Summers Of My Oak Island Youth, by H. Kent Craig

Summers Of My Oak Island Youth

by
H. Kent Craig

The rain from the offshore squall pelted the warped-tin roof of Kyle Matthew's old mobile home on 67th Street NE like a proverbial flock of seagulls engaging in target practice that first Saturday morning in June of '64, the first of many Saturdays we'd be spending at Long Beach for decades to come. Kyle, a customer of our family-owned business, had taken a' likin' to my father, showing his friendship by insisting we spend a weekend fee gratis at his place at Long Beach on very quiet, near-deserted Oak Island.

To my father and mother, it was love at first inhalation of the pure salt air of the lower Cape Fear. We knew most, if not all, of the North Carolina coastal communities and a few in Florida as well. But Long Beach's siren song of sweet solitude called us home. Within weeks, Mum and Pop had bought the first two of three eventual adjacent lots on 67th Street NE's second block and soon after that a previously-owned home, the first of of three, was acquired and trucked down to our lots. Then the process of making our lots livable began, a critical path of things to do which can never be appreciated by the unitiated, a process of hiring Roscoe to put in a septic tank and shallow well and do the big timber clearing, leaving us to do the hard grunt work of pulling miles of yaupon and other roots from the soily loam by hand, tilling the soil with fine-tooth rakes, then pulling another few miles of antipastic roots ad infinitum, a task which would continue on for years before we ended up with something at least passable for a yard.

In the spring of that next year one weekend my father, always a hunter of rabbits and small game never a fisherman before our communal baptism as Oak Islanders, decided to take an old cane pole or two and some shrimp down to the cut at the end of 67th Street half a block away in the salt marsh between the island and the Inland Waterway and try his luck at what he considered a poorer version of freshwater pond fishing. Whether by dumb luck or calculated reasoning or both, he got into a school of spots passing through and within a couple of hours a smaller school of croakers and that afternoon rounded things out with some sheepshead, a couple of small Spanish mackerel, and some inedibles like sea robins and toadfish. That firmly set the hook and when we went back the next day and picked up another ten or fifteen mixed spots and croakers, those fish landed him for good. In time, a small stinkpot boat would be bought, then another larger one, then Linda Sue II , a 21-foot T-Craft with a 188-horse I/O. She is still remembered as such a fine lady who always had the manners never to leave my father anywhere but the dock. That dock on which he and Bob Carr and other fishing buddies would create something of a near-legendary King Mackerel Valhalla. Memories of 30-40-or more kings being landed in a day off Frying Pan shoals being impressed upon no one but themselves, save the photos in one Sunday's sports section.

With Pop generally off fishing when they were biting, Mum and I became practiced beachcombers. These were the years when the tidelines on Oak Island weren't so heavily scrounged, when we could pick up a five-gallon-bucket full of fresh non-worn conch shells in one afternoon at the beach-end of 67th Street, a huge colony of living conches (whelks) being evident somewhere nearby just off-shore. These were the years when on several occasions we saw the feet-and-tail tracks of, but never in-the-flesh, the resident alligator who used to live in the slough behind the dunes which 67th Street passes over. This was a time when the Corp wasn't so fanatical about dredging Lockwood Folly at The Point at the west end of the island, when once a nor'easter blew in some sand and we walked across Lockwood Folly Inlet at lowtide over to Holden Beach and back, the water getting to our knees but not our shorts wet. This was a time for crabbing, crabbing being more fun than fishing to a pre-teen because catching something was guar-an-teed at the bulkhead across from the docks at Harbor House Marina which was a public marina before it went condo. The crabs escaped the cookpot until "Miss Margaret", the wife of Pop's main fishing buddy, Bob Carr, showed Mum and Pop how to "steam and spice" the crabs in question. Summarily, each weekend ended with a ritual breakfast of creme horne pastries on Sunday morning bought from the bakery next to the Red & White the Saturday afternoon before, a ritual that continues with us to this day. Our twelve-year-old son is now being indoctrinated into the ways of Oak Island like eating once each trip at the Kountry Kitchen.

While Pop was catching more kings than God, before daily limits were mandated, and Mum continued her quest for a root-free yard and necessity made us contract with Skipper to drill us a deep well to get away from stinking shallow-well water so we wouldn't have to bring our fresh Piedmont well water from Raleigh to drink and brush our teeth with, the summers of my youth melded one into the other. We still went to Florida now and then, mostly to visit friends and relatives, but we didn't hack around any other North Carolina beaches; Long Beach had become a comfortable second home. My burgeoning young male adolescent sexuality was fueled by the four-tier selection of soft-core pornography down at the Red & White, a much better collection of purchasable two-dimensional bare breasts than anything Raleigh had to offer that year in the time stream. And "The Arcade" at Yaupon was a magnet for all young people who stumbled across it, as it still is today for those down for the weekend, as well as those who consider themselves above tourist-level, if below permanent resident-status; myself among them. The Arcade's famous funhouse mirrors reflected the awkwardness of confused teen-aged self-image all of us still too young to be drafted to 'Nam felt. The noise and confusion of clanging pinball machine and thuds from dime-a-game skeeball and eventually ching-chinging of now-gone pachinko machines creating an appropo cacophony of halting reflections. Company and coupled solitude was found with members of the opposite sex also trying out their sealegs of adulthood via long walks up and down Yaupon Pier and longer walks with one another under turtle-moon June nights along the hightide line detouring only to find new wisdom behind the dunes near 79th Street.

Each summer added, and still adds, one sheet of music to my continuing songbook of Long Beach memories. While the melody remains the same, the lyrics change. Such lyrics as being short-panted when a hurricane, I can't honestly remember which one it was around '70 or '71, blew rolling gales in as it paralleled the Island some 40-50 miles offshore, dumping enough water down and creating enough tidal surge to cause water to lap at but never completely over, the floorboards of our family station wagon as we struggled to make it to the bridge before the 'cane washed that out too. Of the old swinging center-pivoting drawbridge and of the barge which hit it glancingly hard enough so that a modern World War Two vintage pontoon bridge had to be installed as the only gateway to the Island. The pontoon bridge which we invariably caught at low tide, scrapped the oil pan and rear bumper as we navigated down and up the "valley" of the bridge. Irritatingly, maddeningly, frustrating enough to second-homer's besides us so that a few of the residents of Oak Island, some of whom had some minor political pull in Raleigh, got DOT to put in the highrise bridge. The lyrical majesty of watching a school of porpoises feeding on mullet minnows just a hundred yards or so beyond the breakers, of swimming out to them as if drawn by a higher power, and for a few magical moments of swimming with them, their playful chatter welcoming me, their blunt noses gently nudging me out of their way as they satiated their appetites for truly fresh seafood. And of the pax requiem of watching a mother sea turtle driven by the same Energy of Creation that drives us all, do her duty to God and her species by depositing her eggs in a freshly-dug nest abutting a front-row dune down near 60th Street.

As the boom of the late 70's and 80's gang-bustered real estate deals all over, we were sure that Long Beach wouldn't be spared the fate of creeping Myrtle-Beach-ism, of development for development's sake, of units stacked like crackerboxes to create condos. But we feel, for the most part, that Oak Island has been spared the worst of it; don't tell anyone, don't let our "secret" out! Sure, there are more people living year 'round on the Island now, and there are probably three or four times more second homes than when we first settled way back when there was basically just us, Kyle, Mrs. Beddie Spell's cottage next to Kyle's, the nice house at the corner of Yacht Drive, and maybe one or two others. That was pretty much it for our street, not like today with half to two-thirds of the lots having a residence on them. All that said, except for peak tourist times like Friday night of Labor Day weekend, Oak Island seems to be as quiet, as peaceful, definitely as much of a family-oriented beach as it's ever been to us. We once saw an old road map from who-knows-what-era, which showed only a tiny blip of land meant to represent Oak Island, and the only town titled on the Island was "Tranquil Harbour", which us what we understand Long Beach used to be called in past days. To us, that is what Oak Island still is, it is our tranquil harbor away from the hustle and bustle if the bug-tussle hamlet of Raleigh, our tranquil harbor protecting us temporarily but necessarily from life's storms and tempest squalls, offering refuge and restoration and healing when we need it most.

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