The Middle Rumble

"When you sit on the edge of that thing [the Grand Canyon], you just realize what a joke we people are. What big heads we got thinking that what we do is gonna matter all that much. Thinking our time here means diddly to those rocks... I felt like a gnat that lands on the ass of a cow that’s chewing its cud next to the road that you ride by on at 70 miles an hour." --- Danny Glover’s character, Simon, in Grand Canyon (1991)

My first trip to North Carolina's Outer Banks was in 2009. I was on a single-cylinder BMW that I rode from Baltimore. It was the first time I put bags on a motorcycle, and I took the blue highways through Newport News and Virginia Beach through Kill Devil Hills to Route 12 to the ferry to Hwy 264, on the way to South Carolina and Georgia.

2009

I liked North Carolina so much that I came back a year later on a Triumph 1050.

OBX was a highlight of my bachelor days. Having grown up in Southern California, any beach on an ocean feels like home, but I crave a special otherworldliness. Torrey Pines State Beach has that. It's busy all summer, but I went alone in the dark a lot when I was 16 and 17 and could swim in 54-degree water under cover of night or sit unperturbed in a lifeguard tower and just stare at the moon. (Would I let my teenager do such a thing in 2026? Absolutely not! But hey, I'm a Gen-Xer who had a beeper, which seemed a reasonable way to stay in touch in the '90s without what would have been an exorbitant cell phone bill. [I didn't think any of this was weird until my wife raised her eyebrows. We like to joke that we had very different childhoods.])

Torrey Pines (Bommarito Art)

My yen for magical beaches started as a kid, when a friend invited me to overnight with his family on Camp Pendleton's shore. Waking up as an elementary school student in a tent there was formative. With only military access, it was so private, broad, and isolated that it gave Planet of the Apes vibes; the world was far, far away. Seward in Alaska is like that. Cherry Cove in Catalina is, too, and so is Foxton Beach in New Zealand. Maybe I'll look up after a day of not talking to anyone and see the Statue of Liberty. The endless waves and tiny grains of sand don't care about the Internet or politics or anyone's life decisions.

Down the Shore in Jersey is too busy to get to this frame of mind. So is Rio's Ipanema. (Hey, I've had a charmed life.)

The Planet of the Apes (1968)

Anyway, pretty much anywhere facing the Atlantic here in OBX finds this elusive spot in my heart. I knew as soon as I rode the causeway into Kitty Hawk.

The Outer Banks move a yard west every year. Houses routinely fall into the ocean. It's hard to insure, let alone cash flow or afford, most property. Locals tend to live on the less-storm-battered sound side, but that's more prone to flooding during hurricanes. Everyone knows any real keepsakes belong inland. Sailors call this part of the world "The Graveyard of the Atlantic."

Such risk and exposure to the elements brings perspective. Brené Brown likes to talk about "the rumble," which is a polite version of (possibly) Ernest Hemingway's quote, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." The rumble is messy and unpredictable. I could easily have wound up with hundreds of other lives by chance or decision. Nothing is tidy or assured. In fact, I never could never have predicted my life, but here I am, and here is my current rumble: Carl Sagan liked to call Earth a Little Blue Dot, the point being that no one here is important. Is that true? Or did he completely miss the point?

Houtses rolled heavy into OBX this year. My Triumph has been on my patio for a decade, and Abby and I rented a three-quarter-ton van at RDU. My sons stay within my arm's reach and have life jackets on if they go near the ocean. We buy a lot of ice cream. We go on group tours. I have a mother-in-law and daughters. This is where my rumble brought me so far.

Johns Hopkins psych trainees are called “Phipps Residents.”

Seeing the wild horses in Corolla, our guide told us of bachelor stallions, and their life cycle seemed so familiar that I immediately recalled a doctor axiom. Our patients are just like us. Only more so. The 2-year-old stallion in a harem will challenge the mature stallion and lose, then spend a few years hanging out with other bachelor stallions, during which time they rumble. AI says they "roam together until they are strong, dominant, and old enough to successfully challenge a harem stallion for his mares--or until they can gather their own mares to start a new harem." (This is one of those factoids that will make one's wife elbow him. I told Abby she'd be my Bottom Mare, and she elbowed me harder.)

A Young Bachelor (6/2026)

After the bachelor stallion breaks with his bros and gets his own harem, he's basically middle aged, which is to say he'll lather, rinse, repeat for maybe 20 years of getting mares pregnant and kicking his 2-year-olds out of the harem. Eventually, old stallions leave their harems and rejoin with similar-age satellite stallions, at which point they presumably take an inordinately long time fussing over lunch menus after reliving their glory days with endless cups of coffee at diners that open at 6 a.m.

So we have the rumble of being a bachelor stallion, the rumble of being a teenager, the rumble of one's 20s and 30s, and the less dramatic rumble of middle age. Where does all this go? And does it even matter? Is my existence another unread footnote, or does this rumble make something special? Is our Little Blue Dot just another dot, or are we one in a zillion?

I obviously like to think the latter. The ocean is infinite and black, but here I am. Swimming.

Where two guys from Dayton who ran a bike shop changed the world

Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody's setting up late and talking. Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars---doing their old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk---or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Hm.... Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners. You get a good rest, too. Good night. --- The Stage Manager's monologue at the end of Thorton Wilder's Our Town