The Captain of the Crystal Coast
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 and not based on any real person. The events depicted are entirely the product of my imagination.
Neil Dalton lived in Beaufort, North Carolina, a small town on the Crystal Coast. Of all the places he had lived in his worldly travels in the Marine Corps, including northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., and San Diego, California, he had chosen to settle in tiny Beaufort — population 4,000. There were several reasons for it really.
He had grown up in Texas and spent his first 18 years there, but had never gone back. Save for the occasional visit, he had never lived there permanently. He loved his native state, but he had seen too much of southeast Texas and wanted more. Growing up, his family had beaten a path up and down the highways and interstates of east Texas and its bordering states, going back and forth between his parents’ hometown and his hometown of Houston. Other than that, he had never seen or experienced anything else in his childhood. So he wanted out of Houston; he wanted to see and know what else was out there.
He got that chance when he left for college in a nearby southern state, but it was twisted. The place eventually became stifling, and it was too familiar to him, being his parents’ home state and where they both went to college. Staying way too long (9 years), he grew tired of the reality of the Southern gothic myth; he called it “the small pond syndrome.” The entire state and the town he lived in, Oak Ridge, was like something out of a Faulkner novel, but absent the charm of his characters or settings.
After law school, the Marine Corps had saved him from a life of boredom and drudgery working for self-appointed “big fish” lawyers or even bigger local corporations that held a stranglehold on the place. There, a man couldn’t get far in his own right regardless of his merit; you had to be somebody’s son or son-in-law or dubbed “the next one in line,” who had “paid his dues” to do or experience much. If you did not fit the expected mold, people eyed you with suspicion and were capable of the most petty and petulant of subversions. Right out of law school, he had witnessed it with both his and his wife’s legal careers.
So when he walked into the Marine officer recruiter’s office one day in 1992 and showed them he had a law degree, could do 20 pull-ups, 100 sit-ups and run three miles in 21 minutes, they had snapped him up and sent him off to beautiful Quantico, Virginia. He finally could see a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel after nearly a decade of spinning his wheels in the backwater. He escaped, and for a long time didn’t look back.
He liked living in northeast Virginia; it reminded him of the good things from his past, especially the forested hills in which he trained. He learned to navigate the woods at night by feel and sound. He felt closer to God in the calm stillness of the trees. While others would bed down at night in tents or sleeping bags, he would prop his pack against a tree pile up some pine needles, and go to sleep. Outside the base, like his native Texas, people minded their own business. People had their politics of course, but they usually kept their mouths closed about it, which made it easier to get along.
After he was done in Quantico, the Marine Corps sent him to Newport, Rhode Island, for a few months for his military lawyer training. It was the fall in New England, and what he witnessed there rivaled and perhaps surpassed what he had seen of fall elsewhere. The colors were even more brilliant. And there was a sort of small-town charm everywhere — similar to southern charm — that surprised him. It was different than it was down South, but it was just as charming. People were warm, which also contradicted the myths he had heard about the northeast. He developed an affinity for clam chowder, fresh lobster and the scent of the sea air. He visited Walden Pond where Thoreau had lived in stark cabin and saw some Red Sox games at Fenway Park. The people in Boston were tremendously gracious to him.
His first tour of duty took him across the country to San Diego, California. He drove west from his parents’ home in Houston, and once past San Antonio he was in new territory he had never seen; the landscape changed abruptly and stopping points became scarce. He felt like he was driving through a Cormac McCarthy novel. The long day took him through way stations like Sonora, Fort Stockton, Van Horn and Sierra Blanca. He finally saw the lights of El Paso on the black horizon and had to stop for the night. The next day took him across the stark beauty of the southwestern deserts and through places like Las Cruces, Tucson, Yuma and El Centro. Finally over the bleak Sawtooth mountain range, he dropped into San Diego for the first time.
In San Diego, the worm would turn for him in so many ways. The weather there made a person feel super-human, with near endless energy. He trained hundreds of new Marines, and lead a prosecution office as a Captain. During that time, he traveled to Washington State and saw trees the size of skyscrapers. He went to Oregon and saw a wild river that was as pristine as a mountain lake. With seven friends, he ran a relay marathon all the way around Lake Tahoe. As he ran his part, he looked down into the crystal waters and saw 20-foot-diameter boulders 30 feet below the surface. He went north and saw Pebble Beach and the Monterrey peninsula, the most beautiful meeting of ocean and sea on the planet. He ran 5ks, 10ks, half-marathons, then finally three marathons. He was in the best shape of his life at age 35.
After San Diego, it was back to northern Virginia. He wore the uniform of his country while arguing at the highest courts in the land, including the Supreme Court. He worked for three years at the venerable old Washington Navy Yard, one of the oldest military installations in the nation. He traveled to Williamsburg, the site of so much colonial history. He took up cycling, and biked and ran a network of paved trails that ran for hundreds of miles in all directions including western Virginia and into Pennsylvania. He discovered the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park, which started a life-long love of the National Parks. He canoed the Shenandoah River. He went to Harpers Ferry, where a detachment of Marines put down John Brown’s uprising. His government sent him to the central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan on the border of Afghanistan to help those countries’ forces set up bastions to wage the War on Terror. He was carried over the towering Pamir Mountain peaks in Soviet-era aircraft flown by former Soviet pilots, his sworn enemy just years before, but who now became his quick friends.
Then, he went back out to San Diego. On the two week drive back across country with his wife, they visited West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago. He watched his first Cubs game at Wrigley Field on a brilliantly sunny Friday afternoon. He went through Wisconsin and saw lakes and rivers the likes of which he had never seen before. He went to South Dakota and was at Mount Rushmore on July 4. He watched an awesome fireworks display that lit up the monument like it was the middle of the day. He went through Montana and visited Little Big Horn National Battlefield. They stayed a few days in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. They sat on the back deck of the Jackson Lake Lodge sipping a drink as their gaze rested upon the knife-like peaks of the Teton Range. They took a white water rafting trip down the Snake River in Wyoming. They stopped over in Elko, Nevada, and enjoyed Basque food for the first time. Lastly, they stopped for a few days in Yosemite National Park, and were witness to what John Muir called God’s Cathedral on earth.
In San Diego he picked up where he left off before. His family again lived two miles from the beach in Pacific Beach. He took up surfing and learned the joy of being thrashed by the power of the Pacific. He discovered skiing and the Big Bear Mountains east of Los Angeles, where he could drive three hours and ski when it was 75 degrees in the valley. He went to San Francisco and walked the hills and ran with the Golden Gate in view.
They then had a chance to go somewhere they had never been, the Carolina coast near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Along the way back across the country, he went to Zion and hiked to the top of Angels Landing and looked miles back down the Zion valley. He crossed the Rockies in Colorado where it was 75 degrees on July 15th. In far western North Carolina along Interstate 40, he first experienced the fantastic vistas of the “drop” in to Asheville out of the Smoky Mountains and the beauty of Blue Ridge Parkway.
He had heard bad things about the town next to the base, so they searched for a different place to live up and down the coast within a reasonable driving distance. They settled on the town of Morehead City about thirty miles east up the coast. Morehead City was a town of about 9,000 and was just across a bridge over the Newport River’s confluence with Bogue Sound, and right along the Intercoastal Waterway. Just over the bridge sat Beaufort.
It was the first time they had ever lived in so small a place. The Crystal Coast was one of the last remote regions in the country. Once off I-40 just east of Raleigh, one took U.S. Highway 70 for three more hours before reaching the coast. But what they found when they got there was pleasantly surprising. For such a small town, there were plenty of chain and mom-and-pop eateries, good coffee shops, anchor shopping stores, and home improvement centers. A regional airport with jet service through all the major hubs was just 30 minutes up the road in New Bern. And the beaches were pristine and uncrowded, unlike southern California. The place had character. Over in Beaufort there were several old food and drinking establishments that had existed for decades and had notable histories. His favorite was the Backstreet Pub. The Crystal Coast was off the beaten path, and it was one of those best-kept secret types of places. He filed the experience away in his mind.
After leaving there, they were moved back to northern Virginia for the third time, and things seemed to slip. Things were not as exciting as they had been before. The place wasn’t new to them anymore. It seemed as though they had wrung it dry of anything enticing. It even got to the point they reconsidered — after 15 years of being away — moving back to the place they had left behind when Neil entered the Marine Corps. After all, in the intervening years family had moved to that area. It seemed like the timing was right. So they gave it a chance; maybe the place and the people had changed. After all, it was a decade-and-a-half later, right?
But what seemed to be the right move at the right time turned out to be a mistake. To be fair, the motivation for the move was righteous, it was just the job he had taken was a mistake; all the reasons they had left so many years before were still present, especially the small pond syndrome. Within a single year of being back, it reared its head again.
It was like something out of a Thomas Wolfe novel as they experienced a “you can’t go back again” sort of feeling. As Wolfe so eloquently put it in You Can’t Go Home Again:
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.”
Some things indeed will never change.
Fortunately, he was once again rescued by the fierce loyalty of his Marine Corps. He was able to return and finish out the career he had attempted to leave. And on the day he retired, he thought about how nice it would be to never have to practice law again.
And now, like he had wanted, he didn’t practice law anymore. He figured he had done pretty much everything there was to do in that profession and taken it as far as it could go. He had trained recruits, prosecuted hundreds of cases, argued dozens more in Washington, DC, been promoted to running an office responsible for cases in California and Arizona, been selected and appointed as a trial judge, served as a terrorist prosecutor and debriefer, and had then moved over to check what he had always thought would be the final block in the pyramid of legal practice, to serve as a federal prosecutor. All the while, the Corps had consistently recognized his performance and promoted him in rank. Looking back at all of that, he figured he had tapped the legal profession out of anything else interesting. More importantly though, he realized everything he had always done from Monday to Friday he had done so he could do what he really wanted to on Saturdays, Sundays, and vacations. He resolved to start doing what he really wanted to do seven days a week.
Now, he was doing what he had been dreaming of doing for years; his wife and he owned and ran a bed and breakfast and charter fishing service in Beaufort. He surfed at dawn on most days when the waves were best. He sailed. And in late summer, in what had become an annual ritual, they took their boat down the Intercostal Waterway, through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. They would sail all day and then stop at night in places like Swansboro, Wilmington, Southport, Georgetown, Charleston, Beaufort (SC), Savannah, Brunswick, Fernandina Beach, St. Augustine, and then on down to Key West.
If the weather looked favorable, they would occasionally extend the trip around to the Gulf and take the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway around to the tip of Texas, but in order to take this route they had to sail exposed up the west coast of Florida from Key West to Carrabelle to pick up the other waterway.
He liked to travel around to Port Aransas and hang out for a few days. For a while, he toyed with the idea of retiring there along the south Texas Gulf Coast because Texas did not tax income or military pensions. But in the end the Atlantic Coast was just too incredible to pass up for the unpredictability of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
In Beaufort, he was essentially anonymous, which he liked. The only people who knew he had been a Marine were his friends. A lot of these people had served in the military themselves and like him, retired in the area. Most were older than he was. One of his friends was Jim Allison, the owner of a local boat building company and former CEO of several corporations. Now a sprightly 80, Jim spent his days overseeing the building of sail boats or popping in to his wife’s harbor-side business to see what was up. Neil and his wife would always run into Jim and his wife Ann and the group of grizzled military veterans — some retired, some not — Jim hung out with on Friday nights at La Playa, their favorite restaurant and bar. Jim was a good twenty years senior to the next youngest members of the group and held sway over it because he wasn’t just some retired CEO; Jim had gone to Yale in the late forties and then enlisted in the Marine Corps during Korea. He was commissioned an officer and when the fighting was done, he reentered Yale and got his degree with highest honors. Jim had earned a Silver Star in Korea. But even after all this; he was the most humble person in the group. One look at him and he seemed just like some extremely fit 80 year old who looked more like he was in his fifties, dressed perpetually in Tommy Bahama clothing, boat shoes or flip flops, and a sailing cap. He wore not one hint of his past accomplishments. He was gregarious, gracious, charming to women and men alike, and was an incredible raconteur.
All you had to do to know Jim’s character was do some math. He was born in 1930. By the end of World War Two he was 15 and too young for service. In 1948, he entered Yale when he was 18. As soon as Korea broke out, he was 20 and knew he was finally old enough; it was time for him to do his part, so he left school and enlisted. A war time policy of recognizing and rewarding outstanding people and his own great performance record earned him a quick officer commission. He was out of the active duty Marine Corps by the age of 23 with the rank of Captain, and went right back to school. That’s the way America and Americans used to be; it was why Tom Brokaw called that group of Americans “the greatest generation.” It’s just what men did back then.
Now it would be unfair to Neil’s generation and perhaps the following one to say that theirs never had people do that sort of thing. But Neil still thought it the rare case indeed where someone from his generation in a similar situation would quit Yale to enlist in the Marine Corps. If the shoe fits, wear it.
Accordingly, Neil had a huge amount of respect for Jim Allison. Jim’s was a life of service, accomplishment, and achievement, yet he never spoke about any of it unless someone asked. Even then it was like you had to pull it out of him. Neil asked him once after several drinks about how Jim got his Silver Star and Jim just sort of brushed it off. “You know how it is; just for doing my job really. They train us what to do if we find ourselves in certain situations, then when we do what they trained us to do, they act like we did something special.” It was almost like he was embarrassed by it.
During a visit by one Jim’s sons, Neil got his answer about Jim’s Silver Star. The son told Neil that Jim had volunteered to take a group of 6 other Marines to find and haul out a Marine pilot who had been shot down well behind enemy lines. Jim’s patrol went out overnight and returned with the pilot. On the way back they had been engaged in a firefight, and Jim sent the other Marines and the pilot back while he stayed and calmly called in artillery strikes on the enemy for over an hour. About an hour after the rest of the patrol got back, Jim showed up at the line alone and apparently unscathed for his trouble.
The following day a search party went out and located over 30 enemy dead scattered across the beaten zone of Jim’s artillery barrage. Some of them had valuable intelligence information, including enemy gun emplacements and infantry positions. After hearing this story, Neil wondered how Jim hadn’t received the Navy Cross or maybe even the Medal of Honor. But Neil figured back then that sort of valor was so commonplace, you just couldn’t give everyone a Navy Cross or Medal of Honor.
After graduating Yale, Jim had worked his way up the management ladder with several different corporations, building product lines, making a fortune, then leaving for another company and doing it again. He finally tired of that and took his money to the Atlantic Coast and started doing what he really wanted to do: sail and start a company that built sail boats and racing yachts. He knew nothing about either, but through sheer will power he taught himself and hired the right people to help him. He started and built three different companies, made each one profitable, and sold them, until he finally opened the last one and settled in Beaufort at 60.
So this was the guy Neil drank and told stories with in Beaufort. By the time Neil met him, Jim was pushing 80, but he looked and acted like he was a fit 55. Usually Jim talked and Neil listened; Jim’s stories were much better. It was like Jim was a fountain of wisdom and Neil was the sponge trying to soak it all in.
Neil and his wife often talked about how funny it would be to tell friends and family about their closest group of local friends; they were in their forties and clearly the youngest couple in the group, which consisted of another 5 or 6 couples, all in their sixties and then Jim and Ann, Ann being closer in age to the others. Jim was old enough to be Neil’s father, but the two got along like equals, drawing on their kindred background of being Marines, which bridged the age gap and always gave them an easy well of memories from which to start any discussion.
The older he got, the more he realized life was simpler, life was better, with family, a few close friends, and quiet peace. It was a small circle, but inside it one found happiness; one found loyalty; one found a haven from the rest of the world.
Though he didn’t miss much from his past, Neil did miss certain things about the Marine Corps; its efficiency, its meritocracy, its demand that you distill any issue or problem down to only its essence and essential requirements, the camaraderie, the way it treated people like adults, the way it loathed micro-managers and spit them out like poison, and the way it recognized a job well done.
But he never once missed being a lawyer.
Copyright 2015. All rights reserved.
