vacation

Castles in the sand

June 16, 2017 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

First you make a hole and labor along the walls to make sure they are thick and tall,

and only after do you build up the center. The order of steps is not negotiable. Most folks—amateurs mostly, at least in my estimation—lead themselves to believe it can be done any way they darn well please, that if they want to start at the center, then at the center is where they’ll start. I look upon these people with a measure of piteous scorn: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do. Then what I do is sit back and watch as the entire enterprise comes to its slow and inevitable end.

All of which invariably proves my point: there are rules to building a sandcastle as there are rules to living a life. Ignore both to your own peril.

For as much as I act a grown man, being in sight of the ocean tends to unleash the little boy still pent up inside me. Nothing speaks to this more than standing in the midst of miles of untouched beach with a plastic shovel in my hand and a son more than willing to do his part helping (and, as the years have gone on, taking the lead role) in shaping the environment around us into monuments to ourselves.

And I will not kid myself in thinking otherwise. A sandcastle is nothing more than a monument. They are deeply personal things. The shape and diameter of the walls is shaped by our own personalities as much as they are by the implements we use. The depth of the moat and position of the channels designed to divert water away rather than toward. The detail of the turrets and spires. The choice of shells to decorate the sides. My son and I are doing more than building a mere mound of sand, we are staking a claim. Leaving our mark. We are announcing to the wind and sand that we are here.

Of course we know what will happen eventually. You know.

A person has no need of ever seeing the ocean to understand the way of tides. Sooner or later the surf will roll closer and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—we can do to keep our sandcastle safe. No amount of engineering know-how will prevent the water from overcoming our defenses. We know that going in. We build our monuments in full view of white water and cresting waves. We hear their crashing.

We create even while knowing it will be uncreated.

Take a walk down this beach to the end of the island and you’ll discover it isn’t only the sandcastles that are taken. Giant holes dug by children (and men, plenty of men) are gone, too. Messages carved with sticks of driftwood (FREE YOUR MIND; SHE SAID YES; MICHAEL EATS BOOGERS). Shells neatly stacked like cairns pointing the way to a better paradise. Sandbars walked upon mere hours before. All swept away and washed clean without a trace against the Atlantic’s overwhelming power. Say what you want about the ocean bringing a sense of calm and renewal. What you learn most here is that you are a very tiny thing in a very big world, and the big world is often hungry.

Yet that never stops us. Our monuments are whisked away and our marks are obliterated, but still we create.

We tell the world we are here and the world shrugs us away and we tell the world again. Maybe that’s why I love the ocean as much as I do—because it so encapsulates the the sort of lives we all find ourselves living. On a lonely stretch of beach with a child’s shovel we want to know we count, we matter, and that the world would be a little less brighter without us. The waves and brittle sand always disagree.

It’s up to us, then, to decide which is right.

Washing away the mess we make

July 1, 2016 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

OuterBanks16 1

I stand upon a sliver of land off the North Carolina coast that I call home for one week a year, looking at what has been written in the spot of sand at my feet.

For seven years now, this spot has been my special place. All the information I need to navigate my day can be found right here without use of a screen or wifi, without any device at all.

Here, the tanagers and mockingbirds are my alarm clock. Deer move silent along narrow trails cut among the sea oats, calling the weather by the way their noses tilt to the air. Dolphins dance for their breakfast, twirling and slapping their tails in the calmness beyond the breakers, telling me when it is time to cast a line among the waves.

Yet while solitude here is plentiful, I am reminded that I have not wholly left all things behind.

There are others here as well, a family far down along the beach, a man patrolling the dunes, who have come to this place in search of the very comfort I crave.

I tend to study these others with the same sort of fascination I give to the constellations that shine over these deep waters at night, or the cockles and welks I pick up from sandbars that rise up and then fade in the changing tides. A trip through our tiny parking lot reveals that many who have answered the ocean’s siren call have traveled quite far—Ohio, Michigan, even Idaho. We are all travelers here. As such, friendliness presents itself as a thing ably given, but only with the unspoken expectation that all parties will be allowed to return to their own families, their own lives, in short order.

Umbrellas pop up along the beach in the early morning as though the sand has broken out in a multi-hued pox, each widely spaced so as to neither intrude nor interfere: islands on an island. This partition extends even into the ocean, where one is expected not to stray from the invisible line stretched outward from one corner of your square of beach to the next. If one does, should the waves you jump over or ride atop carry you in front of where your neighbors sit reading Dean Koontz and sipping glasses of wine bought at the island’s only Food Lion, your fun must be paused until you stand and fight your way back across the current to where you belong.

I’m unsure whether this need for boundaries is expressed unconsciously or with intent—if it speaks toward a desire to allow others their own attempt at peace and renewal, or if it rather tells of a deep-seated wariness toward short-term neighbors.

Hillary4prison But a little bit ago I took a long walk along the shore, and now I think I have that answer. Here among the piles of scallop shells and oysters and augurs, HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 has been written into the sand. Not far down comes BERNING FOR NC. Then, TRUMP’S FIRED ’16. Each carved by a different finger or big toe, each thus far saved from the encroaching tide but not by the vandalisms of others.

I thought of two things as I stood by each of those pronouncements, and how those pronouncements had been scrawled at with such rage. One is that we can leave our problems and cares at home for a short while but not our divisions. The other is that increasingly, our divisions are becoming worse and angrier.

This in itself is nothing new; our country has always been an angry one. But our collective mood has changed these last years in such a way that it now feels more a souring that hangs between us all. Our rage and distrust has gone from a thing—the government, the economy—to a person—the hated Other who dares not believe as we believe.

It is a depressing thing, really. And to be honest, it is also the very thing I wanted to get away from for a few days. But here I am yet again, a neutral witness to a raging culture war, and it saddens me as much as I’m sure it does you. It saddens me a lot.

I’m only glad I’m out here alone with only the pipers and gulls. Should the Hillary supporter, Bernie person, and Trumpster meet, there may be violence. That’s where things have arrived at now, or at least where things are headed. And I’m willing to say that’s why even here this year, everyone mostly keeps to themselves. Because we’re all tired of it, all the fighting. Because we all just want a break from the notion that we’ve come to associate the opinions and stances of others with their entirety as people, and from the ugly truth that we have somehow gone from mere disagreement with those who think other than us, to wariness, to distrust, to blame, and now, finally, to hate.

I am a writer. That term is a broad one, though I’ve found its job description narrow enough to fit inside a single sentence: Every time you sit to work, try to tell the story of us all.

Thankfully, that story has been fairly easy to come by for most of my life. Lately, though, it’s gotten a bit harder. Diversity is the magic word now, just as the celebration of all that makes us different has in certain circles become our national religion. And while that might be right and good, I’ve found that celebrating of differences often casts aside all those things that makes us the same.

Like you, I don’t know where we’re going as a country. Like you, I’m worried about it. If the recent tragedy in Orlando speaks of a single thing, it isn’t that there are those who would focus upon the weapon a terrorist used rather than the ideology behind why he used it, or that it is far too easy for a sick man to purchase an instrument of war. To me, Orlando says that we have reached a point now where we can no longer even come together to mourn.

But I’ll leave you with this. That family I saw far down the beach made their way past me a little bit ago. Dad, mom, and two little kids. They did not avoid me as they passed, did not take the easier path toward the dunes to walk around me. The father did not look at me as though I were some potential threat, nor did his children glare at me with Stranger Danger eyes. Instead, the mother smiled and offered me a sand dollar they’d found just up the beach. The kids wanted to see my tattoo. And the dad, grinning, merely said, “How ya doin’, buddy?”

And you know what? I’m doing fine. I am.

OuterBanks16 2 Because I nodded and said as much to that beautiful family and then left all that scribble in the sand for the tide to wash away. I walked on as they walked on, all of us looking out toward the ocean with the breeze in our faces and the smell of salt filling our lungs, thinking much the same: in spite of the mess we are prone to make of things, ours is still a beautiful world.

Shutting out the world, if only for awhile

June 22, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

blue ridge I write this in the early afternoon of this past Friday, looking out the window toward mountains shrouded in summer haze. It’s quiet here, always a blessing, even as the world burns slow in other parts of the country. Sad as it is, I suppose I can use “burns” both literally and figuratively.

Tomorrow morning, my family and I will pack up and trade these mountains for the Carolina coast. My job allows one vacation a year, and I mean to use every bit. It’s always a scramble to get away, part stress and part strain and an overwhelming need to escape, even if some part of you understands that you’ll eventually have to come back again. I can say I always look forward to vacation week. I can say I’m looking forward to this one a little more.

Because I’m tired, you see.

Of everything.

This week has brought news of another shooting, this one at a church in Charleston, claiming nine lives. Aside from the hurt and anger and outrage, I don’t have anything to say. Still trying to process it, I suppose. Still trying to take it all in and turn it over in my heart and my thoughts, still trying to figure out if I should do such a thing or even if such a thing is possible. I don’t know that it is. Some part of my says no, that if I could understand the whys of what would lead such a young man to perpetrate such an evil act, I should then worry much more about myself than about the state of the world. But another part of me begs a yes to that question, at least partway—it may not be possible to understand or healthy to ponder why, but an attempt at both is necessary. Too often, we are confronted by the reality of evil only to turn ourselves away. It scares us (as it should), makes us uncomfortable (as it should), but that’s not the worst that evil inspires. To gaze upon it is to see into a mirror badly bent. It is to behold what we are all capable of, should things come to it, and to know how far we have yet to go. It’s heartrending and soul crushing, and yet the alternative—blaming parents, blaming guns, blaming culture, or ignoring it all together—is much worse.

There was a time not long ago when these reminders would come sporadically, spread out over months or even years. But now they seem to come in a much quicker fashion, don’t they? Maybe it’s the news, now on twenty-four hours a day. Maybe it’s a byproduct of living in an age of constant social media, a heartrending and soul crushing thing in itself. I don’t know. All I do know is what I’ve said—I’m tired.

On my way to work this morning, I stopped at the town BP for gas. A tractor pulled up to the pump beside me, the farmer straddling it already dirty and sweating from the fields. Our talk wound itself around to Charleston. He shook his head, eyes wide and mournful. Said he hadn’t heard a thing about it.

I wondered how that was possible, then stared at that old John Deere. Here was a man with neither time nor inclination for the wider world. Long days outside at the farm, tending to cows and the rising corn, short nights curled in bed, the weather report better told by the winds and the clouds than by some man in a suit coming through a television screen. Of course he hadn’t heard. How would he?

I felt bad, thinking I’d ruined his morning with the news. The way he pulled off told me he took things hard. Church is supposed to be a place of love. Where you’re safe. He probably went home thinking that’s the last time he’s coming to town. Ain’t nothing good away from the farm. Whole world’s going to hell, already halfway there.

They say ignorance is bliss, and they mean that bad. I would agree. Shutting yourself off from the world, refusing to find out what’s going on and to care about it, is a lot of what’s behind the problems we face. But I still think about that old farmer on his tractor, tending to his work as the world flies past unseen and unknown. I think about long walks on an empty beach and tides that carry your troubles away. And I think maybe that’s what we all need right now, if only for a little while.

Homeless here on earth

June 23, 2014 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

deer I’m always reminded of heaven when I’m on vacation, though maybe not in the way you’d think. Were you afforded a window seat upon fifty-one weeks of my life, what you’d be privy to wouldn’t be much in the way of excitement. I get up early and greet my family, kiss them goodbye as we part ways into the world. I go to work, do my job. Come home to family again. We do chores and eat supper. We take walks and sit on the porch. We talk. We laugh.

That’s it, for the most part. It’s an unspoken but mutually agreed upon goal that all is done with a common goal in mind: live quietly. It’s a good goal to have, and one in which we usually succeed.

With that in mind, I suppose you could ask what in the world we need a vacation from. Fair enough. It is a quiet life for us here among the mountains and hollers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without complication. The days still wear on you in that slow and awful way that makes you consider whether the long string of your everydays is really just some long, unfurling tragedy.

After a while, even life in the country gets old.

Fortunately, that’s usually about the time I pack up my family and run away.

For the last few years, our spot to escape is a slender little island off the coast of North Carolina. A magical place, truly. The sort of spot where you can sit on your balcony and see dunes and ocean and deer in the same blink. Where the beaches are empty except for the whales and turtles and fish, and where each day the surf washes so many shells upon the sand that you could never possibly count them all.

I’ll tell you this, friend—that’s the kind of place that gets into your bones.

The drive there (about six hours according to the maps, about six-and-a-half when factoring in a few walnut-sized bladders) is usually an event in itself. We say goodbye to our little town, goodbye to the old men who seemingly live on the bench in front of the 7-11, goodbye to the mountains and to Virginia itself. It’s a sloughing off of what hard skins we’ve grown over the year, all accompanied by endless Jimmy Buffett songs and plans made not with the calendar, but low tide charts. We arrive not at a destination, but at a feeling. And for five blissful days, there is no doubt in my mind that I have exchanged the place where I was born for the place where I belong.

Yet five days, no matter how blissful, do not make a week. That’s when I start thinking of heaven.

That’s when I take my morning coffee out to the deck and see that wide and endless stretch of water not as the wonder that it is, but the wonder that it isn’t. It is flat, the ocean. Pocked by whitecaps and boats and the bobbing dolphins, but flat nonetheless. Not like my mountains. And though it is blue, it is of a greenish hue rather than the cobalt of the Blue Ridge. The beach is empty. There are tall dunes, but no tall forest. Town is busy rather than lazy.

For those two days between vacation and the resumption of my life, I realize this one truly amazing fact: I am homeless on this earth.

I can be comfortable here, happy with my mountains and my sand. I can find inspiration from them both. I can find a purpose. But I cannot belong here, not truly, and nor can you.

You and I, we were made for a place elsewhere.

Where tears go to die

June 21, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

I’m sitting on the balcony of our eighth-floor hotel room on a quiet Monday evening. The Atlantic stretches out below me like God’s welcome mat. A soft breeze kisses my face and leaves behind a salty film I desperately hope will never completely wash off.

I’ve abandoned my laptop for old fashioned paper and pen. On the small table in front of me is a rare indulgence of Hemmingway’s beverage of choice, and in my left hand is an even rarer indulgence of a long-forgotten vice: a very nice cigar. Bob Marley is singing “No Woman, No Cry” to me through the earphones on my head, and I lean back in my faded jeans and rest my bare feet against the wall.

This is what the ocean does to me.

It makes me smile, makes me relax. Makes me temporarily suspend my fears and regrets. It replaces the storms of my life with sunshine and the filthy mud with clean sand. And all those nagging cares that wash over me are silenced by the peaceful sound of waves meeting shore.

Here, I am a better me.

But this is not why I come here every year. Not why for one week out of fifty-two I say goodbye to my mountains to seek a distant shore.

If you really want to know why I make this pilgrimage, all you need to do is look at the old man in the bench eight stories below me. Sitting right there on the boardwalk, staring out to sea.

I flirted with the idea of taking a picture of him, if only so you could see what I’m seeing right now. But I can’t. It seems like an invasion of his privacy, a sacrilege to his holy moment. So instead I snap a picture of what he’s been looking at for the last six hours.

Yes, that’s right. Six hours.

We first passed him on our way out to the beach, loaded down with shovels and pails and chairs and towels. Seventies and tired, with a worn cane propped against his right leg. He stared out to the horizon with a soft smile on his lips. It looked to me that he was both there and somewhere far away.

When we passed him on our way back in for lunch, I nodded. He smiled. I nodded on our way back out afterward and got a wave.

Then, as we were calling it a day, I passed and said, “Pretty weather, huh?”

“Sure is,” he answered.

Sometimes having kids gives you opportunities you would otherwise miss. When my son began crying over a missing toy that he was sure would be swallowed by the sea overnight, I went back down to the beach to retrieve it for him. Another wave, another smile. On my way back, I decided to stop.
“Not much beats this view,” I said.

“Come here every day,” he replied. “It’s the only place where the scenery never changes but always gets better anyway.”

I liked that enough to stick around and hear more.

“You and your family from around here?” he asked.

“No, we’re on the other side of Richmond,” I said.

He nodded. “Nice country up there.”

“Beautiful country,” I told him. “But not like this.”

“My wife and I moved here from Iowa,” he said. “Came here, oh, twenty years ago. We retired and realized we’d never seen the ocean. Our kids were grown and gone, so we figured it was the right time.”

His wife wasn’t with him, and I wasn’t about to ask where she was. I knew. I knew by the way he had sat on only one side of the bench rather than the middle. Knew by the fact that he rested his cane against his right leg even though he was right handed. It was the product of repetition. Someone else had shared that seat with him for twenty years.

“Know why I come here?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Because the ocean swallows our tears. That’s what she always told me. ‘Harry,’ she’d say, ‘I think all that is all the tears we shed. God just bottles them up and pours them out so we can have a place to visit where we can leave our struggles.’”

“I like that,” I said.

“Me, too.”

I left him to his pouring, and then I went up to my room and onto the balcony to do the same. Because that’s what the ocean is to Harry and I. A place to pour out our tears and leave our struggles. A place to find the better us.

Breathe deeply

June 18, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

I won’t say the reason I’m heading to a small island off the coast of North Carolina is because of a bottle of my wife’s body wash. That would be an untruth. But it would also be an untruth to say that bottle of lavender-flavored goop doesn’t have anything to do with my vacation. It does.

Me, I’m not a body wash kind of guy. Just give me a bar of plain soap. No bottles, no fancy bouquet of smells. My wife? She likes that sort of thing. Apple and peach and pear and whatnot. She smells like an orchard, my wife.

The thing about having such a mélange of soap is that things tend to get a little messy. There are bottles everywhere. Dozens of them, in various stages of use. Last night, my bull of a son got out of the shower and stepped on them, scattering them like miniature bowling pins.

I was nice enough to clean them up seeing as how everyone else was getting packed. Spending a week from home is akin to adopting a nomadic lifestyle. There are clothes to gather, and medicine and food and computers and iPads—a lot of stress just to get ready for a little relaxation. And though I’m always up for a trip to the ocean, this year things are a little hectic. Edit this book. Write that book. And can you do this interview? I’m busy. I’m busy and there’s really no time for me to relax, because Things Must Be Done. And sometimes you have so many Things That Must Be Done, the only thing you can really do is pick up a mess of bottled soap that your son has spilled over.

So I picked them up one by one, arranging them in no particular order or way, just trying to keep them and myself upright. Then I turned one of the bottles—Lemon Mist, or something like that—around and read the label for no apparent reason at all.

And there it was.

It’s amazing, really, the sorts of wisdom one can find in the most unlikely of places. Over the years I have found guidance from acorns and cornfields, guitar strings and rainy afternoons, but until that moment I had never had the occasion to be smacked in the head by Truth via a bottle of body wash. But we never really know from whence inspiration will come, do we? I think that’s all part of the fun.

You see, written in tiny black letters on the back of the bottle, right below a surprisingly long line of ingredients, were these words:

For best results, breathe deeply.

Yes.

I’m not going to the coast because of a bottle of soap, but I am going because of what that bottle of soap says. Because it’s right, you know. Life is a beautiful thing that can get tough at times. It’ll purr just before it bears its teeth. And in those times when things get so busy and so complicated, we all have a tendency to forget that it’s the little things that keep us going. The simple things like breathing deep.