North of Front Street
Although this story contains actual things from the world in which we live, including towns, places, and events, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional, not based on any real person, and any resemblance to an actual person is entirely coincidental. The events depicted are entirely the product of my imagination.
I pulled slowly out of the east gate at Lejeune and turned right on 24. It would be a about 45 minutes of looking out for troopers and local officers at the usual ambush sites. The key was to set the cruise control to 64 — nine miles per hour above the 55 mph speed limit — and you were golden. How did I know this?
One of our Marines had gotten out and become a North Carolina state trooper, doing very well for himself. On his first visit back, I asked him for the inside scoop; why the hell did they patrol the stretch of state highway between the base and the town I lived in — Morehead City — with such a vengeance? Why had I been given more tickets in a year than I had gotten in the previous decade?
He laughed. “How fast were you going, Sir.” “Usually only 10 or so over. Okay maybe between 65–70, but how can anybody in today’s age drive 55 on any two lane highway?” “Well, here’s what we say. Nine and you’re fine; ten and you’re mine.” Hmm. “So you’re saying if I only go nine over I won’t get stopped?” “Probably not Sir. Because the fines just aren’t worth it until it’s ten or more over the limit.”
I had tested this precept and not yet been stopped, even when passing an officer. It appeared my young state trooper was correct. So from then on, I always set my speed at 9 over, in whatever the zone was. The problem was, this made for a three-quarter hour commute for a drive of about 40 miles. Oh well. About all I could do was roll the sunroof back and try to enjoy it.
It wasn’t really that bad, actually. Highway 24 ran inland for a few miles across sandy shore line that was now packed full of pine trees until it opened onto the coast along the Atlantic at Swansboro near the Intercoastal Waterway. Once across the White Oak River, the road jogged left and passed through Cape Carteret near the Highway 58 bridge over the waterway to Emerald Isle. I’d pass the Marines’ auxillary landing field at Bogue Inlet — used for aircraft out of New River or Cherry Point — and continue on over Broad Creek and finally into our neighborhood in Brandywine Bay, just to the west of the main part of Morehead City, which lay across the Newport River inlet from Beaufort.
My favorite time to drive the route was on Friday afternoons, for obvious reasons. In that direction, the Intercoastal Waterway was on my right, and beyond it sat the narrow strip of Emerald Isle, which farther east gave way to Atlantic Beach. I saw a few vessels slowly making their way east and west, most of them sailboats, and I wondered what it would be like to take one of them all the way down the coast from Boston to Key West, stopping overnight along the way at places like Wilmington, Southport, Georgetown, Charleston, Beaufort (SC), Savannah, Brunswick, Fernandina Beach, or St. Augustine. I realized I was a bit envious and made a note to look into the prospect of getting a boat and doing it. Some day.
Like many people, we had our favorite place to go on Friday afternoons after another long week of work. Most times, my wife and I would head over the bridge into quaint and gorgeous Beaufort, where we’d beat the crowd into La Playa, our little corner of paradise on the Crystal Coast, where the chef produced wondrous tapas creations or bigger items that paired very well with their five-dollar martinis or tantalizing cocktails. The menu for both food and drink read like a list of crazed concoctions produced by the mind of some culinary genius; it was “fusion” before fusion became the cool word to throw around in big cities to describe heretofore untested boundaries. We discovered it years ahead of everyone else at La Playa. It was as if Jackson Pollock had come back to life as a chef in a little town on the Carolina coast, but he wasn’t painting this time; he was cooking. And we didn’t want the secret to get out. It was located about a block off the waterfront, just north of Front Street.
Occasionally, there were days when it ended up just being what I came to call “The Group of Four;” four men — including me — who were all married and enjoyed the company of their brides more than any other person on the planet. So typically it was eight people. But sometimes the wives had enough of the endless war stories and needed a break. On the rare occasion that happened, it was just The Four. And this afternoon and early evening, I was headed over to join the three men who were already at the bar in La Playa.
When I walked in, Jim Allison was already holding court. He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw me and yelled, “Semper Fi, do or die! Grab a seat Devil Dog!” Everybody laughed, including me; my presence had evened the number of Marines now sitting at the table with Sailors. Jim was sitting there with the other two men in our group: Mark Bonner and Dale Rider.
Jim and I were Marines — Jim during Korea — and Marines enjoy giving sailors shit; it’s an exercise as old as the Sea Services. But it was difficult to do that to Bonner and Rider; they had some serious bona fides and had done things Jim and I never had. It was one reason I liked to spend time with this group, and when I did I usually just sat there and kept my mouth shut while I soaked in accounts of stuff they had done when I was only playing tee ball. Or before I was born.
Mark Bonner was a retired submarine captain, and had enough war stories to carry the conversation by himself. He had commanded one of the sub boats that had carried out some of the most daring missions in the final years of the Cold War, when our smaller attack-class subs would dive under Arctic ice in Soviet waters and launch divers to put taps on the enemy’s underwater communications’ cables. It was daring stuff, and those missions had been classified until many years later.
Mark had actually served as technical adviser on a number of books that had recently come out on the subject after everything was declassified. He spent his days as a consultant to the Navy on sub issues and played a lot of golf. And rumor had it that Tom Clancy had based the character Bart Mancuso — the commanding officer of the USS Dallas in The Hunt for Red October — on Bonner. I was too afraid to broach the subject. But I wondered what all we didn’t know about Mark. There was no telling.
Dale Rider, on the other hand, was an old Navy “frogman” in the days before people called them SEALs. He helped pioneer the organization which started off doing strictly underwater reconnaissance and demolition missions, but later evolved under others to become arguably the top special operations outfit in the world. Dale was 68, about 6'4", and still looked like someone you didn’t want to trifle with. But he was easygoing and charismatic. He was also one of the original participants in the Iron Man Triathlon series, having completed the original 1978 race in Hawaii while still in the Navy. At 38, he was the oldest competitor. After running out of water during the marathon portion of the race, his “support crew” consisting of fellow Navy special-ops types resorted to giving him beer.
Dale had eschewed any retirement work dealing with has past military career, and he and his wife ran one of the local bed and breakfasts in town. Dale — the old athlete and Navy diver — was the chef, and word had it their establishment had some of the best food in town. As with Mark Bonner, I wondered what kinds of exploits Dale Rider had engaged in that we didn’t know about.
It was august company to be certain.
It was an interesting group, if only for the age disparities. I was by far the youngest, having just turned 40. Mark and Dale were old enough to be my father. Jim, at 79, was our elder statesman and was nearly old enough to be my grandfather. My war was the War on Terror, Mark and Dale had fought the Cold War and Vietnam, and Jim Allison had served as a Marine rifle company commander in some of the most fierce fighting in the Korean War. All three of them were highly decorated, a fact I had never heard from any one of them; I got it from other sources. Jim had a Silver Star for taking a small squad of Marines into enemy lines in the middle of the night too rescue a downed Marine Corps fighter pilot. He had carried out this exploit as a 22 year-old lieutenant who had been at Yale when that war broke out and who would return to New Haven scarcely a year after his feat to complete his degree.
Mark and Dale were absolutely outstanding guys to be around, but compared too Jim, they were reserved. Jim could speak intelligently about almost any subject, and he was open and honest on issues that most people didn’t want to talk about.
So on the rare occasion when Bonner and Rider took off early and I found myself alone with Jim, he took the opportunity to go deep. I guess he had picked up on some things. So he asked questions. And I’d open up to see what kind of wisdom he might offer.
One evening, I lamented the fact that at 40, I had lived essentially three lives: my upbringing, my college years, and now my military career, and I hadn’t talked to many people from my formative years in a long time. I had no idea what anyone I had known before I met my wife in 1993 was doing. And I had made little, if any, effort.
Jim listened quietly and without judgment, and then launched in. “Well, I’ve been around for a while. The way I figure it, you have different people and different friends from different parts of your life. The first group are the people you grew up with, the kids you graduated high school with. Some people stay in touch with their friends from high school and some don’t. I never did until later in my life. I was so ready to get out on my own and make my mark that I didn’t have any time for them. And honestly, I don’t really believe they had any time for me either,” he laughed. “I mean, let’s be honest. Did you want to keep hanging out with those folks when you graduated at 18?” “No,” I admitted. “I was sick of the whole scene. I wanted to get on with my life.” “Exactly,” he agreed.
“Then you have the people who came into your life next, the ones you went to college with. The ones you ‘came of age’ with. That group during your really formative years when you were first away from home and you made that transition from being a kid to an adult, which at the time is the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do.” Every word Jim said was the truth; he had sized everything up. It was as if he could read my mind. “Mind you, this is the way it is for everybody, whether they want to admit it or not. You were probably very close to some of these people, but as soon as you graduated, it was like a repeat of high school; you all went your separate ways. And no matter what you try, it will never be the same as it was during those few years when you were with them. Think about it. Are you still in touch with any of them? Perhaps. But now you have a family, a career, commitments. Life has intervened. And the bond grows weaker.” True again.
“And then you have your ‘adult’ friends. The people you met after college. Now if you are lucky enough and you end up in an organization that operates under the principle that merit is rewarded — where it doesn’t matter what your last name is or who your Daddy is, or what your connections are, or what your politics are, for instance — you know what I’m talking about; “the cream rises to the top” and all that; call it whatever you want. If you end up in a place like that, then you get to be around some pretty amazing people. You look around and you’re no longer that kid who was the best player on his team from age 5 to 18. You look around and everyone else is just as good or maybe even better than you are, and for the first time in your life you ask yourself if you really measure up, if you really belong. It’s that great. And so you redouble your efforts, you put your nose to the grind stone, and you grind it out. You and I have been lucky enough to be a part of a group like that.” It was all true, no doubt. I soaked it in like it was a waterfall of wisdom.
“So you step back one day and reach a point where for the first time in your life you gain some perspective on these things. You’re old enough to look back over all of it and take measure. And you realize a lot about people and about yourself.”
I had never heard Jim complain or sound regretful about anything. But now I thought I detected a slight hint of melancholy creeping into his voice as he delivered this wisdom, almost as if he had missed out on something.
When he spoke again, he matter-of-factly stated, “The truth is, the only people who really matter are the ones who you’re still with today. Any people from your childhood you still know? High school? College? Your Marine Corps career? It’s sad, but you can probably count these people on two hands, and I bet most of them are in the latter group.”
We sat there in silence for a few seconds. He took a sip of his small batch, neat. I took one from the three fingers of Redbreast I had in my own glass.
“You know, you’re absolutely correct,” I said. “As I sit here with you I’m not in touch with anyone from my childhood. The same is true for high school. I haven’t been to a single one of my class reunions. I don’t have that many great memories from high school. College?” I racked my brain. I had been a two-sport athlete at a big state school in college and I must have had four or five dozen teammates I could’ve been keeping up with. But the more I thought, the more I realized I wasn’t in touch with any of them either. After all, that was what? Twenty years ago now?
He must’ve been able to read my mind. “Why do you think that is?” “I guess it just wasn’t that important to me,” I confessed. “Do you ever wonder what those people are doing?” “Not really. I mean, you have to understand Jim. When I left the area close to home and went into the Marine Corps, it was like a hard break with the past, in many ways.” That had been over a decade ago now, and I had been relieved beyond measure to close so many old chapters.
“I think we might have more in common than you think,” he said. And with that, he drained the last of his drink and stood up and made his goodbye for the night. “ I better get on home. Sue Ann will be wondering where I am,” he laughed. “Let’s take this matter up next time; I’m not letting you off the hook.”
As always and as if he had never done it before, he shook my hand as we parted. It was the firm, but gentlemanly handshake of a man’s man who was strong enough to exert just the right amount of pressure to express respect and affection, but who was secure enough in that same knowledge of who he was that he didn’t try to crush your hand in a vice grip.
He didn’t need to prove anything to anybody.
As he walked out he turned back: “I’ll see you next week. And don’t be late!”
Glen Hines is the author of two books, Document and Cloudbreak, available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project. If you enjoyed this story, let him know and recommend it to others.
