Bath House Intervals

In contrast to Sunday’s 62-degree shorts-and-T-shirt run, Monday morning dawned windy and cloudy and twenty degrees colder.  But these conditions seemed better than those forecast for Tuesday, so I decided to complete a three-mile run, to the “Bath House” and then back on the beach.  What a glorious place to run, this wide flat beach!  It was exactly low tide, and the north wind was blowing offshore, softening the crash of surf, the great wide flashing ocean on my left elbow just a few feet away.  There was almost nobody else out there, but I did pass one well-bundled woman gathering shells, and I noticed as I approached that she was wearing a face-mask!  Really?  I steered a wide berth around this overly-cautious woman.

It’s not all about the running, I told Martha recently, but it’s a big part of the reason we come out here in January, to be able not only to maintain our fitness as runners but also to improve it by adding distance and speed that would be difficult to accomplish in Highlands.  We have been able to run three or even four days a week, and on the alternate days I have developed a challenging weight program using only two 25-pounds dumbbells.  Martha completes an equally challenging fitness routine in front of the DVD player that she has been doing for several years now, skipping it only on long-run days.

Today I repeated Monday’s run, except that I included two “Bath House Intervals,” my first intervals in several months.  Interval training is a classic way to increase speed when preparing for a race, and this is an especially good place to run them, a long flat paved stretch in the big parking lot there where there is little traffic instead of out on the bicycle path.  I run them from the “Yield” sign at one end to the trash can at the other, somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of a mile.  (Since I run them in the same location every year, the exact distance is not important.)  I clocked a 1:09 on the first one and a 1:08 on the second, and was pretty pleased with myself, remembering that last year I got closer and closer to 1:00, and by the end of our stay here had dropped a second or two below that.  It is satisfying to feel that fatigue in the legs, and I definitely felt it when returning on the beach.  

I always wear my Garmin Forerunner watch when running, which has caused me to be chided by some of my non-watch-wearing running friends.  Rather than constraining me, it gives me a feeling of freedom as I simply hit Start and then let it tell me how far I have run.  Like many runners, I am a little obsessed with statistics, and I have recorded my mileage for every run, every week, and every year since 1995.  My cumulative total on New Year’s Day was 31,973 miles, farther than the circumference of the earth!  Like the fatigue in the legs after a hard workout that number is satisfying to think about. 

My other watch, the one I wear daily, is a vintage Timex Ironman Triathlon, which preceded the Garmin.  It did not tell me how far I ran, but it’s easy-to-use stopwatch function told me how fast I ran.  These days I still use it when I am boiling pasta noodles or baking something in the oven, even though our oven at home and here both have built-in timers.  It also tells me what time of day it is, an increasingly irrelevant thing to know as we settle into the easy routine of our Sabbatical.  As if in confirmation of that irrelevance I put it on today and found that its face was blank, its battery depleted.

My Garmin stays plugged in 24/7 waiting for the next run, and it seems almost like an insult to use it for the commonplace function of telling me what time of day it is.  So I have been going about watch-less when I am not running, glancing from time to time at my naked wrist, which tells me it is a hair past a freckle.  And, oh yes, the clouds in the western sky are beginning to turn orange and red and purple, and so I know exactly what time it is again, as the sun sets on another good day.

Glad to Be Here

I was glad that we had decided to postpone our long run until today, because it was 53 degrees when I awoke and 62 degrees when we started running.  Conditions were just perfect for shorts and a T-shirt.

We are in a perfect location for running, east of the Atlantic Beach causeway and about two-and-a-half miles from Fort Macon, the second most visited State Park in the country and one with which we are very familiar.  Hiking trails connect the so-called Bath House, about a mile from here, to the main Fort, and when I want a short run or when I’m doing interval training, it makes a good three- or four-mile run to go only that far, perhaps running back on the beach if the tide is out.  There are restrooms there and also at the Fort, and today I ran straight out to the Fort, circling the parking lot for just under three miles, making a nice six-mile run when I returned.

Once you pass the sign, there are bicycle paths on both sides of the road, which makes for good running.  We know where all the landmarks are, too.  Here is the sign marking the place where Union Artillery shelled the Fort in 1862, forcing the few Confederate soldiers defending the Fort to surrender.  It marks the half-way point.

Just before you reach the Fort, there is a Coast Guard station on the sound side, and there are often big cutters anchored there.  We have both noticed when running past here before the aroma of fresh donuts, but I detected nothing this morning.  I took this photo hastily from the car window later; I thought if I were observed, someone might try to seize my phone.

Just a few yards past that there is a sign marking the location of the ruins of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the ship of the pirate Blackbeard which was abandoned about a mile-and-a-half offshore in 1718.  The shipwreck was discovered in 1996, and some of the relics are on display at the N. C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

This entire coastline has a fascinating history, and there are often programs at the Fort and at area museums that we have attended over the years.  I will describe the Fort itself on another day; today I was focused solely on my six-mile run, and this fence marks the final bend before reaching my destination, a row of cannons mounted on the hill above.

I noticed as I approached the fort that an SUV was driving by with a Christmas tree tied on its roof, a sight we often see in Highlands before Christmas.  I knew where this man was heading – to deposit his Christmas tree with a couple hundred others by the parking lot at the Fort, where they are collected and distributed out on the dunes to help stabilize the sand.  I stopped in front of the big pile of trees and simply stood there for a minute, inhaling the fragrance.

I discovered when I returned to the condo that Martha had also had a good run, five miles, returning on the beach at just-past low tide.  So we celebrated by eating lunch at a restaurant in Morehead City that had been recommended to us, Off the Hook, and we were able to eat outside (which we prefer these days) in mid-60s sunshine.  Our waitress was Jenna, she was very poised, and she also had a lot of tattoos.  Martha asked her what one of them on her arm said, and she gladly told us – the last part of an Audrey Hepburn quote that I looked up when I returned to the condo:  “For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”

After lunch, we drove out to Harkers Island and visited the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, one of our favorite places.  

Out front was a "crab pot Christmas tree," popular in these parts, because those balsam trees piled up at Fort Macon came from a long way off, but crab pots are local.

It was warm enough that some of these little critters were out, basking in sun, on this perhaps warmest day for a few weeks.

And then we walked on some of the paths in the maritime forest near the museum, around to the Willow Pond and back again.

“You know,” I told Martha while we were walking, “Days like this one are the reason we come out here during the winter,” and she agreed.   

Gale warnings are out again for tonight, and later we would move the deck furniture inside for the night.  But this afternoon, now, walking in dappled sunlight on the shady Willow Pond path, we were glad to be here.

Remembering January 6

We had planned to run this morning – a Saturday long run is a tradition, the day of the week adjusted only by travel or adverse conditions – but yesterday the wind started to pick up and temperatures to plummet.  (Tomorrow, the forecast temperature is 70 degrees.)  We tried to walk on the beach for a little while but it was a cold and biting northwest wind.   

A flock of seagulls had been following a vehicle that was slowly driving on the beach – they permit 4X4s on the beach during the winter, and they often park to watch the sunset – and the driver must have been feeding them.  When we approached, they rose into the air as one and circled around chaotically, thinking we might have come to feed them, too.  The wind was so strong that some of them were suspended motionless in the air like kites.

We were inside and had gotten “comfortable” – Martha’s aunt Anne calls it “getting fluffy” – when I realized it was only five minutes until sunset.  So I rushed out to the dune-top deck and took this photo. And then I rushed back inside, very quickly.

The sunsets are almost as spectacular as the sunrises, and visible from the same vantage point, east-south-east and west-south west, and the light lingers for a long time.  I could still see a faint purple glow out over the ocean 45 minutes later.

I have let January 6 come and go and avoided saying anything about the violent insurrection at the Capitol a year ago.  We were out here, and like Kennedy’s assassination or the twin towers falling, we remember exactly where we were when I began hearing coverage on NPR.  We rushed back to the condo and broke our rule about watching television and watched it all unfold.  What a terrible day for our country and for democracy, but not an unexpected one – it was the final inevitable chapter in surely the worst presidency ever.  And it is still not over as we see most of the Republican Party destroyed, the integrity of statesmen like John McCain replaced by a pure lust for power. It is hard to believe that one year has passed, and although some of the insurgents themselves have been jailed, there has been no accountability at all for those who directed the failed coup that came so close to destroying our country.

Although we are on Sabbatical, and spend a lot of time reading and watching the sunrise and watching gulls float by, we do watch the news.  I am hopeful that the House January 6 Committee will bring it all to light, and I was cheered by Joe Biden’s speech commemorating the day and calling out “the former guy.” 

Adulation of said former guy persists in this part of the country.  There is a small, run-down house on the road to Lowes Food which we noticed last year.  It is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and into the fence the owner has jammed red plastic cups that spell out TRUMP in four-foot high letters.  (Why is there even a fence around this house?  To keep out Lib Dems?)  It is both ridiculous and ominous, as was the former guy.  And even the gale-force winds that regularly visit this coast have not dislodged the little cups from the fence.  

If there ever was a time – and I grew up in the era of the Vietnam War and Watergate – now is the time to speak truth to lies.  As Bob Dylan said so prophetically 50 years ago:

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late.

An Easy Rhythm

It seems as if all I write about in this blog is the sunrise, but watching this ordinary daily occurrence sets the tone for the rest of the day – Emily Dickinson would say, “It’s all a common glory.” 

I noticed that someone had left a pair of shoes – a child’s shoes, by the size of them – next to the walkway, and I wonder how long they will stay there.  Martha takes her shoes off sometimes on warm days and parks them in that same place, blurry dimples of soft sand behind her where she has walked, and then closer to the water the clean outlines of her bare feet, heel and toes.  Her soles are tougher than mine; I always find myself thrown into a limp by crunching on a sharp shell, so I wear my running shoes or my hiking boots.  But I have decided I will let someone else remove these little shoes, perhaps not missed until the owner was halfway to wherever they came from.

We have fallen into an easy rhythm of sunrise and sunset and low tide and high, and it has been warm enough for three days in a row to eat lunch out on the balcony – shrimp burgers two days in a row, and tuna quesadillas today, and cold beer.  Our own little bistro table with the best view.

We do eat well, finding exactly what we need in the three grocery stores out here, especially Lowes Foods, which seems to have the freshest fruits and vegetables.  And in addition to Blue Ocean seafood, there is take-out from Friendly Market, a place on which we have relied for good, healthy food for several years now.

Owners Matt and Mindy Fitzpatrick started the market on a vacant lot on the corner of Bridges Street and Friendly Street (thus its name) and turned it into a 6000 square foot building with healthy food packaged to go, local produce when in season, and a good selection of beer and wine.  They opened a nursery a few years ago, and last year even sold Christmas trees.  Their pasta salad and cheese-and-tomato dip are staples, and this year they have begun to offer “Lighten Up 22” dinners to go.  So Chicken Bruschetta was dinner last night and will be again tonight (their dinners for two are so bountiful they turn into dinners for four).

In three days time, I have gotten caught up with my New Yorkers, and will begin on a book tonight.  Martha is reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I may start Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome.  Martha reads more books than I do during the course of a year, and interesting ones, but I stay occupied with the New Yorker much of the time.  Out here, though, I read more in two months time than in ten months time in Highlands.  Perhaps I need to rearrange my free time in Highlands.

I brought my keyboard with me, too, not as good as a piano, but good enough to allow me to practice my handful of pieces of music and perhaps learn another.  

Good food, good books, good companionship, and a piano – what more could a person want on a Sabbatical?

Wasting Time

I am always surprised at how quickly the weather changes out here, from day to day, from hour to hour.  This morning the temperature was 64 degrees, and the north wind had turned around overnight and was coming from the south.  The sunrise was again partially blocked by clouds but gorgeous just the same.

It was so warm and mild that after breakfast I returned to the dune-top deck and sat watching the clouds on the southern horizon, which were changing from minute to minute.  You can see the weather coming from a long way off out here, especially when it is approaching from over the ocean.  I could see dark vertical bands of rain under a turbulent line of clouds, black drapes dangling down onto the water below, and a bright blue window suddenly opening above, as if a sash had been pushed up.

Out there in the morning sky a long line of birds was flying from east to west in front of the pinks and purples in the sky.

I didn’t need Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds to tell me that these were eastern brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis), looking for breakfast in the ocean below.  They were all flying in the same direction, and I wondered how they returned to the east.  You could see their characteristic bills when some of them turned inland and flew overhead.

How glorious, to sit and listen to the ocean, to watch the clouds coming in, and to watch these pelicans floating by, sometimes soaring on unmoving wings.

I realized after a time that I had spent an hour out on the dune-top deck, simply watching and listening.  What a glorious waste of time.  Beach time.  It reminded me of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, except that I was here surrounded by sand dunes instead of grassy fields.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Be Young, Be Foolish

It was still windy when I awoke on Tuesday morning, our first full day here in Atlantic Beach, 15 minutes before sunrise.  We don’t set alarms out here (unless there is a race the next morning) or spend much time looking at clocks – “Living on Beach Time,” as T-shirts and cocktail napkins like to advertise in local shops.  No matter how thick the shades are, first light seems to creep past them, and if you sleep until sunrise it is banging loudly at the windows.

I went out the walkway in 20 mph wind, temperature in the upper 30s, for my first morning Tai Chi on the dune-top deck.  The walkway to the deck is much longer than you would expect before it leads ultimately to the sandy path between the dunes and the wide, wide beach, wider here than in any other oceanfront place we have stayed.  We have measured the distance and it must be a quarter mile from the building to the ocean.

In Highlands, I practice my morning Tai Chi most mornings on our deck, where conditions are always changing.  A week or two ago, I startled three deer browsing on the still-green grass between the apple trees.  But here before the ocean it is always special, the heavily-vegetated dunes on each side, the sound of the crashing surf ahead of me.  The beach is south-facing, one of the few places where you can watch sunrise and sunset from the same vantage point.  There was a deep purple layer of clouds on the horizon and the sun was somewhere behind that curtain in golden sunrise glory.

Straight ahead to the south, patches of clouds were picking up the rosy glow of sunrise, and all around the horizon, even to the west and north, the sky was tinged with the same color, as if the light was a sound reverberating all around.

My witty friend Morris wrote to me this weekend to tell me about his New Year’s Resolutions as a runner.  “This year seems like a good one so far.  After I run today I will have a string of running every day this year.  By the way, my New Year's resolution is to live forever.  So far I have kept that resolution.”  It occurred to me that I should resolve to watch sunrise over the ocean every morning.  So far I had a string of sunrises every day!

Martha had posted the first entry for “On the Blackboard” of the new year, and I thought it was especially appropriate for our Sabbatical time here.

We had done some provisioning yesterday on the way to the condo, but we needed to do some more today, and our first stop was Blue Ocean Market just over the causeway in Morehead City.  I love seeing the fresh fish lined up neatly on ice and to see on the board what is coming in today.  We will buy our shrimp, scallops, crab cake, and fresh fish here, but today we were looking for shrimp salad and cole slaw (for shrimp burgers).  Chef Jeremiah also posts instructional videos on his website showing how to prepare everything from Caribbean Mahi Mahi to soft shell crabs.

The wind had died down by afternoon and it was low tide, so we took our first walk down to the Oceanana Pier and back, about a mile to the west.  There is always something new to see on the beach – what the tide has washed in overnight, what shore birds are out and about or winging overhead – and we have never taken this walk, in any weather conditions, and not returned feeling renewed and refreshed in body, mind, and spirit.  We noticed immediately that some new benches had been installed just below the dunes, and there was a plaque on the one just outside our condo remembering Matt Cobb, who had died last year.  I noted that he was born the same year as I.

That verse rang a bell – “Be young, be foolish, but be happy!”  I have to believe that you can be young (and foolish, and happy) at the age of 72!  I vaguely remembered the Tams from the Sixties, and a visit to YouTube found a video of them performing their hit song of 1968, performing a dance routine reminiscent of the Temptations and so many other African-American musical groups of the era, and each of them seemed to be wearing . . . a tam?  Matt must have been a fan.

We began to spot some interesting shells!

 

Martha pointed out the shell holding a handful of sudsy water in the palm of its hand.  The sea star was especially nice – not as beautiful as the royal sea star we found last year,  but still relatively uncommon.  The horseshoe crab was covered with tiny barnacles of some kind.  And what was that curvy line of feathers doing stuck in the sand? – perhaps a child had gathered them and made a whimsical creation.

Two young women were doing the same thing as we, and had filled a plastic bucket to overfilling.  And what a treasure they had found, topped with four beautiful royal sea stars!  They said they had stumbled on them by accident, higher up on the beach.  There is a saying that you don’t find sea glass, it finds you, so perhaps the same rule applies to sea stars.

We returned with hearty appetites, and after awhile I plated up our appetizers – that delicious shrimp salad from Blue Ocean, and glasses of cold Sauvignon Blanc.  Martha spread our own humble collection of shells out for display – not bad for our first walk on the beach! – and we settled in to books and magazines and puzzles.

What a precious privilege it is to be alive!

Chinese Lanterns

We left Highlands on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning.  It had been so warm that some of our crocuses were beginning to appear a day after the New Year had begun, and later in the day we saw daffodils blooming in Brevard and Asheville.

It had rained during the night but it stopped for the most part, and it was a good day for travel, overcast skies and little traffic.  We usually break up the nearly-500-mile journey to Atlantic Beach into two days, and this year we decided to stay one night in Cary, NC.  Martha had wanted to see the Chinese Lantern Festival there for several years and somehow it had never worked out, but this year it fitted perfectly in our plans, and she even found a motel only two miles away from Koka Booth Amphitheater.

I liked the idea of lantern festivals, held all over Asia, which Britannica explains may have originated as far back as the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE).  Buddhist monks would light lanterns on the 15^th day of the lunar year in honor of the Buddha, but later the festival extended to honoring all deceased ancestors.  “The Lantern Festival aims to promote reconciliation, peace, and forgiveness.”

The weather forecast had been calling for rain all day, and I kept checking the radar app on my phone, just as I would had we been running a race.  We have run marathons and half marathons in the rain, and would not have been dissuaded from the Festival merely because of the weather.  But I was also concerned about being in a crowded venue with the Omicron Variant on the loose.  We checked in at our motel, then ate an early dinner at the nearby MacGregor Draft House and easily drove the two miles to the Festival under darkening skies but still not a drop of rain.

We were among the first to arrive for the evening, and the venue was not crowded at all.  We immediately found ourselves in a long corridor filled with paper lanterns, overhead and along both sides, and absolutely beautiful!  We wandered the pathways looking at the other displays, some of them animated, all of them works of art.

Many of the displays were animated, and I managed to capture some of them in videos, huge peacocks opening their tails, creatures from under the sea swimming in the warm Cary air, lotus blossoms opening and closing.  It was all very lovely.

 

 

After we had made our way through all of the displays, we gathered with many other festival-goers at the stage to watch a performance by Chinese acrobats and performers.  There were quick-change artists, a young woman spinning hula hoops, a traditional fan display, and finally a woman on a unicycle tossing bowls onto her head.  We were uncomfortable with the crowd in front of the stage, and although our socially-distanced vantage point was a good one, alas, all of my photos of these dazzling performances turned out to be too distant and  blurry to post. 

We made our way back to the motel then in light rain, but it was not until an hour or two later that we heard the storm arrive in full force, rain blowing horizontally against the windows and thunder sounding during the night – in January!  It was an all-too-real reminder that we are living in a time of unprecedented global climate change.  In the morning the rain was still coming down, and we learned that there was flooding throughout the area.  Reporters from the Raleigh television station were on-screen in the motel breakfast room standing in front of overflowing creeks and flooded fields.  And traffic along I-40-East – our route this morning – had slowed to a crawl due to flooded lanes and traffic accidents.  We checked the internet, and saw that Highlands had received snow, treacherous roads, and power outages overnight.  We had escaped just in time!  A photo posted by The Highlander Newspaper showed Fifth Street, the very street where I had run on Saturday morning, temperatures in the upper 50s.  What a drastic change!

There was some precipitation halfway between rain and sleet coming down when we left the motel, and at the bottom of the hill, across from MacGregor’s, a river was nearly out of its banks and the woods were flooded.  We made our way cautiously to I-40 in light rain, noticing several cars stopped on the shoulder of the road.  One of them was facing backwards, as if they had skidded a few times and landed there.  But neither the conditions nor the grounded cars slowed down many vehicles that rocketed past us at 70 or 80 miles per hour, weaving between us slower and more cautious drivers.

At last we exited the interstate and made our way, in lessening rain, through Goldsboro, Kinston, and New Bern toward Morehead City, finally arriving at the oceanfront place in Atlantic Beach where we were staying.  The rain had stopped but the wind was picking up, 25 or 30 mph, but I went out onto the familiar dune-top deck after we had unpacked the car to see the great wide Atlantic Ocean, waves breaking and rising into the air and dissolving in the wind, and a wind so sharp that it cut like a knife.  It was good to be here again, I thought, good to be experiencing the wild ocean and the leaping waves, and to hear the wind whistling through the door before we went to bed and shaking the steel balcony rails all night long.  Good to have arrived safely.