Former Michigan reporter reflects on stay at “Tops’l”

BY: MIKE CONNELL

TOPSAIL BEACH, N.C. — Is this a great country or what?

That’s meant as a rhetorical question, but feel free to ask it literally. I realize there are folks who feel America is fading fast. I’ve heard it mentioned on the radio now and again.

In my mind, the real divide in our nation isn’t between liberals and conservatives, capitalists and socialists, Red States and Blue States or even McDonald’s and Burger King.

No, it is between optimists and pessimists.

The optimists think America is doing just fine, thank you. Oh, sure, the country has its warts, and occasionally it scrapes a knee, but all in all, it’s in good health. The pessimists look at the same patient and detect a cancer that’s spreading fast.

The optimists regard the pessimists as paranoid and delusional. Scaredy cats. The pessimists think the optimists are dense and in denial. Polecats. It makes for great theater.

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I’LL CHEERFULLY admit I’m in the optimists’ camp, but then I have just spent a week at the shore. If you want to feel good about our nation, take a road trip.

One of the joys of being an American is our freedom to roam. It’s a big country, and we can pretty much go where we want when we want. The open road beckons.

As a teenager, before I could afford a car, I would hitchhike as a basic means of transportation. In 1967, I thumbed rides from Morgantown, W.Va., which just misses straddling the Mason-Dixon Line, to Tampa by way of Louisville, Ky. The journey took most of a week.

Hitching a ride wasn’t difficult in those days. People seemed less fearful and more trusting. Expressways weren’t quite as pervasive, either, and it usually wasn’t hard to find rides on blue highways.

As I traveled through Dixie, driver after driver shared the same morsel of wisdom: “The further south you go, the nicer folks get.”

A fellow in Alabama added an asterisk: “That’s true until you get into Florida, then it goes the other way.”

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OUR FAMILY gathered this year at Topsail Beach, a little town tucked at the southern end of Topsail Island, or “Tops’l,” to use the local pronunciation. It’s a 26-mile-long barrier island on the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Camp Lejeune.

My wife and I made our first visit to Tops’l in 1977 or ’78, before we had children. We’ve returned more summers than not.

Compared to most beach towns on the Atlantic coast, Tops’l is sleepy and slow-paced — think Mayberry-by-the-Sea. That’s part of its charm.

Last summer, we skipped Tops’l and joined my brother-in-law’s family at Corolla on the northern end of the Outer Banks — think Rochester Hills-By-The-Sea.

Our beach house in Corolla was lovely, with a pool out back, but it sat in a subdivision that would not have looked out of place in Oakland County had the houses not stood on stilts. It was a mile hike to a crowded beach.

When we went out for ice cream, we went to a Dairy Queen in a shopping mall. Hoping to launch my kayak, I drove for miles in a fruitless search for public access to Currituck Sound.

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BY CONTRAST, some streets on Tops’l are three blocks long with public access to the ocean on one end and to the sound on the other.

Tops’l isn’t tony. It’s a place of sun-blistered paint and warped boards. Blanketflowers run wild in vacant lots, and sea turtles waddle ashore by moonlight to bury their eggs.

Until the Second World War, the island was accessible only by boat. During the war, the Navy turned the island into a top-secret site for testing ramjet missiles. NASA owes a deep debt to Operation Bumblebee.

The space program eventually landed in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the weather was more cooperative, but traces of its origins remain on Tops’l. Several concrete observation towers, used to track rocket launches, still stand on the island, and the old assembly building at Topsail Beach now houses a missile museum.

An even more popular attraction, a hospital for sea turtles, is only a short walk from the missile museum. The hospital recently released 16 of its 39 patients, making room for the anticipated arrival of sea turtles injured by the Gulf oil slicks.

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CHANGE COMES slowly to a place like Tops’l, but it also comes surely.

The island is a bit like Pinocchio’s nose — it keeps growing. In the past three decades, drifting sand has added about a mile of new land to the island’s southern tip. It’s a marvelous place to catch fish and sunsets.

All that migrating sand has to come from somewhere. Thirty years ago, a double row of dunes shielded beachfront cottages from the surf. Hurricanes and nor’easters have washed away miles of dunes, and today the government “nourishes” the beaches by bringing in sand and bulldozing it into faux dunes.

Yet another change can be seen at sunrises and sunsets, when beachgoers love to amble up and down the strand. A generation ago, the strollers would nod or tip a cap. It could get wearisome at times, all that “hey there” and “howdy.”

Today, eye contact on the beach is as passé as hitchhiking. It just isn’t done by anyone younger than 50.

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IF PEOPLE seem a little less friendly, or shall we say a bit more wary, they also seem less uptight.

Thirty years ago, nearly everyone on a beach such as Tops’l arrived as part of a middle-class white family. More people are going to the shore these days, and they are more diverse in every way. No one seems to care.

Beachgoers have more toys, and better toys, and they’re finding more ways to enjoy themselves. I might argue the shore has never been more fun.

By the way, I never really bought the notion of people getting nicer the further south you traveled. In my experience, people are pretty much the same everywhere.

No matter where you go, you’ll find similar percentages of geniuses and morons, saints and cretins, optimists and pessimists, or most any other category you’d like to choose. Sure, some folks say pop, and others say soda, but I’m talking about meaningful distinctions.

We’re all in this together. We’re all Americans. And, after 234 years, we’re getting along about as well as ever.

Is this a great country or what?

http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20100704/OPINION02/7040323/0/NEWS01/Connell-Some-folks-say-pop-others-say-soda?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Mike Connell is a freelance writer and a former Times Herald reporter. Contact him at fortgratiot@gmail.com.