A Little Night Music...An Oak Island Memoir
by
H. Kent Craig
(This was originally published in the August, 1994 edition
of The Pelican Post (Southport, NC), and
holds precedent copyright from then, © 1994 by H. Kent Craig.)
I loved the atmosphere of The Arcade, its Zenist simplicity
yet State Fair brassiness. The Smell of the cotton candy
and of the food being brought in from next door at the
pier's grill, the steamy stickiness, the then-and-curent
lack of air conditioning which made your Izod shirt stick
to your back like a second skin, the aroma of gossamer
seafoam mist created when the waves crashed against the
broken concrete and asphalt breakwater a few feet from the
backdoor that the lack of air conditioning also treated you
to, the lullaby heartbeat sound of those waves comingling
with the breakwater and with the pier's pilings a few yards
away, reactions of kids and adults looking at themselves in
the 30's-era all-back-silvered-glass not cheap-plastic
Mylar funhouse mirrors, the sounds of wooden balls hitting
the ramps on the skeeball machines along with a myriad
eclectic cacophony of bells and whistles and thuds from
pinball machines and chinga-chings and clanga-clang-clangs
of pachinko Japanese pinball machines which would come
later, and riding over top of it all as a mad hatter of
divine purpose; spend money, spend money, spend money,
spend money, the ever present sound of the juke box.
I was given permission that summer to stay at the arcade as
long as I wanted to on Friday or Saturday nights as long as
it "wasn't too late" which implied, but never stated, to
mean 11PM-to-midnight and I was given the option of letting
my parents drop me off and walking back along Oak Island
Drive or along the beach or walking both ways. Most of the
time I walked the three beach miles, a hour's walk, to and
from the arcade both ways, even at night, without a
flashlight. I learned that by placing a temporary pile of
shiny new beer cans left from the run of that day's surf
fishermen between the foot of the front row of dunes and
the hightide line near the beach access at the end of 67th
Street (our trailer being directly two-and-a-half blocks
down sound-side from there) that I could spot that pile of
beer cans on the darkest of nights and know that I'd
reached my street.
It was within this public-private zoo of fun that eventful
Saturday night, the summer of '69, that I caught a glimpse
of Linda out of the corner of my eye. She was fourteen
looking eighteen as I was twelve at six foot two tall
looking sixteen, and I deliberately dumped the 8-ball game
I was playing just so I could scout her out
surreptitiously. She was with two friends, both young
girls, a little younger than she. I waited until her
friends started playing mechanical rifle shot games against
each other on adjacent machines while she watched
half-bored with them, then I walked close by her, brushing
into her a little, stopping to apologize, my entree' into
conversation with her.
Her parents had rented one of the front row cottages on the
Yaupon City side of Long Beach's 79th Street with another
couple who were friends of theirs. The other two girls
still busy knocking ducks and targets down inside the rifle
game machines were that couple's daughters. Linda wasn't an
only child, she had an older adult brother who didn't live
at home so for practical purposes was an only child, as I
was. Our eyes stayed glued to each other as one of the
other girls complained she was out of dimes...I fished a
couple of loose ones out of my pocket shoving them into her
hand as Linda and I walked slowly away from them as they
got change and started playing rifle again, Linda turning
every few moments to keep an eye on them since she, being
the oldest of the group, was given the responsibility of
being baby-sitter as much as being at The Arcade to have
fun herself. Linda continued that they had been down since
last weekend, and that this was her last night here,
tomorrow she and her parents had to pack to leave and head
back to Asheboro.
With a slight lump in my throat, I asked her if she'd like
to take a walk along the pier next door. She said "sure",
but she'd have to get rid of her charges first. We made the
walk back to her place in five minutes, more or less, the
four of us walking towards the west end of the island, away
from The Arcade along the high tide line past the first
hillock dunes, arriving at the steps built out and over the
first line of dunes, the cottage being tucked in behind
them. The younger girls scampering back inside as a TV
shone through a thin curtain in the living room, glaring
images of the carnage in Vietnam back at us which we didn't
care to think about at that moment. Linda fussing to her
girlish friends to tell her Mom that it was only 9PM and
that she was heading back to The Arcade to spend the last
of her money and not tell her that she was with me.
We strolled along the edge of the out-going tide's splash,
I reaching to hold her hand, she accepting. The lights from
The Arcade's parking lot being strong, I noticed the
pimples of a nearly-perfect-intact conch shell sticking up
from the packed damp sand, stopping to salvage it from
Sister Ocean and offering to Linda as a gift, we walked
higher up the shoreline placing it atop an old log embedded
int he sand above the hightide line so she could find it
later and continued our walk back to The Arcade and the
pier. We walked hand-in-hand like two older, more mature,
more adult lovers along the pier. The handful of fishermen
wasting bait that night not giving us a second glance as a
cool wind blew from over the waves and under the clear
endless canopy of stars we leaned into each other
simultaneously wrapping our arms around each other's
waists.
As we shuffled down the steps of Yaupon Pier and back
around down to the shoreline again, we head eastward away
from her cottage towards Caswell Beach. As we walked on
staying close to each other at the waist our arms and hands
intertwined like a newly metamorphosed Siamese twin, I
leaned my head down to find her lips a foot and some inches
below mine. Finding them, she kissed me back and our walk
stopped soon after that point. A spot between the purvey
scopes of Yaupon Beach's streetlights and beach houses
became our couch; we nestled ourselves in a bed of sea oats
and beach litter, a beer can tab lancing itself directly
the fleshy part of my rump, staring directly upwards into
Oak Island's summer night's sky getting lost in its
infinity as we held each other for company, for security,
for lessons learned; the haze of noise an audible track
from the jukebox, a Simon & Garfunkel song, the words
hitting home "...it was a time of innocences...a time of
con-fi-dences..." and lights creeping over the yaupon
bushes from The Arcade in the near-distance being our
backdrop to the voyages of discovery and and joy we would
partake that night and still manage to get Linda
home in time before midnight.
{Back To My Writings Page}
{To Main Personal Page}
{Feedback}