On July 8th, we headed south for my family’s traditional trip to the Outer Banks. We aimed to leave the house at 7am to beat some of the beach traffic, so naturally we were thrilled to leave a bit after 8. Five hours later, we were at the beach, having a delightful family experience.

The trip to Buxton fell in between our family trip to Maine and New Hampshire and the trip I took to Banff, Jasper, and Glacier National Park. I know, I know, it is a challenging life. We only had like one day to do laundry in between all of the vacationing. But, we were to find, there could be things even more challenging about the trip, like remembering that the trip started on July 8th. My brother Scott’s family thought that the vacation week was the same as in 2022, which was actually off by a full week, which meant that Scott’s family would not be joining us. It was like in Back to the Future where one small (or not so small) mistake erases an entire branch of the family from vacation existence.

To be sure, that wasn’t the only odd thing to happen on this vacation. There was also this atrocity:

Apparently, Stephen was going to choose to ignore that the waterproof and relatively inexpensive bluetooth speaker could operate at some distance from his much more expensive, much less waterproof phone.

But this, at least, was in keeping with family tradition. Or at least my own personal tradition of allowing expensive video cameras, speakers, and iPods to be claimed by the ocean.

As tragic as mis-scheduling and missing the beach vacation was, it was, in a way, par for the course in a family that has its share of planning challenges. There were somewhere around 4 or 5 failed attempts to simply plan dinners for the beach week, and that was without one part of the family even being aware that there was a beach week. But the family would definitely miss the absent household. Without Scott in attendance, where were we going to find a pyromaniac crazy enough to stand close enough to light Mark’s illegal fireworks? I can already sense the fiery explosions fading from memory.

In spite of our planning issues, it was a great beach week. After our arrival day, which was intermittently and unpredictably rainy, the weather was close to perfect, especially since the clear, bluish waters of the Caribbean apparently chose to migrate to North Carolina.

Even for July in North Carolina, the water was unusually warm. Being married to someone who has watched the natural disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow more than the family members of the people who made the movie, I’ve learned from this reputable source that there will be some kind of cataclysmic weather event spawned by early July ocean temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. But not on this day.

Perhaps more striking than warm, clear water for the Outer Banks was that, on all but one day, the ocean was also unusually calm. Even people who had been told by a grandparent that large bodies of water could suck them away, to be lost forever, braved the ocean this year.

Last year, sand replenishing efforts had created sizable sand cliffs and a drop-off in the ocean that could be challenging to negotiate.

The sand had leveled out since last year, creating an awesome, flat beach this year.

Amazingly, there was no riptide most of the week. Swimming in the ocean was much like floating in a pool on some days. An 81 degree, hurricane-generating pool.

Just as amazingly, there was very little wind at the normally windy Outer Banks, making the evenings perfect for games of beach wiffleball. Through these games, my brothers and I were able to revive a family tradition of playing baseball, like we played when we were younger, when we engaged in frequently contentious baseball games at my parents’ house in Short Pump. As with any family game, our baseball games growing up involved a number of house rules and idiosyncratic wrinkles, all enforced through a violent brand of justice. The most important rule, though, was that if you were pitching to Scott and you managed to strike him out, never, EVER announce strike three, as Scott considered such an announcement to be the most egregious form of trash-talking. In fact, the safest course after striking Scott out was to avoid making eye contact at all, slowly backing away while monitoring the situation for escalating danger, the same way you might if you confronted a grizzly in the wild. Sometimes, even the most moderate reactions to striking Scott out were not enough to forestall violence, but actually announcing strike three or, worse, “punching out” Scott would result in immediate repercussions.

While the younger brothers were subject to rules interpretations by older brothers during these games, as the oldest brother, I could leverage my age advantage to manipulate the rules from time to time. Or possibly more frequently than that. This was especially true when I was up to bat, or when one of my teammates was batting.

• BROTHER (pitching to me): That was a strike.
• ME (trying a jedi mind trick): That was not a strike.
• BROTHER: It went down the middle of the plate.
• ME (trying again): It did not go down the middle of the plate.
• BROTHER (points at the video camera we have set up to record the game): I can check the camera to see if it was a strike.
• ME (allows the ocean to destroy the video camera)

Fortunately, during our beach wiffleball games, we could appeal to unbiased and only semi-distracted observers to umpire the game.

The games were played with a relatively high degree of civility, especially for our family, and threats from our semi-official umpires ensured this would remain the case.

The games were as peaceful as any in family history, with only a handful of children disqualified due to violence.

It turns out that this violence-free version of baseball had broad appeal. Almost every family member who remembered that there was a beach vacation participated in the games at one time or another.

However, the peace couldn’t last forever; there is ultimately no stopping genetics.

As with our baseball traditions, our tradition of making ice cream sundays at the beach is also based on an earlier experience that involved anger, misrepresentation of reality, and yelling. In 2017, we took the kids to Happy Belly, an ice cream place in Hatteras, and this experience was so scaring our 2023 beach trip marked the 6th anniversary of the Kyle Memorial We Are Not Leaving the Beach House with Small Children to Eat Ice Cream event.

Another tradition at the beach is to go fishing but not actually catch fish, which is one of my Dad’s favorite traditions. This tradition has had an 80% success rate of driving Dad’s children away from fishing as a hobby, so he had to move on to the next generation to find another like-minded soul who enjoys staring at water for long stretches, periodically reeling in the line fruitlessly, and then finding the bait stripped clean off the hook.

My parents and Alex and Stephen drove two cars to the fishing pier, an endeavor which we knew from prior experience on this vacation was fraught with the risk that an individual or even an entire branch of the family could fail to show at the appointed place and time. But we had an ace in the hole to ensure that didn’t happen. Through the use of an innovation we discovered just in time for the beach vacation, the Gregorian calendar, we were able to coordinate the arrival of two families at the pier on the same date. It was truly a July miracle.

Getting everyone to the pier was a victory, but there was still the matter of actually catching fish. Up until this day, during our beach trips, Dad’s rods had experienced perhaps their greatest success as a toilet augur.

On this day, however, some rods were unexpectedly successful at fulfilling their primary function.

While the children were breaking time-honored traditions of spending hours fishing without actually fishing, Mark was ensuring that the tradition of fruitless fishing did not die. During a few days at the beach, there were clearly schools of fish swimming not too far out in the ocean because we could see a variety of birds diving and catching fish just past the breakers, prompting Mark to get his fishing rod.

Mark couldn’t quite cast the line far enough to reach the school of fish, but that did not stop him from trying.

A more successful family tradition is the construction of the beach bonfire and subsequent s’more making. Hatteras Island allows bonfires on the beach, so we bought the firewood and waited for a good day, which ended up being Wednesday. Because the vacation was going a little too smoothly and people were getting along a little too well, I decided to stir things up by holding the s’more bonfire hostage until people took our annual group photo. Taking group photos is something that, as a family, we are still struggling to master, with much remedial work still needed, and the announcement that we would take the picture resulted in the typical aimless milling around and slow shambling by most of the family.

Eventually, the milling stopped, and my parents, who had been moving to where we were taking the picture from their beach chairs at the pace of a particularly slow glacier, joined the family. We snapped the pictures, and the s’more fire hostage crisis was over, so the festivities could begin.

Over the years, the family has been open to experimentation with just about every kind of candy on a s’more possible: Rollos, M & M’s, Reese’s Cups, and the traditional Hershey Bars, and our careful use of the scientific method to test s’more variants confirmed that the family really, really likes chocolate. This year, Laura’s sister Gayle sent along a new breakthrough she had seen online – replacing the s’more graham crackers with fudge stripe cookies. Adding a new layer of chocolate was a huge hit with some.

For those purists in the family, we did have the customary s’more ingredients.

Finally, we have our family tradition of celebrating birthdays at the beach. Typically, the beach trip overlaps with Mom’s birthday, but this year, our Gregorian calendars notified us that Michael’s birthday would occur during the vacation. Having cleared the first hurdle to planning a birthday celebration – knowing that there would be a birthday – the planning fell apart after that, as there was another meal-planning misfire.

Normally, we make a smaller adult cake and a larger kid cake for the beach birthday celebration, because the children don’t yet have the good sense to eat cakes like carrot cake, thinking that it sounds too much like the vegetables that they have vowed to forego for the entire beach vacation. This vacation, however, we ended up with two large kid-friendly cakes. You may be thinking that this was the planning mishap we were born to tackle, but the miscalculation threw off our family dessert schedule for the rest of the week. And you know what happens when family schedules get mixed up.