TOPSAIL ISLAND, N.C.--Walker Percy called it a repetition, going back to a place you've been to before. Not so much to see how it has changed but how you have. This time I've come to Topsail Island equipped with a wife, walker, and a sense of suspense at every step. Since my fall, I've come to realize that walking is essentially an arrested fall.
As soon as we land at Wilmington and head for the beach, there is a sense of the sea in the air, or perhaps it's just imagination. The weather is perfect for rain-lovers: drizzly, cool, overcast.
But there is disappointment, too. Highway 17 seems to have been spruced up. And nobody asked my permission. New franchises have sprung up all along the road. The vivid colors leap out at the eyes--glaring, stinging, painful. Like bad color pictures instead of the simple black-and-white halftones newspapers used to print. It's as though the narrow, twisting old two-lane had become New and Improved--cosmeticized. It is not an improvement. Not for those of us who like our South a little run-down, weather-beaten, familiar, unchanged except for some more wear-and-tear.
Happily, there's still a Harris Teeter grocery chain, the old drawbridge still cranks open to let boats pass, and seafood joints still line the main drag in our destination--Surf City--for not everything has changed. That's assuring. It's the way a repetition should be: the same and not the same, a testimonial to what has stayed as it was and a way to measure what hasn't--what James Branch Cabell called the malice of time. ("I have come back again, passing very swiftly over the grave of a dream and through the malice of time, to my Heart's Desire!"--Jurgen.)
There is a Blood Moon the night we pass the village of Topsail Beach--and no beach. By the time we get to Surf City the waves are lapping at our doorstep, swamping the island's narrow roads, reducing any pedestrians to dim figures by the side of the road sprayed by each passing car churning up the flooded streets. All is dark, shadowy, foreboding . . . .
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full,
and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach
By dawn's early light, the tide has receded, the horizon is visible again out to sea, and there is a beach again. The sound of the waves soothes instead of threatens. A few fishermen and early morning strollers pass by. By mid-morning, the tide has turned. And tonight there will be a total lunar eclipse of a supermoon. You can't say the weather here isn't dramatic.
For now Old Glory flaps from our balcony in the rippling breeze, the coffee is delicious, bidding us to have a second cup, and all is, if not well with the world, more than usually interesting. Looking out to sea, it occurs that there is nothing between us and Africa but open ocean. Straight ahead lie Casablanca and Tangier.
Our beachfront apartment (when there is a beachfront) comes fully equipped for the disabled, with grab bars everywhere you can grab, plus all the modern inconveniences, including television sets in the rooms. Though why anyone would want to turn on television when he can just look out any window and see the ever-changing vista along the shore after a storm mystifies me, as so many things do.
The storm may have passed now, but we are changed:
Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shore of your esteem
And its colours come back,
the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.
--W. H. Auden
There Will Be No Peace
At the grocery store in the middle of town, we look for the local papers. (You can buy the Wall Street Journal or New York Times anywhere.) So we pick up copies of the Star-News and News & Observer. Neither reveals the city where they're published--at least not in their masthead--and we're reduced to guessing: Wilmington? Charlotte? It's not immediately apparent. It's symptomatic of ModAmerica's loss of the sense of place. In his ever-relevant little classic, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy has his narrator, good ol' Binx Bolling, try to explain what is meant by a sense of place, and why it matters so much to Southerners like him:
"Not in a thousand years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere."
Douglas Southall Freeman, biographer of Lee and Washington and long-time editor of the Richmond News-Leader, understood. "I think the American people lose a large part of the joy of life because they do not live for generations in the same place."
And now we are here on once distinctive Topsail Island trying to figure out where these placeless newspapers come from. Eventually we do, but for a while there, we might as well be buying a copy of USA Today at an airport. Anonymous USA has struck again, leaving behind a shiver of dread. For who will we be if we don't know where we belong?
Me, I soon find a source of real news, local news.
Local news bears the same relation to national-and-world news as local produce does to the kind of cardboard tomatoes shipped in from California, which is why the Pender-Topsail Post & Voice, "The Media of Record for the People of Pender County," soon becomes my favorite publication hereabouts, complete with its police reports and obituaries. Much like Binx, some of us need to know where we are to be who we are.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 10/07/2015