THE UNEXPECTED STEP –
Oct. 11, 2024 – The last time I drank was September 2nd, 2022, but no one knows it yet. I met my ex-husband working on a magic little sandbar off the North Carolina coast. If you’ve vacationed here, or on any beach in America, you’ve seen the signs to “Rent Jet Skis”, and hop aboard vessels with names like Fish’n Frenzy and Knot Today. Remember the movie Wedding Crashers, when Claire Cleary giggles at her sister’s cheesy, nautical wedding vows between captain and mate? Our lives were a lot like this—minus the cheese, plus the booze. We were two of the tanned, glistening twenty-somethings working in the wild world of commercial water sports. But underneath the Baywatch, beach body veneer lurked an increasingly casual relationship to alcohol that I began to question.
