Back To The 60's

You can't go home again.

 The deer freely roam into my campsite looking for handouts. I refuse to feed the wildlife. It's illegal, it's against mother nature, but so many tourists have fed the deer that they just show up completely unafraid looking for human handouts.

I watched some tourists feeding the deer potato chips, Doritos and cheese puffs. One crazy lady was putting junk food on her lips and having the deer snatch it out of her lips while her friends took pictures.

Humans are a strange lot.

 Back in the 60's my family rented a cabin on this sea island several summers in a row for a week or two. I fell in love with the ocean, boats and beaches. Our cabin rental was very basic. The furniture and kitchen equipment was mismatched ancient left overs. Forks didn't match, plates were an odd assortment of different patterns and sizes. Beds were creaky and banana shaped.

My mother taught me how to go crabbing, catch crab, cook crab, clean crab and eat crab. I ran or swam up and down the beach barefoot letting my skin turn a deep golden brown. I built sandcastles that were swept away by the tides. I skipped across the tidal flats splashing through the waters studying wildlife. I hauled a fair mountain of seashells back to the cabin for further study. When a jellyfish stung me I screamed my head off then returned to the ocean the next day, the sting a forgotten memory.

The cabin was on stilts, no phone, no TV, no stereo, no radio and of course decades before internet. We played cards at night, read books, tried to put together picture puzzles that were always missing a few critical pieces. We used citronella candles to try to combat the mosquitoes. Indeed our cabin had a name sign out front "Mosquito Haven". Sometimes there were power outages or water outages or both.

One time the rangers tried to make us leave because hurricane Camille was on her way. My father steadfastly refused. In those days you could stand up to authority without fear of being shot. The island emptied out. The draw bridge was left open, there was no way for us to escape. I was hoping the hurricane would destroy the bridge so we could live on that island forever, all alone like Swiss Family Robinson. The hurricane missed the island and we did get a few days of true heaven, being the only island residents other than the ranger.

Plumbing had been made available inside the cabin, but underneath the cabin in the shade of the stilts was the old water hand pump. As a child I used to furiously pump it dozens of times to try to get a little bit of water to come out of it. It gave me a new appreciation for the miracle of faucets and water pressure.

I cried every time we went home. I knew one day I would find a way to live on boats afloat or at the beach or on or near the ocean.

As an adult, my second career took me to the Caribbean and other far flung ports where I did indeed live and work on boats, lived on oceans and later my third career enabled me to  live by the sea. But I always wanted to return to that cabin where my childhood was magical for one or two weeks for a few glorious summers in my early life.

 Above is a picture of the old cabin road. It's pretty much obliterated now, just a distant memory of a time gone by. The cabin we rented was a few hundred yards from the ocean. We couldn't even see the ocean from the cabin but we could often hear it. We took a long path through the sand dunes to reach the beach. Our dog ran free, no leash laws then. We rarely ever saw anyone else on the beach.

 Over the decades mother nature reclaimed her sand dunes moving further inland until dozens of cabins literally fell into the ocean. None were allowed to rebuild. In the picture above is one remaining cabin, standing in the ocean. It used to be hundreds of yards inland!

The cabins were all built on land leases, whenever a land lease would expire, the state park would take back the land. For awhile they rented out the remaining cabins, but as the ocean began claiming them, they were not rebuilt or replaced.

 This glorious tree used to be in the back yard of a cabin several hundred yards from the ocean. Now high tide come up to the tree exposing her roots.

The stilts on the cabin shown is not the cabin we rented. Matter of fact, those stilts were half buried deep into the sand and the ocean was far away. The dead trees litter the newly reclaimed dunes and beach providing eerie artwork formed by mother nature.

Life is goof.

Thank you for stopping by. 

We woke up alive and life is goof!

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