Highjacked OBX Style

Life, it would seem, requires a navigator for the horrors of aging.  The wisdom of our elders is often irrelevant in this rapidly evolving mosaic, like predicting and interpreting the next pattern in a kaleidoscope.  They can tell us those symptoms of aging.  Which stage is next according to how it has happened before, but only if they choose to share their experience.  And if they do, then how to deal with these mortifications, in these modern times, we have to pay some certified life coach who is probably 20 years younger than us and centuries less frustrated. 

An unworthy tug boat, a heavily laden barge, and mostly uncharted waters.  

Women especially have been ill prepared. It is indelicate to speak of such things.  The term menopause (the ceasing to menstruate- confirmed after 365 period-less days) coming up briefly in health class perhaps after weeks of discussing cycles and fertility, getting pregnant and the more important prevention of said pregnancy.  No one ever said the word perimenopause, not even in nursing school.  Peri- menopause being the time (months to 10 yrs!!) of transition to that final menstrual cycle (and then full year) when you finally briefly reach menopause and immediately become post- menopausal. It is the stage where some of us feel like we are descending into some psychedelic circle of hell. That which once made sense, is turned upside down and inside out and our mind can no longer think clearly enough to remember this is our new reality. So like a goldfish or Frosty the Snowman, we freshly discover how insane we feel every day with newborn shock. And despite all the Sex and the City of it all, we are less Samantha and more like Pearl the movie.

A woman I know, post-menopausally, has decided not to dye her hair, declining to hide one of the signs of a woman’s inevitable decent to the final 3rd of life without reproductive viability.  She says that older women would make the best spies, as a gray haired woman is invisible. For the most part she feels no longer taken seriously sexually or even intellectually, by both men and woman, and yet she likes it that way. She believes she can fly under the radar to strike those unsuspecting blows.  I was aghast when I heard her theory, but the more I watch and think about it , she has a point.  The antiaging industry is humungous. We spend so much money on anti-aging products and procedures, without any major improvements except to maybe look like a strange pulled, puffy and pinched version of our younger selves.  I have cringed at photos of myself lately because no matter how hard I try,  my hormones are slowly baking me into a giant walking brioche roll with stick arms and a waddle for a neck, like a character from Adventure Time. Is the evolutionary purpose of this to inspire the other humans to cast the old ladies out of the people herd in shear disgust? Hens that no longer lay eggs are destined for the soup pot. Most females in the animal kingdom die immediately when they reach their version of menopause and can no longer add to the genetic pool.  Cementing a fear that we cease to matter, or provide any benefit to the world other than the creation of dirt when we can no longer provide progeny. 

So if I were an optimist, I might say that evolution just has not caught up with the times. Obviously human women are not completely useless when they reach a certain age. These times they are a changing, and the complications of this social life we have created has made us indispensible as well as the job in general more difficult. A new term making a splash in this modern culture is the “Sandwich Generation”.  Gen Xers and Millennials finding that rock and hard place between caring for aging parents and not yet independent children.   Ever increasing financial pressure, inability to miss a paycheck,  and added caregiver burdens bearing down- Queen could write another verse to the song.  Some men are the designated caregivers, but I am betting the role falls far more often on the ladies. We are the Sandwich Generation, caught in middle age and likely peri-menopausal with all that entails. We are seeing a human dilemma emerging like the unstoppable roll from season to another season. Fleetwood Mac asks “can I handle the seasons of my life?”.  As I write this, the season is seeing that autumnal change, much like a human life stage. Past the growing and flowering, shuttering the tree limb windows and making ready for the sleep of winter  October to November, from Spooky to Thankful.  Yet, I want to look back to this Summer, 2026. 

A fully loaded hoagie sub (Refer to Sandwich Gen above) makes its way down the Garden State Parkway, pitstops near Ocean City MD and continues to charge southward down the eastern coast like a blip on the radar, ever closer to her final destination.  The Outer Banks, North Carolina, 3 miles wide at their girthiest and less than an American football field at their narrowest.  They are without a foundation of bedrock and slowly crawling, grain by grain of sand, toward the mainland Carolina.  A glacial journey of cohesion. 

Just offshore is The Graveyard of the Atlantic.  The perilous Diamond Shoals, an ever shifting sea floor beyond these thin barrier islands that are strung together like sausage links.  These Islands of Holocene sand bars below and peeking just above the Atlantic waves, creating a protective forcefield a few miles off the mainland of the state, previously, colony- of North Carolina.  [Carolina- named in feme-Latin style to honor King Charles the deuce of England.]

In the 1700s the waterways off North Carolina saw an ant line of merchant ships pass by on the way to various colonies up and down the East Coast America. Ocean rivers and inlets allowing access to the inland settlers.  Despite the ideal route, this coast was the enemy of large floating vessels.  Ever changing channels, hidden shallows, high stormy seas and wind chewed many a ship to splinters.  A lost cause often held fast in the shoals as the waves broke it apart and cast wood, canvass, goods, gold, men, women and children to a salty grave.  A black hole of sodden quartz particles, that will still occasionally vomit a chunk of ancient wooden hull up to shore. 

The Outer Banks of NC are famous for a few things- Shipwrecks and the Lifeboat Stations that came later, The Brothers Wright, Riptides, 3 enduring lighthouses, and Pirates. Pirate ships were easily hidden in bays and those sea rivers ,ready and drooling to Jack in the Box out on an unsuspecting merchant vessel.  The people that first lived on the OBX were not wealthy.  Many probably shipwrecked themselves, their homes built with the bones of scavenged wreckage.  Their “wealth” coming from the sea, and for some OuterBankers, this source of livelihood led them down the road to piracy- sometimes from the land, sometimes from the sea, or sometimes just aiding and abetting the one doing the pirating.

Pirates, for a time, were seen as an equalizing force like Robin Hood.  Providing the poor some of which they stole and plundered from some far away royal or merchant.  Most pirates would die young, or at least soon after their piratical career commenced, plagued by political statements requiring rotting corpses hung by their ragged fractured necks at the end of a noose.  Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, probably the most famous pirate that hunted the North Carolina coast, was really only plaguing the seas for about 2 years before he was executed.

During the heyday of pirates, the Outer Banks were mostly deserted. Beaches and dunes and scrubby woods. Today, they are a string of vacation towns and few residents. The main road through the Northern Beaches and Hatteras Island divides oceanfront from bayfront, and is often washed out by storms.  Boxy houses on stilts line either side.  A Super Wings pops up every 5 minutes down the road in case you missed the last one. [Super Wings is not a chicken restaurant as I first thought but OBX souvenirs, clothes and beach supplies, cheap but not really inexpensive.]  Looking for a Dunkin Donuts?  Forget it, but Duck Donuts are a tasty alternative if you like a freshly made plain cake donut covered in pretty much any topping you can imagine.  You can still see the occasional left over homemade Trump 2017 signage fading at the roadside. But for all the modern housing and commercial whatnots, you can be assured that this is the most Haunted of places.  

I don’t just mean the nightly scuttling of the ghost crabs. How could this place not be haunted?  A brutal history, with so many lives lost, leading to strange happenings, and tales of the unexplainable passed down for centuries.  Ghosts on the shore.  A figure in white proceeded by the scent of flowers. A flaming ship seen sailing, unconsumed, on the first new moon of the month of September; the passengers seeking home and revenge for the theft of their riches and lives while they slept below deck.   Mad Mag, an old woman walking the dusty roads at sunset or shrieking over the graves in the cemetery, unable to leave a land that was never meant to be hers in the first place. 

And this is where we docked the SS Minivan at twilight.  3 pairs of consecutive generations-  Gen Z/ Alpha angst, Gen X fog and fatigue, and Boomer wilting, toasted with mayo. We were returning after many years away, to revisit some of my childhood vacation memories.  Thanksgivings spent here after my aunts moved away, and summer weeks visiting friends who had moved to be residents here. Appropriately, my first menstrual cycle made its surprise appearance here when I was 12 years old. I had not been back here for 20 years.
The drive had been rather exhausting.  Long and relentless.   I was relieved to stop the parental profanity avoidance that makes me sound like a crazy person during the frustration of close-quarter sibling rivalry.  “Leave your brother alone you little shi-iny… ba-th toy, for f- luff’s sake!

The humid air hit us like stepping into quick-sand.  The high sand dunes blocked any relieving breeze from the ocean.  Immediately the ghouls and ghosts descended.  Drawn to our lifeblood, hungry for one more taste of the living.  The mosquitos, those bloody, brazen, insatiable mosquitos.   The first few days of our beach vacation, our skin resembled a near anaphylactic event; hive like lesions along the backs of our legs and arms. Sneaky ghosts attacking in packs from behind to avoid a sighting and consequential smushing. Step into the light you little mother f-luffer.  

There was a light.  A brief circular flash of photon purity.  It drew our eyes to the dark silhouette of the dunes every few minutes it was there and then gone.  Predictable.  Illuminating, comforting. The Hatteras Lighthouse.  She, a historical gem, has been saved from collapsing into the sea, lifted and transplanted inland, as the hungry ocean slurps away at the borders and beaches further acoast. Despite the modern tech, the local boat captains sometimes still rely solely on her light to navigate the shoals during storms, the tech becoming less reliable inside the Nor’Easter wind, rain, and waves.  She now stands unclothed on her safer patch. Her usual white black spiral dress gone to reveal the underlying rusty brick skeleton. Massive structural renovations to keep her standing tall. Lady Hatteras still matters, still has purpose, and will continue to be loved by the locals and thousands of visitors every year.  Her renovations are not for vanity, or to keep her young, but rather to be upright, strong, present.  

My clan settled into our temporary digs  –  one of trillions of those multistoried homes with lifted skirts and wading shoes ready for rising waters.  A small pool in the back yard, a new trend in OBX rentals, warning against any sand in the filters  In fact almost everything in the rental was labelled with a warning.  The pillows with DO NOT REMOVE in bold sharpie.  A note at the washing machine that most likely it will not be there for long, as us people use too much water and clog it with sand.  We felt slightly offended given the obvious lack of investment in the building-  Unslidable sliding doors, wobbly handrails, the decking cracked and splintering, the outside lighting spotty and burnt out, a lack of freaking beach chairs (for fluff’s sake), and the lidless garbage-can subject to raccoon pillaging nightly.   We were on the oceanfront side of the main road.  The dunes hiding the beach and protecting the house.  Body surfing was the main event on the beach, and once we were visited by the mother of all phantoms- a breaching giant sea ray- black and huge against a gray unsettled sky.  She graced us, and only us, for a singular moment, leaving us questioning whether we saw what we saw.  

One day we took the 45 minute ferry ride to the Isle of Ocracoke, being only just a few miles from the end of Hatteras Island, the ride should be shorter, but the Ferry has to dock miles inland and move way out through the bay and loop around to the other end of Ocracoke to avoid running itself aground and becoming part of the graveyard of ships out there. We were accompanied partway by a pod of dolphins, and skirted a very shallow sand bar with the corpses of ancient skeletal trees.  Ocracoke was a favorite island of pirates before it was thickly settled, including BlackBeard and his cohorts.  William Howard, who sailed with BlackBeard, eventually settled there with a government pirate pardon, and his family name lives on to this day.  Howard’s Pub, an institution restaurant and bar, never closes down for the winter unlike most of the businesses on the island, it serves up a mean hush puppy, hosts local bands, and happens to source its hard cider from the great state of NY.  The walls are pasted with college banners from all over the US and the waitstaff is sweet as pie. Except for Howard’s, the lighthouse and light keepers house, and the tiny pirate museum, Ocracoke was disappointingly posh, touristy, and lacked the homey feeling of my childhood.  If you ever choose to visit, beware of the many golf carts that are now the transport of choice for renters.  For some reason a seasoned car driver becomes completely unhinged and without common sense when placed behind the wheel of a golf cart. 

My mother took all the changes to the island hard.  My parents are now in their 80s.  Still mobile and non-senile,  but no longer their younger selves other than inwardly.  They consider every event as maybe the last time this thing will happen.  My father attempted to get into the ocean, perhaps for the last time, and the waves nearly made it the last day of anything ever.  My mother gets offended when offered help.  This world has no patience for older people, and I find myself rushing to help do something they can do themselves, just slower.  I am thankful for these two people who have been a consistent support system whenever and wherever I have needed them.  I am honored to help them now, in any way they will let me, despite still needing them so very much.  

Our trip to the Outerbanks this year was difficult, wonderful, and eye-opening. I daily feel like my body has been highjacked by pirates.  I have run aground on an underwater island and waves are slowly battering away at my reserves.  Stevie Nicks supposedly had a hard time with this aging mess too.  I have suddenly become so vulnerable, irritable, and impatient. My life has not been built around caring for myself, but rather orbits around others and regards radical self care as selfishness. Shouldn’t someone have warned me this was coming?  Where is the peri-menopausal lighthouse while my radar is malfunctioning? Will I still be desirable and useful or even Me when I finally drag myself ashore from this storm?  Can I handle the seasons of my life…?

I hope to be me, but freer, on the other side of this hill, this trial, this shipwreck.  I will not be Mad Mag, screaming at my disappointments for all eternity, I want to be matron, wisdom, solid, sane… though perhaps I should lower the bar slightly.  BlackBeard rampaged the seas for a short 2 years, but the people of North Carolina lived with pirates for 30-40yrs at least.  I should be able to handle these hormonal tides for a time.  Or maybe I will become a pirate.  I will Highjack this narrative and hunt down the misinformation and bias with my gray haired sisters in uterus, our battle cry “Towanda!!”; our flag the ovary and crossbones. Or… I can calmly sail forth, seeking what light and wisdom I can from my elders, peers, and educated medical professionals.  Unless of course they try to take away the booze and the chocolate, then a pirate’s life’s for me…

References:

Sledge, Joe (2024) Pirates in the Mists, Pirates and Villains Across the North Carolina Coast; Gravity Well Books
Corinna, Heather (2021) What Fresh Hell Is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You  HatchetteGo, Hatchette Books