Part Two of the Reunion Trip - the family, beach and
beachtowns
Part One recounted the journey East through the
Wind River Range, the Mississippi flood plain, the spin-out in West Virginia and
the Hurricane. Part Two recounts the beach time, Wrightsville Beach, my family
- the Culbreth Clan, and our hopes and aspirations about the reunion. Part
Three will tell the tale of getting back West and Part Four will me my views
after living in Seattle, the Puget Sound region, the Northwest, for a
year.
Ah, on to the stasis part of the three-week trip
- the family reunion at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
More than you ever wanted to know about who I am, where I came from, and who my kin are - well, maybe not "more than you ever wanted to know" but certainly more than most of you have known anyway ('cept, of course, those who read or received this who ARE related to me - and y'all are used to my rants anyway...).
So, why North Carolina and why Wrightsville Beach? Well, my mom's family are Scottish and immigrated to these United States in the early 1700's and settled in at Scots Hill, North Carolina - a little podunk town about thirty minutes (today, a few hours back then) northeast of Wilmington. There's this neat little (original building, add-ons make it a huge) church, Presbyterian, which sits right off what had been the horse trail to Fayetteville but which is now four-lane divided US Highway 17. In that church's cemetery, which is so close to the highway that one can smell the fumes, are five or six generations of my precursors and their precursors - the clan name in the new world is Culbreth. That is a derivative of McCulbreth which is a derivative of Culbraith which itself is the derivative of the real Scots name which is Gilbraith. We hail from the Highlands, north of where Loch Ness empties into the North Sea.
On my mom's side, all my precursor kin were living and dying in the same part of Eastern Carolina. Jump forwards about three generations and we have my grandmother and grandfather Culbreth. Granddad worked for the then Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and Adelaide - his wife, my grandmom, was a stay-at-home mom who was the second youngest of - best as I can tell - about eleven siblings (no, remember they were Presbyterian!). My grandmom's youngest sister, Jeffords, who we all called Aunt Jeff despite the fact that she was our great aunt, eventually married and had one daughter. They built a really substantial brick and cinder block house on the inland waterway, on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach. As kids, me, my brothers and cousins all met once a year at Aunt Jeff's (and Uncle Shep's, too) beach house. It was a thirty minute walk over the causeway bridge to the beach or a five-minute drive in a car. The beach town, Wrightsville Beach, was pretty much all houses with a little grocery store, a few other amenities and a U.S. Post Office.
When Aunt Jeff (she outlived her husband, don't all women?) finally died, long after my grandmom and granddad had died, we - us cousins - decided that we really liked Wrightsville Beach because of all the memories and the fact that it was and still is a really nice beach town. No big ocean condos, no supermalls, no schlock and really nothing except what has grown up there organically. It's so unlike other beach towns. The closest other towns which are still like Wrightsville are Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Stone Harbor, New Jersey, and frankly that's about all I can think of. And even Rehoboth and Stone Harbor have boardwalks and fancy shops. Wrightsville Beach really only has beach-fronted houses and a main street set back about three blocks from the ocean. Well, that makes sense since "the city" is Wilmington and it's all of about fifteen minutes away by car and has pretty much anything one could or would want including the supermalls on the ourskirts and a stunningly restored turn-of-the-century waterfront on the Cape Fear River replete with fancy restaurants and clubs and a river walk.
So, that's why Wrightsville - it's "our" beach - me and my siblings and cousins and mom and aunts and uncles. And, it's close enough that a requisite visit to the family gravesite only takes a twenty or so minute car ride. Sad thing about the cemetery is that in addition to all the people who should be there - my great and great great granddads and grandmoms and great aunts and uncles, there's also one cousin - and sad even more is that he was the youngest of the cousins and was only a baby when I last saw him. He died at 19 of a brain tumor and I never really knew him beyond his being yet another cute cousin baby. There's a strange tale associated with my granddad and my cousin. My mom is the oldest of her family - at least she was by the time I was born, but she had an older brother named after my granddad - John Thomas Culbreth. Her older brother - an uncle I never knew - died at 19 of leukemia. In the graveyard is John Thomas Culbreth, my granddad, John Thomas Culbreth, my uncle that I never knew, and John Thomas Culbreth, my cousin that I barely knew. That always strikes me and makes me morose every time I visit the cemetery - not that they're dead, but rather that there are at least two John Thomas Culbreths that I never knew. My granddad was great - and I mean great - I was the first of my generation to be born and he took me everywhere - down to the railroad yards, around Wilmington, up and down 4th Street (where he and Adelaide and their kids lived) and out to the far-lying districts of Wilmington. Unbelievable as it sounds, I have vivid and accurate memories of when I was about 18 months old and from that point onward. I believe a lot of those memories are because my mom's dad took such a shine to me and literally took me under tow and introduced me to everyone he knew and everything he worked on. Back then and through the early parts of my high school years their house even still had outdoor plumbing and a pump in the kitchen for water. Hot water for baths was heated in a huge kettle on the stove and mixed with the pumped water in the tub. They did, eventually, get indoor plumbing and a hot-water heater and a television set - ours when we left for Europe when I was eight. Plus their youngest kid, my uncle Tom, had the world's greatest collection of 1940's and 1950's horror comic books which he delighted in showing me and two other cousins where they were. Ah, the fond memories of being a kid.
So, how many cousins and living aunts and uncles are left? Well, John Thomas and Adelaide had five children, four of whom are living - my mom, the oldest, Aunt Em (Emily) - second oldest, Aunt Pam (Pamela) - third oldest, and Uncle Tom - the baby. My mom had three boys, me and my two brothers; Aunt Em had one each boy and girl; Aunt Pam had two boys; and Uncle Tom had three daughters and the son who died. All my aunts and uncle were there even if only briefly in the case of Aunt Pam, who has recently suffered some severe but not crippling medical difficulties. Aunt Pam and Aunt Em's spouses have - alas - died (Uncle Carl and Uncle Harold respectively). I have great and extremely fond memories of both these uncles and both of them taught me things of value and interest from their respective worlds of being a hunting and fishing store owner and a Western Electric technician.
I've often said to many of you that my dad was one of a spate of "bad" dads who survived World War II. He was so many things wrong that it still makes my head spin to think about him. But, sometimes fate has a way of working these things out. My male adult models were my real uncle and the uncle husbands of my aunts (and to be frank, I didn't think about that aspect until recently, as far as I knew as a kid these were as uncle as it could be) and both my grand dads - my dad's dad was also a railroader - the Baltimore and Ohio - and he schlepped me back and forth on the train between Chillicothe and Dayton for about two years when we were living in Dayton, I was then between two and three, and yes, I have equally vivid memories of the roundhouse and the trains and the smell of coal and the camaraderie of the railroad. So, in retrospect I've had some outstanding male role models - gentle and powerful men who took the time to tutor, shelter, explore with me and teach adventure and inquisitiveness to a toddler and then a youngster and then a kid and then a teenager. I miss my dad in some ways but I really miss both grand dads and Uncle Carl and Uncle Harold. Lucky for me Uncle Tom is still around and will be so for quite a while yet.
Of my cousins, both of Aunt Em's kids were there with their brood for a total of five additional cousins-once-removed. Uncle Tom (and Aunt Helene) were there but only one of their kids, the youngest - Pam - was there and so was her son, Mark, now the youngest at about 6. One of Aunt Pam's two boys showed up but not with his son, alas. Usually both her sons are there but schedule conflicts were in the mill this year. My next brother down was there with his wife and son (Leif's age) as was my youngest brother and his wife (no kids, yet, we're hoping though but they're busy with their restaurant business). So, if you count it all up, the entire Culbreth clan numbers four primary adults with one living spouse remaining for five, my cousins and siblings number nine (ten if John Thomas were alive), and our offspring number twelve. The total full-house clan would have 26 - there were 17 in attendance for part of all of the week. That's pretty good and actually a pretty typical number. These days we hold the reunion every other year - mostly to allow us to save the money to rent the houses and entertain ourselves for a week - it costs about two thousand dollars per primary household for these things and that's a lot of money for most of us. Plus, some of us travel a relatively great distance from Massachusetts or the District or Arizona or - these days - Washington state, and that's an added expense and time to take into account.
But, here's the essential lesson, by having these reunions basically our whole lives and the entire life of our children, we all - the primaries, my generation, our children, have an extended and valid family structure which is solid, tangible, and frequent enough for everyone to take note of growth and evolution and changes and to remind us all that we all truly do come from the same seed stock and that we do have these innate and inherent similarities which gives us our place on this planet - if not a solid reason - at least a solid foundation. We do know from where we came and we do have all these reminders of the way things "used" to be and how time changes everything and also heals lots of wounds. I've been to many a wedding involving the Culbreth clan and I've also been to many a funeral involving the Culbreth clan - but we're still related and we're still blood and we're still a family. We accept each other for all our faults and unglinesses and we continue to argue with each other over the most mundane of things as well as the non-mundane. Oh, and just so no one gets the mistaken idea that all Culbreth's are as wild, liberal and Marxist as I am, make no bones about it, me, Leif, Adam, and sometimes my next brother down (Michael), are usually held up as the outspoken liberals amongst the clan. They're not super conservative (though at least one cousin shows too many signs of fundamentalist religious infection) but rather probably pretty much like the rest of the country - middle of the road in their politics and their sociology and their philosophy. I, of course, always take these reunions as an opportunity to practice my liberalism and Marxist thoughts on my cousins and try and represent the "uncle" that my nieces and nephews think of as the "citified" liberal - but all I can do is really present another view, buttressed by my kids, of course, but each parent raises their kids according to their own philosophical and religious and sociological bent. And, to be honest, all my nieces and nephews (really first cousins once removed) have turned out pretty well and each get along with their "cousins" as well as I do with my cousins - which is damned well.
I think at this point most of us - the primaries and us cousins, are hoping that our kids will sustain this tradition and carry forth with the beach reunion just because of all the positive life values it has offered us through the decades. Each of us can remember times when we were "just kids" and doing this or that for the first time with a cousin and that's a good thing because family is both un-critical but also continuing - that is, as family we can forgive things we might do but we will remember and that knowledge of remembrance may or may not act as a check on some things we might do which we shouldn't. This is where the real family values of America lie - in real families teaching their kids and kin of the world and the ways one can tackle that world and how to react and survive. And just to be sure there are no Republicans out there who misconstrue this - one of my cousins is gay and has been for decades and there's nothing any of us wouldn't do for him if it came to that. And if he chose to marry someone we would all be there at the wedding, too. It's probably this which I think about more than anything - how liberal my clan really is when the push comes to shove - all our religious, political, economic and sociological theorizing goes out the door when it comes to the clan - we're as liberal in fact as I am in thought - and that's what really counts, that we stick together and stand up for each other and maintain our differences while we're building our commonalities.
So, I've got a pretty good family and am pretty happy with the way things have turned out for most of my kin - there's always the "I'd rather so-and-so would just do "this" or "that" " aspect but in the end I have no problem accepting any of my kin for who they really are and am equally pleased that they accept me for who I am, control-freak anal-compulsive raging liberal and all.
Like I said, more than most of you have known about me but considering the influence this family has had on me it's entirely relevant to who I am.
Now, what does one do for a week at the beach. Well, everyday we got wet - the Atlantic at the southern end of North Carolina has water temps in the low eighties - perfectly swimmable all the time. We'd go in early and late - depending really on how we felt when we got up. Some of us (not me) felt a compulsion to get wet every single day lest the beach be wasted. Me, I opted for those days when the surf was truly inviting and would go in for ninety minutes or so of body surfing - fighting the waves and winning some of the time and losing the wave and feeling "left behind" a lot of the time. All my kin are true water babies - none are afraid of the ocean or even rip currents and all are expert swimmers and relatively expert body surfers as well. We all also recognize the importance of not getting skin cancer so we all either limit our time or "goo" up with SPF-40 or above to keep the rays where they belong - in the air and not on our skin. For a lot of us, the family reunion is really our one big chance to enjoy the ocean and we relish that aspect so there's always this undercurrent of just how cool it is to be living in a house right on the beach and that thought never is far from our conversations. A few of my cousins and one aunt actually live on or within walking distance to a beach so this is not, perhaps, as big a deal but it's still treated as a big deal.
We go out to eat about every other day and eat in with one or another family in charge of the dinner for the eat-in days. We share expenses and baby-sitting or "kid" sitting - or as has become more the case recently - teenager watching. Last beach reunion, for instance, it was a battle between one cousin and her two daughters because the daughters wanted to have their belly buttons pierced and all but my cousin were in favor of it and my sons even accompanied them to witness this tribal ritual. Well, my cousin is fine with the belly jewelry now and it actually seems quite natural on my nieces - 'course I was part of the conspiracy which enabled them to get this done so it "would" seem natural to me. But, that's also part of what the beach reunions are about - a chance for the young'uns to test their mettle and to find support from other elements of their "family" even if their primary family has another view. Support mechanisms are strange and wonderful creations and family is the best of the lot.
So, what portends the future. Well, most of my cousins and I and our kids were relatively conscious that this may be one of the few remaining times when my mom and at least one of my aunts might be around so there was nothing outward expressed but a lot of inner thoughts from a lot of the young'uns to their aunts or grandma. As the eldest cousin I'm also conscious of the time when I'll be the oldest clan member and then my time will be coming due so there were a few morose thoughts I harbored as I thought forward. I could also remember when I was completely carefree and had only the upcoming return to school as a future worry. I suspect that the visit to the cemetery will have additional meaning for me at some point in the future. My mom's side lives long and lives well but my mom is now 87 and even if she lives to the 100 which I keep telling her is the earliest I'll accept her death, that's still only half-a-dozen more reunions. At least she's lived long enough to have all three of her children grow up and find spouses and have their own children and she's got three really great grandchildren who care a great deal about her - even if, as boys - or rather young men, they don't show it as they might. She's seen her siblings grow up and do well and have their own families with their own set of nieces and nephews (or once-removed, I get confused with all this first and second and once-removed stuff). And, in my mom's case, she's lived in Paris and Casablanca, seen pretty much all of France and Morocco, and a great deal of the rest of the world and a fair amount of the continent. She's happy, self-sufficient and self-capable - still, though my brothers and I wish she'd relent and at least consider living closer to one of us - but she's as stubborn as they come and as self-reliant as they come so there's very little we can do short of kidnapping her - and knowing her, she'd steal away and call the cops on us.
Next reunion will be summer of 2006 and already some of us have begun the planning phase (beach houses, particularly the ones we want, can go booked up to two years in advance) and some of us, including me, have already begun projecting what the next reunion will bring in terms of the evolution of our kin - we've got lots of the young'uns who are within arm's reach of finding the right spouse and that's always both exciting and fearful - exciting to meet the new people and fearful that mistakes will be made - but we're all human and mistakes are part of the genetic code so it's actually a fundamental element of life and growing up to make a series of mistakes - some minor and some major, but, with a family like mine we'll all know about it within a pretty short time no matter which.
By the way, it finally dawned on me - after being alive for 57 years - why I like mountains and the ocean equally well and really can't decide which I like the more. If the Scots genes are strong enough - and I'm betting they are - I have mountain and sea in my genes and am therefore drawn towards both equally. The great news about Seattle is that I've finally settled in a place where I can see the mountains and the sea in the same view.
Of course what's even weirder is that when I spent four months in Stavanger, Norway, back during the North Polar Ozone Expedition of 1989, I was fond of visiting the North Sea shoreline where Eric the Red staged his Scottish invasions and the moment I first was within eyesight of the sea at that landing spot I felt a kindred spirit and a familiarity with the smell and the salt spray and the wind and cold. I suppose it was all those raping and pillaging and plundering genes coming forth but I swear I'd been there before. Stavanger was Eric the Red's home base and it was from there that he attacked and raided the Scottish Highlands. There's so much about life which remains a mystery; but some of the mysteries seem to have a recurrent thread to them and so much of my life seems to involve unravelling those mysteries. Scottish I am, Irish I am, American I am, African I am, too. I'll leave to another posting to tell you how much kindredness I feel with certain animals - crows, spiders, hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), cats, dogs, wolves, squirrels and racoons, the eagles and falcons and hawks. And,someday, I'll begin work on my totem - an appropriate exercise for one living in the Northwest.
Part three will be a recounting of the trip back to Seattle from the beach with Adam and yet one more set of adventures through both the United States and Canada - but particularly, the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.
And, as previously promised, I'll get photos of all these things posted as soon as I actually get them processed (no, not through Wal-Mart, rather through Photoshop!).
Chas
More than you ever wanted to know about who I am, where I came from, and who my kin are - well, maybe not "more than you ever wanted to know" but certainly more than most of you have known anyway ('cept, of course, those who read or received this who ARE related to me - and y'all are used to my rants anyway...).
So, why North Carolina and why Wrightsville Beach? Well, my mom's family are Scottish and immigrated to these United States in the early 1700's and settled in at Scots Hill, North Carolina - a little podunk town about thirty minutes (today, a few hours back then) northeast of Wilmington. There's this neat little (original building, add-ons make it a huge) church, Presbyterian, which sits right off what had been the horse trail to Fayetteville but which is now four-lane divided US Highway 17. In that church's cemetery, which is so close to the highway that one can smell the fumes, are five or six generations of my precursors and their precursors - the clan name in the new world is Culbreth. That is a derivative of McCulbreth which is a derivative of Culbraith which itself is the derivative of the real Scots name which is Gilbraith. We hail from the Highlands, north of where Loch Ness empties into the North Sea.
On my mom's side, all my precursor kin were living and dying in the same part of Eastern Carolina. Jump forwards about three generations and we have my grandmother and grandfather Culbreth. Granddad worked for the then Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and Adelaide - his wife, my grandmom, was a stay-at-home mom who was the second youngest of - best as I can tell - about eleven siblings (no, remember they were Presbyterian!). My grandmom's youngest sister, Jeffords, who we all called Aunt Jeff despite the fact that she was our great aunt, eventually married and had one daughter. They built a really substantial brick and cinder block house on the inland waterway, on the sound side of Wrightsville Beach. As kids, me, my brothers and cousins all met once a year at Aunt Jeff's (and Uncle Shep's, too) beach house. It was a thirty minute walk over the causeway bridge to the beach or a five-minute drive in a car. The beach town, Wrightsville Beach, was pretty much all houses with a little grocery store, a few other amenities and a U.S. Post Office.
When Aunt Jeff (she outlived her husband, don't all women?) finally died, long after my grandmom and granddad had died, we - us cousins - decided that we really liked Wrightsville Beach because of all the memories and the fact that it was and still is a really nice beach town. No big ocean condos, no supermalls, no schlock and really nothing except what has grown up there organically. It's so unlike other beach towns. The closest other towns which are still like Wrightsville are Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Stone Harbor, New Jersey, and frankly that's about all I can think of. And even Rehoboth and Stone Harbor have boardwalks and fancy shops. Wrightsville Beach really only has beach-fronted houses and a main street set back about three blocks from the ocean. Well, that makes sense since "the city" is Wilmington and it's all of about fifteen minutes away by car and has pretty much anything one could or would want including the supermalls on the ourskirts and a stunningly restored turn-of-the-century waterfront on the Cape Fear River replete with fancy restaurants and clubs and a river walk.
So, that's why Wrightsville - it's "our" beach - me and my siblings and cousins and mom and aunts and uncles. And, it's close enough that a requisite visit to the family gravesite only takes a twenty or so minute car ride. Sad thing about the cemetery is that in addition to all the people who should be there - my great and great great granddads and grandmoms and great aunts and uncles, there's also one cousin - and sad even more is that he was the youngest of the cousins and was only a baby when I last saw him. He died at 19 of a brain tumor and I never really knew him beyond his being yet another cute cousin baby. There's a strange tale associated with my granddad and my cousin. My mom is the oldest of her family - at least she was by the time I was born, but she had an older brother named after my granddad - John Thomas Culbreth. Her older brother - an uncle I never knew - died at 19 of leukemia. In the graveyard is John Thomas Culbreth, my granddad, John Thomas Culbreth, my uncle that I never knew, and John Thomas Culbreth, my cousin that I barely knew. That always strikes me and makes me morose every time I visit the cemetery - not that they're dead, but rather that there are at least two John Thomas Culbreths that I never knew. My granddad was great - and I mean great - I was the first of my generation to be born and he took me everywhere - down to the railroad yards, around Wilmington, up and down 4th Street (where he and Adelaide and their kids lived) and out to the far-lying districts of Wilmington. Unbelievable as it sounds, I have vivid and accurate memories of when I was about 18 months old and from that point onward. I believe a lot of those memories are because my mom's dad took such a shine to me and literally took me under tow and introduced me to everyone he knew and everything he worked on. Back then and through the early parts of my high school years their house even still had outdoor plumbing and a pump in the kitchen for water. Hot water for baths was heated in a huge kettle on the stove and mixed with the pumped water in the tub. They did, eventually, get indoor plumbing and a hot-water heater and a television set - ours when we left for Europe when I was eight. Plus their youngest kid, my uncle Tom, had the world's greatest collection of 1940's and 1950's horror comic books which he delighted in showing me and two other cousins where they were. Ah, the fond memories of being a kid.
So, how many cousins and living aunts and uncles are left? Well, John Thomas and Adelaide had five children, four of whom are living - my mom, the oldest, Aunt Em (Emily) - second oldest, Aunt Pam (Pamela) - third oldest, and Uncle Tom - the baby. My mom had three boys, me and my two brothers; Aunt Em had one each boy and girl; Aunt Pam had two boys; and Uncle Tom had three daughters and the son who died. All my aunts and uncle were there even if only briefly in the case of Aunt Pam, who has recently suffered some severe but not crippling medical difficulties. Aunt Pam and Aunt Em's spouses have - alas - died (Uncle Carl and Uncle Harold respectively). I have great and extremely fond memories of both these uncles and both of them taught me things of value and interest from their respective worlds of being a hunting and fishing store owner and a Western Electric technician.
I've often said to many of you that my dad was one of a spate of "bad" dads who survived World War II. He was so many things wrong that it still makes my head spin to think about him. But, sometimes fate has a way of working these things out. My male adult models were my real uncle and the uncle husbands of my aunts (and to be frank, I didn't think about that aspect until recently, as far as I knew as a kid these were as uncle as it could be) and both my grand dads - my dad's dad was also a railroader - the Baltimore and Ohio - and he schlepped me back and forth on the train between Chillicothe and Dayton for about two years when we were living in Dayton, I was then between two and three, and yes, I have equally vivid memories of the roundhouse and the trains and the smell of coal and the camaraderie of the railroad. So, in retrospect I've had some outstanding male role models - gentle and powerful men who took the time to tutor, shelter, explore with me and teach adventure and inquisitiveness to a toddler and then a youngster and then a kid and then a teenager. I miss my dad in some ways but I really miss both grand dads and Uncle Carl and Uncle Harold. Lucky for me Uncle Tom is still around and will be so for quite a while yet.
Of my cousins, both of Aunt Em's kids were there with their brood for a total of five additional cousins-once-removed. Uncle Tom (and Aunt Helene) were there but only one of their kids, the youngest - Pam - was there and so was her son, Mark, now the youngest at about 6. One of Aunt Pam's two boys showed up but not with his son, alas. Usually both her sons are there but schedule conflicts were in the mill this year. My next brother down was there with his wife and son (Leif's age) as was my youngest brother and his wife (no kids, yet, we're hoping though but they're busy with their restaurant business). So, if you count it all up, the entire Culbreth clan numbers four primary adults with one living spouse remaining for five, my cousins and siblings number nine (ten if John Thomas were alive), and our offspring number twelve. The total full-house clan would have 26 - there were 17 in attendance for part of all of the week. That's pretty good and actually a pretty typical number. These days we hold the reunion every other year - mostly to allow us to save the money to rent the houses and entertain ourselves for a week - it costs about two thousand dollars per primary household for these things and that's a lot of money for most of us. Plus, some of us travel a relatively great distance from Massachusetts or the District or Arizona or - these days - Washington state, and that's an added expense and time to take into account.
But, here's the essential lesson, by having these reunions basically our whole lives and the entire life of our children, we all - the primaries, my generation, our children, have an extended and valid family structure which is solid, tangible, and frequent enough for everyone to take note of growth and evolution and changes and to remind us all that we all truly do come from the same seed stock and that we do have these innate and inherent similarities which gives us our place on this planet - if not a solid reason - at least a solid foundation. We do know from where we came and we do have all these reminders of the way things "used" to be and how time changes everything and also heals lots of wounds. I've been to many a wedding involving the Culbreth clan and I've also been to many a funeral involving the Culbreth clan - but we're still related and we're still blood and we're still a family. We accept each other for all our faults and unglinesses and we continue to argue with each other over the most mundane of things as well as the non-mundane. Oh, and just so no one gets the mistaken idea that all Culbreth's are as wild, liberal and Marxist as I am, make no bones about it, me, Leif, Adam, and sometimes my next brother down (Michael), are usually held up as the outspoken liberals amongst the clan. They're not super conservative (though at least one cousin shows too many signs of fundamentalist religious infection) but rather probably pretty much like the rest of the country - middle of the road in their politics and their sociology and their philosophy. I, of course, always take these reunions as an opportunity to practice my liberalism and Marxist thoughts on my cousins and try and represent the "uncle" that my nieces and nephews think of as the "citified" liberal - but all I can do is really present another view, buttressed by my kids, of course, but each parent raises their kids according to their own philosophical and religious and sociological bent. And, to be honest, all my nieces and nephews (really first cousins once removed) have turned out pretty well and each get along with their "cousins" as well as I do with my cousins - which is damned well.
I think at this point most of us - the primaries and us cousins, are hoping that our kids will sustain this tradition and carry forth with the beach reunion just because of all the positive life values it has offered us through the decades. Each of us can remember times when we were "just kids" and doing this or that for the first time with a cousin and that's a good thing because family is both un-critical but also continuing - that is, as family we can forgive things we might do but we will remember and that knowledge of remembrance may or may not act as a check on some things we might do which we shouldn't. This is where the real family values of America lie - in real families teaching their kids and kin of the world and the ways one can tackle that world and how to react and survive. And just to be sure there are no Republicans out there who misconstrue this - one of my cousins is gay and has been for decades and there's nothing any of us wouldn't do for him if it came to that. And if he chose to marry someone we would all be there at the wedding, too. It's probably this which I think about more than anything - how liberal my clan really is when the push comes to shove - all our religious, political, economic and sociological theorizing goes out the door when it comes to the clan - we're as liberal in fact as I am in thought - and that's what really counts, that we stick together and stand up for each other and maintain our differences while we're building our commonalities.
So, I've got a pretty good family and am pretty happy with the way things have turned out for most of my kin - there's always the "I'd rather so-and-so would just do "this" or "that" " aspect but in the end I have no problem accepting any of my kin for who they really are and am equally pleased that they accept me for who I am, control-freak anal-compulsive raging liberal and all.
Like I said, more than most of you have known about me but considering the influence this family has had on me it's entirely relevant to who I am.
Now, what does one do for a week at the beach. Well, everyday we got wet - the Atlantic at the southern end of North Carolina has water temps in the low eighties - perfectly swimmable all the time. We'd go in early and late - depending really on how we felt when we got up. Some of us (not me) felt a compulsion to get wet every single day lest the beach be wasted. Me, I opted for those days when the surf was truly inviting and would go in for ninety minutes or so of body surfing - fighting the waves and winning some of the time and losing the wave and feeling "left behind" a lot of the time. All my kin are true water babies - none are afraid of the ocean or even rip currents and all are expert swimmers and relatively expert body surfers as well. We all also recognize the importance of not getting skin cancer so we all either limit our time or "goo" up with SPF-40 or above to keep the rays where they belong - in the air and not on our skin. For a lot of us, the family reunion is really our one big chance to enjoy the ocean and we relish that aspect so there's always this undercurrent of just how cool it is to be living in a house right on the beach and that thought never is far from our conversations. A few of my cousins and one aunt actually live on or within walking distance to a beach so this is not, perhaps, as big a deal but it's still treated as a big deal.
We go out to eat about every other day and eat in with one or another family in charge of the dinner for the eat-in days. We share expenses and baby-sitting or "kid" sitting - or as has become more the case recently - teenager watching. Last beach reunion, for instance, it was a battle between one cousin and her two daughters because the daughters wanted to have their belly buttons pierced and all but my cousin were in favor of it and my sons even accompanied them to witness this tribal ritual. Well, my cousin is fine with the belly jewelry now and it actually seems quite natural on my nieces - 'course I was part of the conspiracy which enabled them to get this done so it "would" seem natural to me. But, that's also part of what the beach reunions are about - a chance for the young'uns to test their mettle and to find support from other elements of their "family" even if their primary family has another view. Support mechanisms are strange and wonderful creations and family is the best of the lot.
So, what portends the future. Well, most of my cousins and I and our kids were relatively conscious that this may be one of the few remaining times when my mom and at least one of my aunts might be around so there was nothing outward expressed but a lot of inner thoughts from a lot of the young'uns to their aunts or grandma. As the eldest cousin I'm also conscious of the time when I'll be the oldest clan member and then my time will be coming due so there were a few morose thoughts I harbored as I thought forward. I could also remember when I was completely carefree and had only the upcoming return to school as a future worry. I suspect that the visit to the cemetery will have additional meaning for me at some point in the future. My mom's side lives long and lives well but my mom is now 87 and even if she lives to the 100 which I keep telling her is the earliest I'll accept her death, that's still only half-a-dozen more reunions. At least she's lived long enough to have all three of her children grow up and find spouses and have their own children and she's got three really great grandchildren who care a great deal about her - even if, as boys - or rather young men, they don't show it as they might. She's seen her siblings grow up and do well and have their own families with their own set of nieces and nephews (or once-removed, I get confused with all this first and second and once-removed stuff). And, in my mom's case, she's lived in Paris and Casablanca, seen pretty much all of France and Morocco, and a great deal of the rest of the world and a fair amount of the continent. She's happy, self-sufficient and self-capable - still, though my brothers and I wish she'd relent and at least consider living closer to one of us - but she's as stubborn as they come and as self-reliant as they come so there's very little we can do short of kidnapping her - and knowing her, she'd steal away and call the cops on us.
Next reunion will be summer of 2006 and already some of us have begun the planning phase (beach houses, particularly the ones we want, can go booked up to two years in advance) and some of us, including me, have already begun projecting what the next reunion will bring in terms of the evolution of our kin - we've got lots of the young'uns who are within arm's reach of finding the right spouse and that's always both exciting and fearful - exciting to meet the new people and fearful that mistakes will be made - but we're all human and mistakes are part of the genetic code so it's actually a fundamental element of life and growing up to make a series of mistakes - some minor and some major, but, with a family like mine we'll all know about it within a pretty short time no matter which.
By the way, it finally dawned on me - after being alive for 57 years - why I like mountains and the ocean equally well and really can't decide which I like the more. If the Scots genes are strong enough - and I'm betting they are - I have mountain and sea in my genes and am therefore drawn towards both equally. The great news about Seattle is that I've finally settled in a place where I can see the mountains and the sea in the same view.
Of course what's even weirder is that when I spent four months in Stavanger, Norway, back during the North Polar Ozone Expedition of 1989, I was fond of visiting the North Sea shoreline where Eric the Red staged his Scottish invasions and the moment I first was within eyesight of the sea at that landing spot I felt a kindred spirit and a familiarity with the smell and the salt spray and the wind and cold. I suppose it was all those raping and pillaging and plundering genes coming forth but I swear I'd been there before. Stavanger was Eric the Red's home base and it was from there that he attacked and raided the Scottish Highlands. There's so much about life which remains a mystery; but some of the mysteries seem to have a recurrent thread to them and so much of my life seems to involve unravelling those mysteries. Scottish I am, Irish I am, American I am, African I am, too. I'll leave to another posting to tell you how much kindredness I feel with certain animals - crows, spiders, hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), cats, dogs, wolves, squirrels and racoons, the eagles and falcons and hawks. And,someday, I'll begin work on my totem - an appropriate exercise for one living in the Northwest.
Part three will be a recounting of the trip back to Seattle from the beach with Adam and yet one more set of adventures through both the United States and Canada - but particularly, the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.
And, as previously promised, I'll get photos of all these things posted as soon as I actually get them processed (no, not through Wal-Mart, rather through Photoshop!).
Chas
Posted: Sat - September 11, 2004 at 12:06 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