VACATE
By Cliff Whitehouse
Some kind of Indians used to live here, right? Who wouldn't? Beach,
thoughtless horizons, birdsong, dog-like cats, seaweed, breeze,
memories. Feels like Sumbawa, Indonesia here: a sandy trail cut through
the growth, insect orchestras and midday inertia, a storm 200 miles into
the future.
This rented house, four stories high, was built around the shaft of an
elevator, not terribly tropical, though. Here, it is the Atlantic behind me,
sometimes tempting, sometimes bluster and malice; clouds build over the
sound, mayonnaise not mustard on the water-flat breast of the continent.
So much technology in this escape—planes, cars, computers, games,
refrigeration, phones--comforts at what should be the end of a world. At
least French is being spoken, "Merci, Marianne." Dreams come from
books, from squaques, from muscle pulls, from unknown doubtdevils, from
lovely babysitters during Shakespeare, from nostalgesia, from musical snot
and sublimity, a solar carrot, from junkie-hot tempers and tornado
leftovers.
Hattaras, you've changed. Gone, the royally hot sun. Here, in the
dawndark, uncooked rain runs before hard rain, dances back behind it. My
legs are tight from yesterday's softsand sound walk where we found a
murder weapon. Isn't anything a murder weapon? From words to nuclear
waste. And who, of the thousands that come to these four-story vacation
homes, with six bedrooms and seven baths, pool, pool table, hot tub, who,
of the thousands that build them and keep them pink and green and
weeded, felt sufficiently pissed off to keep someone else from breathing in
the heavy sea air? The pale blue garlic clove of water might know.
The calm of the physical place is constantly superseded by what we
have brought with us: anger, conflict, work, machines, games,
expectations. This ain't southern CA with its hard T & A, this is families,
forgotten bodies, stubborn beer-bellied fishermen standing with surf rods to
spite the sun, nuclear wasted families tilt-soaking into the sand on webbed
aluminum chairs with best-sellers cracked in half.
And all it takes to regain the sauvage is a six-minute walk to the beach.
There, the waves made in China break like cheap plastic toys on the sandfly beach, the merciless riptide moves the swimmer away from his sandy
shoes. Manta ray leaps from the water, white-bellied, gunmetal blue back
airborne for fun? For food? Sandpipers run with the foam up and back,
paranoia on sticks. Some waves crack with Stygian malice, others
masseuse-gentle on the wind-muscled sand. Little mantas get spat to the
sky but fall back. Easy three colors of sand, sea and sky dividing into
browns, beiges, light toast, shell-tainted horseradish, sun-scorched grays,
dirty turquoise, jade green and heavy blue, the curved white of distance
folding into that blue of dead horses' hooves. Kites of childish optimism rise
into the wind.