PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4

A Tangible Dream

"Time alone seemed to work well for Faulkner
Time alone seems to work for the kid
Life and ink they run out at the same time
Or so said my old friend the squid"
- From "If I Could Just Get It On Paper"

Lines from that old song, pretty much still sum up my feelings that time spent alone is a good thing. I think you have to be able to live with yourself before you can even think about living with anybody else, and if that doesn't work out, then you are back where you started, so it is a good thing to be your own best friend.

I had wanted to spend the night in the Green Tomato but the campgrounds were closed and I didn't want to be disturbed in the middle of the night by the local authorities asking me what I was doing on the beach, where overnight camping is not allowed, so I did the good citizen thing and supported the local economy by checking into a room at the marina. My last full day on the Outer Banks, I was dreaming about big waves as I was awakened just before dawn by the familiar rumble of a diesel engine coming to life on one of the charter boats at the dock across from my room. The sky to the East was just beginning to show that pink color that you only see in that early morning twilight or in the eye of a conch pearl. It was still chilly and I dressed warmly the way I do on dawn patrol to Ditch Plains, a thousand miles up the East Coast from Cape Hatteras. Plan A was to head back for the pier at Salvo, which I had visited the day before with the "Real" gang, hoping there might be a pulse of some kind pushing the tide towards the shore and giving me a chance to catch a few real waves on my stand up board. My high speed card wasn't getting a signal so I couldn't check the surf report, but the description of Salvo on the Surfline website bears repeating here, as it kind of set the stage for what I wanted to see and gave me the title idea for this last installment. Remember as Mark Twain said, "Creativity is just undetected plagiarism."

"Next is Salvo. This is where the four-wheel drive fun begins. Take Ramp 23 to 27 to 30 to 34 to the beach. Let a bit of air out of your tires (drop them to about 17 lb) in case the sand is softer than expected, and go find yourself a wave. You can look for Shipwrecks; simply peer out at the water a few dozen yards from shore for -- you guessed it -- a shipwreck. This is one good wave, and you can amuse yourself with the right that breaks off the wreck, or you can drive north or south looking for an isolated peak. Salvo is pretty desolate. You can motor for miles, park in front of your own private peak, set up a rod, toss your pup a Frisbee, go for a surf, fiddle with your slore on the beach, surf again and feel like a superhero on your private little cloud. This is the kind of Outer Banks experience that's been romanticized for years by writers, artists and storytellers. It's a very tangible dream."

You don't need any pictures attached to that description of what you might find at Salvo on a dawn patrol with the Green Tomato as your assault vehicle, and I figured from Sir Walter Raleigh to me, dreamers had been wading ashore out here in search of fortunes, fish, females and favorite surf spots (not necessarily in that order) for a long time. There was no rush hour commute in Cape Hatteras that morning. Besides me and a couple of commercial fishing boat captains getting ready to head out to sea, the streets were off-season empty, and as I drove north past closed beach shops, putt putt golf courses and seaside motels, I couldn't help humming a few bars to "The Coast Is Clear", the first song Mac McAnally and I wrote together many moons ago about fall on the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama. It fit the scenery that morning along North Carolina highway 12 just as well. Well, let's just say the Salvo pier scene that greeted me that Wednesday morning was a little less exciting than the above description, and as surfers and fishermen are aware of, we are always at the mercy of the elements. Some days you are alone in a cove with overhead waves and surrounded offshore by schools of blue fin tuna crashing bait, and other days you are just on the sidelines waiting for the game to begin. That morning at Salvo, the wave game was obviously being played somewhere else along the Eastern seaboard.

As I pulled into the public parking lot it was empty except for a couple of trucks obviously rigged for surf casting-no surf racks in sight, not a good sign, and the walk out to the beach confirmed that the lack of activity on shore equaled the lack of activity on the ocean. I checked the campground down the beach and the same flat ocean greeted me there. There may not have been any waves but the sky was crystal clear, the air was getting less Canadian and more Gulf Stream. It was not a day to waste, in fact at this point in my life, few are. Time for "Plan B". Remember; always have a "Plan B". Mine was breakfast and a stop at the local market for snacks and then proceed on with my day alone driving the beaches, a little "test fishing" on the SUF board, lunch, and a late afternoon ferry ride down to Ocracoke. I found the one roadside restaurant open and settled into a booth by a window with a cell tower visible in the distance and my phone now working. I was wondering if maybe the short order cook in the joint had turned the tower on, on his way to work. Anyway, I checked in with the real world and Dixon, who was now home in South Carolina. One of our other missions on this trip was to try find veggie oil refueling locations that would enable me to run on "grease" all the way from Florida to New York on my way back North in the spring. Well, I am accustomed to serendipitous moments and as I walked out the door of the restaurant, I had an Outer Banks one. At the back of the parking lot, near the dumpster, I spotted a beat up old truck with a tank on the back and a young man bent over a couple of rusty, beat up 55 gallon drums. I sniffed the air and went on point immediately. To the untrained eye and nose, this looked like an unpleasant maintenance job of some kind, but not to me. No, I had not struck gold. I had struck grease.

At one time "Grease" was just the name of a very popular movie and Broadway musical, then a movie, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton John and referred to the stuff you put in your hair when you were a teenage boy that made you look cool and hopefully make you more attractive to the opposite sex. Today's equivalent is the "spiked hair" thing, which is totally off of my radar since somebody stole all the hair from the top of my head a long time ago. But the connotation of the word has made a giant leap into the future. "Grease" is now the term, which those small, but growing numbers of folks who run their vehicles on waste vegetable oil, call their fuel. I am constantly amazed by the basic lack of knowledge about this fuel source by the general public who are paying three times as much as we do to fuel our cars, and most importantly, it is a clean burning reusable fuel. But, as you might expect, a fuel source this cheap is not what big oil companies want you to know about or buy. You can't find it at an Exxon station off the Interstate, and there are no pretty green soaked commercials on TV telling you about it, but there is a way to get into Grease, and that is via the Internet. You will find a lot of "greasers" up there in cyberspace. It is a coming thing and one I do try to make people aware of when I travel. As you might expect, the words "Powered by vegetable oil" written on the side of a large green van does attract attention. In our Margaritaville world, we are moving to grease as well. Recently I met with our partners from the company Garden Fresh, who make our chips and salsa, and they are already using the oil we fry our chips in to run the delivery trucks that take them to the market. In South Carolina, we are looking at partnering up with a local shrimper to supply our restaurant in Myrtle Beach on a boat powered by vegetable oil. Discovering a source out here in Cape Hatteras only confirmed my suspicions that this is a (pardon the pun) bubbling industry. American ingenuity is a wonderful thing and "grease" is the word.

Gathering grease looks more like garbage pick up than refining an alternative clean fuel source and the young man running the truck was dressed for the dirty job he was doing. I discovered that he worked for his father, who was a chemical engineer, and they were using the grease to make bio-diesel which they used in their business. He offered to sell me some and show me his operation but I had promised myself the day alone, though this would have been a very interesting side trip indeed. But I got the information from him and told him I would check it out on the way back up in the spring. The morning air had warmed up and the sun was shining bright. It was time to flatten those tires and get out on the sand.

Beach driving was a big part of my adolescent years down on the shores of Dauphin Island and Perdido Bay in Alabama. I had a great friend who had a Willys 4-wheel drive Jeep that we used for beach parties, fishing trips and just simply driving on the beach. To me, there is something very liberating about leaving asphalt behind and cruising along the seashore with no road signs, radar detectors or real destination. It is like sailing on land. You can basically plot your own course and if you get stuck or break down there is a community of like-minded "sanders" out there who will stop and help you out.

Though I left Alabama behind a long time ago, I kept the thrill of those early years lodged in the fun chips in my memory bank, and the beaches of Long Island are now my stomping grounds for alternative terrain. What some folks refer to as "four wheelin" is largely the domain of fishermen with trucks turned into beach cruisers sporting coolers the size of dog houses and a literal forest of surf casting rods sprouting from the bumpers. But on the Outer Banks, it is also the way surfers get to the best and most isolated breaks. Accepting the fact that the waves looked like a "no show", I stopped at a tackle shop to pick up some local flies before I left the highway.

The view from the campground at Salvo confirmed that today would be a fishing day, and a beautiful day it was. No problem mon. I headed for the nearest beach access road, deflated my tires to 15psi and pointed the Green Tomato north. It was soon apparent that a lot of people were either playing hooky from work as there were quite a few rigs already set up along the shore. As usual, the "Tomato" attracted stares from the vehicle vagabonds as I made my way up the beach towards the lighthouse in the distance. I wanted a room with a view and a local landmark in the background. You can live like that if your accommodations are on four wheels with locking differentials. My job for the day was to make sure that I could load and unload the stand up board by myself. Back in Kill Devil Hills, Andy and Dixon were there to lend a hand, but this and future trips it was necessary to be able to do it all alone. Traveling alone like this has one very simple rule. If you can't load and unload it all without feeling like you have been involved in a rugby scrum, leave it at home.

I found a spot a good distance from any other fishermen with the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse just visible above the dunes. I guess it was the place. I parked, turned on some tunes and began to unload. The big test was a success. I rigged the stand up fishing board, assembled my fly rods, beach chairs and writing table and pretty soon I had my home for the day all neat and orderly and I hadn't even broken a fingernail. My old scoutmasters back in Mobile would have been proud.

Though it was a bright, bright, bright sun shiny day, the wind was still chilly, chilly, chilly and blowing strong from the northeast. It would be a full wet suit day. The sight of the Green Tomato may have made some folks turn and stare while I was driving but it was nothing compared to the looks I got when, looking like a large seal in my wet suit and booties, I drug the stand up fishing board to the waters edge, practiced a few false casts and then headed out through the small waves of the surf break to where I had seen bait working from the beach. I did not care about my first impression to the surf casters, for I was on yet another mission. It might be a second day without waves, but it would be one of those days with a "first" in it, if I caught a fish from the board. Past the break, there was a small stretch of fairly calm water protected by the dunes but beyond it, the chop and the wind were clearly waiting. The trick was going to be to gauge the wind and current and paddle to that calm water, stow the paddle, grab the fly rod and make a cast before I was sailed by the wind out to the Diamond Shoals. I made several practice runs, hooking myself once in the foot, and losing my paddle on another run and having to go overboard to retrieve it.

At one point I could swear I heard laughter from a pod of surfcasters on the beach and I am pretty sure the words "dumb ass" floated by on the breeze. I was not deterred. I kept practicing the moves and finally got comfortable with everything and was ready to now find the fish. The whole point of a stand up fishing board is to be able to sneak quietly up on fish and be able to make a cast with a fly rod without hurling yourself into the water as well. I had done some practice casting on the board in Gulf Shores, Alabama a few weeks before and knew that the board was a fine platform for fly-fishing, but the protected waters of Shelby Lake were a far cry from the infamous Diamond Shoals of the Outer Banks. It didn't take long to find the nervous water I had spotted before. It was on the edge of a slick just beyond the break and out of the casting range of the boys on the beach - Ha Ha. No more practice runs, this was it, and I had figured out the final trick that my water pony would need. At the last second, before the forward motion of the board stopped, I pivoted as carefully as a ballerina and spun my body around to face the stern of the board and made my cast. Once through the water, suddenly I saw a shape dart towards the fly but nothing pulled on the other end of the line. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the bow was only about three feet from the rough water where the wind would then launch me like a runaway helium filled balloon seaward. I also knew that in that rough water not only lay potential capsizing conditions, but also waves of ridicule and laughter from the now several fisherman gathered on the shore watching me. I had one more cast before the comedy special began. I kept my rod close as I could to the surface of the water hoping to keep my fly out of the headwind and reach the spot where I could now see fish moving. I didn't know what they were nor did I care. The fly had barely landed when a splash erupted, the line went tight and the pole bent into a curve. It worked. The bluefish I hauled aboard was certainly no record catch but that was never the point. I released him back into the water and paddled on down the beach looking for more. From the shore, one of the surfcasters yelled out, "nice cast". "Thanks", I replied as I paddled downwind past them, but my thanks were directed much more to the fish that had saved the day than the audience on the beach.

Catching that fish and paddling in that cold air off Diamond shoals was quite a morning's activity and I was happy to get back to my campsite, into dry clothes and in the proximity of my little fridge where lay a treasure of road snacks. I whipped up a little nourishment and settled into doing those things you never quite get to do enough of, like reading, tying flies and cleaning and re-loading your fly reels with new line. The Tomato was a great wind block and I dropped into my beach lounge chair with Jim Harrison's new book and read away till the nap angel descended upon me. The solar panel on top of the van wasn't the only thing recharging on that beach. After my nap, I was ready to plan the rest of my afternoon. I had no real plan for dinner when I got to Ocracoke later in the evening. I was just playing it by ear. The re-pack went off without a hitch. I managed to get the twelve-foot long paddleboard secured back to the side of the van without dropping it on my toe or inflicting self-torture with flyaway bungee cords. Everything went back to where it had come from. I felt that along with all the fun I was having on this little sabbatical, I was also learning to live very comfortably in the Green Tomato. It feels like getting to know the different pieces of your favorite jigsaw puzzle, the edges, angles and colors as they kind of fall into place. Too bad life can't be more like those kinds of puzzles, but as those darn Rolling Stones said, "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." Out on the beach on this day, I was finding that to be true.

With the Tomato back in traveling mode, I headed up the beach. Driving in the sand required desert music and I spun my iPod dial towards my West African music play lists stopping at Habib Koite. Dan Storper, who owns Putumayo Records turned me onto Habib several years before I actually met him at the Festival in the Desert two years ago. His music had been part a musical mélange that had been the soundtrack to our travels there from Bamako to Timbuktu and was a mainstay of my driving music collection. (I will post the rest at the end of the article if I ever get there.) I was groovin' to Habib and just enjoying the day, driving through thick sand, splashing through tidal pools and making tracks North towards the lighthouse. The Tomato seemed to be enjoying the ride as well almost dancing her flat tires across the sand. It is a big rig and weighs a lot, but the guys at Sportsmobile in Fresno knew how to make them do what they were meant to do. I stayed on the sand for several miles just enjoying the freedom and the view until I had to get back on the asphalt to meet Jason for lunch but still had time to stop at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse for a climb. You know me and lighthouses. If there is one around, I will climb it. When I got to the light - BUMMER! It was closed for the season, so I followed the signs to where the original lighthouse had been back in the days when it might have been spotted by members of my family becalmed on that ocean so long ago. I met Jason for a late lunch in Waves and we exchanged photos, videos and contacts and I took pictures with the waitresses and cooks. I would see the Real gang again down island in warmer water with bigger waves in January.

I was watchin' the days go by, as David Byrne says in one of my favorite songs. The sun was low in the southern sky as we head for the winter solstice and I watch them both edging for the horizon while I waited in line at Cape Hatteras to board the ferry to Ocracoke, my last island stop before heading back to the mainland. The Green Tomato was going to sea. I joined a small procession of cars, trucks and campers that were lined up to catch a lift on the floating section of Highway 12 that would take us across the two mile pass between Hatteras and Ocracoke. The weather was about to change according to the satellite map that I could instantly bring up on my Google phone. It's a lot better information than what you get on TV where they have to "sell" the weather. There was a big green glob moving up the Eastern seaboard from the mainland and in my mind, there was no doubt that it was coming our way. My only thought about it was maybe there would be waves. It is SOOOOO surfer. But that evening sky presented a "red sky at night- sailor's delight" sunset and I took in every second until, as the French say, the sun went to bed. I was sitting in the van spinning the ball on my G1 phone looking at surf reports, maps and possible fueling places for the final leg of my trip down to the low country of South Carolina, when there was a tap on the window. It didn't take long to figure out that I had again been spotted. I guess the text messages had been flying on the Outer Banks for a few days. It is hard to stay under the radar these days where videos and photos have replaced autographs, so I guess I better take a moment to give you the rules by which I operate in that regard.

1) I won't sign autographs when I am in the act of eating (drinking is okay). Eating is a sacrament to me, and something, which is never to be interrupted. In my world, it comes with the punishment of eternal damnation in the fires of hell (can't get away from that Catholic thing).

2) As for photos, it all depends on your manners and what kind of mood I am in, and if I do take photos I ask that you keep them as personal keepsakes and not post them on the internet or blogs and not shared with the entire planet earth. A photo should be a keepsake, not a calling card.

3) Finally, I don't want anybody bothering me when I am at home and that includes on my boat. Other than that, I feel that I am fair game and it is all just a part of the job, and I have found the vast majority of the time, fans I meet out there couldn't be more respectful and mannerly and I do appreciate that. I still have a bit of a problem with that celebrity stuff as I do still only see myself as a beach boy, ex-altar boy from Mobile, who worked hard and got lucky and not much more. To me, it is just my job.

Meanwhile, back at the ferry dock, the young man at my window introduced himself as a member of the United States Coast Guard and said simply that he hated to bother me but he would probably never get this opportunity again. I thought to myself, hell, if I hadn't learned those three chords way back when at Auburn, Alabama, I might have wound up in the Coast Guard. Anyway, I got out, met his friends and snapped a few photos, shook hands and listened to his stories about his times at our shows, grateful that he and a whole lot other folks out there love our shows. In these days and times of instant gratification and American Idol, real fans are the basis of any career. Without them, you are just a karaoke crooner.

The bell at the front of the line rang as the ferryboat approached the dock. I said good-bye to the Coastie and his friends and climbed back aboard the GT, watching them high-fiving and laughing as they walked away towards town. I thought for a moment about a piece of advice I got from the late and great Paul Newman, when I watched him deal with a crowd of fans at a function up on Long Island years ago. I said something about how gracious he was with them and he looked at me and said something like, "Kid, it takes no more time to be thought of as an asshole than it does to be thought of as a good guy. Give them a thrill. That's your job." Wisdom from someone like that you cherish and remember forever.

The ferry ride across the inlet was way too short to be thought of as any kind of voyage but in my way of thinking it is always good to be at sea, especially when the elements are co-operating. Bad weather may have been in the forecast but that evening was a splendid one. I am at home on a boat. It can be the Queen Mary, the Continental Drifter, a stand up paddleboard, or the W. Stanford White, the ferry on which I was traveling that day. I am always intrigued by the names of boats, as it is a very serious thing to those who venture out on the water as to what namesake they trust their souls to. So, it did set me to wondering why someone would name a channel ferry in the coastal waters of North Carolina after a famous architect who was murdered in New York in a sex scandal over a century ago. But maybe it was just a coincidence and W. Stanford White might have been a famous local seaman who rescued a dog or a baby in a storm. So, if anybody who reads this can enlighten me on this subject, please send me an e-mail. Anyway, the voyage was pleasant, the air tinged with salt and the spectacular sunset put a curtain on a fine day spent mostly alone on the beach. I chatted with some fellow passengers from Alaska and then went over my plans for the rest of the evening on Ocracoke. They were non-existent at the moment. I had a rendezvous with the real estate agent from whom I had rented a house for the night, but until that time, I just sat back and took in the moment. I feel you can never have enough time on the water. And, once again, I found myself, like many times before in this life, leaving one island for another, which is always a portal to another adventure.

Hope you all have a very happy holiday season. Merry Christmas. - J.B

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4