Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/03/01/life_and_death_at_wrightsville_beach_over_a_century_in_the_carolinas.php
Friday, March 1, 2002
The house sits toward the southern end of a four-mile spit of land right off the coast of Wilmington, NC. It is a typical beach cottage, constructed entirely of wood, with a hollow structure of support beams comprising the first floor. Off one porch is an unfettered view of the berm, the sole protection the house has from the Atlantic Ocean, which beats the shore a mere 150 yards in front of the house. On the opposite porch, one has a view of the sound, the narrow body of water that winds through marshes and channels before reaching the mainland.
The house has been there, in one form or another, since the late 1800s, when my great-grandfather, Preston Bridgers, first built the homestead. Since then, it has undergone many renovations and an occasional calamity. Like many other houses at Wrightsville, ours has been passed from generation to generation. It was only fitting that I stayed there when I returned to see my grandfather before he died.
Flying into Wilmington, I did not know what to expect. My oldest brother picked me up and said that we should drive directly to my grandfather's apartment, even though it was 11:30 at night. I arrived and walked into his office, where he was now living. The room, normally cluttered with papers, novels, and rare Civil War books, had been completely transformed. The desk and sofa were replaced with a hospital bed and an oxygen machine, which gurgled constantly in the corner. My grandfather lay on the bed covered in flannel sheets, unmoving, as if he were taking a nap.
The disease has taken its toll on his insides, but his exterior has hardly been affected. The face was exactly the same—perhaps slightly gaunter, a little paler—but it was still distinctly my grandfather. His chest rhythmically rose and fell with the synchronization of a metronome. His eyes flashed open momentarily upon my arrival, briefly revealing the intense intellectual brilliance for which he was known. Then they shut, not by his power, but from the disease that was killing him. But it has not touched his mind, which still churned as powerfully as ever behind this weakened fa¡ade.
After I sat down and spoke for a few minutes, he struggled to say something. 'It's mighty sweet of you to come.' A few minutes later he spoke again, but this time I could not discern his words; his energy was ebbing and his lungs filling with fluid. I was infuriated with myself, but I know he was even more upset that he could no longer articulate his words. He was perfectly cognizant that he could not speak clearly, and this was the worst part. He knew exactly what was happening to his body, but nothing could be done. After a minute or two, he repeated himself, and this time I understood him. 'You're a fine young man.' These were his last words to me.
The next day when I saw him, he wasn't able to speak at all. Instead, I could only hold his hand and tell him things that I should have years ago. The nurse said he could hear everything although he was no longer able to respond.
Later that night our other brother called my older brother and me to the apartment. We arrived and milled about for a few minutes. The hospice nurses checked his vital signs. They then explained that his kidneys had completely shut down, his blood pressure and temperature had fallen, and his respiration had slowed to 12 breaths per minute. They estimated six to eight hours. He lasted sixteen.
The Middle of the Isle restaurant would be considered a dive to many, but it has always been a part of my trips to Wrightsville Beach. The sign out front of the squat building boasts all-day breakfast. Inside, there is a cacophonic clanging of dishes and silverware, which intertwines itself with the gruff, friendly banter of the fishermen who make up the clientele, especially in the tourist off-season. Each time I step over the buckled linoleum floor and into the main dining room, a cramped area packed with tables and booths, I can't help but feel the timelessness of the Beach. My brothers and I would get up early mornings and meet my grandfather at the restaurant, chat about school, read the paper, and feast on the fine Southern cuisine. I normally get the Sampler, a massive breakfast with grits, hotcakes, sausages, hash browns, and, of course, sweet tea.
My great-grandfather, Burke Bridgers, was a professional fisherman, and probably dined here as well. I imagine that the cuisine was identical—greasy breakfast and fine coffee and tea. Hanging on the wall back at the cottage is a eulogy for Burke, and a picture of the man. He was a grizzled man and wore his hat pulled low over his brow. His gaze doesn't quite meet the camera full on, but converges off into the distance, as if he were again on the water. My favorite passage from the page reads, 'His avidity never ceased until he felt it prudent to slow down. This decision reached after his 75th birthday, when he braved the icy breath of 20 degree weather to fish for rock on Cape Fear River...at three o' clock in the morning. That is a fisherman.'
Above this picture is one of his father, Preston Bridgers, the first Bridgers to build a cottage on the island. In this photo, he is dressed in the typical beach attire of the day—a full business suit. He sits in a rocking chair reading the newspaper and smoking his pipe.
Weeks ago, my mother visited my grandfather in the hospital. Sorting through his belongings, she found a picture of him. In it, he sits on a rocking chair on the beach porch of the cottage, at the exact same angle as in the photo of his grandfather. The picture was framed identically. 'You weren't supposed to find that until I was gone,' he told her. The day after he died we hung the picture beside his father and grandfather's photographs in the cottage.
Three summers ago, friends from high school visited me at Wrightsville towards the end of September. Two were ready to begin college, and two of us were preparing to embark on a trip to Africa. September is high hurricane season, and that year was particularly bad. Hurricane Dennis headed straight for Wrightsville, as many hurricanes do, inexorably drawn to the jutting Cape Fear. Normally they turn away, but Dennis made no such move. My friends, one brother, and I decided to brave the storm, acting on the advice of my grandfather. He had seen enough hurricanes to know that this one, even hitting directly, could do no serious damage.
As the hurricane neared, we decided to play a round of golf in town even though the outer bands of the storm were just rolling in. Hurricane golf is a tricky endeavor. After nine holes of gale-induced agony, I stopped in the pro shop to check the weather report and discovered that Wrightsville Beach was under a mandatory evacuation order, with only residents allowed on the island. We jumped into the car and sped back, having to forcefully explain to the police manning the bridge that we would not turn around, even though we had no resident sticker, and that he could call the beach house if that was a problem.
Hurricanes are at once repulsive and beautiful. The cloud cover is extraordinarily low. Hurricanes come in bands, bringing wave upon wave of ominously gray clouds moving forward while simultaneously moving side to side with the revolving storm center. Their presence is otherworldly, as if something paranormal is skating across the sky above, forcing the clouds into a circular, disturbingly unnatural pattern that cannot be fully discerned from ground level. The wind crescendos very slowly, eventually forcing the ocean and sounds into turmoil; the waters roil and bubble, tearing loose anything not well secured.
With the entire family at the house, we brought all deck furniture inside, tied down other movables outside, and boarded the windows facing the ocean. We have streamlined the entire process into a two-hour job. My grandfather and my uncle, after the work was done, sat on the ocean porch and drank a beer, a ceremony practiced for generations when leaving the island before an oncoming hurricane, not knowing what, if anything, would remain in the wake of the storms.
In 1954, the North Carolina coast was ravaged by Hurricane Hazel, a massive storm with winds up to 150 miles per hour. When it came ashore at Cape Fear, Hazel did so at the worst possible time, the October full moon, which brings with it the highest lunar tides of the year, known to hunters as the 'marsh hen tide.' Hazel brought with it an 18 foot storm surge in some places, viscously bringing the full brunt of its force to bear on the southern beaches of North Carolina. Hazel decimated Wrightsville Beach along with every town, small and large, in the southeastern part of the state. The Bridgers Cottage did not escape the destruction.
Before Hazel, the house sat directly on the beach, with the high tides reaching under the support pillars. The house had remained largely unchanged from its construction in 1895 by Preston, until Burke built a small house behind it to escape from his five sisters. Hazel obliterated the main house, leaving just Burke's cottage, which was only renovated in 1982 when the house became the permanent residence of my grandparents.
While cleaning up from Hazel, a 1920 Claude Howe painting of the original cottage was discovered largely unscathed, under six feet of sand. Somehow it had braved and survived the storm, and it still hangs in the cottage. Hazel remains the worst natural disaster to befall North Carolina, and one of the most destructive hurricanes to hit the United States. But the storm did have a positive aspect; it launched a beach re-nourishment program that strengthened the berm and forced the ocean back over 100 yards from the houses. Wrightsville remains one of the most protected beaches in the state.
Dennis hit at 7:00 PM, and my friends and I were stuck in the house; if we left our property, we could be arrested for violating the evacuation order. After it fell dark, we went onto the beach, enduring the fierce winds. We could hear nothing over the roar of the storm. Sand blown at fifty miles an hour pelted our slickers, berating our hooded ears, and my legs, exposed, felt like they were being sliced to pieces. The ocean lacked its regular rhythmic wave pattern; the entire body of water ran parallel to the beach, sweeping sideways across the land like a mighty flooding river. We quickly returned to the safety of the cottage and settled in for the night.
At eight, a transformer blew, and we lit the candles, just as generations before us had. They hardly illuminated the blackness from the storm and the boarded windows. As the evening progressed, so too did a nagging feeling of uneasiness. We sat in the living room, which was barely lit, playing cards for hours, listening to the radio reports, and watching the barometer on the wall sink. The fireplace muttered gutturally as the wind blew over and down the chimney creating a sound akin to something out of a childhood nightmare.
We were in the exact same position that every generation of our family had been in before. I recalled my mother telling me about sleeping on the floor downstairs as hurricanes roared through the night. She likened it to a rumbling train, and only now did I understand what she meant. As we sat defenseless, the wind began to howl as the ferocity increased. Much later, I awoke at the peak of the storm. The faint vibrations that reverberated through my bed confused me. It was the entire house shaking on its foundations. I rolled over and recalled my grandfather's words; the hurricane posed no great threat. Even these words were not that comforting. Sure enough, by morning Dennis had moved to sea, and we and the house were unharmed, save a few missing shingles. The storm left only pelting rains and turbulent seas.
The weather on the day of the service was beautiful. It was one of those January days in North Carolina where the temperature hits seventy, and the sky is empty and blue. It seemed almost wrong to have such nice weather as we headed toward the grave.
The cemetery is out of a dream. Age-old iron girders, rusted, bent, and flaking, surround a series of small plots, each owned by a different family. The roads double as dividers between plots, and they are nothing more than meandering, single-lane paths of antiquated pavement, eaten through with grass and weeds. Trees and bushes are scattered throughout, making the cemetery more like a park. In the winter months, some type of whispery thin, gray weed clings to the bare branches of the defoliated trees, which look like weeping willows.
A towering obelisk, built for Robert Rufus Bridgers, Preston's father, and some others of his generation, dominates the Bridgers plot. It is surrounded on all sides by the different generations of Bridgers spanning the last century and a half.
Over Christmas, my brothers and I visited my grandmother's grave. We were disturbed to see that my grandfather's name had already been written on the same tombstone as that of his first wife, who had also succumbed to an aggressive cancer.
Now coming back seven years after her funeral aroused a frightening feeling of symmetry. People swamped the area, but our plot is only large enough for the immediate family. The rest stood back, waiting for the immediate family to take their places before encroaching some. The service was brief, as he would have wanted it, and afterwards we returned to my uncle's house, where the melee that had been ongoing for the three previous days continued. But within a couple hours, the crowds dispersed.
They had been there since Friday late afternoon, mere hours after my grandfather's death. Saturday and Sunday were exactly the same. An endless stream of family and friends circulated through my uncle's house, bringing food, catching up on old times, and offering words of comfort. The different generations melded together, all having some connection to Wilmington and the Wrightsville Beach.
My brother and I concluded afterwards that the festivities were a defense mechanism. The endless crowd did not allow those grieving the requisite time to comprehend what had been lost, and often we even forgot the true purpose of the gathering and the conspicuous absence of my grandfather at a family affair.
Now, at midday on Monday, the distraction had to end. Quickly the guests departed, then one of my brothers headed back to San Francisco, and the other toward Virginia. I was left sitting on the steps out front with my mother and her siblings, basking in the sunlight, pondering the sudden silence and calmness, so discordant with the masses of people that were almost smothering the last few days.
It is only in solitude, unprotected by the chatter and company of others, that the full reality hits any of us. The finality of death only caught up to me as I returned to the New Hampshire hinterland by myself.