Wrightsville Beach and family observations
Continuing with the photo essay from the latest
North American road trip, this entry features Wrightsville Beach, NC for photos
and several local (Seattle) shots which caught my fancy. The essay explores
notions of familial relationships, some notions on mortality and its
relationship to heritage, and a general essay on the beach - any beach, really.
My mom's side of the family, the Culbreths, have
been meeting at Wrightsville Beach for long before I was born and for reasons of
familiarity and evolution that side of my family keeps going back to either
Wrightsville Beach or one of the nearby coastal beach towns on that section of
strand. The coastline of North Carolina is a really interesting place for a
number of reasons. Early on it was the stomping grounds of what is now a lost
tribe - the Cape Fear Indians. They were believed to be an eastern component of
the Sioux Nation and associated with the Catawba tribe of what is now South
Carolina. They lived near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, in what is now
Wilmington, and would have traipsed all around the strand islands which link the
southern North Carolina coast from the bottom of the Outer Banks all the way to
Myrtle Beach, SC. The earliest European contact with these natives was in 1661
when an English settlement landed at the mouth of the Cape Fear. Blackbeard and
other pirates plied their trade off this section of the coast from the late
1600's through the mid-1700's. The Sargasso Sea floats and meanders about just
over the horizon and from there for hundreds of miles between the Azores and
Bermuda. Yes, almost by definition, a fabled beach
area.
My mom's side can trace their domestic routes all the way back to the 1670's and in a graveyard not that far inland and up the coast from Wrightsville Beach at Scots Hill are five generations of direct and quite a few more related progenitors of what is now the Culbreth clan. Yes, they were Scots. Wilmington itself was formally incorporated in 1740 and from then through 1870 access to Wrightsville Beach was only by local fishers using skiffs. In 1870 a crushed sea shell causeway was put in place along what is now Wrightsville Avenue. In 1888 a railroad was established along the crushed shell causeway to what was called then "the Hammocks," or as it's known today Harbor Island - an intermediary sand barrier between Wrightsville Beach and the mainland. in 1989 Wrightsville Beach was incorporated and the railroad extended and in 1902 electrified to become a "beach trolley" from the mainland. In 1905 a beach pavilion and dance hall called "the Lumina" was established on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach and prospered through World War II, at which time the railroad ceased operating - replaced by cars and a new mainland and causeway road. The Lumina was abandoned and finally succumbed to the demolition ball in 1973. Sound familiar Seattleites? West Seattle had such a beach and dance hall pavilion called Luna Park near what is Seattle's Harbor Island near the mouth of the Duwamish River and just east of the beach at Alki.
The sad news is that both coastal towns had good, electric, trolley systems and well-patronized local beach pavilions which are now gone because of our fascination with the automobile and our intemperance. The good news is that this intemperate behavior and maddening rush to the automobile is bi-coastal and equanimous.
Lumina Avenue is now the main drag through Wrightsville Beach and at least there's a historic marker where the Lumina once stood on pylons out in the sound. Here in Seattle there's an old neon "Luna Park" sign on a cafe near the old park site and which blinks out a letter now and then but nightly shines its red reminder of the former glory days on the Duwamish delta.
Because Wilmington is a river city with a long riverfront to both develop industrially and to house mansions on the bluffs overlooking the river, the development of Wrightsville Beach was always fated to be slow and more plebian in taste. Carolina and Kure Beach are better connected to the mainland area of Wilmington, those towns developed earlier as beach towns and both have classic boardwalks and smallish amusement parks. Of the three local beach towns, though, Wrightsville Beach retains its early small-town charm even though there are now any number of condominiums and mega-beach houses which have replaced the earlier, clapboard, summer homes.
It's got a couple of areas which are relatively distinctive. South is the area of the older houses and the original downtown, which these days has the requisite beach stores, but also an internet cafe, several really good restaurants, a Coney Island hot dog stand with adjacent soft ice cream stand, and a decent and strictly local grocery store. On the causeway are all the modern appurtenances of city life such as the supermarkets, the post office, the municipal offices and city park and the bigger outdoor and beach stores. This preserves Wrightsville Beach for people actually living there and the summer week-long visitors, of which we've been regulars.
So, what of the beach. Wrightsville and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and way southern Virginia and way northern South Carolina, all benefit from being on strand islands or sandbars - in reality - which stick out into the Atlantic. The Sargasso Sea is offshore from the Outer Banks and kept in circular and constant motion by the Gulf Stream current which flows up this side of the coast. In the Summer, the average water temperature is between 83 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Folks, that's not toasty by any means but it is damned accommodating. The Gulf of Mexico, from St. Petersburg all the way over and down to Corpus Christi, gets much warmer - in the low nineties, and is more saline, which means that people like me who have muscular legs and basically no torso and the faintest suggestion of body insulation can actually float. In the Atlantic, or Pacific, or in a pool, I can break the surface with the top of my head when immobile and suspended, but I don't "float." I'm one of those poor slobs who must tread water constantly when I'm swimming lest I sink to the bottom of whatever body of water I'm in. That, though, still isn't sufficient to keep me out of the surf. The Atlantic has great natural waves along the Carolina Coast and body surfing, and regular surfing, are regular summertime pastimes for whole slices of the East Coast. I would rather live on a mountain top but I'd definitely miss the ocean if I couldn't get to it and linger for at least a week every other year. There's something restorative about swimming in the ocean, the Atlantic especially. The salt water and the salt-laden humidity around the coast are actually very good for human skin and for human lungs. And, there's nothing on Earth to clear out one's sinuses like a noseful of saline ocean water. One body surf moment in the Atlantic and my entire head is cleared out. One day of swimming in the ocean and all the pores of my whole body are breathing and working again. The abrasion from the surf-tumbled-waves-plus-sand even scours the old skin and makes one feel refreshed. Yes-sir-ee. The ocean is all it's cracked up to be and Wrightsville Beach is one of the best beach spots this side of the Pacific, which really is too cold to enjoy without a wetsuit anyway. How do I know - well I've body surfed all the way from Northern New Jersey to Southern New Jersey, Cape May, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, not Georgia but it hardly has much of a beach, and from North to Mid-South Florida on the Atlantic side and from St. Pete through Pensacola and Mobile and Beaumont and Galveston and parts south to Corpus on the Gulf side, and Huntington, Redondo, Santa Monica and Zuma Beaches in Southern California. For pure joy, guaranteed waves, a compelling ocean experience with good beaches and great sand dunes dune grasses, spend your money and time along the Outer Banks down to Cape Fear. You won't be sorry. Not only that, Wilmington is a great town with a sophistication and history and charm which is way outside its present quarter-million metro population. And, they do know how to cook in the South and there's great local fish of both the fresh and salt-water variety. Fishing itself is pretty good along the Intracoastal an offshore. Last reunion, for instance, we went offshore and caught and released a six-foot sand shark and caught and kept a bunch we filleted and ate (not sharks!).
And so what of the family. I've got a mom who has three siblings, two sisters and a brother, all younger. The next sister down has a son and daughter who in turn now have five kids, two sons for the son and two daughters and a son for the daughter. The youngest sister has two sons, one with no kids and one with one son. My mom's brother, the youngest of that generation, had three daughters and a son. The son died in his twenties and the middle daughter has MS and hasn't been able to visit in person but does keep in touch and has a son. My uncle's eldest daughter has two sons and two daughers and his youngest daughter has one son. For the better part of my life and nearly every other year for the past 12 years most of this clan has come together in either one really huge beach house or two adjacent merely large beach houses. I've grown up with all my aunts and uncle and their spouses. My two aunts lost their husbands through untimely deaths (one a heart attack and the other Alzheimer's) but the Culbreth kids themselves seem to be doing fine. My mom is 87 years old and still lives by herself in Charlotte and still manages to get around in her now antique Chevrolet Caprice (no plumbing inside the hood, AM-only radio, real steel for fenders, etc.). She's got arthritis but manages to take enough medicine that it's not an issue and not debilitating. One aunt (the second sister) is doing quite fine; the other is doing less well due to a recent fall where she broke some things but even so she's doing rather well and is taken care of lovingly by her son who lives nearby. My uncle and his wife are doing well, they live up "noth" in Cape Cod.
All my cousins save the one are doing quite well. All their kids are doing quite well - weird to have watched so many relatives actually grow up through all the same phases Leif and Adam went through. I've got seven living first cousins and two brothers. Us cousins have fifteen kids. The living clan then numbers four elders with one spouse remaining, ten baby-boomer offspring with eight spouses, and fifteen Gen-X newbies, none yet with their own kids or spouses, for a total Culbreth clan population of 38. That's not really that large a family by some standards and is a huge family by other standards. Because it's the only "family" we know, it has always seemed just right. It's also been fun since the Redmonds (me and my brothers and our immediate families) have sort of always attended, mostly because it's the best excuse for us to see each other. Because there's usually been more "Redmonds" than McBrides, or Marbuts, or Culbreths (one of my uncle's daughters hasn't attended the reunion in decades), we've acquired a perhaps deserved reputation of "taking over" the reunion. Of course, that's not really true. But what is true is that we Redmond's are all adamant types, somewhat loud (stage voices) and even though all the Culbreth's are opinionated, the Redmond sector seems to have even more opinions (what a surprise for anyone who knows me - it shouldn't surprise you one bit that my brothers are similar in nature and that our kids are also). So it's usually the case that the Redmond's get put off in the "other" house. We like to stay up late (that is except for my youngest brother), party, make noise and just basically run rough-shod over things. Putting us in the adjacent house works fine and it also means that our elders and my brother and his wife and most of my cousins can get a good night's sleep. It's almost as if the main house is the "hotel and restaurant" and the "Redmond" house is the "casino." This arrangement has served all of us well for the past dozen years and I suspect has become the norm now.
The pressing issue for most of us boomers now is what will become of our parents. My dad is already dead as are the dads of most of my cousins. These dads represented the new genetic material for the clan. I've often pondered changing my last name from Redmond to Culbreth just so the name would live on. Of course I won't, I have become quite accustomed to my last name and it does represent the fiery side of me anyway (some might go so far as to say the "dark" side) - my dad came from Irish Catholic roots with a little French (my grandmother) thrown in for good measure. Our folks are getting on in years. My personal goal is for my mom to live to be a hundred. There are times, though, when she tells me that she's "tired." I know what she means. Life is a drain. It takes work to live and every new day is a new set of challenges and obstacles. We're all captives of Nature's timeline and methods and caprice. There are times when all of us get "tired." We press on, though; some of us because we're just so delighted by living that we don't see any real alternative, even if the living at the moment has its serious downsides or pains. My mom won't quit, because it's not in her nature. If there's anyone more stubborn than me in the clan it's my mom. She also won't even consider living in an assisted home and has told me and my brothers in clear, unequivocal, terms that she will not live in Arizona, Maryland, DC (when that was an option), or Washington state. She likes where she's living and from my limited experience with the last generation I'd say that folks live longer when they live where they want.
So, we'll all put off the inevitable until it arrives and then we'll deal with it as a family as we have already many times. There's a weird twist to all this for me, though, because in a short time, once my mom, two aunts and uncle have all gone, I'll be the elder of the clan. I won't provide much additional insight or management for any of us. I've got one cousin now who does a superior job of getting us all together and she has my proxy to continue that tradition. I'm not sure what one does when one is the elder of a clan. Our society is so different these days from when that concept had any real meaning. I already offer plenty of advice which is either taken or ignored. Point being that most of my relatives are pretty well equipped to live their own lives and manage their own affairs - we've all done pretty well and have survived and prospered as a generation. We've all produced and raised some pretty magnificent human beings so, in that sense, the genetic thread continues. We think of these things when we get together - not that much and not that deeply but it does gnaw its way into our reunion in one form or another. We're all proud of having been on this continent for as long as the Culbreth's have and we're all aware of the stages of our forebears' lives and the struggles they must have gone through during that era of the country's evolution.
I'm equally aware of the times in the future when my kids and their kids will be visiting the gravesite at Scots Hill and pointing out my marker. I always feel deeply sad when I think of this - not because death is sad, it's inevitable (or as Adam so succinctly puts it: "if you're alive then you'll die.") It's the presence of my family gathering at the gravesite which makes me sad because, of course, I'd want to be there with them. So, perhaps it's the realization that there will come a time when I won't feel the love or the camaraderie and that's what makes me sad - the anticipation of not having those feelings. I don't dwell on these thoughts, it's just that the reunion always brings them back because we do, of course, always visit the family gravesite. i guess I can take comfort in the notion that at least my family has a family gravesite - a place where my offspring and present and future relatives and their offspring can gather to reflect on the past, on the evolution of the family and perhaps even their own future.
Deep thoughts done with, on with the photos. I've tried to capture the true feeling of Wrightsville Beach, the reason we always want to return there. I've also taken some liberties with the Wrightsville Beach Municipal History Museum and posted some earlier photos from their website to give a bit of perspective on what "our" beach town looked like before I was born and my mom was a kid. The truly wondrous thing about the "New World," is that everything is still so new that it's retrievable. Think about it! Humans have been recording their history for over six thousand years and here we are, a nation of newbies, whose history traces a scant four or five hundred years into the past. That's eight percent of recorded history if you don't count the cave drawings in France.
Chas
Scale model of the Lumina and trolley which passed by on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach at the
turn of the 20th Century.
Aerial postcard of the beach town with boardwalk sidewalks in the
pre-World War II era. My mom was a teenager then and quite the looker.
The sound is on the left and the Atlantic on the right.
Generally, the same stretch of beach as the 1940's era photo above. This taken from one of the local restaurants looking south with
the Blockade Runner hotel in the foreground. About the third house away from the hotel is the beach house which was the main
gathering place for our reunion. This was taken late in the afternoon with the evening clouds starting to gather.
This is taken from the rooftop deck at the main beach house and is looking straight East into the Atlantic. The path goes from the main,
beach-side, porch straight to the dunes and then the ocean. A 30-second walk from the house to the shoreline and surfing. This was
taken near noon and shows the wonderful manner by which the Atlantic changes its color throughout the day - contrast with the
greenish-gray of the shot above.
Much later in the day from the rooftop balcony, this is looking west at the residual light from the sunset over the sound. The sound
is the lighter colored area, showing up in between all the houses on the sound-side. We had great sunrises over the ocean and
great sunsets over the sound. Just a wonderful location for a reunion.
This is a panorama from the rooftop deck and shows the entire sweep of view available to us during our stay at Wrightsville Beach. The
center of the image is due North, middle of the ocean is due East, where the noonday sun is blotting out the image is due West, and
the edges of the image are due South.
Yes, I know, it's tiny. This is a panorama from Lumina Avenue on the sound side with due West being right center of the image. It's small
because I was standing on sand to get this photo and the sand was angled so my 360-degree sweep with the camera also included a
significant tilt up as I rotated about. The panorama can only be made from areas of overlapping images so there was a significant element
of both the top and bottom of the 18 images which had to be "lopped" off by the software algorithm. Alas. See other, better, shots below.
This is a better panorama taken on a different day from a slightly better position, also on the sand (notice boats in foreground).
Wrightsville Beach has two really advantageous sides depending on whether you want to see sunrise (ocean side) or sunset
(sound side). We prefer ocean side but sound side does have its spectacular moments.
Yet another view of the same sunset, this wide-angle shot from somewhat more north along Lumina Avenue than the one above.
Notice all the masts from the fishing and sail boats moored in the sound. About half the homes on both sides are permanent-party for
folks who actually live here. The other half are rental houses for anyone who "wants" to live here - they're about $1400 a week for
houses which will hold three families so it turns out to be a reasonable bargain for big family events and nearly everyone here in the
summer is engaging in some form of "family" activity with an extended family or a family of friends. The boats are about evenly divided
also, about half of them are owned by the permanent residentss and the other half are for hire by the hour, day or week.
Half a panorama of yet another sunset along the sound side. It was just about impossible to NOT have a gorgeous evening. We were
lucky, we arrived on the heels of Hurricane Charley and had a week of beautiful weather. Hurricanes are on a roughly seven-day
cycle from their spawning grounds off the West Coast of Africa until they make their way across the Atlantic and up the East Coast or into
the Gulf. Because we'd just had one go through the Saturday we arrived, we had an almost-guaranteed seven days of great weather.
Another partial panorama from virtually the same spot as the one above but on a different evening. Like I said, hard to beat this kind
of scenery with the kind of weather we had, temperatures when this photo was taken were in the low '80s with a light breeze northward
along the barrier island.
Okay, last sound-side sunset shot, but aren't they glorious?
Heading toward the Wrightsville Beach "downtown" late at night. This is a corner set of B&B's, one on top of the other in a condominium
built about thirty years ago. The avenue on the right continues past these hotels and turns into a little town square with all sorts of
shops, restaurants and things to do. It was fun walking around at night because we could listen in on other folks' conversations with
their families and listen to what style of music they played in the background. Plus, after hours, the municipal lot, also just past
this intersection, closed and all the day surfers went back to the mainland and left us in peace. In the day this place was filled with
hundreds of UNC-Wilmington students and local and out-of-town surfers and general party-types. What else is summer for?
The heart of downtown Wrightsville Beach. That's an internet cafe directly across the street and the local grocery store is to the left.
In the background is one of many multi-story beach-side apartments which have gone up, thankfully, not in the southern sections
of Wrightsville Beach, mostly from here (which is the center of the four-mile-long island) and north. Out of sight, mostly. US Highways
74 and 76 both dead-end at Wrightsville Beach and start at Chattanooga with 76 going through Columbia and 74 going
through Charlotte on their way from the mountains-to-the-sea. Part of America's highway heritage.
Keeping with the sunset theme, this is a full, orange, Harvest Moon rising
over the Cascades this past weekend here in Seattle. The sun had just
set past the Olympics and I was able to capture this outstanding shot -
for a measly 2 megapixel camera with a measly 2X optical zoom, this
came out better than I expected.
It's that time of year when the mists roll off the Sound and the orbweavers
make their last stand at capturing enough food to allow them to create
their egg sacks and lie low for the Winter or, like Charlotte, die.
I'll leave you with this sequence of images showing the Vashon Ferry docking at Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal during
one recent, extremely foggy morning. I decided to walk down to the beach at Lincoln Park early in the morning,
about 9:00, before the fog lifted, expecting that I'd find something worth capturing - sort of along these lines.
For now - happy trails - for the plaintiff or defendant or barrister in you, happy trials.
My mom's side can trace their domestic routes all the way back to the 1670's and in a graveyard not that far inland and up the coast from Wrightsville Beach at Scots Hill are five generations of direct and quite a few more related progenitors of what is now the Culbreth clan. Yes, they were Scots. Wilmington itself was formally incorporated in 1740 and from then through 1870 access to Wrightsville Beach was only by local fishers using skiffs. In 1870 a crushed sea shell causeway was put in place along what is now Wrightsville Avenue. In 1888 a railroad was established along the crushed shell causeway to what was called then "the Hammocks," or as it's known today Harbor Island - an intermediary sand barrier between Wrightsville Beach and the mainland. in 1989 Wrightsville Beach was incorporated and the railroad extended and in 1902 electrified to become a "beach trolley" from the mainland. In 1905 a beach pavilion and dance hall called "the Lumina" was established on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach and prospered through World War II, at which time the railroad ceased operating - replaced by cars and a new mainland and causeway road. The Lumina was abandoned and finally succumbed to the demolition ball in 1973. Sound familiar Seattleites? West Seattle had such a beach and dance hall pavilion called Luna Park near what is Seattle's Harbor Island near the mouth of the Duwamish River and just east of the beach at Alki.
The sad news is that both coastal towns had good, electric, trolley systems and well-patronized local beach pavilions which are now gone because of our fascination with the automobile and our intemperance. The good news is that this intemperate behavior and maddening rush to the automobile is bi-coastal and equanimous.
Lumina Avenue is now the main drag through Wrightsville Beach and at least there's a historic marker where the Lumina once stood on pylons out in the sound. Here in Seattle there's an old neon "Luna Park" sign on a cafe near the old park site and which blinks out a letter now and then but nightly shines its red reminder of the former glory days on the Duwamish delta.
Because Wilmington is a river city with a long riverfront to both develop industrially and to house mansions on the bluffs overlooking the river, the development of Wrightsville Beach was always fated to be slow and more plebian in taste. Carolina and Kure Beach are better connected to the mainland area of Wilmington, those towns developed earlier as beach towns and both have classic boardwalks and smallish amusement parks. Of the three local beach towns, though, Wrightsville Beach retains its early small-town charm even though there are now any number of condominiums and mega-beach houses which have replaced the earlier, clapboard, summer homes.
It's got a couple of areas which are relatively distinctive. South is the area of the older houses and the original downtown, which these days has the requisite beach stores, but also an internet cafe, several really good restaurants, a Coney Island hot dog stand with adjacent soft ice cream stand, and a decent and strictly local grocery store. On the causeway are all the modern appurtenances of city life such as the supermarkets, the post office, the municipal offices and city park and the bigger outdoor and beach stores. This preserves Wrightsville Beach for people actually living there and the summer week-long visitors, of which we've been regulars.
So, what of the beach. Wrightsville and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and way southern Virginia and way northern South Carolina, all benefit from being on strand islands or sandbars - in reality - which stick out into the Atlantic. The Sargasso Sea is offshore from the Outer Banks and kept in circular and constant motion by the Gulf Stream current which flows up this side of the coast. In the Summer, the average water temperature is between 83 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Folks, that's not toasty by any means but it is damned accommodating. The Gulf of Mexico, from St. Petersburg all the way over and down to Corpus Christi, gets much warmer - in the low nineties, and is more saline, which means that people like me who have muscular legs and basically no torso and the faintest suggestion of body insulation can actually float. In the Atlantic, or Pacific, or in a pool, I can break the surface with the top of my head when immobile and suspended, but I don't "float." I'm one of those poor slobs who must tread water constantly when I'm swimming lest I sink to the bottom of whatever body of water I'm in. That, though, still isn't sufficient to keep me out of the surf. The Atlantic has great natural waves along the Carolina Coast and body surfing, and regular surfing, are regular summertime pastimes for whole slices of the East Coast. I would rather live on a mountain top but I'd definitely miss the ocean if I couldn't get to it and linger for at least a week every other year. There's something restorative about swimming in the ocean, the Atlantic especially. The salt water and the salt-laden humidity around the coast are actually very good for human skin and for human lungs. And, there's nothing on Earth to clear out one's sinuses like a noseful of saline ocean water. One body surf moment in the Atlantic and my entire head is cleared out. One day of swimming in the ocean and all the pores of my whole body are breathing and working again. The abrasion from the surf-tumbled-waves-plus-sand even scours the old skin and makes one feel refreshed. Yes-sir-ee. The ocean is all it's cracked up to be and Wrightsville Beach is one of the best beach spots this side of the Pacific, which really is too cold to enjoy without a wetsuit anyway. How do I know - well I've body surfed all the way from Northern New Jersey to Southern New Jersey, Cape May, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, not Georgia but it hardly has much of a beach, and from North to Mid-South Florida on the Atlantic side and from St. Pete through Pensacola and Mobile and Beaumont and Galveston and parts south to Corpus on the Gulf side, and Huntington, Redondo, Santa Monica and Zuma Beaches in Southern California. For pure joy, guaranteed waves, a compelling ocean experience with good beaches and great sand dunes dune grasses, spend your money and time along the Outer Banks down to Cape Fear. You won't be sorry. Not only that, Wilmington is a great town with a sophistication and history and charm which is way outside its present quarter-million metro population. And, they do know how to cook in the South and there's great local fish of both the fresh and salt-water variety. Fishing itself is pretty good along the Intracoastal an offshore. Last reunion, for instance, we went offshore and caught and released a six-foot sand shark and caught and kept a bunch we filleted and ate (not sharks!).
And so what of the family. I've got a mom who has three siblings, two sisters and a brother, all younger. The next sister down has a son and daughter who in turn now have five kids, two sons for the son and two daughters and a son for the daughter. The youngest sister has two sons, one with no kids and one with one son. My mom's brother, the youngest of that generation, had three daughters and a son. The son died in his twenties and the middle daughter has MS and hasn't been able to visit in person but does keep in touch and has a son. My uncle's eldest daughter has two sons and two daughers and his youngest daughter has one son. For the better part of my life and nearly every other year for the past 12 years most of this clan has come together in either one really huge beach house or two adjacent merely large beach houses. I've grown up with all my aunts and uncle and their spouses. My two aunts lost their husbands through untimely deaths (one a heart attack and the other Alzheimer's) but the Culbreth kids themselves seem to be doing fine. My mom is 87 years old and still lives by herself in Charlotte and still manages to get around in her now antique Chevrolet Caprice (no plumbing inside the hood, AM-only radio, real steel for fenders, etc.). She's got arthritis but manages to take enough medicine that it's not an issue and not debilitating. One aunt (the second sister) is doing quite fine; the other is doing less well due to a recent fall where she broke some things but even so she's doing rather well and is taken care of lovingly by her son who lives nearby. My uncle and his wife are doing well, they live up "noth" in Cape Cod.
All my cousins save the one are doing quite well. All their kids are doing quite well - weird to have watched so many relatives actually grow up through all the same phases Leif and Adam went through. I've got seven living first cousins and two brothers. Us cousins have fifteen kids. The living clan then numbers four elders with one spouse remaining, ten baby-boomer offspring with eight spouses, and fifteen Gen-X newbies, none yet with their own kids or spouses, for a total Culbreth clan population of 38. That's not really that large a family by some standards and is a huge family by other standards. Because it's the only "family" we know, it has always seemed just right. It's also been fun since the Redmonds (me and my brothers and our immediate families) have sort of always attended, mostly because it's the best excuse for us to see each other. Because there's usually been more "Redmonds" than McBrides, or Marbuts, or Culbreths (one of my uncle's daughters hasn't attended the reunion in decades), we've acquired a perhaps deserved reputation of "taking over" the reunion. Of course, that's not really true. But what is true is that we Redmond's are all adamant types, somewhat loud (stage voices) and even though all the Culbreth's are opinionated, the Redmond sector seems to have even more opinions (what a surprise for anyone who knows me - it shouldn't surprise you one bit that my brothers are similar in nature and that our kids are also). So it's usually the case that the Redmond's get put off in the "other" house. We like to stay up late (that is except for my youngest brother), party, make noise and just basically run rough-shod over things. Putting us in the adjacent house works fine and it also means that our elders and my brother and his wife and most of my cousins can get a good night's sleep. It's almost as if the main house is the "hotel and restaurant" and the "Redmond" house is the "casino." This arrangement has served all of us well for the past dozen years and I suspect has become the norm now.
The pressing issue for most of us boomers now is what will become of our parents. My dad is already dead as are the dads of most of my cousins. These dads represented the new genetic material for the clan. I've often pondered changing my last name from Redmond to Culbreth just so the name would live on. Of course I won't, I have become quite accustomed to my last name and it does represent the fiery side of me anyway (some might go so far as to say the "dark" side) - my dad came from Irish Catholic roots with a little French (my grandmother) thrown in for good measure. Our folks are getting on in years. My personal goal is for my mom to live to be a hundred. There are times, though, when she tells me that she's "tired." I know what she means. Life is a drain. It takes work to live and every new day is a new set of challenges and obstacles. We're all captives of Nature's timeline and methods and caprice. There are times when all of us get "tired." We press on, though; some of us because we're just so delighted by living that we don't see any real alternative, even if the living at the moment has its serious downsides or pains. My mom won't quit, because it's not in her nature. If there's anyone more stubborn than me in the clan it's my mom. She also won't even consider living in an assisted home and has told me and my brothers in clear, unequivocal, terms that she will not live in Arizona, Maryland, DC (when that was an option), or Washington state. She likes where she's living and from my limited experience with the last generation I'd say that folks live longer when they live where they want.
So, we'll all put off the inevitable until it arrives and then we'll deal with it as a family as we have already many times. There's a weird twist to all this for me, though, because in a short time, once my mom, two aunts and uncle have all gone, I'll be the elder of the clan. I won't provide much additional insight or management for any of us. I've got one cousin now who does a superior job of getting us all together and she has my proxy to continue that tradition. I'm not sure what one does when one is the elder of a clan. Our society is so different these days from when that concept had any real meaning. I already offer plenty of advice which is either taken or ignored. Point being that most of my relatives are pretty well equipped to live their own lives and manage their own affairs - we've all done pretty well and have survived and prospered as a generation. We've all produced and raised some pretty magnificent human beings so, in that sense, the genetic thread continues. We think of these things when we get together - not that much and not that deeply but it does gnaw its way into our reunion in one form or another. We're all proud of having been on this continent for as long as the Culbreth's have and we're all aware of the stages of our forebears' lives and the struggles they must have gone through during that era of the country's evolution.
I'm equally aware of the times in the future when my kids and their kids will be visiting the gravesite at Scots Hill and pointing out my marker. I always feel deeply sad when I think of this - not because death is sad, it's inevitable (or as Adam so succinctly puts it: "if you're alive then you'll die.") It's the presence of my family gathering at the gravesite which makes me sad because, of course, I'd want to be there with them. So, perhaps it's the realization that there will come a time when I won't feel the love or the camaraderie and that's what makes me sad - the anticipation of not having those feelings. I don't dwell on these thoughts, it's just that the reunion always brings them back because we do, of course, always visit the family gravesite. i guess I can take comfort in the notion that at least my family has a family gravesite - a place where my offspring and present and future relatives and their offspring can gather to reflect on the past, on the evolution of the family and perhaps even their own future.
Deep thoughts done with, on with the photos. I've tried to capture the true feeling of Wrightsville Beach, the reason we always want to return there. I've also taken some liberties with the Wrightsville Beach Municipal History Museum and posted some earlier photos from their website to give a bit of perspective on what "our" beach town looked like before I was born and my mom was a kid. The truly wondrous thing about the "New World," is that everything is still so new that it's retrievable. Think about it! Humans have been recording their history for over six thousand years and here we are, a nation of newbies, whose history traces a scant four or five hundred years into the past. That's eight percent of recorded history if you don't count the cave drawings in France.
Chas
Scale model of the Lumina and trolley which passed by on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach at the
turn of the 20th Century.
Aerial postcard of the beach town with boardwalk sidewalks in the
pre-World War II era. My mom was a teenager then and quite the looker.
The sound is on the left and the Atlantic on the right.
Generally, the same stretch of beach as the 1940's era photo above. This taken from one of the local restaurants looking south with
the Blockade Runner hotel in the foreground. About the third house away from the hotel is the beach house which was the main
gathering place for our reunion. This was taken late in the afternoon with the evening clouds starting to gather.
This is taken from the rooftop deck at the main beach house and is looking straight East into the Atlantic. The path goes from the main,
beach-side, porch straight to the dunes and then the ocean. A 30-second walk from the house to the shoreline and surfing. This was
taken near noon and shows the wonderful manner by which the Atlantic changes its color throughout the day - contrast with the
greenish-gray of the shot above.
Much later in the day from the rooftop balcony, this is looking west at the residual light from the sunset over the sound. The sound
is the lighter colored area, showing up in between all the houses on the sound-side. We had great sunrises over the ocean and
great sunsets over the sound. Just a wonderful location for a reunion.
This is a panorama from the rooftop deck and shows the entire sweep of view available to us during our stay at Wrightsville Beach. The
center of the image is due North, middle of the ocean is due East, where the noonday sun is blotting out the image is due West, and
the edges of the image are due South.
Yes, I know, it's tiny. This is a panorama from Lumina Avenue on the sound side with due West being right center of the image. It's small
because I was standing on sand to get this photo and the sand was angled so my 360-degree sweep with the camera also included a
significant tilt up as I rotated about. The panorama can only be made from areas of overlapping images so there was a significant element
of both the top and bottom of the 18 images which had to be "lopped" off by the software algorithm. Alas. See other, better, shots below.
This is a better panorama taken on a different day from a slightly better position, also on the sand (notice boats in foreground).
Wrightsville Beach has two really advantageous sides depending on whether you want to see sunrise (ocean side) or sunset
(sound side). We prefer ocean side but sound side does have its spectacular moments.
Yet another view of the same sunset, this wide-angle shot from somewhat more north along Lumina Avenue than the one above.
Notice all the masts from the fishing and sail boats moored in the sound. About half the homes on both sides are permanent-party for
folks who actually live here. The other half are rental houses for anyone who "wants" to live here - they're about $1400 a week for
houses which will hold three families so it turns out to be a reasonable bargain for big family events and nearly everyone here in the
summer is engaging in some form of "family" activity with an extended family or a family of friends. The boats are about evenly divided
also, about half of them are owned by the permanent residentss and the other half are for hire by the hour, day or week.
Half a panorama of yet another sunset along the sound side. It was just about impossible to NOT have a gorgeous evening. We were
lucky, we arrived on the heels of Hurricane Charley and had a week of beautiful weather. Hurricanes are on a roughly seven-day
cycle from their spawning grounds off the West Coast of Africa until they make their way across the Atlantic and up the East Coast or into
the Gulf. Because we'd just had one go through the Saturday we arrived, we had an almost-guaranteed seven days of great weather.
Another partial panorama from virtually the same spot as the one above but on a different evening. Like I said, hard to beat this kind
of scenery with the kind of weather we had, temperatures when this photo was taken were in the low '80s with a light breeze northward
along the barrier island.
Okay, last sound-side sunset shot, but aren't they glorious?
Heading toward the Wrightsville Beach "downtown" late at night. This is a corner set of B&B's, one on top of the other in a condominium
built about thirty years ago. The avenue on the right continues past these hotels and turns into a little town square with all sorts of
shops, restaurants and things to do. It was fun walking around at night because we could listen in on other folks' conversations with
their families and listen to what style of music they played in the background. Plus, after hours, the municipal lot, also just past
this intersection, closed and all the day surfers went back to the mainland and left us in peace. In the day this place was filled with
hundreds of UNC-Wilmington students and local and out-of-town surfers and general party-types. What else is summer for?
The heart of downtown Wrightsville Beach. That's an internet cafe directly across the street and the local grocery store is to the left.
In the background is one of many multi-story beach-side apartments which have gone up, thankfully, not in the southern sections
of Wrightsville Beach, mostly from here (which is the center of the four-mile-long island) and north. Out of sight, mostly. US Highways
74 and 76 both dead-end at Wrightsville Beach and start at Chattanooga with 76 going through Columbia and 74 going
through Charlotte on their way from the mountains-to-the-sea. Part of America's highway heritage.
Keeping with the sunset theme, this is a full, orange, Harvest Moon rising
over the Cascades this past weekend here in Seattle. The sun had just
set past the Olympics and I was able to capture this outstanding shot -
for a measly 2 megapixel camera with a measly 2X optical zoom, this
came out better than I expected.
It's that time of year when the mists roll off the Sound and the orbweavers
make their last stand at capturing enough food to allow them to create
their egg sacks and lie low for the Winter or, like Charlotte, die.
I'll leave you with this sequence of images showing the Vashon Ferry docking at Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal during
one recent, extremely foggy morning. I decided to walk down to the beach at Lincoln Park early in the morning,
about 9:00, before the fog lifted, expecting that I'd find something worth capturing - sort of along these lines.
For now - happy trails - for the plaintiff or defendant or barrister in you, happy trials.
Posted: Sun - October 10, 2004 at 01:29 AM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM