Memory Bank (continued part 5)

I was sixteen years old the last summer we went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last official family vacation we would ever take together. I had started going there when I was twelve. I knew nothing of the ocean back then. My father announced we would be traveling to the Carolinas, South to visit friends and then on to North Carolina to the beach where we would spend the remainder of that vacation. At our friends house I was shy, awkward and I thought they talked funny, these people who I had grown up with in my hometown in Ohio. A middle son, Wesley pronounced naked as necked, separating the last syllable out as “ed”. I asked him to repeat it several times, when his older brother who had kept some of his fluent Ohioan language skills explained it for me. “Ooooh,” I said back finally understanding this foreign tongued boy. He might as well have been speaking French for all the information I was able to gather through his thick drawl. By the time we were scheduled to leave I had made friends with them again after having been apart for many years. I was not anxious to go to the beach where I feared sharks and jelly fish would certainly attack me the minute I hit the water. We drove well into the night when we finally arrived at the desolate place. My immediate reaction was to sob. I couldn’t see anything that even remotely resembled the lovely place my dad had described from an earlier visit he and my mom had taken. For him it was a sanctuary, for my twelve year old mind it was hell. It was pitch black as he had to maneuver a smaller camper onto the cement pad. There were no trees, no woods as I had always been surrounded by when we went camping. There was nothingness. I could hear the crashing waves just beyond the sand dunes and a storm was brewing off the coast. I was scared; terrified of what I could not see and things I could only hear that made my imagination go wild. I cried myself to sleep that night, only to wake up and discover we landed in Oz.
Swollen eyed and still very upset to be brought to what I was sure was some God forsaken place, I rubbed my eyes and slowly climbed down from the bunk with the small air space. Get up too quickly and I would have knocked myself unconscious. My parents had a pull out couch they made up and slept on, which the moment they got up they had to promptly put back together so we all had some place to sit. The smell of breakfast, fried eggs and bacon hung heavy in the salty sea air. The breeze blew the curtains back and forth through the windows and the sun was shining high in the sky, lighting the new world we had landed in. I walked outside and saw my dad, sitting fiddling with fishing tackle and poles. “Good morning, Weepy.” My father grinned at me, waiting for my full reaction of the place he couldn’t wait to take us to. I felt my stubbornness creep into my face, as I tried not to look as excited as I was. My instinct was to run at break neck speed toward the ocean to see it, smell it, squish the sand between my toes. Moping, I went over to a camp stool opposite my dad instead, making sure I was continuing to wear my scowl, so as not to reveal any indication that he had been right bringing me to the apocalypse. “You know,” Dad started out saying, “I know you are not nearly as unhappy now about being here as you were last night.” I squinted my eyes hard back at him trying to prove once again how wrong he was. Dad grinned ear to ear at me. “Give it up, kid. I am on to you. I know you can’t wait to go to the beach.” He was right, I was dying to give up my bratty facade and go to the beach, but I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure I was thrilled to be here, though if I had had to make an educated guess, I was fairly certain he was right. I continued to pout and went back into the camper to see my mom and avoid Dad’s gloating. After breakfast we all went to the beach with chairs, sun screen, cans of pop, a book for mom, fishing equipment for Dad and inflatable rafts for Kim and me. Dad went over all the new rules for swimming in the ocean. “This is different, it is salt water so don’t swallow it. Stay close to shore and if you get caught in a rip tide, swim with the current. Do you understand me?” We both nodded in agreement that we understood everything he had just laid out, but for me, I was so distracted by the water, the waves as they crashed into shore, the sea gulls flying over head scouring the beach for anyone foolish enough to feed them and the boys who were on surf boards, just beyond the second break. I would have agreed to almost anything at that point in order to get cut loose from my father’s current lecture hold.
By the end of our stay I was crying because we had to leave. The place that once seemed desolate, barren and isolated, as if it were cut directly from a science fiction movie was now someplace I wanted to move to and live forever. I swam in the ocean every day, my hair turning a white blonde as my skin darkened by the day from the sun. I sat on the edge of the water digging for tiny clams, so I could race them with the new friend I had met, Nancy. I kept one clam in a bucket while we were there, naming it Clamintine. She/he was my best racer. I would put in fresh sea water and kelp every day in her bucket, so she would stay alive long enough to race that afternoon. I would dig her up from the bucket’s bottom and throw her into the pool we had dug, by hand for our races. She continued her winning streak until the day we had to pack up and head out on the road. My last day, I took Miss Clamintine, the best clam in the world, and set her free in the shallow edge of the crashing waves. Come to think of it, I shed a tear over that too. Thinking back I realize now, I was kind of cry baby. Scary things made me cry, sad things made me cry, happy things made cry, sentimental things made me cry. Dad really shouldn’t have been so worried about me taking salt water. It turns out I had already gulped in my fair share.