Duck Week, Some Assembly Required

Proper preparation for a beach vacation generally starts by February.  Christmas and New Year are finished.  College Bowl Week is over.  The Super Bowl has been decided.  There are no more excuses for your riotous consumption of delectable foods.  You have to stop eating compulsively like you're pregnant and start eating like a grown up again.  Unfortunately, this didn't dawn on me until the drive down to Duck.  As I was licking the nacho cheese off my knuckles and simultaneously lunging for some Dolly Madisons in the glove box, I felt the seat belt snug tight against my love handle.  It was then that I knew I had wasted the days of my preparation.  Oh well.  At that point, nothing to do but pretend you meant to look like that.

That's because come Saturday morning, it's time to hit the beach.  And since most of the people only stay through Monday, you have to make hay while the sun shines, as the old gaffer would say.  Saturday is the biggest beach day of the weekend.  There's the annual volleyball tournament starting around 9 AM, and this is the day when everybody congregates in the same spot for a day's worth of sun and swimming and more flirtatious tomfoolery than you can shake a stick at.  It's a tricky thing learning to pace yourself on your first day.  When people know they only have three days of stick-shaking good times, they tend to run too hard and get too much sun that first day and then the rest of the weekend is lost to exhaustion.  It's understandable.  Everybody wants to have a rockstar beach vacation.  But it's better to be the Mick Jagger of Duck Week than the Jimi Hendrix.  My first trip to OBX, I went the Hendrix route. I wound up bright red with heatstroke on Day 1 and spent the rest of the weekend begging for agua and aloe rubs. Taking a full week off work, if you can, is well worth it.

This year, Saturday began with breakfast with my housemates, almost none of whom I knew.  See, since most people are lining up housing months in advance, they get to choose houses where they know most of the other 30 people in the house.  When you wait until the week of the trip to make arrangements, you wind up in a house of odds and ends (mostly odds) who also decided last minute.  This outcome was fine for me, as I enjoyed my housemates.  And at breakfast, I ran into the one guy at my house that I knew, Mr. Meth.  Mr. Meth is an attorney, one of those guys who thinks thoughts about three times faster than the average human and is limited only by his mouth's ability to form the words.  Occasionally when he's asking you a question, he expects an answer by the time he finishes asking, if not sooner.  If you haven't provided an answer by the time he places the question mark, or at least begun moving your mouth in anticipation of an answer, he immediately re-poses the question.  The resulting sensation is that of having a conversation with a meth head or a high-functioning autistic.  This can sometimes be exhausting, but I knew Mr. Meth to be a good guy.  So after breakfast, I invited him to wander down the street to a house where many of my DC friends were staying to touch base before hitting the beach.  I was unaware at the time, but this extra stop was the beginning of what, for brevity's sake, I will refer to as The Band.

You see, it adds to the experience to get a good, relatively small cohort assembled that can go out together.  Not an exclusive clique, mind you.  Rigidity in groups is the death of fun and possibility.  Especially at the beach.  But when groups swell to 30+ people, you need flexibility to do things separate from the group, or maybe even separate from your smaller cohort, things that may not interest everybody.  Like Voltron, you need to be able to go out and kick some butt according to your own agenda and reunite later to share notes, introduce new friends, or go on the attack together.  Otherwise, you turn your entire vacation over to the tyranny of the majority.  Case in point, I wanted to be sure to get my running in while I was there.  So while the Band members were out harvesting groupies or catching up on their Hollywood gossip mags, I would put on my swim trunks and run a few miles until the sweltering heat chased me into the soothing embrace of the ocean.

Anyway, upon arriving at my DC peeps' house, I ran into Hero.  Hero is a friend of mine from San Francisco who, despite living on the west coast, seemed to know everybody already.  Some people just have that gift.  She also has pipes like Bonnie Tyler. Whether she had come to Duck in search of a white knight upon a fiery steed, she wouldn't say, but she introduced me to two friends (and future Band members), Lobster Paws and Suk Suk.  Lobster Paws is a refreshing combination of beauty and brains stretched over the 5'10" frame of a beach volleyball player.  As impossible as she was for the boys to ignore, she made the mistake of applying sunscreen everywhere except her feet, thus distinguishing herself the rest of the week as "that tall blond girl with the swollen red feet."  Suk Suk is a delightful opera singer with a mind for mischief and a curious ability to sooth over-fed bellies with rhythmic chant and massage.

Hero, Lobster Paws, and Suk Suk

L

Lobster Paws, Hero, Me, and Mr. Meth

For those counting at home, that makes five members of The Band.  It just so happens that my car seats five.  So we all piled in and headed out to our first gig on the beach.  We hadn't been there for ten minutes when the grabass went into full swing with a co-ed game of football.  Ten minutes after that, I came up lame with my first injury, a sprain of the ligaments between the second and third toes (self-diagnosed.  I'm not a doctor, but I play one at Duck Beach.)  So afterward I was restricted to bocce ball tournaments and frolicking in the waves.  I'd have been upset about the gimpy walk, but in the sand everybody walks with a gangsta lean, so nobody noticed.

I was meticulous throughout the week about applying sunscreen and hydrating, so I avoided the energy drain and sunburn of the first day.  Some good grub and a quick early-evening nap put me in just the right mood to make a fool of myself.  The buzz around the island was that one of the houses was having a dance party later that night.  You may say, "Feel like making a fool of yourself + Dance party = Perfect match."  For some that may be true.  But it's too anonymous for me.  I'm the kind of fool that needs a spotlight.  This is one of those times when being in The Band comes in handy.  While everyone else was driving around looking for the dance party, The Band cruised down the island to the local watering hole for some Saturday night karaoke.  The five of us were the only sober ones in the place, and it was every bit as joyous as you would expect.  Suk Suk started The Band performances off strong with a rendition of Killing Me Softly that had every woman in the place singing along.  Hero foolishly took the advice of some guy and performed I Need A Hero, a song she didn't know the lyrics to, despite having a voice custom made for such a performance.  It cratered.  Mr. Meth followed later with the most delightfully WASP-y rendition of Bust A Move ever.  And it was transcendent in its earnestness.  I was the last solo act of our group.  My performance of Keep Your Hands To Yourself definitely wasn't going to make anyone faint.  However, my contribution to the night stood out for one reason:  my very special backup dancers.  Drunk guy is just the beginning.  Once the camera footage calms down, you'll see Fancy Pants emerge from behind the pillar.  I have nothing to add that the footage doesn't convey.  Gold sequined booty shorts, as a rule, speak louder than any words.

Sunday was a slow moving day with not much to report.  It was rightfully a day of rest from the partying, and was consumed mostly by visiting friends around the island, occasionally punctuated by meals.  Enriching at the time, but boring to write about, and even more boring to read.  Let's get to Monday, the last dash for most people before returning to the real world.

Monday is a much more integrated day at the beach than Saturday.  Saturday, people are just starting to get to know others, just beginning to venture outside of their own groups.  By Monday, you're practically family.  I spent most of the day swimming, wandering up and down the beach playing bocce, or catching up with friends old and new.  Because of this, I missed out on all the fun Suk Suk was creating with a little prank called "ghosting."  Ghosting is when you follow someone around mimicking their every move without them knowing.  This is an especially amusing prank when played on a guy who is hitting on a girl.  There he is, doing his best to seem impressive, but failing miserably because the girls behind him are illustrating just how absurdly subjective the battle of body language can be.  The most serious or confident gesture can be totally undermined by having as many as five people behind you copying every head tilt and hand motion.   I'm not positive that I didn't get ghosted myself, being that I was oblivious to the activity until late in the day.  I have only Suk Suk's word to believe.  Hopefully no embarrassing pictures like this one surface.

 Chicken Wing getting ghosted

That night, one of the houses up the island was hosting a karaoke party.  We figured that the success of Saturday night at the bar would give us the upper hand as seasoned pros.  But I'm telling you now, this weekend was a tale of two karaoke cities.  It was the best of karaoke, it was the worst of karaoke.  Now, I love my people, but doing karaoke with large groups of Mormons is the lamest thing this side of Wichita (as an aside, the sole exception to this rule was my friend B's birthday party when Matty C., the tax attorney, broke out a solid delivery of Like A Virgin.  I'll never forget that.)  Whereas Saturday night was a boisterous crowd of backup singers supporting your efforts, the Monday night crowd seemed to think they were sitting in Simon Cowell's chair for a taping of American Idol.  Either that, or they were expecting some Janice Kapp Perry or something equally awful.  A rousing rendition of Fat Bottom Girls might have shortened my "new friends" list significantly.  Add to this a karaoke machine meant for small house groups of 10 friends: weak speakers, couldn't hear the music or read the lyrics.  It was a train wreck from the first note.  By about the fifth song of the night, it was obvious that there wasn't much life in this thing.  And yet somehow I let Suk Suk talk me into getting up, thinking that a jaunty duet of Summer Nights might get the crowd into it.  We closed the party down, and not in a good way.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that as soon as we finished, the entire room of 30-40 people rose as one and began filing toward the door.  I guess they don't know talent when they see it.

The nice thing about staying the whole week is that you can afford to recharge your batteries after everyone leaves on Monday without feeling like you're missing something or wasting valuable vacation time.  You can afford to hang out in the Food Lion parking lot for two hours chit-chatting about nothing in particular.  You  can squeeze in a run before lunch while everybody is uploading pictures to Facebook.  You can go to the beach or not go to the beach all day long.  You get to have the special experiences, like the girls singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame on the field during the seventh inning stretch of a college summer league baseball game.

 Root, root, root for the home team

 

Or you can drive a few miles up the beach, beyond where roads will take you, to see the wild horses roaming the shore.

 Peter, Suk Suk, and me

Or you could witness Mr. Meth nearly spin off this planet when he has an adverse psychotic reaction to a lame party (I wish I could have captured this in a photo.)  Or maybe you'd be content to nurse a cold bottle of Nehi Soda outside a ramshackle gas station on the edge of nowhere and talk weather with the locals.

Sooner or later, the time comes when you have to leave Duck.  All week long, there is a slow trickle of departures.  By Thursday, there are barely enough left to have any sort of meaningful gathering.  Oddly enough, though I had supposedly been relaxing for an entire week, I felt like an overgrazed pasture, chewed down to a nub.  I don't think I realized how fatigued I was until I stopped for gas on my way off the island.  After filling up and grabbing some road grub, I pulled away from the station with the pump still in my car.  Symbolic, perhaps, of the fact that though you may fill your car's tank, if you leave Duck with fuel left in your own tank, you may have done it wrong.  But that's up to you to decide.

   Lunch at the Bad Bean

DC Peeps' House

The Band touring a shower.  Sounds lame, I know.

Putting Rebekah in a dilemma.

Last day with The Band