With his newly awakened puberty urges shining from his glassy eyes he sat down to leaf through the magazines while I went back outside to look around.
The island was made of dredge deposits from decades ago. Among the treasures I found on the sandy beach were countless beautiful fossils of long dead marine organisms. I collected some splended Scallop fossils among others, carefully putting them in the boat to keep along with my collection of various other natural oddities at home.
My infatuation with the north spit had spread to my friends by the time I had reached age fifteen. One fine evening I gathered them all together for a camping trip to the Spit. This time we would not mess around with the boat. Instead, my father dropped us off at the end of the paved road at the north end of the spit. It was already dark by the time he dropped us off. It was Fat Eddie, Chris Akerson, my best friend Mike Gray, and Fat Eddies little brother Mike Lewis who accompanied me on this trip.
My friends were a little apprehensive about journeying out onto this empty place in the dark of night, but as usual, they were grudgingly willing to follow where I led. It was something new and everyone was tired of the neighborhood summer boredom that we had been stuck in for the last several weeks.
Thus we walked the bayside beach for hours in the dark. I had a destination in mind. From the Mainland side of the bay I had always been intrigued by a huge white building that we could see from the beach. It was an old abandoned Coast Guard building dating back to World War II. On the beach in front of the building was a small boat house connected to a dock that extended about three hundred feet out into the bay. I had determined that this was where we would camp tonight.
On this trip we became acquainted with the North Spit's most famous inhabitant. An old black horse who had lived alone and wild on the spit for many years. The horse was curious about us and made his presence known by his stentorous breathing and loud snorts in the darkness behind us, much to the discomfort of my friends who thought him way too creepy for their tastes. I theorized that he was probably lonely for his long gone human masters who had left him here so long ago.
At length, we saw the old dock ahead of us, illuminated by the light of the full moon. In the shadows of the trees was the boathouse, a spot of darker blackness in the night. My companions were somewhat daunted by this spooky looking place as I stepped inside the open front end of the building. Their caution was replaced with content when I lit candles and revealed the open and fairly clean interior of the old shack. It was about twenty feet long and twelve feet wide with an enormous square hole sawed out of the planks in the center of it's floor. Upon our approach, a large orange cat fled from the building into the pine woods up the hill. Within minutes we had built a warm fire in the sandy bottom of the hole and we laid out our gear. It was like having our own little house in the wilderness. My companion's mood quickly changed from dubious fear of the spooky place, to cheerful enjoyment as the fire warmed us and cast pleasant light on the gray wood of the inner walls of the building.
Before long my friends, who had been so reluctant to come to this dark and eerie place, became just as enchanted by it as I. For hours we sat up around the fire into the wee hours of the morning. We watched the moonlight on the rippling bay waters as we passed around the stashed bottles of booze from the bottoms of our backpacks. It was a magic and wonderful night that we would all remember for a long time to come.
At length we all happily dozed off in our sleeping bags, the fire having made us pleasantly drowsy and comfortable. I was the last one to fall asleep. The last thing I saw before I drifted into slumber, was the eyes of the old horse watching us from a few feet outside the front door, glowing red in the firelight. I spoke softly to him, inviting him to come in and eat one of my candy bars. He turned with a loud snort and vanished into the night from whence he had came.
There was yet another event before daylight. I was awakened from a sound sleep by the distressed snarl of a cat and Fat Eddie mouthing coarse obscenities. The cat had apparently come in to warm itself by the fire and had fallen asleep on Eddie's chest. Awakened by the weight of the animal, Eddie had cursed in fear and surprise, causing the cat to flee precipitously, leaving red claw marks on Eddie's chest.
The next morning saw us beginning a wonderful day of happy exploration, covering miles and miles. The first thing we did was explore the big white old Coast Guard building that loomed like a southern mansion on the forested hill behind the boathouse. Except for the dust and a few of the walls starting to crack here and there, the place looked like it had been left deserted only yesterday. Riffling through drawers and shelves I found old musty duty rosters and other paperwork stacked in binders. As I was poking around the dusty rooms Mike called me up to the top floor. I climbed the stairs up to the empty top floor and out to a back staircase where Mike stood in wonder. All around the back room were the mud nests of swallows. The parent birds paid no heed to us as they attended to their squawking younglings in arms reach of us. He and I stood there for a long time, enchanted by the lively bird community that had taken over this manmade haven.
As the day progressed, we made discovery after discovery. Climbing the hill and pushing through salal thickets in the thick shorepine forest, we found an old water tank hidden in the trees, surrounded by rusty blankets of old pine needles. A short ways from here we found several tiny guard shacks, totally intact, evenly spaced around the hillside in the forest. On the rear side of the hill was a small building that might have been used yesterday, so well preserved was it. Inside was a couple of chairs and a wood stove. Above was a ladder going up into a massive attic that was empty except for a thick rope that hung down from a ceiling beam. On the outside of the building was a ladder leading fifty feet up to a "Crow's nest" type lookout that had once looked out onto the sea. The trees had grown so high that the sea was no longer visible from the lookout.
Memory of that hill brings to mind another time when I had tired of the boring camp food we had brought along on one of our trips. Dumping out my bowl of soup I took a rifle and headed for the hill, my mouth watering at the thought of tender plump cottontail rabbit.
At the very top of the hill I wormed my way alone through a dense thicket that opened up into a clear spot. The top of the hill concealed a hollow surrounded by tall trees festooned with spanish moss fed by the ocean mists.
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