A Rumbling Peace

The image above encapsulates the competing sensations and feelings I experienced on my recent, annual, winter, solo car trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There’s the exquisite peacefulness of staying in a remote, ocean-front cottage where I’m surrounded by sand and water. But there’s also a rift in solidity that exists here at the bottom end of a thin ribbon of barrier island that makes up this part of OBX. A rumbling of not only the pounding waves that crash against the pilings of my deck at high tide, but also an exciting tension in my mind as I start to tackle the concepts and themes of my new novel.

I wrote about a similar trip I made last year when I began work on the second book in my time-travel novel series: NEANDER. This one—code-named “N3”—will probably be the final book in a trilogy that travels to the world of Neanderthals 40,000 years ago and back again. Or maybe not. Too early to know at this point.

My daily process on this trip went like this:

1. Up early to open the front door and be greeted by the sun climbing over a turbulently alive Atlantic Ocean. Plus the roar of the waves against the shore, the smell of the sea, the slap of wind against my face.

2. I made coffee and a quick breakfast before scanning for any urgent emails on my iPad and then studying the tide charts I had pre-printed. The whole place seems to run on a timeline of the tides, and having spent decades as a surfer who lived by the diurnal rise and fall of sea levels, I understood this well. If I was planning to hike the beach, this was of critical importance as you can see by the photo below.

3. I took my daily exercise in the late morning. One day it was a long beach hike to the infamous Cape Hatteras Point, the dreaded Graveyard of the Atlantic that has claimed so many shipwrecks and lives over the centuries. On another day it was to trek through the Buxton Woods near the iconic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. And a couple of times, I jumped into the freezing water (41-43 F or 5-6 C) for a short swim.

4. By noon or so, and after a self-made lunch, I settled in to work on my new book. I had brought plenty of reference materials and notes, and, of course, my big whiteboard with only structural hints written on it. I filled in a lot of it by the time I left.

5. Fully virus-masked, I took one day to get on the ferry to nearby Ocracoke Island—where Blackbeard the pirate met his end in 1718—to read and think some more. There was a cold wind blowing from the north so I found a spot in the dunes that protected me from it. But I had to keep track of time because the return ferry was on a strict schedule. By the way, the ferry is free!

6. After sundown, I worked some more, and finally settled into one of the cottage’s comfy chairs to drink a beer, watch a bit of TV, and sense the waves that continued to rumble and tumble beneath me.

— Harald