearly covered with loose cottonball clouds, the Atlantic Ocean is greenish brown before me. I see two boats far off on the horizon, and cloud towers even farther out. Their tops shine white in the sunlight they catch. The sea is choppy from the breeze, but the waves are small and gentle. From my left shoulder all the way in front of me to my right shoulder, the Atlantic arcs to the horizon, an unfathomable basin of salt and water.
Written from the beach on our vacation to Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, in August of 2020.The featured image is not from the day I wrote; it is from the day after Tropical Storm Isaias blew through and the wind and sea were still wild.
I was in the kitchen making dinner last night, and my phone dinged with a new text message. I wiped my hands from chopping onions and picked my phone up off the counter.
“Can we go to iceland”
This from our son in our family group messages, the modern equivalent of the household intercom. He was in his room, our daughter in hers, and my husband on the couch.
My husband texted back “Sure.”
I yelled from the kitchen, “If you still want to go in two years, we can talk.”
Our daughter piped in from her room, “If we go to Iceland, can I go to the beach? Like, the Bahamas?”
I mentioned the other day in one of my blog posts that we know our time with the kids at home is short. One way we want to make the most of our time together is to go on a big family trip the summer after each of their senior years of high school. We’ve started saving. We’ll set a budget and they’ll get to pick where we go as a family.
Our son’s trip will be in two years. As of right now, it sounds like he’d like to go to Iceland. “I like cliffs,” he said. He also likes cool air, rain and snow, and low light. Our daughter, on the other hand, wants warmth, sunshine, and unlimited blue water to swim in.
Every few months I ask them where they might want to go. I’m excited to see where we end up.
Not everyone loves a road trip, and especially not a road trip alone. I love them, though. I loaded my phone with all 12 episodes, plus the extra notes, of Season One of the Up and Vanished podcast for my drive home from Georgia today. My girlfriends talked about their new obsession with true crime podcasts (and their subsequent questioning over the weekend, “Is this cabin creepy to anyone else?”), and the first season of the least-creepy show was the same length as my drive.
I pulled away from our cabin under a sky that was clear blue with steely grey clouds, the kind that makes you wonder if snow is coming. Trees rattled in the wind as I put the car in first gear to climb a steep rise out, and then swooped around S curves and switchbacks on my way off the mountain.
For hours, road passed under my wheels, first tight-turned and narrow, a tunnel through the forest, then comfortable and curvy through farmland accented with gnarled trees, then wide open interstate filled with trucks and fast cars.
I listened while the land and sky changed around me. They didn’t change a lot — I was in the Appalachians the whole time — but sometimes I was in deciduous forests of scratchy bare branches, and others in a green glade of white pines. The blue disappeared from the sky in Tennessee, replaced by a grey blanket of winter clouds. Small snowflakes hung in the air, swirling in the eddies of passing cars.
I love watching the world go by from the windows of a car. In planes you’re removed from the landscape; you look down from above. In a car you get to see the shape of the land change around you. By crossing space in a short amount of time, you get to see the geology of a region, the history of the earth. You get to see the open sky, pass under it, and witness more weather over more space than if you stayed in one place. And you get to see the vegetation change in the heights and types of trees, and their color, and their bareness or evergreen fullness.
And while the world changed gradually before my eyes, with this podcast I downloaded, I got to binge read a compelling story with my ears. I was as entertained by my solo drive as if I had a long cozy day alone, curled up with a good movie.
My girlfriends and I are in our little cabin in the Appalachian mountains of Georgia. I drove down from Virginia yesterday and listened to about seven podcast episodes — two Fresh Airs, a Radiolab, two TED Radio Hours, a Throughline about the Violence Against Women Act, and a New Yorker Fiction episode where Andrea Lee read “Barn Burning” by Haruki Murakami. It was my first experience of Murakami, and holy moly. Now I know why everyone loves him.
I arrived around 4:30pm, a few minutes after my four other girlfriends had arrived. They had just unpacked their cars. Roller suitcases, hoodies, purses, and computer bags were strewn across the log cabin living room. I couldn’t see an empty square inch of kitchen counter because it was covered with loaves of bakery bread, baguettes, arborio rice for risotto, shallots, brownie mixes, beer, La Croix, onions, potatoes, garlic, a bag of split peas for split pea soup, potato chips, Fritos, Kettle corn, salty popcorn, a bucket of caramel corn, Girl Scout cookies, a big pot to make the pea soup in, and a box of Alka-Seltzer cold medicine for hangovers.
On the kitchen table was a laundry basket full of booze. I added mine to the mix, and we have enough to make anything we want: two kinds of dark rum, light rum, whiskey, bourbon, two kinds of vodka, two kinds of gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, Campari, red wine, sparkling wine. My friend passed around metal insulated tumblers for each of us. Mine is peach and says Best Bitches on it.
We always talk big about how much we’re going to go crazy and drink on Girls’ Weekend, and we did start pretty much as soon as I arrived, but we’ve slowed down quite a bit over the years. I made Negronis for two of us, then later made Boulevardiers, but I nursed those two drinks over a period of hours, and by 9 o’clock, when we all started yawning, I had switched to tangerine La Croix.
I don’t think we stopped talking or laughing for a single minute from the moment I walked in the door. Often there were at least two conversations going at once. We’ve been waiting all year to talk to each other.
Even after waking at 3:30 am yesterday and not being able to get back to sleep, I was able to stay up until midnight last night. And I wasn’t the first one to bed! We all turned in around that time. Usually the first night lasts until 3:30am. We’re getting old.
Now I hear our early riser, who rises even earlier than me, in the kitchen making coffee. I’m proud of myself for sleeping past 6 am. I’m going to go pour a cup, pad around this warm cabin in my sweatpants, and see what the weather looks like from the balcony overlooking the mountains.
Butterfly Mind 