Summer is a special time. It is not unusual to throw caution to the wind in the summer months. People sometimes try things that they would never attempt at another time of the year.
Long ago, the year before I was a senior in college at Harvard, one of my roommates and I embarked on a summer long trip to Alaska. In the late sixties and early seventies, college students were pretty adventurous.
We had been doing some climbing and rappelling during the six months before our trip. I had even rappelled down the side of the house in Mt. Airy, NC much to the surprise of our neighbors.
We had a few adventures on our way west, but we started seriously climbing in Colorado. One afternoon, I was standing on a ledge a couple of inches wide about 100 feet in the air, and I decided that I would rather be standing in a stream with my fly rod. I told my roommate that he would have to find some other climbing buddies.
We eventually got to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and he did just that. He went off climbing with a group of students while I went fishing. When I came back to pick him up a day or two later, I found that he was in the hospital in Jackson Hole. He had finished a climb and was headed down when he slipped on some snow. Before he could stop his slide with his ice axe, he had fallen off the mountain and landed on a ledge 150 ft below.
The ledge was about three feet wide, and apparently there was nothing under it for about a thousand feet. Somehow they got him off the ledge, and he managed to walk several miles out with a broken collar bone. Of course he carried a piece of that ledge in his pocket for several years after that. We still made it to Alaska, but I ended up doing a lot of the driving for the next few weeks.
Tonight on the news, I heard the story of a couple from Pennsylvania who drowned near Nags Head. One of the news stations is reporting that they were standing on a sand bar and stepped off of it. They never made it back.
Back in July a boat carrying five people capsized in Bogue Inlet. They were rescued with the help of another boater and the Coast Guard.
Things can happen quickly in the summer. It is one thing to have fun, but it is another thing to try something that puts yourself or others in danger.
There are plenty of wonderful things to do without taking a chance that you might not live to regret. The Southern Outer Banks or almost anywhere on the North Carolina coast is a great place for a safe vacation, but the ocean can be very unforgiving.
Maybe I am just getting old, but a ride down the river before breakfast is about as risky as I like it these days. I have even been avoiding going out into the ocean at Bogue Inlet. There have been enough warnings in the local papers that I am hoping it will improve before fishing season.
If the Coast Guard does a threat assessment before they going into the Inlet, the challenges are serious.
I can have a great time just walking down the beach occasionally getting wet when I am hit by a wave. The power of the ocean is something that you learn to respect if you are close to it on a daily basis.
We see drowning deaths every year, and most of them happen because people forget to be careful. The ocean along the Carolina coast is not a swimming pool. The currents can be strong and the bottom can change from day to day. It is a place of great beauty, but it is not a place to forget your common sense.
Check out my new website with a year's worth of posts about life on the Southern Outer Banks. The Crystal Coast as it is known locally is a wonderful spot for a vacation, just don't forget to be safe.
