Our Man in Arlington

The Bartons returned from their house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina late Monday afternoon more or less ready to enter back into the daily life of Arlington.

The drive was unusually easy. Traffic was not grossly heavy on a Monday afternoon, even though we spent a good deal of the trip on I-64 and I-95. And we managed to keep up pretty much with the almost 80 mile-an-hour pace being set by most cars, including police cruisers. Anyone traveling the 65-mile an hour speed limit was liable to get completely overrun. (We saw exactly one person pulled over for speeding during the entire 320-mile trip.)

We have been going to the Cape Hatteras area of the Outer Banks every year for at least thirty years, twenty-six of them in our own house in Avon, three lots from what must be the widest beach on the east coast. The house has weathered everything Cape Hatteras weather has thrown at it with little or no damage. Even Isabel managed to break only one window when the wind threw a roof tile through the outside pane of a double window. No big deal there.

Our children have many fond memories of the place, which they are now passing on to our grandchildren.

When we first began to spend our summer vacations there, we had no television, no telephone, and precious few newspapers – mostly local ones that covered the fishing news and little else. It was heaven not having a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world. Now we have cable, Internet connections, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. How is that for overkill? (No pun intended.)

While in Avon, I read a column by the Post’s esteemed columnist, David Broder about the political situation in the tiny town of Beaver Island, Michigan, on an island in the northern part of Lake Michigan. Broder spends some time there every summer in a house that his wife’s family has owned for five generations. His column was an interesting story about the formation of a Democratic caucus on the island that had always been presumed to be rock-ribbed Republican.

I was abashed. I had done nothing to test the political waters in Avon, which is about the same size as Beaver Island permanent-resident-wise. What kind of columnist was I?

Unfortunately, I do not know many natives of the village, and those that I do really don’t talk politics. So I set out on a little fact-finding mission. First, I wore my new Kerry-Edwards tee shirt on a stroll down the beach. Not much there. A couple of middle-aged guys gave me a thumbs-up as I walked by. Everyone else ignored me, though I did notice a few surreptitious glances at my tee shirt. I took this to mean that the beach was overwhelmingly for Kerry-Edwards. If they had been for Bush, they would have jeered me, right?

Then I rode up and down the island’s only through road looking for bumper strips. I probably counted fifteen or twenty Kerry-Edwards strips and perhaps a dozen Bush-Cheney strips. Not really definitive, but still an indication of a Kerry-Edwards sweep, right?

As far as the local newspapers were concerned, there was no mention of the national election at all.

This entire study probably lasted more than hour. I was exhausted! I went back to the house to watch the Olympics, which was far more interesting. Somehow, I don’t believe the Washington Post is going to pick up my column.