Chapter 1
I don't normally read Cosmopolitan. Honestly. I don't.
A thirty-year-old man, traveling alone, reading Cosmo – with this month's wiry, bronzed entertainment nymph perfectly posed amid the bold-typed headlines, staring out at whoever is sitting across from the reader – well, it's one way to draw raised eyebrows. And I'm not big on attention. The guy running the airport magazine kiosk from his wobbly-stool perch shot me a quizzical look followed by a presumptuous smirk. Part of me wanted to throw a copy of GQ or Men's Health on the counter to reaffirm my masculinity. My more cynical side was tempted to buy a women's hairstyle magazine, and maybe one of those glossy bridal catalogs-disguised-as-magazines. “Which name do you like better,” I would have said. “Susan or Miranda? All my friends tell me I look more like a Susan.”
It would give the guy something to talk about later; a better tale to tell. Maybe there is a magazine-kiosk-dude convention somewhere, and this guy could win some sort of prize. In the end, I ignored his stare, bought a pack of gum with the Cosmopolitan, and went to wait for my flight.
Generally, I make it a policy to stay away from magazines with airbrushed, tanned and toned perfection gracing the cover, whether written for men or for women. Real beauty is never flawless and pretending it is seems counter productive; a standard set too high. Beauty has its place. I'd be a hypocrite to say it has no role. But elevating random genetics and good luck to the level of a virtue that eclipses all other virtues is hazardous. As a songwriter friend once wrote, “God knows the world is cruel place when beauty don't grace your head.”
After taking the “Is He Marriage Material?” quiz on page seventy-seven (and validating the opinion of my last girlfriend: no, I’m not) I was reminded why I didn’t consider such a magazine worthy of the paper it was printed on. It was a news story the night before had peaked my interest in this issue of Cosmo, though.
Packing my bags with the 11 o’clock news as a sort-of-soundtrack, I saw a story that hit close to home: an interview with an actress, who I had gone to high school with, detailing how she had decided to move back to the Midwest to give her son a slower lifestyle than they were living while splitting time between Los Angeles and New York. The key to a slower, happier life, she said, was to find somewhere in fly-over-country to live and raise her child. She told the interviewer how she was looking forward to her son’s first day of school in his new surroundings, free, she hoped, from the drugs and violence and pressure found “even in the private schools in California.” During the interview, she mentioned an article in the issue of Cosmo I held in my hand. An article that ultimately provided little in the way of pertinent information, while being chocked full of useless tid-bits about some hunky star or another the actress had worked with. (Liam Niesson, apparently, preferred his espresso prepared in a stove-top, Italian-style maker, as opposed to more modern methods.)
The story hit close to home for three reasons: First, the actress being interviewed was Lila Broussard, a high-school classmate of mine. Second, that “slower, happier” mid-west town she talked of moving back to was my home town of Hamilton, Ohio. Finally, Lila’s son, Adrian, would be a student in the school where I taught; a student in my classroom.
The trip I was taking to South Carolina was supposed to be a “work free” trip. I had promised myself there would be no thoughts of the upcoming school year, no thoughts of the students and their parents, and no concern over lesson plans or room decoration. But the mention of the magazine article had intrigued me enough to break that promise to myself. A little work wouldn’t hurt, I figured. A “work free” trip would prove to be little more than an idle hope.
***
The twin-engine prop plane made a smooth landing after a quiet flight; the Sunday morning, South Carolina air was void of turbulence. The locals call the flight from Charleston the PJE – Puddle Jumper Express – and it was the last leg of my day’s journey from Cincinnati to Charleston, then on to the small, municipal airport at North Myrtle Beach.
After the plane rolled to a stop, I stood and stretched along with the four other passengers, ducking to exit the doorway. The bright, early-August sun darkened my self-tinting glasses, and the heat and humidity of a Carolina coastal summer morning welcomed me. Descending the stairs to the oven hot concrete, I looked toward the tall glass walls of the terminal area. The glass was a mirror of the world behind me, obscuring the terminal area excepting the occasional ghost-like figure moving behind the reflected scene. I caught my reflection and wondered at the pooch of “desk work fat” that rested above my belt. It was the first summer that I hadn't worked off the extra pounds. I made a mental not to address it later.
A gust of cool, dry air blasted past me as I stepped through the sliding doors and inside the airport building. My glasses adjusted to the darker, cooler atmosphere. A thin film of condensation clouded my vision. I removed my glasses and wiped them clean.
“What’s with the glasses, Grant?” said a familiar voice, the blurry form of its owner returning to sharp focus when my glasses were back in place. “I thought you gave those things up years ago.”
Cory Evans was sitting perched atop a stool at the coffee counter not far from the door. Typical of most Sunday mornings, Cory’s beard was gray, patchy stubble, and his hair an unkempt shock of white straw. Cory had always believed that a day of rest was designed to allow man to rest and not “an excuse to get all dressed up and in a hurry to impress those sitting in the next pew with your fancy clothes and shoes.”
“I’ve been having trouble with the contacts,” I said, walking to join Cory at the counter. “I’ve had to wear the glasses again for a couple months now.”
“You hated those things, working at the golf course and having them fall off your face ‘cause of the sweat. If I remember right, you tossed a pair of glasses into the big pond, right out in the middle by the fountain aerator. I think you might say you were a little frustrated.”
We both cherished that summer—now a dozen years in the past. For me, it was an adventure. For Cory, it was a summer of healing.
After graduating from high school in Ohio—the summer before I would journey off to Indiana for college—I decided to fulfill a boy-hood dream: to live on the beach. With no plan, and no money, I set off for the coast, and landed in North Myrtle. Initially, I had been clinging to the delusion that I could find a cheap place to live and work a few side jobs just to make ends meet. The rest of my time would be spent enjoying the sun, the sand, the ocean.
The reality turned out to be that there are no cheap places to live on the beach, and the cost of living in a beach community surprised me. Upon arrival, I learned it would be impossible to do much living if I didn’t get a good job, and work as often as possible. So, with the exceptions of Friday afternoons and Sundays, I worked as often and as long as the management of the Surf Golf and Beach Club would allow.
I did the kinds of work an inexperienced young man would be allowed to do on a lush, private golf course. Mostly, I was assigned to the digging or laying sod in “non-course” areas and weeding the flowerbeds around the clubhouse. I was not allowed near a green or tee-box without thorough supervision.
Working long days through the hottest summer on record left me exhausted at the end of every day, having turned what seemed like gallons of water into sweat that clung to my body in the profuse humidity. I would walk the mile to the one-room apartment I shared with a college student who also worked at the golf course and collapse face-first on the uncomfortable, still-damp bed beneath the window air conditioner that drowned out the ocean just a block away. Some days, I ended up sleeping from the time I got home until the alarm went off at 5:15 the next morning. But most nights, I was able to drag myself to the shower, clean up enough to not scare off tourists, and make it down to the water’s edge to enjoy the last hour of daylight on the nearly deserted beach.
It was the greatest summer of my life.
That summer, I met Cory, who became my excuse to return to North Myrtle annually. Cory was a retired North Myrtle cop who worked at the Golf Club a few hours a day to kill time and make some extra money. We became friends almost instantly.
Cory was right about my unusual disposal of a pair of glasses, though he was in error thinking it had been the pond at the 18th hole where I had launched the spectacles to a murky grave. Trying to mow a steep embankment in the hot afternoon sun, struggling to keep my footing while being hassled by the glasses constantly slipping down my nose and startled by a snake slithering right between my feet, I ripped the glasses from my face and with every ounce of strength I could muster, tossed them into a collection pond filled with water lilies and snapping turtles.
The glasses disappeared into the water, reminding me of the first day I had been assigned to mow that bank. I watched a mother duck leading her young ducklings in a slow swim across the water, only to see one of the little ones suddenly disappear, just as my glasses did. The duckling had been snatched from below by one of the basketball-sized snappers in the pond. It was a phenomenon that would be repeated until the supply of ducklings had been exhausted, and the mother duck was left to make the slow paddle across the pond alone.
Cory woke us from our memories. “They finally caught the big momma,” he said. A waitress approached and I pointed to Cory’s coffee cup in reply. She poured a cup for me, and moved on down the line.
“Was Big Mamma the turtle Sid claimed was the size of a first grader?” I asked. The powdered creamer barely changed the color of the coffee, and I wasn’t anticipating the flavor would be any better than the aesthetic appearance.
“Sid’s crazy in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t far off in describing that monster.” Cory sipped from his cup. “They didn’t exactly catch her. A golfer, searching for a ball he had miss-hit, found her belly up on the edge of the pond couple weeks ago. Newspaper came out, along with some bio-EPA types. Said it was the chemicals we use on the course that killed her.”
“And it was as big as Sid claimed?”
Cory snorted in reply. “Almost. Bigger than I imagined. Thing must have been older than me. And our chemicals killed it? Hogwash. Monster died ‘cause it was old.”
I tried the coffee, which was even worse to drink than to look at.
“How have you been?” I asked, wondering if I would get a straight answer, or if I would have to dig for information about Cory’s health.
“Feeling better,” he replied. “Doc says I’m supposed to give up the cigarettes and the coffee, though I’ve not figured which I’d rather do without, so I’m still enjoying both.”
Cigarettes and coffee. Cory never went more than an hour without one or the other, and usually both. “Are you at least trying to cut back?”
“Trying, but it’s hard. I’ve tried to drink decaf, but it’s no good. Tasteless brown water. Kinda pointless, to me anyway. And those nicotine patches didn’t do much for me besides making my skin break out.”
We sat in silence; awkward because there was rarely silence between Cory and I. But I knew his health condition was worse than he would admit. Heart problems and a battle with pneumonia had kept him sidelined for most of the spring and part of the summer. Only in the preceding few weeks had he been able to return to the golf course.
Well, hell, you didn’t come here to see the inside of this airport or to talk about my addictions. What say we go hit the lunch buffet at the Captain’s Plank?”
“All the seafood you can eat and sweet iced tea to wash it down? Sounds like a plan.”
I dropped a few dollars on the counter, having barely touched the coffee, and followed Cory out to begin my vacation.
***
The Grand Strand area isn’t somewhere you go to get away from crowds, but if you know where to go, you can avoid them. Walking north along the beach, beyond North Myrtle and away from the large beach-front hotels, there is an area much less densely populated, where the ultra-wide beach gives way to sand dunes and tall beach grasses. By positioning a blanket just right among the mini-dunes, you can relax peacefully, relatively isolated from others, except the occa