Our Place At The Beach

My family went to the beach once a year while we were growing up. It was our one big vacation and the only place we ever stayed for a full week—but it took a while to find the right place. I have vague memories of tagging along on a work trip with our dad and staying at a small oceanfront motel. It had two double beds, a bathroom, an ice bucket--and the giant cooler any family has to bring along when their destination lacks a fridge for all the milk, juice, and snack supplies kids can't be without. My parents had only 3 kids at that point and were still working the kinks out of their agreed upon idea of a vacation. After a weekend of trying to keep her three fair-skinned children from shriveling into sunburnt cinders, my mom eventually threw up her hands and had all three of us swimming in oversized Emerald Isle tshirts. And sustaining us on McDonald's and whatever would keep in a cooler for 3 days was definitely a mom's nightmare. I'm sure my dad was part of some terse dialogue about the basic inconveniences of that trip--but then again, he was at the beach--a place where he needed little more than a swimsuit and a "surf mat" to keep him happy. So even crammed into a single motel room with 3 pink children screaming for French fries--I'm sure he still found a way to enjoy himself.

The beach has always been one of Daddy's favorite places. And his love for the ocean became ours as my parents gradually fine-tuned their efforts to produce a beach vacation all could enjoy. Next, came the condos at Atlantic Beach, aptly named "A Place At The Beach", that assuaged my mom's desperate need for an upgrade in amenities. This place gave us separate bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a washer/dryer, a full kitchen, and a giant water slide snaking down the dunes into an expansive outdoor pool. It was a HUGE place, which sometimes had us lugging our beach gear nearly a mile to the sand from a faraway condo unit, looking like a small tribe of nomadic people with our chairs, towels, and trash bags filled with sand toys flung on our parents’ backs, while the kids ungratefully bemoaned our tale of strife and woe over being made to walk our flip-flopped feet so far to the ocean.

We had a good run at that place, but the surging popularity of Atlantic Beach began to take its toll on those treasured amenities after a few years. Over time, it got so crowded at the pool that the line for the waterside was hardly worth it and more than once, I remember getting accidentally stepped on while swimming along the bottom of the pool. My parents, meanwhile, had increased their total kid headcount to 4 in the years since our initial Emerald Isle exploits, so our traveling circus was already population-dense enough without the influx of new tourists flocking to the county's "longest waterslide". The final blow to "A Place At The Beach" came in the form of "whale poopies"--an unexplained onslaught of what appeared to be tar balls all over the sand and surf, that my parents facetiously named after large mammal feces. This was about 15 years pre-Internet age and nobody seemed too worried or overly informed about the origins or prospective clean-up of the "whale poopie" abundance, so we went about our business there for the next few years. It stained our bathing suits and freaked us out occasionally when we accidentally stepped on a slippery underwater tar ball lodged in the break zone. But other than that, it really didn't break our stride. Like Daddy, we were still just happy to be at the beach and perfectly willing to work the whale poopies (which looked round balls of asphalt when dry) into our beach landscape. A neighboring family even showed us how to soak the balls in sea water and line the moats of our sand castles with maleated tar to maintain the life-like aesthetic of a water feature between incoming waves--making "whale poop" the unlikely “chocolate fudge icing” on our vacation cake.

It did get old though, eventually, and by the time the 5th kid was born, it was time to move on. At the end of our last visit to A Place At The Beach, we took a field trip down the road to scout out North Topsail Beach. You could see the pristine water on both sides of the highway from the narrow strip of land that composed the island and the sand was bright white--like dry angel food cake mix, completely unblemished by tar balls. There were no water slides, no putt-putt establishments, hardly a restaurant for us kids to beg about--and barely a single soul on the beach. It was exactly what our parents were looking for...it was also extremely vulnerable to storms and would be split into new sections several times in the coming years when different parts of the road would wash out and need low bridges to re-connect it. The homes and resorts on the island were one good storm away from floating out to sea in jagged pieces--but until then, this was our new "place at the beach".

There were two major condo resorts on the island, a mini high-rise set with a frequently abandoned restaurant at the top and another set made to look like little Italian villas melded together with stucco. We stayed at both intermittently over the years, but the high-rise was really our home-away-from-home. We'd count down the days for weeks as kids, Marie and I whispering to each other from our adjoining bedrooms as we fell asleep at night, "This time next month we'll be AT the beach!!!" on and on until we were finally there. Every beach morning, we'd indulge in the “crap cereal” my mom usually refused to buy but would happily stock the beach condo with—Cookie Crisp, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms—whatever rots teeth the fastest and has the least nutritional value. We'd spend the next hour getting suited up and slathered with SPF by my dad, whose technique for children's sunscreen application had become aggressively efficient, resembling the way a racehorse might be rubbed down after a derby. We'd then trek out en masse over the short boardwalk with our assigned items-- chairs, rafts, umbrella, trash bag full of sand toys--and set up a base camp that we'd run back-and-forth to from the water until lunch time, which was usually ushered in by one of the younger kids whining to go to the pool. Our camp would then be gradually dismantled as one parent at a time retreated to the pool with a kid or two and whatever sandy belongings they had originally escorted to the beach. At the pool, we did exactly what they asked you not to and plunged our sandy bodies into their clear chlorinated water, a pre-bath of sorts to reduce the size of the sand dunes that would eventually rinse off into our condo’s tubs.

Back up in the room, we’d fight over who got to shower first (and in which bathroom). Afterwards, we’d eat sandwiches, carefully crafted with a broad spread of cheese and deli meat, and soak in every second of whatever brain-deadening monstrosities were going on at the MTV Beach House—knowing we’d be returning in less than a week to a home that would lack cable until the turn of the century. The parents and the younger kids would retire to their rooms for nap time and the older set would camp out on the couch in the cool, dark living room until General Hospital was over, when the “all clear” signal would be given for post-nap activity to resume and the process of prepping for the beach would begin again.

Our late-afternoon excursions to the beach were much more low-key. Fewer toys, less gear, zero sunscreen, but always at least one “surf mat” and Daddy’s massive shovel—not the feeble plastic kind you might pick up in a value pack at the local Wings, but the kind you’d use to dig a shallow grave or chop a copperhead in half. It’s really a miracle none of us, including my dad, ever lost a toe to that shovel, because I’m sure it could have performed a Civil-War era amputation or two--and I don’t think any of us were strong enough to carry it until we were fully-formed adults. But it was the catalyst for decades-worth of ambitious sand forts that began with digging a circular trench, strategically placed on the shore for our castle’s demise to be perfectly timed with our departure from the beach. The sand from the freshly-dug trench was then patted into peaks with the back of the giant shovel and flattened on the top, so that Daddy or the kids could add towers and other embellishments by filling and upending a series of sandcastle-themed plastic molds along the length of what looked like the Great Wall of China, replicated in sand. The center was wide open and large enough for us to sit inside—and I remember the walls towering over my Barbies’ heads as I positioned them around interior, in the years before we were forbidden to ruin favorite toys from home by grinding them into the sand.

After Barbie was banned from the beach, I remember sitting inside the finished fort with our sand toys and our thoughts, watching the tide get closer and closer as dinnertime approached. Daddy, having built his second sand castle of the day at this point, was usually ebbing and flowing with the surf, riding the occasional wave to shore then hurdling back over the breakers to bob next to his inflatable raft until the next worthy wave came along. He always encouraged us not to fear the ocean, escorting us in until we were old enough (or brave enough) to go on our own. He eagerly taught us to ride waves as well, keeping us afloat beside him for what seemed like forever while he waited for just the right wave…and then abruptly, grabbing us by a thigh and a bicep, and throwing us onto the raft--like he was tossing a whole hog onto a pig cooker. It was no dainty operation. Every one of us had at least one near-death experience of falling off the raft too soon and being pummeled by crashing waves. And there were days, Daddy would take one look at the how the waves were breaking and announce, “It’s too rough; you’re not going in.”

But ultimately, we all learned to love the water. That salty,sometimes treacherous water, with its sneaky undertow and hidden aquatic predators. To be honest, I’m more scared of it now than I ever was as a kid. And I’m thankful—firstly, to fate, that I never lost a limb to all the sharks that have recently taken to snacking on swimmers up and down the North Carolina coast—but mostly, to Daddy, for the countless hours I spent in the ocean, old enough to swim but too young to be afraid. The freedom and weightlessness, the endless rise and fall, the crash and thunder that was both invigorating and peaceful at the same time under the lazy summer sky…

If all these damn sharks could just quit biting people, maybe I could get a piece of that tranquility back—but probably never to the extent I enjoyed when I was young. As a parent, there’s too much to be afraid of, so much worry, anxiety, and responsibility, so many ways to accidentally render your children orphans—sometimes, it’s hard to imagine ever being completely free and weightless again. But that’s what I remember feeling in the ocean and how I always think of my dad at the beach--youthful, peaceful, and joyful in the waves, with world-class castle-building skills (and the biggest shovel ever) in the sand.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY, DADDY!