Up Moses Creek: Surf’s up!
“What the Tuck?”
Fred Coyle photo
Every fall, Becky and I leave Moses Creek for a week to go to Isle of Palms in South Carolina, and we stay on the beach there in a complex called the Sea Cabins. I make sure that two canoes go with us, a tandem we use to explore the quiet inland waterways together, and, for ocean surfing, a small solo canoe that I paddle here on our mountain rivers. We also rent bikes, and we walk the beach.
Becky is a beachcomber without parallel. She’ll sit for an hour in the swash and, with patient look, comb the shelly beach hash with her fingers to see what the ocean turns up — be it shark teeth, old glass shards or pieces of fossil bones from prehistoric sea beasts. If she had a basin in her hands, you’d think she was panning for gold.
One nugget Becky combed up this fall was an honest-to-goodness message in a bottle. She saw it floating in a tide pool. Always patient, she didn’t pull the cork until that evening when we were eating dinner with friends at a restaurant. But the bottle’s mouth turned out to be too small for any of us to get out the folded-up message. Our waitress joined in and offered to take the bottle to the chef, “He’ll have tweezers!” And in a minute, she brought the extracted paper back. We were up to three waitresses and the hostess at our table when Becky opened the paper and began to read. It turned out to be a hand-written letter from a father to his daughter, Lyla, on her 16th birthday. His words were loving and full of good wishes for his daughter’s coming year.
Unfortunately, the girl's first name and her age were the only specifics. No date or place of origin. The father ends by telling her, "Now, throw this bottle into the ocean and wonder on its travels."
Becky happened to find the bottle on her own birthday — though I’m not giving her age in this article. “The whole world doesn’t have to know everything!” she exclaimed. At the bottom of the father’s letter, she wrote the date and place she’d found the bottle, then, tamping the cork back in, she threw it from the end of the Sea Cabins pier into an outgoing tide.
Becky likes to walk the beach, but before I go out, I usually “comb” it first with my eyes from the balcony of our Sea Cabin, because you never know what is going to appear on the sand below. For instance, one morning here came a bright-yellow trackhoe chugging down the beach. The machine somehow managed to fit itself under the Sea Cabins pier, and then it rolled on out of sight toward the row of 10-bedroom-15-bath McMansions perched precariously on the southern, eroding tip of the island. I watched how easily the waves erased the two rows of caterpillar tracks that the heavy machine left behind and took it as a sign.
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The next morning, I was watching both the sun come up over the ocean and the tourists on the beach, who were, as usual, facing the bright east in what I call "The iPhone Prayer Position," when a burly man decked out in a red plaid kilt and full Scottish regalia strode out of our complex, accompanied by a lass. He crossed the dunes, parted the iPhones, and positioned himself at the ocean’s edge, feet firmly planted and hands on his hips. He was so large he eclipsed the sun. I swear I saw the foaming breakers shrink back from him in fear! After a couple of minutes in that challenging pose, he turned and, with his lass, walked back. His biceps and shoulders were so big he had to hold his arms out at his sides. We see other people at the beach who walk like that too, but not because of their muscles. I wondered, “What was he about?” Then Becky showed me a headline in the morning newspaper: "54th Annual Charleston Scottish Games." The games were being held the next day, with thousands of kilts expected to attend and grapple.
After the Scotsman left, the sun climbed into a clear sky, revealing uniform waves that were perfect for ocean surfing in my little solo boat. It’s my favorite thing to do at the beach. Becky, who watches from shore when I paddle out, says, “It’s a bunch of boys on surfboards and one old fart in a canoe.”
Tuckaseegee? Nantahala? Pigeon? Chattooga? I’ve canoed our mountain whitewater for years and love it, but nothing can match the thrill that comes when I catch a breaking comber just right and ride it to shore. Even the canoe gets excited. I can feel the hull vibrating beneath my knees. If I catch the wave just wrong, however, it rides me. A few inches too far forward or back on the curling crest make all the difference between exultation and a violent trip down to Davy Jones’ locker.
The most heroic-looking picture ever taken while I was canoe surfing — made by friend Fred, who, along with his wife, joined us last year — shows me doing a bow ender on a breaking wave. An “ender” is boater talk for what happens when you tuck your bow down into the bottom of a barreling wave and let the onrushing wall of water push the stern straight up towards the sky. I wish I could say that Fred’s photo shows me executing a premeditated ender — elegant, graceful, controlled. But I was just trying to ride the wave to shore. And the instant Fred’s camera went snap, capturing my canoe on its way to unanticipated verticality, my one meditation was, “What the Tuck?” Or something along those lines.
The next morning, the sun illuminated the wrong conditions for paddling but the right ones for pedaling. The tide was out, exposing smooth, hard-packed sand, and a stiff north wind blew down the length of the beach. So, riding my bike through sheltered neighborhoods up to the island’s northern tip, then crossing the dunes, I saw the lone and level sand stretching far away, and I was gone with the wind.
Since I like to bike no hands and had the wind in my sails, I fished a pen and note card from my pocket as I cruised along and began to write this article for The Smoky Mountain News.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the sec-ond week of each month.)
