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OAK ISLAND , NC
My first love was a girl from Linclonton NC, named Linda. She was at the beach with some of her family for a week or two. We met one afternoon at the pier complex and spent the evening at the dance floor and playing miniature golf.
There was a strong attraction between us from the start, and we both felt as if we had known each other for a long time.
Later that night, I walked with her and some of her family, back to their house. It was then that I found out that their house was almost directly behind mine on 79th street, just one street over. I also discovered that her nickname was �The Girl from Wolverton Mountain�, after the Claude King song, which was out that same summer.
That week I didn�t see any other girl but her, and we spent a lot of time at night out on her large screened in front porch.
At the end of the week when she had to leave to go back to Linclonton, we kissed and agreed to write each other every week. And we did. We wrote letters to each other like we said that we would and I always looked forward to getting the next letter in the mail. Of course I also looked very forward to her and her family coming back down whenever they could.
One Sunday, my Grandmother and I had occasion to drive to High Point for a couple of days. Linda and her family were getting ready to leave to go back home at the same time as we were leaving to go to High Point. They followed behind us all the way through the swamp on highway 211 until we got to the highway 74 intersection. They pulled beside us to make a left turn, I waved at her to say good-bye, and that was the last time that I ever saw her. I received no more letters either. It really broke my heart. It was the next summer before I found out that she had gotten married. All I could do was hope that she was happy.
Although we still have not seen each other in almost forty years, we are still friends and we still talk on the phone as friends several times a year.
She was a part of growing up in a special place in a special era, and to preserve any part of it is a wonderful event, and �The Girl from Wolverton Mountain� will always be in my memories and have a special little place in my heart.
But my memories also include other special people who came into my life at different times. There were girls like Brenda Walsh who I went out with only twice at Yaupon Beach and then drove all the way to Salisbury NC to visit her one Sunday. There was Janice Raynor whose family had a house on 76th Street and Pat Sykes from Greensboro NC and who now lives in Long Beach. She runs a convenience store there. There were girls from California, Virginia and many other states. There was even one girl from Canada. And a girl named Dee Dee from Cortland, NY, who was totally �wide open�. This was a trait that would not be totally appreciated in women until a few years later.
The biggest and foremost negative to growing up in a beach environment was that almost all of my relationships with the opposite sex were only temporary at best. In my later years, it was really difficult to feel any security in relationships at all when all of the formative years of my life had been spent learning that anyone you grew attached to would just simply go away. Also learning that any closeness or intimacy was not meant to last regardless of my personal feelings. After a while, You learn that you are better off without the personal feelings and live each day for yourself and the moment. You learn to attach yourself to the things that ARE constant like God, and the sea, and things that are controllable like surfboards and one�s own actions. After all, in the morning the girl you had been with the night before would be but a memory, and you are left alone in the companionship of what is true and faithful, God, yourself, and the sea.