Vini, vidi, vacati

I came, I saw, I went on vacation.

Then I came back and responded to the need to chronicle the experience, which turned into a convoluted experience in itself, taking two more weeks to process the process in the process of describing the process. In a word, it has faded faster than the tan on my low-melanin skin. Does that mean it was all skin-deep? I'll let the reader be the judge.

Day one
Corolla, NC, Monday, 6/5/06

We arrived at the coast last night after a long day's drive from Central Swingstate and slept well in the king-sized bed. Got up, had coffee upstairs with Merlian, Curt, and Keith, and started to settle into their established family rhythm and the neutral space. The kitchen, dining room, TV/music room, and deck are on the third floor, with four bedrooms on the second floor, three bedrooms and another TV/music room on the ground floor. Lots of space. Patio, pool, grill, and a good-sized lawn.

Over breakfast (Joan's banana bread) we looked through the Marshall family geneology book. Gven's dad Curt showed me the pages outlining his grandfather Ballard Marshall's branch of the tree, and we found the branches of that branch, including Curt's mother, Lake Marshall, his sisters, his children, including Gven, and our own little ones and their dates of birth. We seem to belong to this clan.

I went for a walk by myself and saw lots of interesting flora, some kind of laurel I think, lots of native hollies and pine, and a fox creeping behind a house. I came back and started a pot of red bean soup to carry me through the week and invited anyone else to help themselves. I had an audience while cutting up onions and peppers, and I'm afraid the peppers scared them off. To his credit, Curt tried the soup and declared it 'hot'.

Nephew-in-law Scott Kiernan collared me for a while to talk about his Duncan relatives a couple of generations back. The Kiernans are related by marriage to the Duncans, including the famous dancer Isadora and her brother Raymond, who worked a lot in Paris, New York, and Greece to develop a school and community of artists.

Gven and I went for a nice long bike ride up to the lighthouse and back, discovering bike paths off the highway, a place to pump up tires, and access to the public beach. I even found a pair of clip-on sunglasses that fit. It felt good to be out in the warm sunshine and moving. We got back in time for cocktail hour, so Scott K. and I had a gin and tonic together while he talked about New Orleans restaurants he and Misty went to on their honeymoon. Jim talked about rafting the Chatooga, and he got me going about the textbook business, which drew forth an opinion from just about everybody in the room. I got to play a rousing game of whiffleball out on the deck with the little boys, Dylan and Xavier, who alternated pitching to each other while I played catcher. Somehow it was more fun to play ball on the third-floor deck than down in the yard.

Day two
Corolla, NC, Tuesday, 6/6/06

Jim and Sharon drove down to Kitty Hawk in their SUV without us, mostly because I was less than enthusiastic about spending the day driving around site-seeing. After breakfast I took a cup of coffee and a John Barth book out on the deck and did some Basic Movement in the morning sun and the ocean breeze and read a chapter of ripe metafiction by the old master John Barth. Mavis and Dylan had been to the beach already and gave Gven and me walking directions, so we walked down to the water, about a four-block ramble with our chairs and a bag of books and towels. After a couple of hours it clouded up and looked like rain, so we headed back with a few shells to show for it. Not ideal beach weather, but now we know where to find it.

The cast of characters is beginning to take shape for me, a somewhat out-there in-law from the midwest. Here we are, about 20 of us, holed up for a week in a big, built-for-tourists house subdivision on Currituck Sound. It's not where the rich and the super-rich go to play, but it's not where the poor folks go either, it's ordinary working folks from everywhere east of the Mississippi who can afford a week at the beach.

Merlian is usually the first one upstairs in the morning. He takes up his position at the main table, eats his oatmeal, and stays there most of the day observing the procession of younger characters enter and exit the stage. First Joyce and Joan, his tall, still-pretty wife and their organizer-daughter. Then Curt, the quiet patriarch of this crew hobbling up the stairs on his hurting knees, and his wife Mavis, fretting over her adored and adorable grandchildren. Haley and Dylan are usually nearby their mother Tiffany, who is trying mightily to do the right thing as she adapts to single-motherhood.

Keith and Janet eventually appear, but they're more reserved and private, disappearing (like me) when they want or need some alone time, yet making the effort to participate. Keith is Curt and Mavis's second son and Tiffany's brother, making him Gven's half-brother. He got the quiet gene, but he opens up but in the right company, and I enjoyed hearing about some of his misadventures, which made it easier for me to disclose some of my own checkered past. He throws a mean frisbee, too.

Day four
Corolla, NC, Thursday, 6/8/06

Began auspiciously with real French roast coffee instead of the decaf we'd been slipped for three days. If Joan was affronted, she didn't show it. Gven drew the line at promising coffee and providing decaf. Cousin Joan has been many places, but apparently there are a few things she doesn't know, so a quick trip to the Food Lion on route 12 solved the problem, besides being a good way to ogle the young women in the checkout line.

I think Gven and I were more relaxed after an afternoon spent mostly by ourselves driving down to Manteo, enjoying a witty two-woman play about Queens Mary and Elizabeth spiced with contemporary schtick about American politics tossed into the running argument between the feuding Tudor monarchs. We walked around the little tourist town looking at local art and the harbor, then drove back sipping our coconut and peach snowballs. It did us good to get out of the house as things got real on day three.

Tiffany caught the 24-hour virus that Haley had on day two, so she stayed home sleeping and aching while the rest of us went to the play on Roanoke Island. Janet stayed home because she wanted to, and then received the wrath of the mother-in-law for not being a team player. Keith had another Budweiser and let it go. Janet has been a good sport as far as I can tell, so if she retreats to her room or poolside, it's her way of coping with the group situation. I'm sure I don't know the half of it, and doesn't every family have its own internal history that only insiders know?

The warm, not windy morning was an invitation for a bike ride, I realized after breakfast while reading an Anne Lamott novel on the deck. I can into a fully recovered Tiffany on my way downstairs to saddle up Orange Handlebars. She said she was going to the coffee house to work on a test for her anatomy and physiology class. I rode to the hardware store for Allen wrenches, then kept going, down route 12 to the town of Duck, turned around and rode back in the rising heat. I had the sense to stop for water halfway back, then saw the coffee shop, and there she was, sitting at her laptop, being the responsible student working on a new self-definition.

Day five
Corolla, NC, Friday, 6/9/06

A bunch of us took a guided tour of the dunes up beyond the end of the highway and heard a little of the natural and human history of the place. The young tour guy (I say young because he seemed young for a 35-year-old former guitar player and chef looking for his next gig) had a lot of good stories.

One of my favorites was the origin of the lifesaving stations that dot the outer banks every 15 miles or so. There's one at Manteo down south, one at Kitty Hawk, one at Duck, one at Corolla, and one at Carova up near the Virginia state line. They were built around 1875 to watch for shipwrecked sailors, and there were a lot of shipwrecks. Each station had a staff of six workers, who would take turns walking up or down the beach until they met the man from the next station, exchange a ticket to show that they had covered their section, and walk back. When they found a ship in trouble, they shot a cannon loaded with a pair of pants attached to a length of rope out to the ship. With one end of the rope secured to the ship, one by one the stranded sailors would climb in the pants to be pulled in to shore on a pulley. At least that's the story.

We saw some of the famous wild horses up close, and we drove through beautiful downtown Carova, which consists of half a dozen houses and a general store/post office. There were quite a few for-sale signs, and apparently property is still cheap there, although one would need a four-wheel drive even in fair weather. Buyer beware, however, that some of the "waterfront" lots have frontage on a canal that may or may not be connected to the ocean or the sound.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Methodistville, OH, 6/10/06

It was a long drive, but we made it, taking a leisurely midday break to explore Charlottesville and daydream about the future. The kids were home when we got there, and Helga had cooked a nice meal for our return - the good daughter. Jessi was there with Alex, his tall, beautiful friend from New York. Gven had not met her before, and over the next couple of days they would spend some time together getting to know each other. We all learned a little bit about one another eating meals together and inhabiting a small house with our big energy. That story can wait for another day.