Alert ! Man on Bike Path Not Doing Bike Path Things...

My wife called me the other night on her way to meet me. "There's this guy on the bike path right by the house, earlier he was just sitting there, now he's lying on his back listening to an i pod. Do you think I should call the cops." Now at this point a normal non-alarmist person, I thought about saying no, it's probably nothing. What I actually said was, "Hell yes call the cops." Reactionary? Overreacting? Maybe. Maybe not? The Duck Police Dept certainly takes care of their business. Their business just tends to be a little more routine than say, the LAPD. You can read the blotter. DUI, drunk in public, public nuisance etc. We do have an unfortunate amount of pedestrian/cyclist interaction with motor vehicles. Actually we had a brutal, fatal hit and run a couple of years ago. But suffice it to say, booze, cars, fireworks and rudeness are the normal fair. Once we met for dinner, I asked my wife if she indeed called the police. She did, and the duty officer's response to her query got me thinking. He proudly reported, "yes ma'am I saw that gentleman and he did look mildly suspect to me, so I stopped and asked what he was up to . . . waiting for a ride. Thanks for the call though." As I muse about my town's pleasantness, and ponder frequent turmoil in the world outside it, I'm inclined to look for root causes. I think this story illustrates one: In Duck, you do appropriate things in appropriate places. Bike paths are for biking or walking. Beaches are for relaxing. Houses are for eating and sleeping. Streets are for driving etc. When you try to re-purpose a town feature, you will be noticed. There will be no waiting for a ride on the bike path, without some inquiry. We aren't huffy about it we didn't haul the kid off to jail. We just notice. And in a world where psychological research assures us that if we are getting a beating on a crowded street, it is unlikely that we will be helped by passers by, it's nice to know that here, someone would probably have already asked our assailant why he was wearing last year's Tommy Bahama before he could even think about beating our ass. OK, it's probably not that extreme. But it is pervasive. Theft is a huge problem here, especially in rental houses. It is very hard to police when contractors and rental companies are constantly scrambling to keep the newest and nicest amenities in houses. Once you see enough TV's and dining room sets on the side of the street on bulk pick-up week, you start to not notice the unauthorized individual quietly removing said items from a property. The weird thing is that Duck also doesn't feel particularly exclusive or high brow. All the restaurants are casual. There are rental houses of every stripe and price range. I don't think it's the residents either, there just aren't enough to set such a pervasive tone. I think it is what it is. A resort town. Everyone is here to have a good time. And maybe a good time is more important, or at least more dear than morality. Absorbed in our everyday lives in any other city or town, passing by someone being harmed, there is a possibility that we tell ourselves we do not understand the circumstance. Maybe we don't even notice due to our absorbtion in our day. Life is real, life is busy. We see our world through our worldview. We bend our surroundings to our purpose. People re-purpose things. Houses become meth labs, streets become protest venues. Pressure cookers are made into bombs, parks become community gardens. Cars become homes. The pulse of the world around us doing what it needs to do to get something done is intense. In a place where you go to get away from all of that, even if you carry it around with you on your smart phone the whole time you are supposed to be relaxing, there seems a desire to not re-purpose. A desire to see things at face value. Re-purposing can serve good or evil ends, but in either case it takes a critical eye to see and a critical mind to develop, and perseverance to execute. In a resort town these are not common values.

The ooze of pleasantness and bliss

A bad week, putting it mildly. I listen to the news regularly, but after the Boston bombing, I was paying special attention Tuesday. An extremely powerful earthquake was being reported in rural Iran. Then, Wednesday morning, reports of an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West Texas. At some point interspersed in there, authorities in Mississippi made an arrest of an individual suspected of mailing poisoned letters to the president, and a member of congress. On Tuesday morning, as I pondered the news from the night before and the breaking news from Iran, I passed a group of what I deduced to be Mennonites playing volleyball on a sand court in Ocean Dunes. I'm not sure I can capture or explain the minutia that makes towns like Duck the way they are and separates them from the rest of the life as we know it. Maybe it's in these snapshots, that I might find some sense of what it is though. On a placid, gentle, warm oceanside morning, as Bostonians were waking bewildered by the previous day's senseless carnage, as Iranians were in the midst of suffering and loss, and as Texans in the town of West were on the brink of disaster; eight young women in cheerful dresses and matching bonnets played an impromptu game of beach volleyball. I'm finding it difficult to imagine a more poignant or bizarre juxtaposition. I cannot. Truth may be stranger than fiction. Truth in a hamlet devoted to relaxing by the ocean as the world goes flying by is far stranger. I completely accept that if you isolated any small town, neighborhood--even in a big city--you could make observations similar to mine. This is extraordinary however, to my mind. Yes there will be a share of human suffering on a daily basis. And yes any pleasant town could be seen in contrast to this. I must maintain however, the following is extraordinary. There are less than eight hundred permanent residents of Duck. It's only April. It's not a holiday. So with the smattering of vacationers visiting, say two hundred and fifty or so people here to work for the day, no permanent mennonite community, and me by no means scouring the streets ( I do have a job...); How does this happen. By chance, with a random sample of less than 3000 possible humans do I happen onto the street where eight young women are playing volleyball in bonnets. They were all beaming with happiness by the way, having the time of their lives. That is why I feel compelled to share these observations. The ooze of pleasantness and bliss can be so pervasive at times it would seem saccharine, if it weren't so blissful.

...and that is why we are afforded our grace

I'm finishing the build of our new house, and I've been thinking about a new project. I've lived in Duck for about a year and a half now, and though I've been on the Outerbanks for almost ten years, I feel that Duck is different--more removed, more isolated, more compact. I want to chronicle a year in Duck, in hopes that I can highlight the sense that I get sometimes of being a part of the world, while being separated from it. I'd planned to start this project, or whatever it will become after finishing our home. But, as I have been mulling it over in my head for that last couple months as while tiling a floor or trimming a window, I've felt compelled to somehow illustrate Duck's relationship to the wider world. Today that relationship was illustrated for me in full relief. The Boston Marathon was bombed today, while I was meeting with clients concerning a potential second home building project. As my potential client and I said our goodbyes they admonished me to take my time in getting back to them and not forget the importance of spending time with my family. I assured them that I was grateful for the work, and looked forward to putting pen to paper and finalizing their budget. I stopped off to meet a pool contractor at another job and then returned to the office to begin developing a budget proposal for the new build. Here I am completely consumed with the world of second homes, pool additions, cranes employed to move hot tubs...and there it is on my homepage "Explosions Rock Finish of Boston Marathon." How banal seems my world. I have dear friends who live in Boston and work downtown. Call or text? I texted, they are attorneys after all, and was relieved to get an all's well response. Miraculously, they were both home, with their kids, on a Monday. We all seem to take for granted why Boston, New York, Sydney, Miami,Cape Town, Norfolk, Los Angeles etc exist. Centers of population develop around ports, centers of commerce develop between them; Chicago, St. Louis, and in between them small towns. And that's where people live: big cities, or small towns, or something in between. But then there are regions set apart. Areas so beautiful or singular that people want to spend some time there. Enterprising individuals who can tolerate underemployment, sparse public services, seasonal isolation, and occasional but absolutely shit weather make these places home. And try to make a living making the visitors comfortable. We deal with serious issues here, but they are almost always uniquely local. We agonize over managing development, erosion, traffic etc. But our issues are destined to be microcosmic. We are affected by, and shaped by the events of the world around us, and at the same time unaffected. Maybe the world needs places like Duck, and that is why we are afforded our grace. Bostonians will visit us this summer, and I hope they don't remember the bombs, for a week or so. I hope, in this blog, to explore this idea further. A year in Duck. What's going on here, what's going on out there, and how are they related, or not.