At the intra-coastal swing bridge all vacationers are obliged to stop at the guard station and swear an oath to “Sloth,” the god of island idleness. Although we have been summer regulars for more than twenty-five years and have not yet seen any such signs, we are sure there must be some that read: “Walking on the beach is prohibited. Please wander aimlessly.” Shells are in such abundance on this island that we need not seek them; they find us.
Topsail Island is a 26-mile long barrier island off the southeastern coast of North Carolina. The name “Topsail” traces its origin to a time when this was a barbary coast, where swashbuckling pirates—with bad teeth, worse breath, and awful taste in hats—talking parrots, and peg-legs hauling kegs, of rum, routinely sailed these waters freely, long before anyone had ever heard of Captain Jack Sparrow or scored a hole-in-one at any Blackbeard miniature golf course.
The legend is that these buccaneers would hole up in the island’s coves waiting to prey upon unsuspecting merchant ships, until the dim-witted, or perpetually inebriated, or both, ships’ captains gradually realized that they could spot the top of the subtle skull and cross-bone sails and thereby take evasive maneuvers. If the legend is true, and considering both the dynamism of the English language, and changes in American common usage in particular, I suppose “Topsail” is far preferable to “The Island of Easy Booty,” which rumor has it was a close runner-up in the “Name That Island” contest.
Topsail is about a 6.5 hour ride, by car, from Washington, DC, unless one is forced to take a circuitous route, entering from the northwest, either to avoid I-95 or to sneak in behind a hurricane moving furiously up the coast. Every once in a while, simply to remind Oprah, Hillary, J.K.R, the Mother Queen, and the rest of us that she is still at the top of the A-list of the most powerful women in the world, Mother Nature will whip up one of her patented late-summer tropical cyclones. Although this year Irene inflicted minimal damage, the island has fared poorly in years past with the incursion of Fran, Ike, and others of their ilk, who have swept homes and dreams into the sea.
The island is the home to three towns—North Topsail Beach, Surf City, and Topsail Beach—all of which can be missed in the blink of an eye. Scattered across the three towns are a smattering of small grocery and “notion” stores, one bank, a couple of gas stations, about a dozen restaurants of different degrees of sophistication, surf shops, marinas and boat ramps, some family parks, and some fledgling spas. There are about a half a dozen motels on the Island, but the vast majority of summer visitors, which are families, stay in cottages, such as “A Shore Thing,” “Sea Section,” “Tax Breakers,” “Going Coastal,” and “Flip Flops.”
In sum, there are few amenities, even fewer distractions, and essentially nothing to do here, which is precisely the point.
That being said, the island offers several attractions. Topsail Beach is a sanctuary not only for the weary and computer-screen bleary seeking rest and relaxation, but also for baby sea turtles needing free passage from their nests in the dunes to the sea, and for their parents and family members, who can receive services, as needed, at the Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Hospital. Local residents, businesses and vacationers all have donated money, time and materials to sustain this operation over the years.
The island is also a fisherman’s paradise. Anyone—male or female, young or old, novice or expert—who simply drops a line from a pier, casts from the shoreline, or sets out in a boat—merits the title “angler.” The “Gamefish 2011” and “Silver King Anglers 2011” scoreboards at one of the island’s three piers capture the exploits, both pictorially and statistically, of the most competitive, thereby keeping outbreaks of fish stories, which are as frequent as hurricanes at this time of the year, to a minimum. Flounder, red drum, sea mullet, bluefish, Spanish mackerel, sea bass, grouper and wahoo—none of which I could identify at a Coast Guard line-up—end up as often on laminated place mats as they do in foul-smelling buckets or on vacationers’ dinner plates.
Pirate legends aside, the island boasts some interesting history. Topsail Island was a US Government secret missile test site after WWII and several missile observation towers still stand as testimony to this period. A local area guide notes that the Navy developed the ram jet engine on the island, an innovation in aviation history as significant, yet not as well known, as propeller flight developed by the Brothers Orville at Kitty Hawk. Nonetheless, these two discoveries certainly justify North Carolina’s license plate claim to “First in Flight.”
Tortugas, trawlers and mechanized birds, however, are not what bring folks like us to this island every summer. We come to witness the cerulean sky, listen to the symphonic sea, feel the sand between our toes, and enjoy the warm water swirling around our ankles.
At approximately 6:45 a.m., an enormous orange orb rises silently from the sea on the far eastern horizon. By 7:10, already in all its yellow splendor, the sun is high enough to cast a golden, shimmering reflection that cuts like a watery pathway from the horizon to the western shore directly in front of the beach-front cottages. By the time the sun reaches its highest point in the East, the sky has transformed itself from a soft gray-blue hue to a silken, silvery cobalt blue.
On the most perfect days, there are no clouds in the sky. On the slightly less-than-perfect days, the sky is full of wisps of white cotton candy that resist being swirled. On the stormy days, particularly at night, Poseidon will sometimes shrug, thereby letting loose a barrage of thunder claps and blinding bolts of lightning heralding either another great adventure or a science experiment gone seriously wrong.
Pelicans rule the sky. Consummate aviator-anglers, they fly perpetual reconnaissance missions throughout and across the days in perfect formation as they scan the sea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They glide effortlessly in single file, no more than six inches from a cresting wave, for a moment disappear behind it, and then reappear just in time for us to witness the death-defying dive of the most daring of the spotters, hell-bent on securing whatever the sea is offering on this day.
Not to be bested, each morning the sea announces itself with a thunderous roar, which it heroically sustains throughout the day and night, empty or full coastlines of spectators notwithstanding. Each successive wave unfolds in much the same monotonous, hypnotic manner: first the cresting, accompanied by a primal pounding, followed by a clap, a splash and a frothing fizzle in rapid succession, after which the wave takes its bow and returns to the sea in this relentless ebb and flow of reassuring, persistent regularity. The trance-inducing effects of this mesmerizing process are well-documented. By August 1 of this year, local authorities had received a half-dozen reports of “excessive reveries,” all of which included mermaids on boogie boards serving cold Coronas to middle-aged men with receding hairlines and bulging waistlines.
Although the unobserved life under the sea remains a mystery to most casual beachcombers, the aqua-marine ocean offers pleasures to those who can hold their gaze without succumbing to dubious maritime imaginings. Dolphins are arguably the highlight of life on the ocean’s surface, as they swim in schools, rising and dipping behind a lazy shrimp boat at it makes its unhurried, repetitive journey from west to east at mid-morning. Flying fish always make us wonder about the size of the creature from which they are flying. Darting minnows—some in pools of standing ocean water at low tide, others in receding waves—are a fleeting delight, given their place in the sea’s food chain.
In contrast to the high-flying maneuvers of the Soaring Pelicanos, legions of terns (both left-handed and right-handed), pipette-legged sandpipers, and piping plovers pass their days pecking furiously in the sand in search of crustacean treasure, shuttling madly this way and that, constantly in motion, hardly ever bothering to take a rest or flight. In contrast, gulls spend their days scavenging the beach, feeding off the unremitting hard work of their colleagues. The only thing keeping the gulls from being ostracized from the community of island birds is these birds’ failure to raise, for just the briefest of moments, their little heads from the sand and bear witness to the banditry of these gulls. Encouraged by vacationers pandering to their wishes, the gulls spend a good part of their time squawking at us for refusing to indulge their bad behavior.
Burrowing crabs are best viewed at night with the aid of a flashlight. This year the hurricane dredged up a mother-load of varied and collectible shells in a place that is already well-known for its rich cache. The dunes and sea oats and sea grass remain, but are increasingly and unfortunately sharing space with mud balls that have washed ashore—a blight on the otherwise pristine beaches. The company responsible for taking sand from the sound and dumping it in the sea to build up the beach and combat erosion, apparently dredged too deeply, which has resulted in thick mud deposits that become concentrated balls as they are tossed and turned by the waves.
Above and beyond the natural beauty and wonders of the island, we seek solitude and breathing space, uninterrupted time to read, and much-needed Vitamin D. We also welcome the opportunity to entertain unfettered thoughts that take us forward and then backward and then forward again in time. Recently, however, at least some of those thoughts have become predictable—as predictable as that spot on the top of my foot, now scarlet red, that always seems to evade sunscreen—and they come in waves—of nostalgia.
For a couple that moved frequently around the world with young children—from Chapel Hill to High Point to Greensboro, NC; to Lome, Togo to Bangui, Central African Republic; to Frankfurt, Germany; to Atlanta then to Boston and finally to Potomac, MD—Topsail has always been our constant port-of-call, an anchor for the kids during the years of constant transitions.
Now, as the boys, grown and graduated from college, move to their own rhythms, and juggle the myriad responsibilities of adulthood, Topsail has become for us the home of bittersweet memories: the Hungry Hippo, 500 rummy and bingo games played; the circles drawn in the sand; the horseshoes thrown; the sand castles built and the “drip people” conceived to populate them; the shovels and buckets rescued from the surf as they quietly drifted out to sea at high tide; the waves ridden; the nerf footballs thrown; the videos watched; the stories told; the pictures taken; the dancing bathing suits dried on outdoor clotheslines; the laughter shared with family and friends; the unconscious ordinariness of spending time together.
These days, we stuff all those memories in a big blue bag, carry them with us down to the beach, set up our umbrellas and chairs in the sand—as we have done countless times over a quarter of a century—sit, stare at the sea, and smile gentle, wistful smiles.
There’s nothing else to do.
