Another Medium story—certainly not well done…

Evans’ Rag

Vol 3 Issue 20

We’ve escaped DC for the Outer Banks again. Been since last June when all hell was breaking loose, and we slipped in a week before they closed the bridge to keep the Covid devil out.

Sanderling, where we’re staying, is a development designed to be more environmentally sensitive. There’s a sign on the wooden walkway over the dunes about saving the sea turtle babies.

Of course, the most environmentally sensitive action would be not to keep developing a place this fragile, but people keep having babies and hoping they’ll do better, so I expect Sanderling is little more than a holding operation. In Sanderling, they saved a majority of the live oaks, and it’s a place D and I have nosed around but never stayed before now.

Just up the road from our old place. It’s quiet here until the helicopters fly over. We think only a few of the houses are rentals, and the rest are owned by old folk who occasionally come to this enclave of quiet. On the beach, it’s the same—beach chair clusters to the south, clusters to the north and solitude in between where retired environmentalists watch for sea turtles.

Here on the Outer Banks, fighter jet and helicopter pilots down from Norfolk don’t know better than to roar up and down the beach. The jets fly higher and the helicopters are at pelican level, only a hell of a lot louder. If they can’t read the maps, the pilots can follow the beach, so they don’t get lost.

Two old Chinooks just flew by; must be National Guard. Chinook was a Native American tribe in the Northwest living on the Columbia River; they may be running a casino these days. Put all that together and you have a flying device as nimble as a cicada with ten times the noise.