Are you having a good summer? Me too. Outdoor concerts, picnics, travel, hiking. One thing I'm not doing, because I never do it, is go to the beach. The reason is ... well, once I took a crack at trying to explain why.
I have not gone to the beach this summer. Nor last summer. Nor the summer before that. Or before that. Didn't go in 1994. Or the previous summer. Or in 1992. Summer of '91? Nope.
In fact, I haven't gone to the beach at all in the entire decade of the 1990s, though I live a brief stroll away from a rather popular one.
Not only have I never gone to the beach; I never considered going to the beach. Why would I? The beach is a crowded desert ending abruptly in a flood.
First, think of sand. Sand is an awful substance. Sand is used to make glass. In a sense, a beach is just an expanse of crushed glass. Sand sure feels that way, in your shoes.
And sand gets everywhere. Try this experiment. Take a teaspoon of sand and put it in one of those double-seal plastic sandwich bags. Then put the bag in a coffee can and wrap tape around the lid. Place the coffee can in the basement. Now go run your hand over your sheets — sandy, right? That's how sand is.
Second, people. Lots of people, spread out everywhere. Nearly naked people. Nearly naked, fabulously unattractive people who, in their public state of undress, are a profound, silent argument for the importance of clothing.
Finally, there's water. Lake Michigan is frigid slush except for about an hour on the last day in August. I went in once, one July day, long ago. It was like jumping into liquid nitrogen.
Despite all these strong feelings, I was prepared to go to the beach, as an experiment, influenced by reading Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker's new book, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth.
While of course disagreeing with their premise that the beach is important, historically, I found enough fun trivia to reward my chewing through the book's dense thicket of academic babble. (And boy, is it thick. For instance, the idea "going to the beach" is rendered, I kid you not, as "the inspirational pilgrimage to the ephemeral boundary of land and sea.")
Where else could one learn that, in the summer of 1936, the country agonized over whether men should be allowed to go topless on public beaches.
"No gorillas on our beaches," Atlantic City declared, banning topless bathing. Cleveland passed an ordinance requiring that men's bathing trunks cover the navel. Galveston went further, legislating tops for men's suits.
The authors trace the lure of the beach back to Greek times and, swept up in the history of it, I resolved to head to the beach and see if, perhaps, I had been neglecting it unfairly.
"Don't expect me tomorrow," I told the city desk, breezing out the door Monday evening. "I'll be at the beach."
That night, I cataloged everything I would need. Pail and shovel, of course, for digging. Sun block. A cooler of some sort. Drinks and snacks. A towel. A thick beach book. (Having finished The Beach, I thought I'd bring along my current project, A History of Private Life from Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Talk about interesting trivia. Did you know that the Roman emperor Justinian created a scandal by marrying a stripper, Theodora, famous in Constantinople for her act involving geese peckinggrain from, well, a place where geese do not normally peck grain?)
Everything was ready. It was a ton of stuff to schlep — my wife suggested taking a wagon — but, hey, inconvenience is what going to the beach is all about, at least in my mind.
Then — and those whose long-term memories go back 48 hours may have seen this coming — Tuesday broke, all gray and rainy, and my careful plans were abandoned. So I stayed home, made progress in A History of Private Life, and happily postponed going to the beach for another year, or another century, or never.
Just as well.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 9, 1998
Have you gone to the beach since 1998? (I'm guessing the answer is "no.")
ReplyDeleteYou are so right about sand.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. Sweating, baked, with sand in every crevice of your body, preparing your skin for the cancer that will kill you in 40 years. Where's the upside? I have friends who can sit on a beach for 8 hours and think they are in heaven. The boredom alone makes my blood run cold.
ReplyDeleteI've spent a lot of my life on beaches. My family owned a motel on the beach in Florida when I was young, back in the days when people slathered themselves in oil and suntanning lotion and then fried themselves for hours. It was a common routine to ferry Canadians to the ER after their first full day on the beach. I haven't had a basal cell carcinoma yet, but I presume that day is coming.
ReplyDeleteMy relationship to the beach has changed over the years. Every beach has its own character and my experience is different based on the weather and the season. When I travel, we walk the beaches to see the birds. We often schedule our visits right after high tide, so we can see the most birds. One of my favorite books about the natural world is "the Outermost House" by H Beston, which is about a year spent living on the beach and observing the changes throughout the year.
A few years ago I witnessed a wedding photo shoot on Montrose beach at sunrise, but early AMs are usually uncrowded, as are the beaches in Lake County. I'm not keen on walking the beach in horrid weather, but once you're drenched, you can't get any wetter. I did, however, short-circuit an expensive camera while taking photos in the rain once, so that was another lesson learned at the beach.
I've become far less judgmental of appearances at the beach now that I'm "old". Especially since most beach-goers look happy to be there.
I am 85 and have spent a lot of time on beaches mostly in Mexico and Michigan. I love walking on beaches and swimming in the water and spent many years having fun on the beach with my kids when they were little. Sitting under an umbrella with a good book after a good swim on a beautiful day was heaven to me. The best time on the beach is morning and late afternoon. No crowds and less sun danger. I will agree with you that getting to the beach with chairs, umbrellas and sustenance is a pain as is just sitting on the beach baking when it’s too wavy to swim. All of that is behind me now. Walking in the sand is difficult as is getting in and out if the water if there’s an incline. I miss it.
ReplyDeleteVery funny reflection on the ever changing mores of those who frequent the "crowded desert" also known as the "ephemeral boundary between land and sea." I have a photograph of my maternal grandfather, whose last name was "Salmon" bedecked in a 2-piece bathing suit right about the time my grandmother was discarding her burca-like floor-length dress and almost floor-length hair for the latest knee-baring skirts and marcelled short hairdos.
ReplyDeletetate
That was hilarious and deserves to be widely anthologized! Sharing with friends.
ReplyDeleteI mostly agree with this take. I certainly am not wild about getting sand everywhere. I agree with Dennis that spending much time on a beach is boring.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, the lakefront is one of the glories of Chicago and I feel guilty not taking advantage of having those beaches right here, without having to travel to a faraway island to enjoy them. And I like swimming in the lake on the select days when it's not "like jumping into liquid nitrogen." Though calling my time in the water "swimming" is a bit of a stretch.
(One of the unfortunate quirks I've observed over the years is that on the hottest days, the wind is generally from the west or southwest, which pushes the warm water out and makes the water closest to the beach quite cold.)
Anyway, we used to go more often, though never very much. But we'd usually ride our bikes to get there, with a couple beach towels, and only spend an hour or two. Alas, recently we haven't even managed that.
On the hottest days in Chicago, a southwest wind will push the warmer and shallower near-shore surface water offshore, after it has been warmed by the strong rays of the summer sun.. This is technically known as upwelling... the rising to the surface of cold water from the lower depths of a body of water.
DeleteThis phenomena often occurs along the California coast during the summer, but it also takes place in the Great Lakes as well. Lake Michigan is also large and deep, so even in June and July, it has a hard time warming up.
Most years, that feature makes for chilly wading and swimming until the shortening days of August. and it's a rare summer indeed that sees the Lake Michigan water temperature hit 75 degrees in Chicago. On the other hoof, much smaller and much shallower Lake Erie reached 80 degrees a few weeks ago, which was probably an all-time high.
I think a lot of people share your view but for some reason they are reluctant to admit it. I still enjoy the beach but I can understand why someone would not want to sit in the sand, baking under a hot sun, and swimming in water possibly polluted with e-coli. To each their own.
ReplyDeleteI was invited to a beach a couple weeks ago. It was near the Indiana Dunes. They warned me you had to hike up and over a big dune to access it. The reward was that the people there were mostly young and fit and there were no “obese cooler draggers”. I’m not too far from fitting that description so I declined.
Guess Mr. S. and I cancel each other out. I love the beach. I remember Oak Street Beach at the age of three. Spent many a summer day at the best beaches in the city...in East Rogers Park. Touhy, Lunt, Morse. The lifeguards at Touhy allowed teen-age boys (like me) to body-surf in the six-foot waves that followed the big summer storms.
ReplyDeleteAcquired the necessary "beach tokens" in my late teens from an Evanston friend, and bypassed the residency requirements of that segregated era (they're called "beach badges" along the Jersey Shore).
Spent a couple years in Florida. There's nothing in the Midwest that compares to a pristine ocean beach. The sand and the surf are the only things I miss about that benighted, crowded, teeming, paved-over, oppressive state. It was not that way in the mid-Seventies. My Florida is gone.
My first wife, being of Norwegian descent, was sensitive to the sun, and turned red...not brown. She disliked both summer and the beach. My luck was better the second time around. We have some lovely Lake Erie beaches nearby, and have made ample use of them over the last three-plus decades.
In our geezerhood, we have learned to avoid the weekend crowds, and to make ample use of the shady spots. Tanning is now irrelevant...it's simply being near the water's edge that matters most. We spend far less time actually in the water. And I'm well aware that those pushing 80 are like a rock or a tree...old, ignored, and in the way. And that I need breast reduction surgery. But none of those things will ever keep me away. My ashes will probably end up on the beach.