Vacation of the Century

All of my lady friends take vacations. They’ve all been to Europe more than twice. They’ve been on multiple cruises. Some of them take several vacations each year. They grew up in families that took yearly vacations, usually a week at the beach. I keep wondering what a vacation is.

When I was growing up, a vacation was a series of short sight-seeing stops on the way from Point A to Point B as we were moving either North/South along the east coast, or East/West (going and coming) from Rhode Island to southern California. Those four years in California did include a yearly day trip to either Disneyland or Knotts Berry Farm. As far as the beach goes, Dad once took us to the Laguna Beach Art Show, where we could SEE the ocean through the car windows. Even the two times we were stationed in Newport Rhode Island, the only time I recall Dad taking us to the beach was to see the beached whale at Easton’s Beach. Someone had stuck a cigar in the blow hole. Poor creature!

Any beach time I had in California would be a day trip with friends or an outing with YMCA summer camp. However, I spent lots of time at the beach our second time in Newport. By then, I was a teenager and Mother could drop me off in the morning and let me make my way home (5 miles) in time for dinner. I did a lot of walking, begging rides from friends, even some thumbing (accepting rides only from little old ladies).

I have attempted vacations. In fact, I can think of three that I really enjoyed. They included two group trips, one to France and one to Ireland, and my second-time-around honeymoon to Ireland, which we took with another couple who did all the planning for us. (During my first-time-around honeymoon I kept thinking it could have been fun if we’d brought some friends with us, but that’s another story, altogether).

The other (very few) vacations I can recall would better be described as “oblivations.” They were enforced in-law family reunions that included assigned meal prep duties for about thirty-seven people (meals which I personally would have skipped), and ridiculous early-risings and early bedtimes. These were endurance tests without the benefits of game playing or storytelling or having adventures.

But I digress. Two very important vacations were actually rewards for work from my employers. One was a fully paid trip to Disney World through VACCE (Virginia Association of Chamber Executives), which I had written the winning essay to receive. Unfortunately, it coincided with the week Mother died and I never got to go.

The other occurred years earlier, when I’d won an award for the advertising firm where I was the Art Director. I’d worked through weekends, including some all-nighters. The boss had a connection to someone who owned a condo on Emerald Isle, North Carolina. He’d arranged for me to take a long weekend (of my choice) there during the off-season. If I’d tried to take the children, I’d have to pull them out of school and it wouldn’t have felt much like a reward. I kept putting it off, hoping to coordinate with a friend. They pushed me to take it in March before the rates went up, and I ended up going alone.

Still, I was excited to go, to be by the ocean. But not only that, you see I’d have to drive through Morehead City to get there. Mother had always called me a “Tar Heel” because I was born in Morehead City, actually the Naval hospital at Cherry Point. I had no memory of it, though, because we’d moved to Miami Florida six weeks later, another place I have no memory of. But, it was still a spiritual feeling to return to the place of my origins for the first time after forty-one years.

Excited to squeeze every moment out of this opportunity, at pre-dawn on Thursday, March 11, 1993, I headed out on the five-and-a-half-hour drive from Lynchburg, VA to Emerald Isle, NC.

Just to set the stage, I was barely making ends meet in this post-divorce period and couldn’t afford a TV or cable. No one had Internet yet, and radio broadcasts spent about 90 seconds every half hour giving the local weather brief. I had no idea that I was headed directly into what they later named “The Storm of the Century.”

Emerald Isle is about 12 miles long and about one to three residential blocks wide at various points. It runs roughly east/west off the coast of North Carolina, separated from the mainland by Bogue Sound. At each end of the island is a connecting bridge.

As I drove down Salter Path Road, the island’s main road, I marveled at the consistent shape of the trees, all permanently bent by what must have been a constant ocean breeze. Even in the car, I could feel a gentle buffeting of the wind between the high-rises that dominated the ocean view.

I arrived at this large condo resort about mid-way down the island. My two-bedroom unit was in one of several three- or four-story buildings and I was on the top floor. Access to all upper units was via an exterior elevator or exterior stairways. The complex was built to maximize the ocean view for all units. They were built around a series of open-ended courtyards, each in a U-shape wider toward the ocean, narrowing toward the outfacing units. A pool was centered in each courtyard. On one side my windows faced across the courtyard, but because of the angle, there was still a clear view of the beach. There was a narrow stretch of sparsely vegetated dunes with access paths separating the courtyard from the ocean. My second bedroom overlooked a parking area, requiring serious neck-craning to see the ocean.

That first afternoon, I drove to Morehead City’s waterfront, looking for a seafood lunch. Every place I saw specialized in “Calabash Cooking,” which I’d never heard of. I discovered that whatever the food was, it was all battered and deep-fried in the same oil, so fish and vegetables all tasted pretty much the same. It seemed the wind was picking up, blowing onshore from the darkening ocean.

I thought, “Well, who doesn’t like a nice oceanfront storm?” I had lived four years, only yards from the rocky shore, almost at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, and was excited to relive something like the storms of my youth. After wandering about for a couple of hours I headed back to the condo to unpack and settle in.

I turned on the TV and discovered that indeed a storm was coming. I had a flashlight and there were candles in the condo. I gathered them and a book, just in case I was stuck inside for the next day without power. That first night I enjoyed the rattling windows in the larger bedroom. By morning it was a full-on blow with increasing rain. instead of going out for breakfast, I hit the vending machines on site and loaded up for the day. At some point I looked across the courtyard to the flat rooves of the facing buildings, noticing they were paved with gravel, and it appeared to be shifting. The HVAC units bolted to the rooves were holding their own against the wind. I turned on the TV for a weather update, but heard little before the power went out.

My anxiety level began to rise as I started hearing pinging noises against the bedroom window. Gravel was being blown from the adjacent roof against the outer storm glass. I hoped the wind would stop before the glass cracked. It wasn’t long before the outer glass did crack and I was hoping it would not fall to pieces. I noticed the courtyard below was littered with gravel and then, thought of my car.

I went out on the landing realizing I couldn’t take the elevator in a power outage, so I looked down the steps. The car next to mine had a shattered windshield. Thankfully, mine was still intact, so I rushed down the stairs to move my car to the leeward side of the building, turning the rear toward the wind so that if anything shattered it would not be the front windshield.

On the day before, the parking lot had hosted several cars. Now, there might have been three or four. I walked over to the guard station at the gate and found it dark and locked. I copied down an emergency phone number which was posted in the window, fought the wind, and returned to my condo. The temperature was dropping so I crawled into bed under the covers just as the outer panes of glass fell away, leaving only a single pane between me and the storm. Gravel was still flying off the roof, pinging the remaining pane.

The ceiling above me was now visibly bouncing as if elephants and hippos were using it for a trampoline. Just then, the window cracked, and before it blew in, I put all of my belongings back into my suitcase and moved myself into the smaller bedroom on the leeward side of the unit and closed the door. I might be safe from flying glass and rain, but the ceiling was still booming and bouncing. My guess is the HVAC units were rolling around up there, or maybe still bolted, but bouncing in place. How long before they came crashing through?

I called the emergency number and got the security guard, who had moved inside to the manager’s office. He told me both bridges had been closed and there was no getting off of the island. I told him of the condition of my condo and he arranged to get me a key to another first floor, leeward condo. It was a struggle, but I managed to get my belongings down the three or four flights of stairs, load them into my car, move it across to the next parking lot, and get to relative safety. I stayed the night there, in the dark, wrapped in blankets while the world outside howled at a deafening volume.

It was early morning when I woke and found the storm had passed. Mine was the only car without shattered glass, probably because I was the only one there to strategically move it to the best shelter I could find. Before I left, I returned to my top floor condo and found the ceiling had fallen and just about everything inside was destroyed. I was glad to have made my exit when I did.

I don’t recall why, but when leaving, I drove the length of the island to cross the opposite bridge. Probably it was the only one with access cleared at that point. All I could see was devastation, massive puddles, trees down, service station canopies flung across the road, rooves and windows gone. The crews were out working with their chainsaws, and travel was slow. I guess just about everyone else on the island had gotten the warning to leave ahead of the storm because there wasn’t much of a mass exodus. Even after I’d left the island, travel was slower than usual because the damage persisted inland. I had no idea how large or powerful this storm had been. It had been an adventure, for sure, though not the one I had anticipated.

Signs of the storm continued as I headed north toward central Virginia. I was surprised to see a dusting of snow when I reached Yancy, NC, about ten miles south of the state line. But I was amazed to find, practically ON the state line that Virginia was completely blanketed with snow! What had been a hurricane in North Carolina was a massive blizzard in Virginia! And it got deeper and deeper the farther north I headed. When I finally arrived on my street in Lynchburg, I had a hard time parking because there was more than two feet of snow covering everything! I can’t remember if the power was on in my apartment. It didn’t matter. I’d made it home safely.

I called my boss’s house and spoke to his wife. She said they’d been worried sick about me and were glad I’d made it home. I told her how surprised I was to find snow and asked how they’d fared.

She said she could tell me in three words, “Tree in kitchen.”

So much for grand awards and vacations.