Several months after our family outing to Florida, I took my own good advice. My buddy Jim and I sailed out to an uninhabited barrier island off the coast of North Carolina and spent four days camping in the dunes, fishing , lolling, philosophizing and generally working hard to accomplish absolutely nothing. We got greasy and tired and sunburned and windburned. We survived a series of sea squalls that collapsed my tent in the night, caught ghost crabs and bluefish and sharks, bodysurfed in the moonlight, figured out the rhythm of the wind and the tides and sunrise and moonrise, and several times got to laughing so hard we may have come perilously close to death itself.
This trip was the fourth in a dramatic series starring Jim and me. It’s sort of a pact we’ve made, involving the two of us and water. Every summer for the past four years, we’ve gone to find some interesting body of water and get seriously involved in it for a couple of days. One summer we canoed a stretch of flat water on the weird, mystical, north-flowing New River in southern Virginia. Another time we did the northern reaches of the Susquehanna in upstate New York. And yet another time we camped and canoed among the forested river islands of the James in central Virginia, taking my boy along to celebrate his seventh birthday.
