(four)

      The first morning sucked. I didn't really have anywhere to live so I stayed on Todd and Lori's couch the night before. Todd was an early riser in those days. I was not. I had only been on the beach for a couple of days, maybe a week. I was used to going to sleep about the time Todd woke me up that first day. He offered me breakfast, and I declined. Morning food was also a foreign thing to me. I usually had to smoke up the ganja first thing to quell the hangovers which were commonplace back then. Sometime around midday an appetite would find me. But for the moment, I had all I could take with the hangover and the stiffness from sleeping on a lightly padded wicker sofa. Todd and Lori lived in a really cool house back in Kitty Hawk Woods. There were no neighbors, and the road that lead to their yard was a good half mile or so through a quiet stand of forest that was somehow spared during the development of that little subdivision. During my earlier years as a chef I lived with Todd and Lori in Jamaica. They had a little bed and breakfast of sorts and I would go down for the winters to cook for them and their guests. The house in Kitty Hawk kind of reminded me of the house in yard. That's what the folks in Jamaica call their country, yard.

      It was all I could do for the first thirty or forty minutes of that first day to hold my head upright. As Todd and Lori moved around their kitchen, scrambling eggs and frying bacon, I sat on the couch waiting patiently for their ten year old daughter Savannah to head out with the babysitter for the day. I wanted to smoke. Lori still smoked so I knew I would have the chance, just not around the kid. Todd didn't smoke, but he was no stranger. He had been raised a C.I.A. brat, growing up all over the world. He joined a pretty successful band right out of high school and made a living playing rock and roll on the road for more than twenty years. He and Lori had Savannah around the time he turned forty. Once they found themselves in the family way he decided to leave the road for a more suitable and sustainable living. I think he quit smoking weed then, but he never turned his nose up to those that still smoked. In his words, he stopped getting high, but he never came down. Anyhow, once he left the music scene he needed something to do. He was always good with money, and he somehow managed to scrape up enough back in the early nineties to start his business. He piggy-backed off of another fella for the first couple of years. His old partner Ray Blender. Ray had an ATV tour company and Todd used his little office from which to book kayak tours. For the first few years that worked out well for them, but eventually Todd would branch out, moving into his a retail location and buying a fleet of old, beat up Chevy Suburbans to make a little more money than he could with one truck and a half dozen kayaks. Enter the Wild Horse Safari. Todd had close to ten years under his belt by the time I got there, and he and Ray almost had the market to themselves. There was one other company running, but the guy was a stoner and his stable of guides was no match for Todd's. On top of that, we specialized. We offered “Eco-tours.” Any high school drop-out, or out of work framer could drive a truck up and down the beach until the horses showed themselves, but we gave you the full lay of the land. The bottom feeders guaranteed their clients would see horses as a marketing ploy. We laughed at people that asked for a guarantee, or rather, we laughed about the statement of “money back guarantee”. We told them - it's not like a whale watch, where you may or may not see the whales in the great big ocean...we operate on dry land, roughly nineteen thousand acres, twelve miles from the end of the pavement in Corolla to the Virginia border. And not only do we see the horses every time out, but by the end of one of our tours, we assured the customer that if they felt like listening to half of what the guide was going on about, that they would come away from the experience knowing more about that little stretch of North Carolina's Outer Banks than people who had lived here their whole lives. My first ride to Corolla that morning with Todd was an illustration of his passion for what he offered his customers. As we climbed up into the old Chevy that morning he handed me a five page script which detailed all of the sights which we would showcase and all of the pertinent information about them which was to be shared with every group, on every tour.

      By the time we were heading up I was feeling a sliver more like myself. I had managed to sneak a couple of hits off of a roach with Lori while Todd showered. I didn't want to just get full blown highed up right there in front of the boss man, even though he knew me to be an “herbsman”, as they say down in yard. I wanted to make a good impression. And all the cobwebs, paraphernalia and dirty clothes aside, I had just returned from a two year crack at trying to run my own business. I may not have been all that successful at it, but I knew the pressures he was under a little more so than the average new employee. And back then, as well as to this day, I considered Todd and Lori my family. From the very start I let Todd know that if there was any way that I could be helpful I wanted to be used. I was also reeling from the hangover that the life I had in Asheville was now breaking me with. I had left behind a business partner who was also a house mate, our failing business, and the bills of both of those worlds. I knew when I left that I wasn't going back. But no one out there had that knowledge. The next couple of months would prove harder than I ever expected anything could be. Lawsuits, phone calls to my mother, resulting threats made by me to the former partner and friend for said phone calls, and the blanket of guilt which I dragged with me everywhere I went. The guilt sat with me at the bar. The guilt followed me to the beach. It reminded me that I had now lived as everything that I had once hated. 

(five)

      My very first training mission was with the former Army Ranger. Steven was the big man around the shop. He was also the “snake man”. Oh yeah, there were plenty of horses to see out there in the slipping wilds of Carova and Swan Beach, but there was much more in the way of wild life as well. Steven loved to catch snakes, which I think is what endeared me to him right from the start. I myself have a long history with them as well. All over the office there were pictures posted. Most of them of horses, or of beached whales, or of satisfied Mid-Westerners, but lots of pictures of Steven and the snakes. Little did I know it at the time, but I soon realized that I was in snake heaven. Currituck County, long heralded as a “sportsman's paradise” for the waterfowl and the fishing, is also home to 19 different species of snake. I felt like a king while standing at the cork-board with Steven as he pointed out all the snakes he caught and posed with on his tours, swapping stories of six foot Eastern Kings and short, fat Cottonmouths. I think I scored a few points when I showed him my scar. I had been bitten by a Cottonmouth back when I was eleven, and was proud to recall the ordeal. Growing up near swampy wetlands, I was no stranger to the venomous reptiles. All of us kids carried snakebite kits, consisting of a razor blade, an antiseptic towelette and a strike anywhere match encased in two suction cups that fit together like toy Easter Eggs. These were the days when it was still seen as proper to suck the venom out if bitten. The procedure was simple. If bitten you just opened up the kit, struck the match and heated up the blade, then sterilized with the towelette. Next, using the razor blade, you had to cut a slit over each puncture mark from where the fangs entered. (in my case, on my hand) The two suction cup ends were to apply suction to the wound, but I of course used my mouth. I thought I was doing it right, but all I really did was make myself sick as hell. I almost lost my hand too. And it hurt like a motherfucker! A trip to the emergency room with an irate mom and a pissed off dad and a couple of courses of antivenin later I was fit to have my ass whipped. Steven wasn't impressed though. He told me in a “big brotherly” sort of way what I should have done. Nevertheless, soon he was given his little slip of paper with the name of his party and we prepared to hit the beach. As we all piled into the Suburban I payed close attention to Steven and hung on every word. I didn’t want to let Todd down. I wasn't even sure at all if I would even be able to do this job. There was so much information to memorize and not to mention, the two and a half hour and thirty mile round trip through the off road area of the North Beach was a real tester if you didn't know where you were going. The bumpy drive took us along the beach, over the dunes and into the maritime forest. For my first tour with Steven I would also be learning the route for the kayak part of the tour. I had kayaked a little in Jamaica when I was living down there with Todd and Lori, but never in the states. I was also vaguely familiar with Carova Beach, having had family there as a kid, but I hadn't been in the area for nearly twenty years. My eyes were wide open. And it was a good thing. We saw some pretty spectacular sights along the way. The “doe boys” of Swan Beach had been out gill net fishing for spot on the beach and left behind all the non-marketable spoils. Brown Pelicans stood nearly four feet high on the shoreline, sloppy and care free with abnormally full gullets. We could nearly reach out of the windows and pet them. There were also dozens of small sharks that were caught in the net and left behind for the gulls. Scalloped Hammerheads and Spiny Dogfish littered the foreshore, still fresh but with the eyes and gills well picked over. Aside from the gulls, which everyone has (even in Kansas) there were tons of other summer migrants. The Sanderlings, Willetts, and Whimbrels. Semi Palmated Plovers, Ruddy Turnstones and seven or eight species of Tern. As we rode along, the disdain for the Highway 12 traffic was a frequent topic for discussion among the guests, but I was astounded by the birds, some of whom may only be with us for a few days or weeks, but fly upwards of thirty thousand miles a year to keep up with the food, amazing. To top it all off, once we got the kayaks and the tourists in the water Steven pointed out what he believed to be an alligator, although it was from a good distance back. I can't tell you for certain to this day what we saw, but the local newspaper reported that it was in fact a gator. Steven explained to us that he had noticed several “kill sites” in the weeks leading up to his gator sighting. These “kill sights” were places where he found the feathers or other remains of large birds like the Great Egret, or Great Blue Heron. Both of these are large birds he told us, and that there was nothing out there that could have killed them except for an alligator. There is plausibility to his story, as the northernmost reaches of alligator habitat would be about sixty miles to the south of where we were paddling, even though sixty miles is a long damn way for a gator to travel unless conditions are really special. To this day I have never seen another one up there and I paddle three times a day, six days a week. But I tell the story at least three or four times a week, or about as often as people ask me about alligators. All in all my first tour was a fun one, but the best part for me was when it was all said and done. The family from Harrisburg, PA was nice enough ...but the hundred bucks they handed Steven when it was all said and done is what I remembered the most about that trip. Of course Steven didn't share any of that tip with me, and I don't blame him. But I knew then that I wanted to do that job as well as I could, and not just for Todd's piece of mind, but for my immediate and short term financial well being. The dollar menus of french fry alley were starting to get to me. I wanted some flounder, and some steak.

      On the tour earlier that day Steven and I found moments to swap stories and interests. He was an extremely organized and militaristic type of guide, but that was all from a former life. In real time, he was drinking way too heavily, smoking plenty of everything and occasionally getting fooled by the harder stuff. He was estranged from his wife and adolescent boy, and it was killing him. But, like most of us, he was there to sort all that out. He must have seen a glimmer of hope in the punk ass new kid he eventually came to refer to sort of lovingly as “his little subversive.” The funny thing is, even though I may have appeared as his polar opposite on every conceivable front, we were closer to one another fundamentally across the board on issues like love, and war. After that first tour, he took me over to Cosmo's Pizza for a slice and a coke. Later that day I caught a ride home with him. It was about a forty five minute ride from Corolla back down to Kill Devil Hills where he was living. We stopped at the Brew Thru to get a six pack for the ride, and he threw in a pack of smokes for good measure. I have since come to know him as extremely frugal, so that little gesture on my first day has gone a long way with me.