Thoughts from the Beach

Mary, Anna, and I have been at the beach since June 30 with Wayne's family and assorted friends and "drop-in" guests. We've been coming here together since 1999, usually at the same time, and we usually stay in the same house, a bright, open place with four bedrooms, a loft, and an observation deck that's level with the house roofline. This hasn't really been a complete vacation for me because I've still had to take Help Desk calls and work on projects, but it's been way more relaxing than being at home. This is because, at about 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. each weekday, I tear myself away from this laptop and walk the short walk to the beach, book in hand, where Wayne has a chair, umbrella, and cold soft drink waiting for me. I stay there, reading with the surf in the background, and after about an hour and a half or two hours, I feel really relaxed and return to the house to make dinner (something that I only seem to enjoy when I'm not at home). On weekends, my time in front of the ocean is much longer, often from before lunch until an hour or so before sunset. I rarely go in the water because that entails reapplying sunscreen on a sandy body (not fun) because no sunscreen is waterproof, no matter what they promise on the bottle. Also, I get knocked down and dragged along seashell beds by the gentlest waves, emerging with ears and nose full of water and scraped skin and bruises on my legs, so that also keeps me from running in the ocean. I don't mind this, because, to me, the ocean is like snow--it's something to love from a distance (like up on the sand or through a window or from an observation deck), but not to have too much direct contact with. After I've been exposed to the sound of the surf and the wind for at least an hour, I feel like I can handle anything stressful that life throws at me and I sleep much better than I ever do at home.

This year, for some reason, I've been reminisicing about past beach trips as I marvel at what I consider a whole separate culture--the family beach trip culture--and ponder two of the 12 books I brought along to read (which have all been read now, to my dismay, but fortunately there are some "beach house books" here that I haven't read), and I felt like sharing some of my thoughts here.

Childhood Beach Trips
One of the things I think about a lot when I'm here are my childhood beach trips. For years, I thought that beaches were similar to desert islands with hardly any people on them. I didn't understand what people meant when they said that beaches got crowded. "Crowded with what?" I'd wonder. "Seagulls? Beach houses?" It wasn't until I was in my teens that I actually saw a crowded beach.

The reason for this is the curse of the fair skin. When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, SPF 50 sunscreen was unheard of. Actually, no lotion was even given an SPF rating at all. As a result, anyone with skin as fair as everyone's in my family, was a candidate for the lobster look and future trips to the doctor to discuss melanoma if they were in the sun for any period of time between about 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. during the day. So, when I was young, we'd get up very early and go with my father (and sometimes my mother if she wasn't busy with breakfast or my younger brother) down to the beach sometime around 7:00 a.m. We'd stay there until about 8:30 and then go back to the house for the family's self-imposed sun exile until after 4:30, when we could go back out and stay longer, mindful that we all had to be in bed before 9:00 p.m. Sometimes, if my mother came with us in the morning, we could stay out longer than 8:30 a.m. if she slathered us with Sea 'N Ski because she objected to Coppertone for some reason, but we still had to go in by 9:30. (I miss Sea 'N Ski--I haven't seen it on the shelves in years. The smell always sent me back to the beaches of my childhood.)

We were all very happy with this arrangement. We'd all been sunburnt at some point in our lives and it was horribly painful and then itchy so we didn't want to get sunburnt if we could help it. Because of our early and late hours, the beaches were essentially ours for the taking--we could race along the edge of the water for what seemed like miles and dig huge sandcastles wherever we wanted because there weren't any "beach camp vs. beach camp" wars. My mother always managed to bring along some fun board games or graph paper (for Battleship) and we'd play those games for most of the day, if we weren't reading. I remember fondly a beach house called "The Pink Panther" that had a screened porch that ran along the length of one side of the house (on the sound side, I believe), where we played Monopoly (and possibly Life) for hours, even during a thunderstorm. Nowadays, with SPF 50, big straw hats that tie under my chin tightly, and strong beach umbrellas, I can go to the beach at any time of day I want as long as I sit in the shade, mostly covered. I'm glad that I can be there for longer times, but when I listen to Wayne plot his ideas of how he plans to win the "beach camp wars," which exist even on this fairly sparsely populated beach, I miss the times when that wasn't a concern. Maybe that's why I really still enjoy the hours between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. on the beach so much--they take me back to a simpler time when my family ruled entire stretches of sand.

The other thing I remember vividly about my childhood beach trips is something that continues to amuse my daughters even now that they're teenagers. My family's decision to go to the beach was usually made after the first of the year and involved my mother's making phone calls and looking through books that advertised beach houses for rent. As children, we never paid much attention to that part of it other than to suggest to my parents that they rent houses with names that we liked (which is how we came to stay at the Pink Panther that year). Therefore, when it came time to drive to the beach, we had no idea what our house would be like. We'd arrive at whatever beach we were going to (my parents took us to a lot of beaches along the North Carolina coast from below Wilmington to the northern Outer Banks) and we'd be told the beach house name and address and given the task of helping my parents find it. We'd drive by brightly painted, tall, two-story wonders with exciting decks and huge windows right on the beach, all of us children hoping that we'd spot the house and it would be one of those. Invariably, however, because my parents were living on the salary of a professor at a small all-women's college and not that of a manager at Western Electric or RJR, my father would turn down the street until we were at least 3 blocks from the ocean, and eventually pull in front of a house that usually looked like it was a candidate for condemnation, complete with faded asphalt shingles and dingy, slightly rusted metal awnings and at least one screen door that wouldn't shut properly so that it banged in the wind and convinced us that the house was haunted. Because this was the 1960s and 1970s, none of these houses had air conditioning or televisions, which we really didn't miss because we didn't have air conditioning or anything but a black and white TV that was mostly for watching the news, but we still felt it would have been nice to stay in a house that offered those amenities just to see what it was like. When I was very young, we stayed at one house around the Ocracoke area that had spiders in a bathtub that was one step away from having claw feet. In fact, it might have had them, but I was so young that I don't remember anything much except how huge and scary the spiders were (as a side note: I love claw-foot bathtubs now that I'm an adult but as a child I was slightly afraid of them). Finally, the year I turned 18 and graduated from high school, we stayed in one of our dream houses, but that's because we shared it with another family and it was a number of blocks from the ocean. Because I was 18 and my sister was 16, however, we wanted to be as far away from our parents as possible, so we didn't spend much time in that house and instead careened around the Atlantic Beach area in the family car, looking for cute boys and clubs where we could go dancing.

When Mary and Anna were younger and we were driving here, I told them about how we wished we were staying in a brand new beach dream house and what we actually ended up staying in. Now it is a favorite game of theirs when we drive along this beach to ask me to point out ramshackle two-bedroom shacks with siding blown off that might have been a Michie beach house once upon a time, especially if we have a guest who has not been here before. This year, it was Anna's boyfriend. After I point out one or two of these houses, they get into the spirit of it shouting, "Look, there's a Michie house right there!" and collapsing into laughter.

The Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture
Before I met Wayne and after I grew up and got married, I didn't go to the beach very often. When I did go, it was usually either a quick weekend jaunt with a one- or two-night stay in a motel with fast food as our meals or a drinking spree with "the girls." Even when I was young, our trips were to different beaches at different times of the year. My mother would pack a few food items, some games, the Sea 'N Ski, a couple of blow-up floats, and plastic buckets and shovels, and off we'd go. As a result, I had no clue that there is an entire Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture that has existed for years. This culture includes owning items like special low-rise beach chairs that are made only for sitting on the beach, skim boards and boogie boards, sand augers that you manually twist deep into the sand to hold beach umbrellas so that they aren't blown over, small coolers for six packs of beer or Cokes, water bocce ball games, and small anchors that you can put in the water and tether floats for small children so that the floats aren't carried out to sea. There are also beach carts and golf carts for carrying all this paraphernalia so that you don't have to make lots of trips to the oceanfront. And now, there are fairly wind-proof canopies that you can set up so that more people can be in the shade. I used to be amazed at all the items for sprucing up your life and your house during the Christmas season, but this beach paraphernalia thing has that completely beat.

This sub-culture does not stop at possessions. It also extends to the houses and schedules as well. Until I started going to the beach with Wayne, I thought that getting a beach house that you wanted when you wanted it was a crap shoot and if you were lucky, the stars and planets would align themselves and the house and schedule would work out for you. I marveled at the amazing luck of people who got the same beach house at the same time year after year, including Wayne's parents. Finally, Wayne let me in on the secret: during your stay at the beach house, you have until the Wednesday of the week you're staying to go to the beach rental people and reserve the house for the same time the next year for a relatively small reservation fee. You then have until January of the next year to confirm that reservation or cancel it. For Wayne, this is perfect, because he is a creature of habit who likes things to be the same as much as possible, and, except for a few lapses that have resulted in our having to move to a second house after one week, we've managed to be in this house since 2000. Every once in a while, I look at the book of available beach houses and think of other houses and other times to come here. Wayne and I discuss the possibility of all of these, but in the end, we decide that this period in the summer works best for us, and so does this house.

The other thing I learned is that, in North Carolina, beach houses that are manged by rental companies or real estate companies are rented from Saturday to Saturday. I used to think that you could rent a house for any day of the week and keep it for a few days. Of course, you can do that if you choose, but it's more expensive that way. For some reason, I find this comforting. Maybe it's because in my internal struggle to fit in with the rest of the world when I really don't feel that I do (and at times wonder why I want this), when I hit I-40 East with hundreds of other families all headed to the beach at the same time I am, I get that belonging feeling I long for much of the time.

Beach Reading
The popular media labor under the misapprehension that the only books you should read at the beach are page-turning thrillers that are long on action and short on philosophy or deep thought. Because those types of books make up about 90% of the normal reading that I do when I'm not on vacation, a number of them end up in my beach book bag; however, I also take along books that I've acquired in the last year but have continued to put aside in favor of lighter reading. I usually have a long list of "I should read this" books that often gather dust on the bedside table while I race through Janet Evanovich's latest. However, when I'm down here, the only books I can read are those that I bring with me, so those dusty books are put in the bag and are read avidly. This year, I brought The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and American Chica by Marie Arana. I am a big Joan Didion fan but had been hesitant to read a book that is devoted to discussing the death of her husband and the illness of her only daughter and that's why I had owned it since January without reading it. My mother sent me American Chica because I love almost all things Peruvian and the author was writing about her childhood in Peru and America and what it was like to have a Peruvian father and an American mother. At the time she sent it, I had just finished a book by Mario Vargas Llosa and one by Isobel Ellena and after reading the first chapter of this one, I decided I needed a break from the harum-scarum wording that threads its way through the heart of Latin American prose and I set it aside.

On the surface, neither book would seem to related to the other. Joan Didion is sharing her grief and her thoughts about her life without her husband who died of heart failure in 2003 and Marie Arana is writing about her childhood. After I finished both, however, I realized that they were actually both tales about the marriages of two couples who were of the same generation--that of my parents. In Didion's case, it was her own marriage and in Arana's, her book focused on her parents' marriage. Both marriages were larger than life with deep abiding love and huge disagreements and both lasted more than 40 years. The interesting thing was that the marriages were so different. Didion wrote several times that she and her husband John were rarely apart. They were both writers who had home offices and the few times they were separated involved their traveling as journalists to cover some event. Didion commented that the time they were separated could be measured in days. Arana's book recounted how her parents tried living together in Peru for 14 years without any measure of success because her mother was unhappy in a culture that believed basically in the subjugation of a wife to her mother-in-law and thought that independent women were only worthy of contempt. The parents then tried living together in Summit, New Jersey, and that was also unsuccessful because her father missed his homeland so much. In the end, they compromised and her father would travel to Peru and other parts of South America for several months at a time and in the end, they were a very happy couple who lived for their reunions.

When I think over the books, I'm amazed that Joan Didion, who appears to be a strong person that pursued personal freedoms throughout her life, had such a dependent marriage and I'm amazed that a Peruvian man found himself happy in a marriage that was completely unlike many of the marriages of those of his Peruvian class and culture--where men might stray to a mistress or a brothel, but not away from home for months. It just goes to show what happens when I create pictures of people in my mind without knowing the whole story. I also wonder if I married someone from Peru or another culture, would I suffer simply because I was an American and fight with my in-laws or would I decide to throw myself into the culture completely, walking away from my life as a woman who runs a household by herself. This might seem like a silly thing to worry about since I have a long future with Wayne, but I look at it as a philosophical exercise. Sometimes it's tiring to be a single mother and an independent, successful career woman making crucial decisions by myself almost every day. The idea of giving my life over to someone else, whether it's a husband or a mother-in-law, is very seductive sometimes. On the other hand, when I think of my almost 30-year battle with the stove and mop, I have to laugh at myself thinking I could either cook or clean for any length of time without doing anything else for years. I'm sure there is no anti-depressant on the market today that could help me handle that kind of future.

Last night, I talked to Wayne a little bit about the two types of marriages I'd read about. We decided that, given our personalities, we had a greater understanding of the happiness derived from having separate lives than one in which the couple lives in each other's pockets. Neither he nor I want to live thousands of miles from each other for months at a time, but we do think that having breaks from each other is a great idea. We have also discussed buying a duplex to live in during our retirement, with me on one side and him on the other or something similar to that. My sisters tell me constantly that the reason we've been so happy for almost 9 years is because we don't live together. He and I both agree that they're right. When either of us is irritated by the other, we can go home. That way we avoid the undesirable result of the irritation festering long enough to become an unhealthy discharge of accusations and emotion. We're able to laugh at each other's foibles instead of actively declaring war on them. Since I envision a retirement with no pet care and little strife or discord, I think that the duplex idea makes sense.