A Walker in the Suburbs

The commonwealth of Virginia stretches from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. Today, we drive toward the latter. But to reach coastal Virginia we’ll drive through much of coastal Maryland. 

Chincoteague perches at the top of Virginia’s outer banks. We’ll spend most of the almost-four-hour drive in the Free State, won’t reenter the commonwealth until we’re almost there. 

In that sense, we’ll have done on the first day of this short getaway what all travels hope to do, which is to bring the traveler home again. 

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote William Wordsworth. Though his cloud floated “on high o’er vales and hills,” mine was perched in a perfect blue sky above a sand dune. 

How solitary it looked, this cloud, how out of place, as if it had stumbled into the wrong act of a play. 

Where were its compatriots? There were other clouds in the sky that day, but nowhere near this one, which had dared to move inland instead of out to sea. 

Its out-of-placeness only emphasized its ethereal boundaries, its contrast of white with blue. It looked like the dot of an explanation point, punctuating a late summer day. 

I write this post to the sound of waves pounding the shore. It’s a sound I never grow tired of. Nature’s white noise machine, its beating heart. 

Like a white noise machine, if you listen hard enough you find the rhythm in the randomness, the patterns in the passages. 

Like an inhale and an exhale there’s a sucking in and a blowing out, a familiar back-and-forthness. Action, pause, reaction. A rush, a rustle, the life force. 

(Gulls in the surf, oblivious to the white noise?)

Having spent time on the Gulf Coast of Florida the last 10 years, I’ve been spoiled by the sunsets, so many picture-perfect ones, the great orb sliding down just before dinner, a fully awake time to be sure.

On the Atlantic coast of North Carolina, you have to wake early if you want to see the sun rise. I didn’t yesterday — but I did today. 

Rolled out early enough to see the first color streaking the sky, to wonder if the clouds would impede or dramatize the rising (the latter), to document the moment when the blood-red disc came out from behind the ocean, to feel a sense of relief then.

A line from Walden came to mind: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”

The Outer Banks of North Carolina (known on sweatshirts and bumper stickers as OBX) is close enough that I should have visited long ago. But here I am now, which is all that really matters. It was a brisk welcome, sunny and cold, with wind that meant business and had busied itself burying the stairway to the beach.

Just a reminder of who’s in charge, as if we need it after Fiona and Ian. 

The dunes here are protected but diminished, and seeing them yesterday, proud seagrass waving, was to feel an ache for all the beautiful things that grace our lives … then disappear.