The Ocean is Calling

We have been looking forward to our annual Sabbatical more keenly than usual.   The weather has been cold for December, and the older I get the more I feel it.  I remember running in the winter when the temperatures were in the teens, and when there was snow on the ground.  Readers of this blog may look back only a few years and see photos of Highlands Roadrunner with ice in his beard and snow on his cap.  But these days a mere 30 degrees seems cruel.  I have run more than once this month in temperatures below freezing, hoping to become acclimated to the cold, but my body no longer seems to adapt to winter running as it did when I was younger.  We are looking forward to 40-degree runs in Atlantic Beach instead of 30-degree runs in Highlands.

It has been a stressful year in many ways, but we have wrapped things up well, I think.  I totaled up the mileage in my running log for the year, something I have been doing since 1995 when I first began keeping records, and the cumulative total including this year’s (least mileage of any year - 435) is 32,885.  That is only a fraction of the miles which an elite runner would complete in a career, but I am proud of it nevertheless.  

We decorated the house for the holidays, had new friends over for dinner, and sought out old friends for lunch, and prepared Christmas Dinner for our daughter and son-in-law and Martha’s 93-year-old aunt.  And then we undecorated the house for the holidays and packed up and left 2023 and Highlands behind for a couple of months.  The Ocean is Calling, I wrote on the blackboard a day after Christmas.

It is more a spiritual call than an auditory one and it requires careful listening:

      On quiet nights I can hear that ocean
if I listen carefully, here below Satulah Mountain,
beneath the cricketwhisper and the quavering calls
of the screech owl and the faroff wail of a hound,
that ancient blind soothing saltwater breathing,
the pulled tides and the moonphase nightwaters
sighing softly from an impossible distance,
the gentle surfcrash, the end of all seeking,

We took our time getting to Atlantic Beach this year, as we did last year, driving first on Saturday morning to the Historic Brookstown Inn in Old Salem, an old converted cotton mill where we have stayed many times in the past.  

A familiar face greeted us at the Inn – Sally, the hotel cat, who showed up ten years ago, a stowaway (perhaps a reluctant one) in the back of a moving van.  Her owners in Seattle were glad to learn that she had a new home, and Sally seems to love it here, killing the occasional mouse while not at all interested in the bacon and sausage on the breakfast bar every morning.

We had time before checking in to explore nearby Old Salem, but most of the shops were closed because of the holiday.  Only Winkler Bakery was open with its historic beehive oven, and visitors were queued up to buy their famed Moravian Sugar Cake.  We declined the urge to indulge.

We returned to Old Salem on Sunday morning to worship at the beautiful Home Moravian Church, founded in 1771.

It was an appropriate service for the last day of 2023, a liturgy for a New Year, with a timeless scripture reading from Psalm 148, one of my favorites.

Praise the Lord from the earth,
you sea monsters and all deeps,
Fire and hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind fulfilling the Lord’s command.

One of the members of the church had died in the past week, so the service included two hymns from Funeral Chorales of the Moravian Church.  It was especially moving to us because we learned that one of our friends from Highlands had suddenly died the previous day.  Life is short.  Or as one of the Chorales put it,

A pilgrim, us preceding,
in grace has been called home,
the final summons heeding
which soon to all must come.

We had time to visit the church’s nearby God’s Acre, where generations of Moravians are buried in identical graves, reflecting their belief in equality, even in death; no one person stands out among the recumbent stones.

It was only an hour’s drive to our next stopover, Shelton Vineyards in Dobson, and on the way we stopped to stretch our legs and refresh ourselves with a cold beer at the Angry Troll Brewery in historic downtown Elkin, “The best thing to happen to Elkin since the blanket.”  The brewery is located in an old blanket manufacturing building.  We tried an interesting IPA called 42 Is the Answer to Everything, perhaps the best IPA I have ever had, in fact.  I wondered about the name, and later found that it derived from Douglas Adams' science fiction book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and represents all meaning (“the meaning of life, the universe, and everything”) as determined by the fictional supercomputer Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years.  Unfortunately, nobody could remember the question, so the joke goes. 

Shelton Vineyards was an appropriate place to wrap up 2023.  We enjoyed a wine tasting and then a New Year’s Eve dinner at their restaurant, The Farmhouse, with excellent wines perfectly paired with each course.  It was a late night for us early-to-bed people, and we actually left before the final course of Yadkin Valley Port and a rich chocolate dessert.  There is only so much celebrating that we can withstand, even on this final day of the year known for excesses of celebrating.  And as in the past, no, we did not stay up to “see the New Year in” as some of our dinner companions were planning to do.