Day 12: Sunday trip to the beach…Part 2
I left you yesterday with some Geography lessons and the Kicking Machine. I heard from several of you that you have been there and “got the boot”…that’s pretty funny.
Fort Macon beach was perfect. White sand (sometimes hot as the dickens, as they say) beautiful waves, and emerald water. You could walk out about 30 yards and still be waist high or chest high depending on the tides and then it would gradually drop off.
The waves were fabulous, or at least that’s what I remember. No one used a surfboard in those days, it was always body surfing, and we learn to do that quite well going all the way to the beach. As the high tide would come in, the waves were pounding, but that also meant the undertow was VERY strong. North Carolina beaches are well known for their rip tides, which is an undertow that can pull you out to deep water.
If it happens, and it never did to me, thank God, you have to let it carry you out then swim parallel to the coast until you are out of it, then back to shore. If you try to fight it, you will not win. Sometimes, mostly at Nags Head or Kitty Hawk, they had to put Red Flags up, which meant that no one was supposed to go in.
When we would get to the beach, my parents would say that we just had lunch and we had to wait an hour before we went in the water. That was the longest hour in the world. I think they just said that so they could take a nap and didn’t have to watch us in the water.
Debby and I had been able to swim for as long as I could remember, but the ocean is no place to mess around. You can get in trouble very quickly and you don’t take chances, so somebody was always in the water with us.
In the late afternoon, we would start to pack up. We almost always got sunburned, even with lotion on, but we didn’t care. There was a bathhouse there that was ancient. Men on one side and women on the other, but the shower part was open to the sky…no roof. It was seemed awkward to me because I was not used to taking open showers with anyone and the floor where the benches were seemed to have an inch or two of water on it constantly.
Sometimes, we would go to the old Fort. Fort Macon was pretty cool. It was a Civil War Fort that guarded the mouth of the inlet that went into Morehead City at the end of the Sandbar we were on. The extra cool thing was, that they had dug down into the Sandbar so that the upper level where the canons were was almost ground level protecting the opening to one of the only deeper water bays in the area. From the sea, I’m not sure if you could have seen the canons until they fired, so I’m sure it was a strategic place. So much so that the “Yankees”, as we Southerns call them, took it over during the Civil War. There were Southern soldier unions in there that I could have fit in as a boy. But it was a real Fort and a cool place to visit.
Leaving the beach was a pain and only got worse over the years. One way in and one way out AND only two lanes, so it took a long time…maybe that’s why we went to the Fort.
In later years, after Daddy was gone and I was in High School and College, I would go down to the beach, listen to great music, dance, party with friends, and do things I probably shouldn’t have. We even had our own genre of music called “Beach Music” of course. The Embers, The Tams, The Drifters, and anyone who could copy them played while we danced “The Carolina Shag”, look it up on Youtube, it’s a real thing.
The beach was a great place for me growing up. Later, I took my family to the Outer Banks around Duck, NC to share the beach experience with them. I live in Colorado now and love the mountains here, but I really would like to get back to the beach at some point and just smell the air, climb the sand dunes, see the Sea Oaks, and the inland waterways, and walk the shore as the waves wash in either at sunset or sunrise, it doesn’t matter to me, they are both beautiful.
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