PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ALLAN LIBBY, TOWN OF SURF CITY, NC
TOPSAIL ISLAND, NC – The temperature’s still warm. Not brutally hot, as it has been most of the summer, but warm. Good enough to make you sweat even in a T-shirt and shorts. The ocean is warmer still, at least in a relative sense. The water remains in the ‘80s, even as the nighttime air temps drop into the ‘60s.
Yet there’s a decided feel that summer is ending. The practical end of summer – Labor Day – is still a week away, and the date that the calendar chooses as the finish date is still more than three weeks away.
But on this small island, as up and down the North Carolina coast, you can feel it.
The summer crowds aren’t merely dwindling. “The people just disappeared this week,” the lady who runs the gift shop next to the IGA in Surf City said Saturday. “They’re gone.”
Likewise, the young woman at the register of Island Treasures down in Topsail Beach said, “Where is everybody? Nobody’s here.”
They both know why. Most North Carolina children returned to school last week. Most college students had already returned. Vacations for those families are over, as far as the summer of 2010 concerned. Shops are having to make do with only Virginians and those from farther north whose children don’t return to school until after Labor Day. By next week, those, too, will be gone. All that will be left are those couples too young or too old to worry about children getting on the bus.
And the concern has shifted to hurricanes, whose peak season runs from late August through September. Danielle passed without fanfare this weekend, though the waves Saturday night were up, crashing around the Jolly Roger Pier in Topsail Beach. Now the attention is on Earl and Fiona and whoever will follow.
But there is another sign of summer’s impending end, just as telling as the dropping temperatures or the dwindling crowds or the threatening storms.
That is the inestimable sadness of summer’s end.
Autumn is a wonderful time on an island, to be sure, and many prefer it. But it is a different, less exuberant, more restrained time than summer. For those who fancy themselves summer people, fall’s arrival means nothing less than the departure of the island’s spirit. Cold weather is around the corner now. Soon another year will have passed. On an island, there is nothing sadder than the calendar rolling into September.
That is in the air these days, palpable, and it is a bad feeling.
HAVE BEEN GOING TO THAT BEAUTIFUL ISLAND PARADISE FOR 47 YEARS, WOULD LOVE TO MOVE THERE. EVEN WITH ALL THE GROWTH IN BUSINESS, YOU CAN STILL FEEL LIKE YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE THERE. WAS THERE IN MAY, WOULD LIKE TO GO BACK DOWN IN OCT. UNTIL THEN TAKE CARE OF MY ISLAND.
