Nights in Rodanthe

  Willie’s first significant road trip involved ten hours in the car on the way to North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  With the consent of my friends, I brought him with me on a week-long writing retreat where Willie shared a beach cottage with the five of us.

Willie snoozed on my lap or on the seat beside me for much of the day as Steve piloted the SUV south along the coast – with occasional breaks for Willie to stretch his legs and to sniff around at each rest stop.  Willie began exploring all the rooms of the cottage as soon as we arrived, and just moments after we carried our bags up the stairs and into the cottage, Julie called out from the back bedroom, “Willie’s got a mouse!”

I dropped my bag and bolted into Julie’s bedroom, where Willie was indeed trotting around with something in his mouth — a small gray object with a tail. “Willie – give!” I said, crouching down to open his jaws.  Using two fingers, I removed the mouse by its dry, stiffened tail.  “Wow,” I said to Julie, holding the mouse upright as if it were a treat speared on a toothpick, “it’s sort of like an hors d’oeuvre.”  “Well,” Julie said, “it almost was.”

Energized and playful after all those hours on the road, Willie trotted in and out of each room as we settled ourselves for the week, making our beds and unpacking our bags.  Tom, who’d arrived a couple of hours ahead of the rest of us, had our dinner waiting.

The following morning at sunrise, I took Willie outside to join Julie for a beach walk – and for Willie’s first view of the ocean.   Willie heard it before he saw it, his ears up and his small body on full alert at the sound of waves meeting shore.  As we crested the small dune separating our cottage from the beach, the rising sun, the ocean, and the vast expanse of sand all came into view in the same instant.  Willie stopped and stiffened at the peak of the dune, frozen in place as he took in yet another incomprehensible first: the enormity and power of the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s no telling what he thought or felt about this new experience, but a moment later Willie got to work trying to make sense of it all by sniffing every shell, bottle cap, crab claw, and seagull feather we encountered.  He nibbled the empty shell of a horseshoe crab, he ate some seaweed, and, like a furry sandpiper, Willie ran from the waves as they advanced on the sand and then chased them back into the ocean in their retreat.