When I was fifty-eight-years-old, I ran away to a tropical island. The doorman slammed the trunk of the overloaded car and my husband and I pulled away from East 79th Street in New York. In the back seat was a crate from Paris containing La Meduse Lumineuse, a large papier mache jellyfish light that would hang over our stainless steel table. The car rode heavy with all the things too precious for the moving van.

We drove down the eastern coast. In North Carolina, wisps of white whipped and twirled across the highway, then a few miles later, turned into a major snowstorm. Traffic slowed to ten-miles-an-hour and snow caked the windshield. Cars and trucks slid off the shoulders into snowbanks, their back wheels buried, their fronts upended like rearing animals. Large puffy people holding flashlights stood alongside. When I rolled down the window, I heard sirens. My husband, Edward, was trying to hold the car steady and on the road as we snaked along to the next exit. Inside the car, I was shouting, and when I looked into other cars, I was not the only one. We slid down the first exit ramp in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. My over-packing, a source of some dispute at departure, had kept us on the road.

We pulled into a Best Western and got the last room. A group of old people filled the lobby, which had been set up for free coffee. They stood in rows, the snow melting on their down shoulders, droplets fogging their glasses, stomping the ice off enormous white tennis shoes. They unzipped their jackets onto comfy velour tracksuits and stood in a line like a row of seabirds on the beach staring into the wind. A man brought in a tray of glazed donuts and they lined up again. And then one of those old faces, a woman who had lived a full life of love and heartbreak, disease and work and turmoil—one of those brave old people heading south—said, “Go get a donut, hon. They’re real good.”

In a panic, I realized I had landed among the snowbirds. I might even be one. I was glad there was no mirror in that lobby. Incipient old age and a blizzard had reduced me to a cliché. Was this what I had become? No, I was an adventurer, a firebird, a bolter, a hawk. I was not going south for a few months of Early Bird Specials, vermilion sunsets, and calm. I was going forever.

“Where are you heading?” she asked me.

“Florida,” I said.

Overnight, over that first long night, the windshield in our car cracked from the cold and I got very sick. Edward had to bribe the Denny’s waitress to get food to take out to me. And alcohol. There was no alcohol anywhere. It was then in my fever, thrashing to avoid contact with the motel bedspread, that I began to wonder for the very first time whether I had made a mistake, whether my lifelong need for the sea, for the coast , for a life away like Charles Arrowby in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea was entirely a wise decision.

Then the road was cleared, the exits opened. As our wounded car pulled out of the parking lot, a group of snow-dusted elders standing on the Denny’s porch waved goodbye. We pushed on through Georgia into the northernmost edge of Florida, “the First Coast” as I would soon learn it liked to call itself, over a causeway onto the barrier island, Amelia. Live oaks, dripping strands and tangles of Spanish moss, were folded over the road on both sides. Under this green tent, through our severely cracked windshield, I saw the blue aluminum roofs of home, an end apartment on the fourth floor of a seven-story building. Vaguely post modern, the color of sand, the building was canted so that we faced the sea on two sides with a swath of green treetops leading to the Intracoastal Waterway in the rear.

The elevator had the sweetish smell of old suntan lotion mingled with the perfume of a recent southern woman.

Arley Quick, our contractor, was waiting with the keys. It was Arley who had emptied the apartment, creating our shell. It was he who had pried up the tiles and laid the dark wood floors, taken down all the ceiling fans and “window treatments,” ripped out the entertainment center and painted over the holes where plates had hung from the walls—even in the bathroom. We had begun every morning with long distance conversations during which he always, no matter how I urged otherwise, called me “Ma’am.” But Ma’am I was, and Ma’am I am.

There, in front of me, were the bare white walls lightly tinged with pink, the dark floors, and that particular cold full light that comes with sea air, coming at me from all sides. I opened the doors, “sliders” they are called, to the terrace and the winter ocean–silvery black and furious that day—rose to meet me over the green dunes.

Over centuries, after white men had wiped out the Timucuans, eight peoples had fought over this particular strip of land, the length of Manhattan but as far away in mood and tone as a place could be. Amelia is a barrier island between the sea and the Amelia River. I was to be set off, apart by definition, an islander, the land equivalent of what I have always felt. Barrier islands and their ecosystems are fragile, exposed and risky places, open to the northeast winds and hurricane threats. They are something broken from the whole, marginal by definition. At last I was living on the edge.

A line of pelicans was sweeping low over the ocean then plummeting. It was winter, but everything here said it would always be summer.

We began to take bits of our northern past out of the car. Most of our two- room weekend cottage in Connecticut would be arriving on the moving van. I had planned and diagrammed every object because this was the first time I ever lived in a home I had chosen. And it was mine without mortgage, free and clear and in my name.

“I don’t hate it,” I told the agent, Marcy Mock, when we first walked in the door a few months before. I tried not to focus on the sequin pumpkin on the glass table or the large tweedy furniture blocking the way to the terrace. I tried not to be disturbed by the blond family who looked like no one I knew magnetized to the refrigerator. There was something deeply unfamiliar about the previous owners. One of us was in the wrong place.

I walked out to the terrace. At low tide, the beach was wide, flat, and white with the hard quartz sand from the Appalachian mountains.

“The kind of beach you can run on.” I’d like to think it was that sentence that had lured me to Amelia Island, to Marcy Mock’s office in the Ritz-Carlton next door, to the end of my long quest to live by the sea. I had always seen the coast as a refuge and some sort of solution. All my life, I had been heading back to the beaches of my childhood, to the amniotic slosh and flow of the first safe place. Mother Sea. It was a common enough fantasy, but I had taken it further than most. Alone, I had taken the Southwest Chief across the country to drive the Pacific Coast Highway from one end of California to the other. I would pull my rented jade Buick off the road whenever I saw a sign for “Coastal Access.” Edward and I had flown to Miami and driven through all the Florida Keys, scouted the Jersey and Florida Gulf shores. I spent my young summers on French beaches and in Westhampton, East Hampton, and Bridgehampton, Long Island. After my first book, I had walked out onto the jetties of Maine to recover my aplomb. I took time off from a friend’s trial for murder to walk the beaches of Galveston, Texas. Now, after many rambles, the timing, the money, our good health and the place came together, and we came here at long last to live by the sea.

“The kind of beach you can run on,” my friend Bettye had said. In that sentence the word I most heard was “run”—as in run away.

Edward was taking the Medusa’s crate from the back seat. From other boxes, he brought out needlepoint evening slippers with palm trees on the toes, a portrait of us by Richard Avedon, fancy china, an organdy tablecloth embroidered with silver bees, and many tissue-wrapped tortoiseshell objects. There were boxes, a tortoiseshell fan and dance program, bracelets, and even the shell of a giant sea turtle wrapped in towels. I had pet turtles when I was a girl, lots of them, sometimes two and three at once, crawling all over each other in a round slimy bowl. Often we bought them at the circus with painted shells that must have poisoned them for they all died pretty quickly. And soon, to me, turtles equaled death. Now, I had come to one of the very places where turtles were revered as holy. There was a dawn Turtle Patrol with determined ladies on dune buggies setting up crime scene tape triangles where the loggerheads had nested. There were small gopher tortoises—maybe a foot long– holed up in the protected dunes. There were ancient giant turtles, their shells caked with sealife, that crawled at night from the ocean to lay their eggs by moonlight on the beach where they were born. When the babies broke from their shells, it was an event and people came out to watch the doomed little creatures in their race for the sea.

As Arley Quick stared, I began unwrapping the towels from the large sea turtle carcass of one of the Amelia Island gods.

There was more in our cracked car—for me at least, a trunkload of regrets, misjudgments, lost friends, untaken opportunities, paralyses of will. There was a carton of the bound galleys of my second novel, soon to be published, my unhatched egg, about which I felt nervous. There was a vanished big New York life, and a small hint that a friend who had recently been tried for murder and acquitted might be after me. I was here hiding out like the pirates who once used this island as their base and the escaped slaves who had no choice.

“Maybe all one can hope to do is end up with the right regrets,” Arthur Miller said. My regrets, well-placed, were following me.

That night, sitting on the new dark floor, as we ate from a bucket of no longer Extra Crispy Kentucky Fried chicken, a sobbing howl came from the terrace, the railings starting to sing, a strange long moan as the north winds shook them. I got up in the middle of that night and watched the lights of the shrimp boats bobbing across the horizon.

The next morning, still slightly sick, I awoke to the slip slap of the sea. I went down to the beach.