It is all Sandbars Out There

I was sixteen when I went with my best friend's family to Ocracoke, North Carolina. They rented a towering house on stilts and we crammed all the boyfriends, and girlfriends, and friend friends into it. From the deck on the second floor you could see out over the marsh grass and beach plums to the ocean.

We spent our vacation trying to body surf on nascent waves, rising pink and fresh skinned from being tumbled along the abrasive sandy bottom of the ocean.

There was this sandbar way out in the waves, just at the limit of our range. Twice a day it would disappear and reappear in a new location.

On our third day we made the swim out to this lonely island. We arrived just as it was fading, mushy wet sand between our toes, and water already lapping at our ankles. I remember us standing there, lit up in the golden sun, like trickster messiahs, walking on the water.

Turning back to the shore I saw the adults on our trip waving at us. Not the kind of wave they give you when they are saying "yes, we see you out there". This was a different kind of gesture. The kind of wave you give to a group of teenagers who have been ignoring you while doing something stupid and dangerous for the past thirty minutes.

The tide was changing, and with it our disappearing island was now in the middle of a river forming out in the ocean. The first few off the sandbar made it back through the forming current. The rest of us followed shouted instructions to swim along the shoreline, flipping over onto our backs to catch our breath, until the tide let go of us.

I remember my feet finally hitting the soft sandy shore, standing wobble-legged on the beach, looking out at the ocean that looked just as friendly as it had an hour before, feeling scared and alive. Our fugitive island having been washed away by the changing sea.

Hundreds of miles, and twenty seven years, away I still think about that sandbar.

A lot of hard work has led to a good week, in the middle of an expectedly good month, halfway through a unusually hard year. I wish I could say it was like standing on a hilltop looking down at how far I've climbed.

Really though I'm out on that sandbar, mushy sand between my toes, trying to figure out where I can stay dry.

No matter how far I've come there is always a little voice asking me "yeah, but what have you done today?" The sand slipping away beneath me. Water at my ankles.

I worry that it is eroding me. Washing me away.

Then I look back at the shore. I am the adult now, and it is my children that are watching me, waving.

To them I am something else. I'm walking on water saying 'this too is possible.'

So I point out the currents. I show them how I swim on my back when the tide is too strong. I teach them to swim along the shore.

Because the truth is that it is all sandbars out there. But it's not about the sandbar. It is about how you change with the tide.