Emily Louise Smith

Emily Louise Smith
The Paradox of Stillness
Salt magazine, October 2015

Winter light spares nothing on this island. It lavishes equally the sailboats moored in Banks Channel, the boarded ice-cream stand on Lumina Avenue, the faded towels in the display windows of Wings. It bathes the egret in the marsh at the center of Harbor Island, where I begin my usual six-mile run, lingers on the boats shrink-wrapped and stacked four-high in dry docks, slides down metal awnings on the island’s old cottages, which it clearly loves best. It pauses along the concrete face of St. Therese in the alcove over the Catholic church’s sanctuary. This is Wrightsville Beach in the off-season, gloriously empty of tourists. If I time it right, I’ll make it around the John Nesbitt Loop, out to the south end gazebo to stretch, just as the sun slips behind Masonboro like a coin down a jukebox’s throat.

Some nights I run the beach end to end without seeing another person. My favorite public accesses cut through oleander and fig trees, a rare undeveloped lot and shingled house. The waves I can’t hear when running along the marsh crescendo as I crest a walkway over the sand. No matter how many times I pass through here, the ocean is never less imposing. Everything’s dialed up on this side: the smell of salt, the inky expanse of sky, the bright stories of constellations. “My god,” I say to greet it, stretching my arms overhead, “I live here.” Come June, this section of beach is an obstacle course of chairs and coolers, sandcastles and moats. Summer leans close, and the humidity slows everything it touches. But winter here is clear and invigorating, makes my run fast and flat. Bitter winds from the northeast hustle clouds of loose sand down the beach. The wind grips my cheeks and eddies in my ears and head, my legs and lungs, as if the whole island were suddenly swirling in my chest. Three miles in, I exhale a laugh no one has ever heard — it’s reserved for my romance with being alone.

My devotion to this winter beach run was hard won. I don’t come naturally to Wilmington’s soggy landscape. For more than a decade now, this place has left me unsettled. Its barrier islands migrate with currents and wind; wandering inlets can close with a single storm. Mason’s Inlet has shifted more than a half mile south in the past fifteen years. Summer breezes push sand back to the northeast. Just look at the juniper trees to see how indecisive and twitchy the wind can be here, its ambivalence ensconced in their branches. When I first encountered the illustrations of Claude Howell in the pages of Ben Dixon MacNeill’s The Hatterasman, I couldn’t explain how his sparse pen and ink drawings so deftly capture our restless islands. It would take me years to fully appreciate what my colleague Philip Gerard meant when he wrote that Howell’s drawings are filled with wind. 

A native of the South Carolina Piedmont, I prefer the golden fanfare of ginkgo leaves, the Japanese maples that deepen in both spring and fall — colors that smell of smoke and hay. As kids, my sister and I tromped through the Appalachian forests of the Carolinas and Tennessee, scrambled across Grandfather Mountain’s swinging bridge, and up craggy peaks to sweeping views of the valleys. All these years later, though, it’s not those overlooks that have stayed with me, but rather the coves of laurel and rhododendron my acrophobic father loved, light filtered through a canopy of oaks and eastern hemlocks. The old forest made me feel safe too. At summer camp, I savored the days our counselors directed us to disburse into the woods with notebooks. The object was simply to lean against a trunk and record everything we saw, heard, and smelled.

It’s not those overlooks that have stayed with me, but rather the coves of laurel and rhododendron my acrophobic father loved, light filtered through a canopy of oaks and eastern hemlocks. The old forest made me feel safe too.

My first year living on the coast, I grieved that familiar pageant of color, the mountains and farm seasons that had taught me how to feel. I missed counting the weeks until school started by which peach varietal — Monroe, Cresthaven, Loring — filled the baskets at the stand. So when I left Wilmington after graduate school to move back to South Carolina, I confess that I didn’t mind its downtown steeples and Antebellum columns awash in afternoon light, its riverboat Henrietta, framed in my rearview mirror. I couldn’t have predicted that less than a year later, I’d drive back across the Cape Fear to accept a coveted teaching position at my alma mater, and that, after more than a decade here, I’d still resist putting down roots. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve built a rewarding career, a community of friends and writers, helped found a magazine and my dream press, but I’ve not yet invested in a house or condo. A house is a story that could go on for years, and part of me needs to maintain the illusion that I might wander like an inlet.

I moved not long ago from a 1920s bungalow in historic Carolina Place to a house tucked along a prong of Bradley Creek. The marsh swells with moon tides, and every morning, light floods the cordgrass. Outside my kitchen window, a heron glides past, an elusive clapper rail purrs. Nearby vernal ponds ripen with Mabee’s salamanders and the fairy shrimp popularized as mail-order Sea-Monkeys. Once they herald spring, the peepers and other resident frogs don’t give up their raucous chorus until fall. I leave my porch light burning all night, because the insects that accumulate around it draw the jewel-sized beauties out of the trees to my doorstep.

It’s my new proximity to the ocean, this inching closer, that makes beach runs possible several times a week. A camera mounted at the corner surf shop records the island’s secrets like a diary and, on a monitor in the window, replays the morning light in the street outside Tower 7, the patient father whose children wag ice-cream painted tongues at it, the couple late at night, faces full of beer and fresh freckles, who can’t contain the humidity and endless vacation in front of them without combusting in argument. I lengthen my stride, hold my head a little higher as I pass. If you could isolate the frames, you’d see a woman shedding winter layers of fleece and gloves in favor of shorts and a tank top. You’d see my face become a red berry in July, wet hair curl at the nape of my neck. You might not notice a woman praying, her senses heightened, how acutely aware I am when I’m running. You wouldn’t see me becoming a little more myself with each loop, the ideas I’m working out, or the paragraphs I’m writing. Perhaps that’s the paradox of stillness: only when I’m in motion can I achieve the peace that allows me to see and hear clearly, to attune myself to my surroundings.

A house is a story that could go on for years, and part of me needs to maintain the illusion that I might wander like an inlet.

Though I’ve always relished long, solo runs, I’ve also made some of my best friends while running this island. The beats of our feet, synced strides, and arms swinging in unison allow us to talk about subjects that might not come up as easily while sitting across from one another. Our late thirties have brought their share of hardships — cancer, miscarriage, divorce, rehab — but none of these has been off limits. Just as valuable, we’ve learned the rare art of being quiet together. This winter, as we crossed the bridge, a friend spotted a bottlenose dolphin in the channel. Like me, she confronts grief by turning up the speed and distance — it’s one of many reasons we get along well — but that day we slowed to watch its dorsal fin windmill to the surface, vanish, and appear again. When it swam beyond sight, we picked up the pace, but not the conversation. For a while, we ran in silence — simply held it, and everything unsaid but understood, between us. 

Maybe home, too, is an idea that can lie dormant in us for a long time before it rises and floods us with familiarity. Like the fairy shrimp eggs, waiting years in the loamy soil for a good spring rain to coax them to life, or the peepers that survive winter beneath a shingle of loose bark. Or that unfailing September day when I push my key in the lock, and realize suddenly that the frogs are gone and have taken summer with them. It’s my new way of telling the seasons.

Which brings me to a summer night I keep tucked in my memory. As I rounded the corner near the athletic fields that border the parking lot, a toy airplane whirred by, dragging the pink banner of sunset in behind it. I lingered there, stretching, as more enthusiasts arrived and spaced out across the field, each attached to a miniature aircraft. The oncoming dark buzzed with planes wheeling overhead like illuminated sea birds. Spectators gathered, and I leaned close to watch a father wrap his son’s arms, their four hands guide the remote that, for a little while at least, tethered our hearts to the sky.

This essay first appeared in the October 2015 issue of Salt. An expanded version is included in the anthology 27 Views of Wilmington (Eno Publishers, 2015). © Emily Louise Smith All rights reserved.