“What time is it?”
“About 10:30, why?”
“Ha ha! I’m missing math class!”
The scene was a broad expanse of sand and surf, where Assateague Island meets the Atlantic. Huge silver waves roared and butted and surged onto the land, leaving behind shining mounds of foam. The dramatis personae: Four bad children and their bad mother, who were supposed to be in school or doing important errands, depending, but who had absconded instead.
Three of the children ran around, dodging the sudden fingers of water that would come shooting onto the sand. They poked for shells and cheerfully threatened each other with the carapaces of horseshoe crabs. The youngest stayed well back from the terrible waves and built a little kitchen of twigs, shells, and mushrooms in the warm lee of a sand dune.
It was truancy.
It was heaven.
Nothing quite exposes the opportunity costs of normal life as getting away from it for a day or two. All those hours that family members spend commuting, cooking, cleaning, doing homework, earning their keep — hitting the mark, making the grade, meeting the deadline — months can go by, with everyone trotting along in their invisible harnesses and keeping to the road without ever once stepping off, as it were, on a detour.
There’s a beauty to domestic routine and order, and what Thoreau called “quiet desperation” could also be called “delightful placidity,” but it’s indisputably worth wriggling out of the bridle now and then, if only to remind oneself that one can.
One striking thing about Assateague in November: All the leaves are brown and the hair is gray. On weekends, young families on bicycles string along the roadsides, but the weekdays belong to retirees (and, um, shirkers). Superannuated bird-watchers with giant cameras stalk blue herons and Canada Geese. Pensioners in high-tech anoraks cycle carefully to and from the beaches. At sunset, cars crawl along the road that circles the island’s bird sanctuary. The occupants invariably seem to keep their windows rolled up to avoid the chill. Alas, it means they never breathe the cool ocean scents, or hear the thousand tiny sounds of nightfall.
Retirees and malingerers aren’t the only ones to find a sojourn in Assateague refreshing. So do millions of migratory birds, great flocks that descend in autumn and spring in honking formations.
“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you can try and count all the geese,” said one truant to another as the band of outlaws stood on a scenic overlook, overlooking the scene.
“One, two, three–wait, one, two…”
“I win! You can’t count them all.”
“You still owe me 20 dollars.”
“No I don’t. You didn’t count them all.”
“You didn’t say I have to count them all,” said the junior smarty-pants. “You said I had to try to count them all.”
“What time is it?” someone inquired.
“1:45.”
“Suckers!” the children yelled ungraciously, referring to their schoolfellows at home. A thousand geese rose into the air, as if in reply, but it was probably a coincidence.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
