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The Road to Harkers Island

Although this story contains material from the world in which we live, including references to actual places, persons, and events, it should be read entirely as a work of fiction. All dialogue is invented. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination.

They needed to get away from DC. Badly. They never planned to be there permanently, and the old familiar feelings were beginning to emerge. DC was DC, and that was never going to change.

This happened every time they came back, after being there for about six months. There had always been something off about the place, in more ways than one. They never got completely comfortable. Strange things happened. Their boys, now grown and in college, had never liked it either; probably even less.

Dalton and his wife had learned over the years to leverage the few good things about the place and avoid everything else. Their days consisted of traveling the short corridors to and back from work, making the occasional stop along the way at the commissary or PX, or their one “happy place,” the military-only Arlington Country Club, where they had been members since Dalton was a young Captain. There, they could escape the rat race that existed around them in the quiet, sylvan hills that sat overlooking the National Mall; from the right vantage point, you could see the Washington Monument off in the distance. And the club had done a great job over several decades of growing a forest of tall hardwoods that screened the legions of vehicles that twisted and snaked along in their daily crawl north and south along 395. It was almost like being on vacation, even if only for a couple of hours. Almost.

The other club members, being military families, had the same priorities as the Daltons. They viewed the world through a very similar lens. They held similar social and political views, although there was an unofficial rule that frowned on political discussions. Nobody wore their rank; it was their place of respite, their sanctuary, their haven away from what was a fetid, stinking swamp — yes, Trump was actually right on that one — that Dalton knew deep down in his heart would never be able to be “drained.” Washington was as close to a self-perpetuating system — a veritable perpetual motion machine — as existed anywhere on the planet. For reasons too innumerable to write down on paper, there was no chance of changing it. And that was because the masses accepted it. The denizens of the swamp had legislated their way of “serving” into existence for perpetuity.

Yes, the Daltons needed a break. A lengthy one. And they needed it soon.

But they needed a reason to leave. Even if just for a little while. Even though it was just the two of them now — empty nesters living away from the nest — they still needed to escape.

But these musings would fade at the end of another weeknight as they retired to rest for another day; he worked for the same big federal government that he philosophically detested, while she fought that same monolithic Goliath for her clients who were private citizens as small businesses. It was an ironic situation to say the least, and one of their unwritten rules was they neither brought work home nor discussed it.

The list of reasons they needed a break was lengthy. In addition to all the foregoing, Washington was not a good city to raise kids. Their sons knew this, having experienced the strange and dysfunctional way kids and teenagers in the area acted and treated one another, and there was no chance they would return there with their own families someday. It wasn’t a good place to live permanently. It was a very difficult place to work. There were actually few good qualities when you actually stopped and gave it some deep thought.

Few people who lived in Washington were from there. The non-military types had come to the capital out of careerist ambition. The people in the military had no choice; they were ordered to be there. The city was full of stressed-out people, all working way too hard at the expense of everything else in their lives, including their families.

These people had exchanged a life of relative normalcy for a career and the chance at some kind of professional or political notoriety. The vast majority of them wore their resumes on the backs of their vehicles, the Mercedes and Priuses alike. And nearly all were “liberals,” intellectually if not in actual practice.

They lived off what the New York Times and Washington Post fed them, and they thought and talked the way those editorial pages told them to think and speak. For example, if the New York Times proclaimed that aliens had landed in the middle of Times Square last night, they would believe it with zero fact-checking. When they read something saying “we” needed to get back to “science,” they liked to throw out phrases like, “we need to get back to science,” in political discussions. But the line would be a non-sequitur of no substance, and when pressed about what they really meant, they were almost always unprepared for the need to offer a substantive response or explanation. And they never offered a coherent one. Indeed, non-sequiturs, tangents, and an inability to formulate coherent arguments based in logic and without a strong undercurrent of emotion were the hallmark of most of their ilk.

They lived in a world of empty, hollow, and in the end, meaningless platitudes. It was boring and banal. What made this state of affairs even worse, these people were typically well-educated, and they lived in the upper middle class and affluent neighborhoods of northern Arlington and Alexandria. They were primarily responsible for keeping every elected office in the area reliably “blue” going back many decades. They engaged in, but were apparently unaware of their double standards, had a huge blind spot about most other issues in many instances, looked down their noses at anyone from the south or west, and gave new meaning to the terms “pretentious,” condescending,” and “intellectually lazy.”

Dalton and his wife had lived surrounded by them in the same neighborhood a few times, and they could usually get along with their neighbors, until someone who found out the Daltons were from Texas couldn’t resist trying to draw them into a political discussion. And that inevitably went badly for the neighbors. One of the couples hadn’t talked to the Daltons for over a year one time after Dalton’s wife called Obama an “empty suit.” In fairness to his wife, the other couple had it coming, and the comment had stung them. Everything was emotion with these people. Oh well, don’t ask questions that you may not like the answer to.

Washington itself, as John Kennedy famously quipped, was a city of southern efficiency and northern charm, meaning it had neither efficiency nor charm. Its gleaming, white marbled buildings and monuments — after time — became a bland, spiritless conglomeration that masked something rotten at the core, like Scripture’s whited sepulchers.

It was also the most confusing, disjointed, and inefficiently laid-out area in the United States, making driving a nightmare. This fact had the resultant effect of driving up everyone’s blood pressure and putting every driver on the road on edge. As a result, Dalton had nicknamed the area the “car horn and siren capital of the world,” because on an average day, he would hear at least half a dozen people honk their horn at another driver (or even pedestrians), and during any 24-hour period he would invariably hear a siren the same number of times.

The area was the most over-policed place in the world too, and that was saying something, because Dalton had spent military deployments in some very autocratic countries, including some former Soviet republics. For example, Dalton has once witnessed 20 officers and 9 police cars respond to one homeless man cursing at people in the Ballston area of Arlington. He had actually walked down to the scene because he was afraid one of the officers might draw their weapon and shoot the unarmed man, and Dalton was a law enforcement guy; he was a career prosecutor who supported police. He had actually asked an officer why so many of them had responded. When he didn’t receive any response, he told the officers that where he was from, the situation would’ve been handled by one officer. They had looked at him like they had no idea what he was talking about. Because they didn’t. He wondered how much real crime was taking place at that very moment elsewhere in the city and going completely unchecked.

It was little wonder, then, why everybody moved and drove around like scared rabbits in their hybrids with their “Coexist” and Ivy League stickers pasted on the back windows. People were stressed out. The cops had very little to do. Government was very big, whether it was federal, state, or local. For instance, you would shovel off your sidewalk after a big snowfall, or receive a fine. That’s right; involuntary servitude in service to the Old Dominion and its principalities was not deemed unconstitutional. You would shovel off that sidewalk and not be paid for it. And if you didn’t, you would pay them.

And all of this was too bad, because Washington and northern Virginia did have a few good qualities. Dalton loved Shenandoah National Park and the mountains that rose up about an hour’s drive west of the city. But it just wasn’t enough. And those mountains might as well be in a different country. The few good things about DC were drowned out by everything else.

The bottom line was the Daltons did not fit. They never had. And they never would. That much they were certain of. The real question was, if not there, then where?

He was pondering these issues once again on a Monday, already planning another weekend escape, when his wife walked in holding a letter and wearing a questioning look. “What is it?” he asked her. “My Mom’s aunt just passed away,” she said. “I’m sorry sweetie; were you close to her?” Dalton empathized. “No, not really. I only saw her a few times. I don’t think I’ve seen her in over 20 years.” “Then what is it?” “Well this letter is interesting. It’s from a law firm in Raleigh. They’re doing her estate and this says she left one thing open. She apparently has some property out on some island in North Carolina that nobody wants and they’re about to auction it off. They’re giving every living survivor notice.” “I’m not following you,” Dalton said. “This says if they can find a surviving descendent to pay fair market value, the estate has to sell it to that surviving descendent. She wanted to keep it in the family, I guess.”

Dalton thought about it. “Where is it?” “Some place called Harkers Island.” Dalton sat up and was now fully alert. “Do you know where that is?” She asked. He did.

“You remember when I was stationed at Lejeune? It’s up there just east of Beaufort, that little barrier island between Shackleford Banks and Cape Lookout National Seashore,” he told her.

She looked confused. “Did we ever go out there?”

“Yeah. Remember? There’s only one road in and out across that causeway and bridge. We crossed over and turned left and went out to the National Park seashore.”

She still looked like she couldn’t remember it.

“Can I see the letter? I’ll look up where the property is and we can talk about it,” he offered.

She chuckled. “You want to move to an island off the coast of North Carolina?”

“Not yet. I just want to see where it is right now.”

She handed him the letter, smiling now.

“Is it just land or does she have something on it?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” she answered as she walked into the kitchen.

He pulled out his laptop and went to work. This was familiar ground. They had lived in Beaufort in Carteret County, a little town on the waterfront, near where the Newport River flowed in from the north, and where the boats pulled in each night off the Intercoastal Waterway. He knew from memory Harkers Island was east of Beaufort in a sort of no-man’s land; it was a short trip from Beaufort by boat across the Back Sound, but by car one had to take highway 70 up and over the North River and then back down what beaten path there was to get there. It was out of the proverbial way, and there was no reason to go across the causeway unless you either lived there or were traveling to the Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Once he had the Carteret County assessor’s office website pulled up, he entered the plat number for the property. The lot was located about half-way across the island, just off the “main drag,” Island Road, that ran east and west after it swung in across the causeway from the mainland to the north. The address was “17 Pelican Lane.” He felt an immediate good vibe; 17 had been the jersey number he wore while playing college football and baseball. That had to be a good sign. Maybe he was reaching now, but he didn’t care.

He pulled up 17 Pelican Lane on Google Earth, and could barely believe his eyes; the property fronted Back Sound to the south, and it had a long pier and boat slip. Back Sound separated Harkers Island from two narrow, uninhabited barrier islands — Shackleford Banks and Core Banks — beyond which lay the Atlantic.

He couldn’t zoom the picture in close enough to tell what kind of condition the house, the other structures, or the pier were in, and due to the rural location, there was no “street view” available. But none of this mattered; Dalton had a feeling, and it was beginning to take hold of him.

He walked into the kitchen where his wife stood humming and making one of her vintage Cosmos. “We need to book a flight into New Bern as soon as possible,” he said. “What? Are you serious?” “Yes. Wait until you see this.”

Twenty-three years of being married to him taught her that when he was this assured about something, she should trust his instincts, because his instincts were pretty damn good on most things.

She smiled that magic smile of hers — the one that could make his heart skip a beat — and could only say, “Well, I guess we’re going down to Harkers Island.”

Glen Hines is the author of two books, Document and Cloudbreak, available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is presently at work on his third book, to be published in early 2019. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.

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