Chris Bickford

It was a historic day for the world; perhaps the largest planned historical event ever. Nearly two million people in attendance, billions more watching on television sets around the world, or tuning in on radios and computers…It was a day of a dream coming to fruition, of a nation re-asserting to the world that it still has the potential to be that shining beacon of nations it has been for so long, a magnificent experiment in democracy and progress that somehow continues to survive and lead the world.

I wanted to be there. I wanted to be part of that happy multitude of supporters and celebrants; I wanted to feel that I was among like-minded people, to feel for once that I was not on the outside, to wave an American flag amidst the throng and feel that doing so was an act of pride and unity, not a veiled act of hatred and aggression towards the “other”…I wanted to hear that change has come, that yes we can take this country back and be once again a nation of ethics and principles, a nation of good will, a nation of innovation and cooperation; a nation of true democracy.

Unfortunately, I had matters to attend to at home, and so January 20 found me driving the quiet roads of the Outer Banks as a snowstorm descended on our little community. It was a beautiful omen, and some small consolation for not making it up to Washington. A good snowstorm on the Outer Banks is a once-every-five-year occurrence, and what it does to the dunes and beaches here is marvelous to see.

There was another inauguration happening as well, on the OBX. David Alan Harvey, a photographer who needs no introduction, had just moved into his new house, a beautiful old-school Nags Head style Cottage Row house from the turn of the century. Just across the street from the dunes pictured below, three doors down from his son Bryan and Bryan’s girlfriend Michelle. David and a small group of friends and family spent the weekend hanging out by the fire, smudging the rooms, doing our best to impart the new space with good juju, while Bryan and his longtime friend Scooter worked to put in new windows, plug up holes, tear down walls, and insulate wherever possible.

So in honor of new beginnings, of beauty and hope in the depths of darkness, here are a few mementos of Inauguration Day, OBX style. Despite the wintry chill of these times we face, there is still light and life, still hope, and still opportunity. We just have to dress warmly and stay close to the people that matter to us. Spring will come, it always does.

Autumn is drawing to a close, and with it the convergence of warm water, tropical storms, and nor-easters that make it the best surf season on the Outer Banks. The long Indian Summer has faded, the winds are getting stronger and more biting, the long afternoons of surfing after work have ended with Daylight Savings Time. The committed are stepping into wetsuits, still damp and cold from the last session, and bracing for the first duck-dive into burly waves for the punishing paddle-out. It only gets colder from here on out, and the faster you get used to it, the less time you’ll lose procrastinating. Now’s the time of year when that old wetsuit you’ve been meaning to replace really starts to show its age and you have to ponder whether or not to spend a few hundred bucks on a new one that will keep you warm all winter, or keep wearing that same ripped-up, water-swallowing sack of rubber. A smart investor would put the money on the new suit, knowing that the payback will be more time spent in the water; still, facing a long winter of no money coming in, on the heels of a slow summer and an abysmal economy, it may mean the difference between surfing and eating…or at least drinking…

Still, it’s been a good season. A little windy perhaps–okay, REALLY f-ing windy–but there have been some fine swells coming through and a lot of great fall weather. Who knows what kind of winter we will have. Bets are on it being a cold one, since we’re due for one. Hopefully, though, the cold snaps will be broken with a few of those sublime winter warm-spells, where it gets up into the ’70s and the winds lay back and the beaches fill with locals walking dogs, collecting sea-shells, and just enjoying a little bit of respite before the next nor-easter drives them off the beach again.

All Hallow’s, The Day of the Dead, The Night of the Living Dead, Samhain, All Soul’s Eve…Celebrations for those who have lived and died on this earth are as old as human memory. Whether they ascend to heaven, descend into hell, live in limbo among the shadows of our earthly existence, or are reborn into new bodies, the fate of those who have gone before us will always remain a mystery to the living. Their absence haunts us; evidence of their existence lives on in written records, artifacts, individual and cultural memories…We are who we are because of those who have lived, died, fought, discovered, loved, given birth, raised families, developed languages, sciences, religions, and paved the way of human development for us, their descendants. Yet, they are all, without exception, gone. Dead. Vanished. Never to be upon this earth again. Never to be heard from, spoken to, touched, loved again.

Or are they?

We may ponder the question until we also die; we may build religions and cults around our feeble guesses as to what happens to the dead; we can conduct scientific experiments, though they are of little use beyond the world of energy and matter. But there is one thing for sure, the dead live on in the souls of the living. Perhaps only as mere memory, myth, history, the accumulation of culture; or perhaps in a more supernatural collective consciousness. Regardless of how, in what form, or to what degree, something lingers; and it is only fitting that we celebrate that “lingering” in ritual and festivity.

My very first memory is of Halloween. I was three years old, dressed in a Superman costume with a plastic pumpkin, standing at the top of the stairs urging my mom to hurry up and change my younger brother’s diapers so she could take me trick-or-treating. For a child, Halloween is certainly the most numinous of all holidays. And not just for the candy or the cool costumes; there is something strange and magical that children see in this night–a magic that is often lost as we enter adulthood and are confronted with the fact that the ancient holy holiday has become little more than an excuse for kids to eat sugar, and young adults to dress up like vampires and whores, get drunk, and with any luck, get laid.

But perhaps this is not so far from the point of Halloween after all. To dance, drink, eat, indulge in the pleasures of the flesh: is this not what the dead would have us do to celebrate them? Perhaps by donning strange costumes–of ghosts, skeletons, vampires, angels–we are inviting the dead to live through us, just one night; to experience all the magic and sensuousness of life. And perhaps we too enter into their world, just a little, by losing ourselves in the “little deaths” of intoxication and abandonment. And so the ancient idea of a night where the space between the living and dead is open and permeable, if only briefly…

Well, it’s a nice idea at least, and without a doubt a great excuse for a party.

This year I spent Halloween in New York City, where the living and dead are stacked high one on top of the other. I walked the famous Halloween Parade, New York’s only night-time parade; and followed the crowd to the after party at Webster Hall (ahem), I mean “Webster Hell”. It was a warm night, just days before a historic election, and the energy was high; crowds were unprecedented, as it was also a Friday night. Here are a few keepers culled from a ridiculous amount of crap. Enjoy.

The Atlantic’s famed “nor’easters” are the great double-edged sword of a surfer’s life on the Outer Banks. Their constant pounding slowly erodes the beach and breaks down the sandbars, and they can blow for days, making the ocean too rough to surf, swim, or do anything but wait. In the wintertime, they bring cold, damp, chill-you-to-the-bone winds and drive everyone indoors, where some resort to drink, some to smoke, some to TV…the dedicated hit the gym, and the lucky ones hole up with their current squeeze, engaging in indoor recreational activities.

But once the wind stops blowing, and a lighter or westerly wind “cleans up” the ocean surface, that’s when the fun happens. The crazy, confused, stormy soup of whitewater and foam organizes into clear lines of swell, and the the two roads that run the length of the beach surge with vehicles toting boards—boards on racks, boards in the back of pickup trucks, boards hanging out the side windows of compact cars. Most are heading south, to the famed breaks of Hatteras Island, though many of the locals will be hitting their favorite sandbars in town, unmolested by aggro day-trippers from Virginia Beach and Richmond, who descend on more famous breaks in droves and act like they own the place.

On a big day, the hardcore converge wherever the wave is the gnarliest–usually somewhere in the vicinity of Rodanthe, the easternmost point of the state, where the deep water of the Atlantic slams right up against the unprotected barrier islands, creating big, fast, fat-lipped beachbreak barrels that require lightning reflexes and a fair bit of cojones to ride. The most famous spot, and often the best, is S-Turns (local Rodanthe-ites call it “S-curves”), the spot at the northern end of town, now immortalized by a chick-flick that features the famous “Serendipity” beach cottage that marks Rodanthe like a beacon when you are driving south through miles of empty national seashore.

Surfers are notoriously protective of their “spots”, but I give nothing away by talking about S-turns in such detail. It is the most overexposed surf spot on the East Coast. On a good day, the dune will be lined with photographers standing behind four-foot lenses on tripods, firing away on motor-drive. The side of the road will be lined with parked cars, surfers changing in and out of boardshorts and wetsuits, chattering on cell phones and high-fiving about the sick waves they caught. There will be spectators, girlfriends in bikinis, a crew of guys who’ve already surfed drinking beers and howling at the crazy drops and sick barrels being caught offshore.

This past month, we were forced to endure 12 straight days of howling onshore northeast winds before it cleaned up. At one point, winds were sustained at about 40 mph for two days straight, and the ocean threatened to swallow us all in its anger. The fishing piers shook with the force of the incoming swells, and oceanfront houses were battered with storm surge. But finally the storm died and we were rewarded with one day of big, heavy, perfect surf…followed by one or two days of fun, juicy surf. The following shots are from those few days. We are all anxiously waiting the next nor’easter or tropical system to blow through, because since then it’s been pretty flat around here.

For a little bit more information on the project, see the post below entitled “Surf/Life”…

Even if you live here year-round, you know that the Outer Banks is a summer place. Much as we love our uncrowded and beautiful off-season, we all know that we owe everything to Summer, for without it this place would not survive. Summer is when the Outer Banks comes alive, when the cash rolls in, when the beaches fill with colorful umbrellas and pasty families that turn beet red by Tuesday, then dark tan just as it’s time to leave…Summer is when the road gets congested and everybody curses Pennsylvania drivers (it is a well-accepted public opinion around here that Pennsylvania drivers are the worst)…Summer is when the college kids come down and rent houses on our streets, crank their music in the wee hours and party on their front porches like they were still at the frat house…Summer is a time of new friends, new love, crazy nights, trips “down south”, and barbecue afternoons. We measure the years in summers, for though the off-seasons are all pretty much the same, each summer is unique. Summer is a time of hot sultry days and sea-breezy nights…a time of earth-shaking thunderstorms that sweep in out of nowhere with cooling winds, chiaroscuro skies, and a fireshow over the ocean at night. Summer is a time of transitions, life changes, discoveries…A time of longboards, flat spells, and mind-blowing sunsets. Okay, every season here is a season of mind-blowing sunsets, but summer’s sunsets have a special character about them…

This summer on the Outer Banks was a bit slow. The economy is down, both the summer kids and the weekly family renters can’t afford much more than rent anymore, so the restaurants and bars have been pretty quiet. It’s also been a strange time for my little community of friends, as many of us are dealing with changes, transitions, scaling back on extravagance, finding other ways to make money, dealing with personal and relationship problems…For me this summer was the culmination of a long and difficult period of change, and I suffered kicking and screaming all the way through it. Eventually life forces you to deal with loss; it is part of the passage of life. Some losses are easier than others, but one thing is guaranteed, and that is that no loss you have yet suffered in your life will be the greatest. Life saves that one for the end. And as some people wiser than me have often said, it is those difficult passages in life that offer the greatest opportunities for communing with your deepest self, and discovering places in your soul you’ve never explored before.

I have been blessed with a number of caring, insightful friends who helped me through this time, and for them I will always be grateful. Most of them are represented in this post, and this is my little thank-you for them. The compassion and thoughtfulness they have shown me have been life-affirming, and I only hope I can return the favor any ole time, and we can keep spreading that thing outward in our world, because that’s the thing…

Here’s a little excerpt from the book companion to the “Alchemy Cards”, a set of Tarot-inspired divination cards using archetypal symbols. My friend Michelle pulled the “Open Heart” card for me one afternoon at the beach, and it became my symbol for this time:

“Love is as close as the air we breathe, as natural as the rising and falling of the waves, as simple as the sun’s rays caressing the earth, yet with our dualistically inclined minds, we make it something complicated, remote, and ultimately, unattainable. Indeed, ignorance about the true nature of love is the single greatest cause of human suffering. So, let us be more careful and contemplative in our approach to love. Imagine for a moment that love has two dimensions: the horizontal, confined and enclosed by time and space; and the vertical, representing the infinite, eternal link with the spirit. Human love often gets caught up in the horizontal zone, fostering the desire to own, possess, and control one’s “love object”. Such strategies, motivated by fear, are doomed to fail.

“Aphrodite offers love to humanity from the vertical plane. Her love is unbound by time; it is endless, eternal, and deeply fulfilling. It embraces each of us every moment of every day. It resides in the cave of our heart and expands outward, unconditinally, once the virtue of self-love has been mastered within the soul body of the individual. The archetypal qualities of Aphrodite’s love arise from the transcendent realm of non-duality and freedom. Unification with her love engenders wholeness, for she bridges the polar opposites of masculine and feminine within her golden light.

“You are invited into the golden chambers of the Love Goddess. Let the elixir of love that that Aphrodite pours into your heart chalice overflow with sensuality, freedom, generosity, and unconditional love for yourself and others…Dare to be the rapturous beauty that lives in your heart.

Amidst all the blues and hard times, we did manage to have some fun this summer. Tiki parties, music gigs, concerts in Virginia, happy hour at the Harveys’, the first annual OBX Pier-to-Pier swim, frisbee afternoons on the beach, and lots of small surf. Having fun in the summer is an obligation here sometimes; sometimes you’d rather sit on the couch with the A/C cranking and feel miserable about your sorry life. But you live at the beach. You are required by law to play…