Nowadays, I often compare my beach trips to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I went to Sauvie Island over the weekend, which is a beach and farm-lined island outside of Portland, and being there kept giving me vague flashbacks of this place.
The first time I went there it was during the summer, in 2005. From what I remember, we set up a camp ground on Ocracoke Island, and spent the night drinking wine on the beach, and later running into the ocean waves under the stars.
The following day we parked our car in the parking lot on the edge of town by some general store, and paid a man to escort us to an uninhabited island a few miles away with his boat. Though sunburned and eaten alive by horseflies in the daylight and mosquitoes at sundown, it was quite an interesting human versus nature experience.
After he dropped us off on a dock, he warned us of the shark-infested areas, so we had to make sure to steer clear of any possible predators in the water. The beaming sun made us delirious, and we had to find patches of water to cool off, where we wouldn’t be attacked, and could swim aside the wildlife and sparkling flying fish that would jump out of the water. At the end of the day, we had to turn on our camping stove buried in the sand to cook some ramen on the beach, while hundreds of mosquitoes somehow dove into the small, contained fire. We got in a tent to try to shelter ourselves, and made sure to kill every last one of them before we would rest. The following day, the man picked us up from the dock and drove us back to the designated parking lot on the end of Ocracoke. We entered civilization again, all battered and burnt and half-dressed with eyes half open, obvious products of weak survival skills against this area’s natural habitat. I believe we departed the coast to Asheville that day, to take on the landlocked mountains, as we were defeated by the coast.
I went back to Ocracoke about two and a half years ago, to escape the dark and dismal late fall of New York state. The way down, we took the ugly highway trip down Route 95 through the New Jersey turnpike, the dreaded drive-through of the Northeast, full of stench and Ikea and oil tanks and traffic and rusty industrial steel and crazy connections of multiple on-ramps through the most densely-populated American state, also known as the country’s armpit. A couple states later, we stopped off in Washington, DC, for the night, then continued on out of the megaopolis of extreme population, southward, into a warmer place.
The entrance into the outer banks is quite wholesome. It is a network of long islands with beach houses, and lots of little shops selling fudge and sunscreen and beads and kites and fresh produce, as you can smell the salty ocean air and see it flapping all of the flags hanging in the air. At one point we took a large, free ferry boat across the water, where people get to dock their cars on its platform, to hang out in the waves under the seagulls, and wave to other approaching ships full of jolly vacationers.
We reached Ocracoke, one of the more southern islands, and entered our somewhat-remembered campground. It has a bunch of sites set up around a circular parking lot, sectioned off right before the brush and cacti and sand dunes that then descend off and downward into the sandy beach. You must run uphill through the friction-packed sand trails and brush off the dozens of mosquitoes before reaching the summit and sliding down to the ocean area and have the breeze blow these pests away.
The beach there itself is quite slow-paced. The waves are mellow, and the water is warm for swimming. Once in a while, you can see groups of dolphins jumping up and down through the water in synchronized patterns.
The people there seem to encompass the slow pace. Once in a while, some buff men go out in their kayaks and face the windy water with their paddles. Otherwise, it is usually just groups of people hanging out on beach blankets, or a collection of men who set up fishing poles upright in the sand and wait around for their daily prey that they put in buckets.
By the end of the day, the sun sets on the beach, creating another warm mesh of concluding mellow colors. A spread of different shells and former sealife washes ashore, sometimes even a crystallized jellyfish.
I haven’t been in a while, nor do I know when I will go back. I hear stories from others that go to the Outer Banks, and compare mine to theirs’, or I see stickers on the backs of campers and try and guess which island they may have spent their time.