| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters A Tale of Long Beach By Gene Hyde Oct 27, 2004
The dredging boat churns up the channel, spewing a thick mix of sand and water over its port side. Bouncing in the choppy waves a hundred yards offshore, it turns around and heads back down the channel again. Keeping this watery passage navigable is an ongoing job, and this boat's been struggling with the task for several days. I'm watching from a rented cottage at Long Beach, North Carolina, gazing over the dunes as high tide rolls in on an overcast May morning. Long Beach is on Oak Island, just south of the Cape Fear River, and it's one of the scores of barrier islands along the Carolina coastline. Little more than strips of sand that protect the mainland from the rages of the ocean, these islands are fragile entities shaped by currents and tides. This shifting coastline is about as unstable as any inhabited place in the world. Despite this precarious nature of barrier islands, people spend millions of dollars to build resort homes on them. I'm sitting on the porch of someone's beachfront abode now, having swapped a handful of cash for the right to play in the surf and sand for a week. Given the natural beauty of the place, building these seaside houses is the kind of folly that almost seems to make sense. The island's fragile nature is immediately apparent a few miles from here, where there's not a lot of beach left. Hurricane Floyd swept the eastern end of Long Beach into the ocean. In an effort to replenish and rebuild two miles of shoreline, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is moving 2.5 million cubic yards from the bottom of the Cape Fear River, then pumping it on the island to create a new beach. The result is a large dune stretching as far as sight allows, a wall of sand between the road and the ocean, dotted with a few strands of recently planted American beachgrass. My grandfather built a cottage at Long Beach when I was two years old, and I've spent my whole life watching the shoreline creep inland. A few years ago my family sold the cottage, and it still stands on the pilings my grandfather erected, an aging wooden box on stilts. Miraculously, it survived Floyd's onslaught, a fate not shared by the fifty or so beachfront houses on the N.C. coast. Long Beach was still littered with the remnants of destroyed cottages more than a year after Floyd passed through. My grandfather, Daddy John, was an unpretentious, hard-working, eastern North Carolina farmer. His investments in farmland and the beach cottage left my grandmother relatively comfortable after his death in the early 1960s. He was pleasantly unaffected by the current trend to give cottages clever monikers, and the cottage boasted a succinct "John Lewis, Parkton, NC" sign on the front. It stood in sharp contrast to cottages bearing such names as "Tokidoki," "Copacetic," and "Nap Monster." My grandfather bought his beachfront property in the wake of Hurricane Hazel, which struck Long Beach in 1954. Packing 140 mph winds and a 17 foot storm surge, Hazel destroyed nearly every oceanfront cottage and washed just about everything else into the marsh on the leeward side of the island. Honeymooners Jerry and Connie Helms were out roller-skating and arrived back at Long Beach too late to hear the Coast Guard's evacuation notices. They were stranded as Hazel roared in. "We started seeing houses exploding then floating away," Jerry Helms said. "Sometimes you could see the whole house flying through the air." As the waters rose, the Helms broke into a two-story house and climbed upstairs, but the house started to fall apart. They lashed themselves together with a blanket, climbed onto a cotton mattress, and were washed out to sea. The currents brought them to the leeward side of the island where they came to rest in some treetops. Daddy John knew that a building a beachfront house was a risky endeavor. A farmer by trade, he was keenly aware of how weather dominated life's fortunes. He opted for affordability, purchasing two buildings from the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg, trucking them down to the ocean, and placing them on pilings. The cottage had three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath upstairs, plus an outside shower, storage area, and bedrooms downstairs. There was no heat or air conditioning, and on those rare times when the cool ocean breeze would shift and blow off the inland marshes the cottage became oppressively hot, and clouds of hungry mosquitoes hovered outside. Long Beach remains a quiet stretch of family owned cottages, recently called "decidedly unglamorous" by a New England tourist publication. Unlike many beaches in the vicinity, Long Beach sports no high-rise hotels, no outlet malls, no chain restaurants. When you come here, you watch the gulls and terns, swim in the ocean, and walk in the surf. If you're looking for more, try another beach. Long Beach faces south, which is unusual for an Atlantic beach in the United States. This orientation allows for gorgeous sunrises and sunsets over the waves, but it also means that the beach takes direct hits from hurricanes roaring northward. In September 1999 Hurricane Floyd made landfall near Oak Island. It killed more than 50 people as it poured a deluge of Biblical proportions across the eastern part of the state. Floodwaters crested 30 feet above flood stage along the Tar River, sending 48,000 people to safety in shelters. The ensuing floods killed more than 3 million fowl and hogs, destroyed or left uninhabitable nearly 17,000 homes, and caused over $6 billion in damage in North Carolina alone. Floyd was the latest in a series of hurricanes that hit Oak Island. July 1996 brought Hurricane Bertha, followed by Fran two months later. Bonnie arrived in August 1998, and one year later Floyd hit in September. We were vacationing at Long Beach as Bertha crept northward, and we kept one eye on the Weather Channel and another on the ocean and sky. The waves grew choppier even as the sky remained clear and sunny, but by the time we were evacuated the wind was picking up and the weather was changing. We made the 200-mile drive home without incident, grumbling about our shortened vacation, but thankful that modern meteorology gave us plenty of time to leave. Real estate agents downplay these events in hopes that the brisk trade in high-priced oceanfront dwellings will continue. It;s hard to imagine that it wouldn't. After all, renting an oceanfront cottage for a week costs between $800 and $2000 (or more), depending on how upscale the cottage is. Owners can make a lot of money over the rental season, and for middle-class North Carolinians, a week at the beach is a traditional way to spend a vacation. I have a photo of my grandmother and myself that was taken while the cottage was being built. Mama Nellie was in her sixties, a healthy-looking farmer's wife, and I was a grinning 2 year old, standing beside piles of lumber and enough sand to build a million castles. When my grandparents built the cottage, they also built a long walkway that stretched fifty yards or so across the dunes, ending with a deck and a set of stairs to the beach. After Daddy John died, Mama Nellie took over the seasonal maintenance of the cottage, and continued to rent it out every summer. She never learned to drive, so my uncles would ferry her down to the beach. After my father retired from the Air Force, we moved back to North Carolina in 1969, and soon my parents began to help my grandmother care for the cottage. Each spring and fall my parents would truck my grandmother and a load of tools and supplies down to Long Beach. Dad would replace screens, fix furniture, tack down linoleum flooring, and repair leaky plumbing fixtures. Meanwhile, my mother cleaned up, replaced contact paper in the kitchens and bathrooms, and generally did whatever my grandmother deemed necessary. Each spring, before the Memorial Day start of the rental season, Dad would inspect the decking, usually hiring a contractor to repair the damage the winter's storms had inflicted on the walkway and stairs to the beach. These annual "working vacations" with my grandmother were especially trying for my father, a former B-24 waist-gunner who finished his Air Force career training Titan II missile crews. He had a moderate yet passionate taste for cold beer, and at the end of a long day's work, he would have dinner, enjoy a cigar, take his shower, then settle down for a few brews and some snacks. It was a ritual he enjoyed three or four evenings a week. Mama Nellie, however, was an outspoken teetotaler, and alcohol consumption was not even mentioned in her presence. She talked disparagingly about the neighbors across the street as they blatantly drank Schlitz beer in the evening. They greeted us from their balcony, my grandmother grumbled quietly, and my father waved back longingly. Occasionally, the end of the rental season would reveal a few surprises. My aunt once discovered my grandmother and her sister, two octogenarian, church-going siblings, pouring over a copy of Playboy left by some renters. To our enduring surprise, rather than being embarrassed or ashamed, Mama Nellie and her sister sat side-by-side on the couch, giggling and hooting their way through the entire issue like grade-school girls. On one of my family's spring beach cottage repair trips, my parents and grandmother arrived at the beach like they usually did. Mom and Dad began unloading the car and taking everything upstairs, and after a minute they noticed that Mama Nellie was missing. Despite being warned that the walkway might be unstable, my grandmother had strolled to the end of it. The stairs had been washed away over the winter, and she plunged onto the beach, breaking her hip. While her hip mended well for someone in their late 80s, she never went to the cottage again. Ever since the cottage was built, each year the walkway grew shorter, the dunes diminished a bit, and the ocean crept closer to the cottage. By the time my wife and I honeymooned in the cottage in the mid-1980s, all the dunes were gone, and we listened each night as high tide lapped against the pilings under our bedroom. Mama Nellie died just before we were married, and my mother and uncles decided to sell the cottage. Given its proximity to the ocean, the family's general consensus was that it would never sell, and that we'd have it until it tumbled into the sea. My parents continued to go to Long Beach, every spring and fall, completing the cleaning and repair rituals. It wasn't long before my wife and I joined my parents on these seasonal trips. We'd work during the day and play canasta at night over beers and snacks. My wife and I began to sense a generational passing of the torch, and it was generally assumed that we, along with my cousins, would take care of the cottage. Then one day, surprisingly, my uncle called to tell us the cottage had been sold. The "John Lewis" sign came down, and an era ended. Even with this familial tether gone, the lure of Long Beach was deeply set. My wife and I continued to vacation there, often sharing a rental house with friends. We'd walk on the beach, swim in the surf, ride our bikes, read lots of books, drink beer, play games, fix meals of fresh seafood, and take naps in the heat of the day. Vacations were never more ritualistic and relaxing than those at Long Beach. Which brings me back to this rented house on the far west end of Long Beach. Five years ago my wife and I moved to Arkansas, and this was our first time back to this familiar coast since then. A friend from New England joined us, and we brought our yellow Lab Enid, who reveled in the pure canine bliss of chasing terns and gulls along the surf. At the end of the week, as we drove the seven miles of Beach Drive for the last time, we slowed down as we passed my grandfather's cottage. Just down the beach you could see the huge wall of sand that the Corps is tossing up to defy the wind and waves. The former John Lewis cottage still stands, precariously perched, with all the plumbing, wiring, steps, and decks torn away. It would take a ladder just to enter it. It's just a box on stilts, ready to topple into the sea. I knew that this was the last time I'd see the cottage my grandfather built. It looked like little could save it now, not even a new beach recently pumped from the river bottom. Eventually, the ocean will take it, as it will most of the buildings on this stretch of barrier island. No doubt, with his seasoned farmer's understanding of nature, my grandfather expected nothing less. Copyright©2004 by Gene Hyde Gene Hyde is an academic librarian, and a writer and observer of nature. Visit his website at http://www.radford.edu/~wehyde/ and his writing at West By Northwest.org: Intimations © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
