Blowing in the Wind

We blew into Duck late afternoon Sunday. A nearly five hour drive, which isn’t the worst but certainly not the best time we’ve ever made. The real tourist season starts Memorial Day when the kids get out of school and all the parents in New Jersey decide to leave their humdrum lives by piling their SUVs, packing trailers, towing cars, motorcycles and whatever else they think is required for a week at the beach, dogs and grandparents strapped to the roof.

Layla found a tennis ball on the beach and began acting like a puppy, tossing it up in the air then catching it. She was happy to be out of the car and happier still digging deep holes after the sand crabs to plop into after she’s done. With no snow, she makes do with the sand.

Our traditional arrival dinner is held at the Roadside Bar & Grille, mainly for the Pom Julios (Dom Julio + pomegranate juice and lime) and tomato pies. Tomatoes not in season this early, they make do with cherry tomatoes slathered with cheese and croutons broiled to perfection. Missing basil as well this early, of course, but by the second Pom Julio, who could tell?

Three quarters of the year we sit outside on the patio at Roadside accompanied by our thick-furred accomplice. Winter, when it’s raining, the dog stays home and we sit at the bar, and chat up whoever’s working the bar that day. We’ve met some unique folks this way—cheap entertainment.

The owners, husband and wife, are ex-hippies, evident from the homemade artwork and wise cracking messages all about the place. “If you’re drinking to forget, pay up first.” That and he wears his hair in a ponytail. Their two daughters have worked the bar in the past. Both natural blondes and neither are the shy retiring southern bells. Come to think of it, I think they’re transplants to the Outer Banks. The artwork is largely broken colored bottle glass under clear acrylic for the inside tables, and ‘stained glass’ done similarly. And an oyster roast at Thanksgiving in the back bar. Other times it’s just a local band and heavy drinking mountain boys out back—and a few heavy mountain girls showing them the love.

Motorcycle Week in Duck happens in April, so we just missed it. Mostly all Harleys, loud as hell. The beards on some of these boys would shame a Taliban fighter. They won’t sell you a Harley without a decent beard, that, and a beer gut. Roadside is jammed that week, and the roar just beyond the patio can be deafening, the patio being three or so feet from the road edge.

Roadside Bar & Grille in Duck—photo from the Roadside Bar & Grille website

What you see in this old photo is the hedge surrounding the patio. The cedar shake shack has been sitting roadside since before Duck was incorporated. You couldn’t get a permit to build anything so close ever since Duck found its postcard-cute identity. I can imagine the Town fathers’ heated discussions on reasons they can’t get rid of it as a nuisance, but it hangs in there. If we ever get the beach house built, we could stroll there in the evening.

“Duck is a town in Dare County, North Carolina, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 369. During the peak vacation season, starting after Memorial Day, the population increases to over 20,000 [unconfirmed]. Duck is the northernmost incorporated town in Dare County and the Outer Banks' newest town, incorporated on May 1, 2002. Duck offers visitors outdoor recreational activities, summer events and concerts, watersports, fine dining, shopping, art galleries, and a nationally known jazz festival, as well as the 11-acre (4.5 ha) Town Park and soundside boardwalk.

“Duck… has a total area of 3.7 square miles, of which 2.4 square miles is land and 1.3 square miles, or 35.02% is water.” from Wikipedia article on Duck, NC

Since they incorporated the town—to keep the Walmart out—the town fathers (and mommas) have been working on their image. They hope to make it more like Chatham or even Nantucket. Certainly not Provincetown—good gracious. The teenage girls selling ice cream and fudge will sell to anyone—even to folks from Hoboken, but you shouldn’t do that alternative lifestyle thing in public down here, ya’ll. After all, it’s still North Carolina.

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When we hit town last Sunday and made our way to the Roadside Bar & Grille, Layla rallied from her road trip to join us. Since the days of outdoor dining during Covid, she’s become quite the social butterfly.

With much commentary and laudatory talk about her beautiful eyes, we took a table on the patio, which now has a curious surround of sliding glass doors, replacing the hedge but no roof. Instead of a roof to make a real porch, they have individual awnings for the tables and ceiling fans hung from bare rafters, like any day they expect to nail some plywood and shingles to it. Hippies take their time.

The truth is it’s a workaround for not applying to the town fathers (and mommas) permission to build a real porch. Route 12 is a state highway—running the entire length of the Outer Banks. But either the right-of-way in Duck is barely wider than the pavement, or there’s serious grandfathering going on. Roadside sits across the street from the town park where the jazz fest is held in the fall. Along with the town offices, and I’d put money on how badly they’d love to see the hippies move to Venice Beach. Except they do an amazing amount of business at Roadside.

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We were seated next to a tourist group from Sweden—they were taken by our rescue dog from Siberia. They were from southern Sweden, on the coast facing the Baltic Sea.

“Layla doesn’t get too much snow where we live near DC, not any more.”

“We don’t get much snow either. A few times a year.”

Which surprised us. At a latitude of 90 degrees north, Sweden lies on a line with Nova Scotia. It’s interesting how large bodies of water influence the weather. Currituck Sound only influences things when a hurricane is coming up the channel. Then things get interesting.

We didn’t start too long a conversation, as they were finished and waiting for the check. Their take on the Roadside’s paeia was we should order the seafood pasta instead. Good paeia in the States is hard to come by. “No spice,” the wry Swede who’d not finished his advised us.

Sweden’s in the news at the moment, but it didn’t seem polite to quiz them on their feelings about Putin’s invasion and joining NATO. Not that I wasn’t thinking about it.

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Our waitress said she was from Russia. She has worked the gig at Roadside for several years, so she recognized us and smiled when we’d first arrived. Elana.

Back in the 80s and 90s, there were student exchange programs bringing students from Europe. A large number came over from Russia. Seasonal work to be sure. Young and willing to work for cheap housing on the Outer Banks, they were seeing a part of the States quite a few Americans couldn’t locate on a map.

Elana said she’d been in this country for fifteen years. I didn’t ask if she’d first come as a student, but it seems likely. She’s a resident now.

Being one of those tourist locations, the Outer Banks have become a melting pot. Still a lot of southerners, now blended with retirees from up north, an increasing number of African Americans, and more and more Hispanics in the construction trades. And tourists from Europe.

Just up the road, my favorite coffee place was run by Howard, the wise cracking Jew from New York, until he retired—a second time. His first job was as a buyer in the garment industry. The coffee wasn’t the best, but his bagels were tasty, and his stories were always top notch Jewish humor. Anyone who’d been in Duck more than once knew Howard.

Hard to say how old Elana is, maybe in her thirties, though her eyes look tired. Don’t know if she’s married, with or without children. She said her parents still lived in Moscow. Her father just celebrated his 70th birthday, and she couldn’t travel, not with the war going on. She has family in Khakiv as well, where the Ukrainians and Russians are hammering at each other. She says they tell her they’re surviving, but they can’t safely say much more, not even where they’re sheltering from the bombs and missiles.

I’ve read so much about World War II. Perhaps stirring in the grand sweep, but nauseating in the cruelty. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, what is that by comparison other than more of the same? Does it bring back fond memories of childhood for him?

The starving Russian civilians surrounded in the siege of Stalingrad—all of them trapped. Plus the ignomous deaths of the grunts on both sides. Driven by one despotic regime against another.

“The Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad, and total Axis casualties (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 800,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured. Of the 91,000 men who surrendered, only some 5,000–6,000 ever returned to their homelands (the last of them a full decade after the end of the war in 1945); the rest died in Soviet prison and labor camps. On the Soviet side, official Russian military historians estimate that there were 1,100,000 Red Army dead, wounded, missing, or captured in the campaign to defend the city. An estimated 40,000 civilians died as well.” from Britannica website article on the battle of Stalingrad

The British and American firebombing of Dresden described with bitter irony by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five killed 25,000 German civilians in one of the last bombing runs in the European theater of war.

There’s a video of the Russian military’s launch of phosphorous bombs packed with bomblets spraying death across acres of the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol.

There’s no scale to measure the weight of deaths in World War II, but with cell phone technology we are witnessing the carnage live in Putin’s invasion. Making war to your own people, is that not sufficient to label the man insane?

Saddam in the Kremlin.

Since before the last election in the States, since Obama’s election, actually, we in the States have become increasingly tribal, with multiple stories about the fractures created between Trump believers and their closest family. Either they’re just louder than the extremists on the left, or there are more of them. How do you tell your seventy-some grandmother you love that she’s off her blooming rocker—off the entire reservation?

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Elana didn’t elaborate, but it was clear she lives with that ‘side product’ of the war.

She was going about her work as we sat enjoying our first day by the ocean, but with a sad expression of endurance. Given what she’s coping with emotionally, living a world away from her home and unable to return, whose despotic leader has all but declared war on the U.S. and western Europe, it’s not a shock that she’s crushed by it—it would be more shocking if she wasn’t.

I’m worried the fanatics in this country want to destroy it with their rage. Worried I can’t even speak to the craziest, and you can never tell which. I remind myself we’ve always been a contentious people, even before letting the migrants join—my people included—and we wrote our Constitution specifically to allow for it.

But it’s scant reassurance. Living through the civil rights years, the Vietnam War protest years, thinking the country had gone mad—that’s not reassurance either. That it only takes a narcissistic TV personality or two to turn us against ourselves is a difficult thing to admit. And we are the bulwark behind the Europeans, behind the Ukrainians, behind Elana’s family in Kharkiv and Moscow.

Hope in the face of this whirlwind is hard to locate, though if Elana can do it, we should as well.

Sunset over Currituck Sound—photo by William E. Evans, ©2004