Just Past Utopia

Anthony Hatcher’s father spent countless weekends fixing up a little beach house on the North Carolina coast, just past Utopia Street. That “house built on sand” held the memory of Hatcher’s very worst and very best day with his dad.

By Anthony Hatcher

My father was responsible for one of the worst days of my life. He was also responsible for one of the best. Both experiences revolved around the perpetually deteriorating beach cottage our family owned for 25 years on Topsail Island, a thin barrier island on the storm-prone North Carolina coast.

Joseph Earl Hatcher, who went by Earl, was an independent pharmacist and co-owner of the Kenansville Drug Store, beginning as an employee and working there for 40 years. My brother, Dana, and I worked in the store as soda jerks after school and during summer breaks. We consumed endless Cokes and candy and scooped up new comics and vinyl records weekly. I never paid for toothpaste or deodorant until I went to college. Dad was often there seven days a week, including days off. The local hospital called him at all hours to fill prescriptions for emergencies. In the days before 24-hour pharmacies, he was a 24-hour pharmacist for Kenansville, North Carolina, population around 800.

Good with his hands, he liked to tinker in the store after hours. If there was a leak, he stopped it. If something came apart, he put it back together. On the rare occasions we had snow in our Southern town, he shoveled it away from the doors. 

A gregarious introvert, Dad puttered late into the night, enjoying the solitude. At home, he was up long after Mom, Dana, and I had gone to bed, reading until 2 or 3 a.m. He always got to work the next morning a half-hour ahead of the 8 o’clock opening time.

Since Dad didn’t sleep much, he could be cranky as hell. 

He had a cutting sense of humor that wavered between hilarious and cruel. Insults shot toward his wife and sons would be followed with a “Naw, I’m just kidding.” On one particularly fruitful day of barbs aimed in my direction, I pushed back by asking if he had taken a sarcasm class in pharmacy school.

Without looking up from his pill-counting, he said, “No, I taught it.” 

I was in awe of him. And a little bit afraid. 

He could be volatile as well as merely cranky. I have memories of Dad being enraged about something and watching him quiver like a volcano before exploding. The eruptions came in the form of a full tea tumbler smashed against the kitchen wall, a fist smashed through the bathroom door, or a camera that didn’t flash smashed on the living room floor after he snapped shot after shot of my brother and me dressed in our Sunday best.

Dana and I spent a good part of our childhoods dodging fragments of glass and plastic.

Building on Sinking Sand

In the 1960s, Topsail Island was a little-known gem. Used for missile tests immediately following World War II, two decades later the narrow island was 26 miles of unspoiled beach with piers, cottages, and trailers, plus small motels with names like Breezeway, Sunny Bee, and Silver Sands. 

Surf City was incorporated in 1949, and the town of Topsail Beach followed in 1963, each with a year-round population of a few hundred. North Topsail Beach in 1990 became the third municipality once gentrification began. Today, there are high-dollar houses perched on fragile sand dunes along the formerly deserted north end where Dad used to fish. 

Prior to a building boom on what is essentially a glorified sand bar, Dad would drive an hour to the coast, cross a swing bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, and navigate another 15 miles of dark two-lane road to an isolated pier called McKee’s. He parked his Plymouth wagon in the dirt lot, gathered up two rods, a Thermos of coffee, and a cooler of ice. By the time he started fishing, it was usually close to 11 p.m. 

He bought a green and white 1949 Zimmer travel trailer and parked it on a rented lot in Surf City. It had a dining area, galley kitchen, bedroom, and the world’s smallest bathroom. A tire well consumed much of the floor space in the bathroom, and the toilet was perfectly positioned in the stream of the showerhead. 

After a few summers in these cramped, cricket-infested quarters, Dad had saved enough money from his pharmacy to purchase a small plot on the sound north of town and towed the trailer out to Bird Lane, just past Utopia Street. Our trailer was the second house on the block. 

He tore out the ends of the trailer, placed it on wood pilings about 4 feet off the ground, and built a 700-square-foot cottage around it, retaining the kitchen, closets, and bathroom. This was the original tiny house, before tiny houses were cool. 

Dad had mentored a succession of teens who worked in the drugstore over the years. He hired those guys, now in their 20s, to lift roof beams and hammer nails all day in the hot sun. 

With no architectural training, Dad transformed a metal tube on wheels into a wooden A-frame house — more than doubling its size. 

Back in Kenansville, we sang a hymn on Sundays with the refrain, “On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand /All other ground is sinking sand.” That’s where our tiny Topsail house was situated — on sinking sand. As time passed, the place settled to the point that, as Dad put it, “You could drop a marble at the front door, and it would roll out the back.”

The Worst Day

The gradual decay of Dad’s creation triggered one of the worst days of my life. I was 15, old enough to pitch in with repairs, or so he thought. He needed to replace siding, and it was his Saturday off. Since Dana was only 10, it was just Dad and me working to stay one step ahead of the house’s decline. 

The journey to Topsail was pleasant enough, with small talk and conversation revolving around plans to finish the second bathroom, which was still being used as a storage closet. When things were going smoothly for Dad, he whistled the tune “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as he labored away. There was no whistling on this day.

The troubles began shortly after we arrived and unpacked the building supplies. Dad had never trained me in carpentry, and I didn’t know one tool from another. After a couple of hours of my handing him the wrong implements, he barked, “If you can’t help, just go in and watch TV.” So, I did.

After a half-hour or so, he burst in the front door, sweat rolling down his face. “I can’t believe you would go in there to watch TV and leave me out here working in the heat!”  

I have a vague memory of being shocked out of my reverie at the sound of his voice, levitating from fear off the couch, turning off the TV in midair, and landing by the door, trembling.

The rest of the day was hell for both of us. I was a disaster, and he grew increasingly frustrated and impatient as the temperature climbed. The window unit struggled to cool the interior of the house and failed. There were no trees outside for respite. By the time we left for home, most of Dad’s comments to me were obscenities, combined with much head-shaking at how his genes could have produced such an idiot.

Dad had always been harder on me than other employees in the drugstore, pointing out my mistakes both at work and later at home. Now that pattern was repeating itself with the beach house. The thought of having to do more construction projects with him made my stomach hurt. The good news is, I was never asked to do maintenance on the thing again while I lived at home. Once was apparently enough for Dad. 

I lived out my teen years going to the beach house sporadically, including the night of my high school graduation. Friends came with me on occasional weekends when I was in college at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. But the older I got, the less I wanted anything to do with the place.

The Best Day

The next time I helped Dad repair the beach house, I was just over 30. The house was in sad shape. It needed paint and a new roof, but mostly it needed shoring up. At only a few feet off the ground, it was already the lowest house in the neighborhood, and sinking fast. New houses soared around us on pilings resembling the octopus-like Martians in The War of the Worlds. Our place looked more like a sea turtle.

Dad’s genius was in evidence in his approach to the sinking-sand fix. He bought small hydraulic jacks from Sears to lift the house, but he still had to solve the problem of lifting a heavy structure when the pressure would simply force the jacks downward into the soft ground. He needed something sturdy to rest them on. The solution came to him when he had some oak trees chopped down in the back yard in Kenansville. I had moved away after college to take journalism and teaching jobs elsewhere in North Carolina, but came back to lend a hand.

Dad asked the tree service to saw the oak trunks into sections. Each section was about the size of an ottoman and could serve as a base for the jacks. He also cut several squares from two-by-fours. These thick blocks were to be used as spacers to place on the pilings, leveling the house. 

We loaded the tree trunk sections into Dad’s station wagon, along with the jacks and wood blocks, and headed to the beach. As he drove the familiar road to Topsail, we joked about how the previous outing had gone. 

“You’re not going to repeat that, I hope,” he said. 

At the beach house, we unloaded everything and went to work. We placed the oak tree ottomans under each corner. Sand filtered into my shirt collar as I crawled on my back underneath the house to position the jacks. It was only after I got under there that Dad told me to watch for snakes. Up until that moment, my biggest worry was that the house would slide off the pilings and crush me to death. 

As the house rose slightly with each pump of a jack, I placed the small square blocks on top of the pilings. The plan seemed to be working.

When we finished, Dad laid his level on the floor of all the rooms, and the house was even for the first time since I was in high school. 

We had done two amazing things: We had jacked up a house in sand with an oak tree, and we had built a bridge on solid ground between us. 

Over the next half-dozen years, I saw him through recovery from a heart attack, and he supported me through a divorce. Despite these and other stressors, our relationship was solid, and we both knew it.

In 1995, at age 66, Dad died two weeks after being diagnosed with lung and liver cancer. In 1996, the beach house was washed away by Hurricane Fran. This final alignment was somehow appropriate.

Dad and I were good at the end, and that means the world to me, still.