i started this literally a month ago and took forever to finish it, which is why it’s a bit disjointed. i really thought i was, like, on an Eat, Pray, Love thing this day, despite never having read that book. usual disclaimers apply: typos, lack of narrative cohesion, forgive the rambling nature of it, etc etc etc
I didn’t go to the beach just so I could write about going to the beach…but I also didn’t not go to the beach just so I could write about going to the beach.
At a party two days before, some people were talking about the midwest and how being able to see for miles on end can affect your psychology. This Is Your Brain On Iowa, or whatever. I was only half listening, so I missed the part where they explained exactly how it affects your brain. When I try to google an answer, using keywords like “midwest,” “field,” “horizon,” or “psychology,” I get links to the 12 Best Things To Do In the Midwest, or to academic papers about some social psychologist named Kurt Lewin, who invented “field theory.” To the best I can understand, he said that behavior is a function of the individual and environment. (I’m not a social psychologist, but that seems pretty intuitive.) And to what I couldn’t really understand, he used physics and geometry to think of humans’ brains as containing actual spaces, “life spaces.” He created a formula, sort of like how in physics everything is a function of some other things acting together, to explain human behavior: your action is a result of your individual person being acted on by the people and things around you. At least I think that’s what he meant.
I’ve never been to the midwest, but I have been to an ocean, so I have stared at a horizon before and felt that small feeling everyone seems to get when they look at something so huge. I think it’s a bit different, looking at the ocean, rather than an expanse of wheat. In a field, you know there’s probably a house, or a tree, or a road somewhere, something you can’t see but can trust exists. And while it might be hard to, like, spatially, understand how far the flatness extends, you at least know what it consists of: wheat. At the ocean, when you’re looking out and squinting to see where the water stops and the sky starts, you know that the expanse includes water, but it’s more troubling, or unsettling, or maybe exciting, to think about everything you don’t know exists beneath it. In a field, you might feel physically small in comparison to so much flatness sprawled in front of you, but at the ocean, you might feel that the essence of you is small – freaked out at the recognition of how tiny your own existence is compared to what you’re looking at; how little you actually know about anything, and how you’re sort of just the same as everyone else.
So anyway, I ended up going to the beach.
I piled my stuff in the back of my car around 9:00 a.m. My stuff included: a towel, a blanket to place my towel on (because where would I sit if I wanted to wrap myself in my towel?), and a bag containing my book and other boring things everyone brings to the beach. To eat, I brought a week-old peanut butter sandwich and a quarter-full bag of Goldfish. None of this is important, but this is what I brought to the beach. (I feel like travel writers always include this kind of tedious detail, and I am nothing if not Unoriginal.)
The 2.5 hour drive was largely uneventful, spent mostly on a few highways in Maryland, shifting my air conditioning up, getting too cold, and shifting it back down for ten minutes until I felt my legs sticking to the seat, and turning it back up again, ignoring intermittent pangs of guilt when I remembered I filled up my tank for $5.09 a gallon. I stopped at a Wawa to pee about 20 minutes away from the ocean, and, as a treat, bought myself a box of questionable and overpriced fruit (pineapple, cantaloupe, grapes), feeling guilty again when I remembered the handful of fruit stands I’d just passed on the road in. The older woman who checked me out called me honey twice in the 45 seconds it took to scan the fruit and insert my card. When I got back to the car, I texted my mom.
I found parking relatively easily, in a small lot off the boardwalk, wedged between two condo duplexes. An old and maybe concerningly sunburnt man sitting on the steps to one of the complexes saw me get out and look around for a parking meter, which I couldn’t find. “Am I allowed to park here?” I called out to him, once I knew he was watching me. I saw him start to sit up from his chair, and walked towards him to hear him better — and because it looked like standing up was something he should not be doing. He told me yes, and asked “if my phone had apps,” to which I told him yes, my phone did have apps. I walked down to the entrance to the lot, where I found a sign with instructions to pay via the ParkMobile app. I paid $15 for the day, retrieved my things from my backseat, locked my car, and thanked the older man as I walked up to steps that led to the sand. None of that is very important, but it’s how I got my car parked at the beach.
I situated my towel next to another woman who was there alone, flat on her back in a pink bikini. Maybe if I was next to someone else that was alone, no one would notice that I was alone, too. That was, I guess, my thought process in selecting that spot, even though I knew really no one would notice, let alone care, that I was at the beach alone.
To my left, there was one of those very intense family beach set-ups: four umbrellas lined up in a zigzag next to each other, multiple coolers positioned in the shade, adults planted firmly in a semi-circle of foldable soccer chairs that they wouldn’t leave all afternoon, teenage brothers and cousins teasing their teenage sisters and cousins near the water, while the elementary schoolers lingered around, basking in the thrill of hanging out in uneasy proximity to the Big Kids.
To my right, and closer to me, was another group of what seemed to be two families with young kids. Parent friends, I assumed. One of the two moms kept getting up to attend to the smallest little boy, maybe three, as he sat in the sand behind their chairs, picking it up and throwing it on his knees. The two dads, meanwhile, were deep in conversation, sipping from those Yeti cups that are unnecessarily expensive and probably sold at REI.
When you arrive at the beach with a group, a bit of sweet hesitation always seems to precede the removal of your clothes. At least, it feels that way to me. Nearly everyone around you is half-naked in some fashion, but it’s the act of undressing – getting to the point of half-nakedness so publicly – that still carries some type of tween-bashfulness. Undressing is a routine reserved for bathrooms, bedrooms, dressing rooms, or wherever else you choose to take off your clothes (and with whomever), so doing it out in the open, in the middle of the day, just feels odd, especially once you’ve convinced yourself you have an audience. But by myself, I found it much easier to slip off my shorts and tank top, comfortable in the assumption that no one cared, or had even noticed, that I was at the beach.
I laid (lay? lied? who knows) on my back for about 15 minutes, rolling over every three minutes to check my phone, failing at my goal of “unplugging” for the day. The woman next to me in her pink bikini still hadn’t moved, and I wondered how she could be so still for so long. Then I decided I was either hot enough, or bored enough, to try going in the water.
The water stung my toes when the first little half-inch of a dying wave came up to me, a sensation that felt like more of a challenge to go in further, to put my whole body into the stinging, than a sign to turn back to my towel. I waded in, and stood for a minute with my waist in the water, batting away the image of what I must look like from behind (imaginary audience!) With half of me soaked and the other half of me shivering, I dove into one of the more manageable waves and popped back up with an audible shudder, clinging my elbows to my ribs. Challenge met and now freezing, I embarked on the embarrassing exercise of getting out of the ocean: looking behind you for any waves that might break over your head, trying to figure out how to pull your limbs against the force of the tide. I waddled onto the sand and thought about how endearing it is to watch people get out of the ocean, faces sweet and young with an earnest look of almost bewilderment.
A group of around six girls (women?) had set up their camp directly behind me while I was in the ocean. I didn’t get a good look at them, but spent the next 40 minutes drying off, re-reading the same few pages in my book as I ingested fragments of their conversation. They looked like they could have been my age, but the dynamics of their interactions pointed to late high school. Two of them were laid (lain? lying? who knows) out, while the rest were sitting in chairs, books folded open, text down, across their knees.
“I’ve always wanted that,” I heard one of them say, I think commenting on something having to do with bodies. (Isn’t it always to do with bodies!?) “I’m pretty sure it’s genetic,” responded another, as the rest chirped in agreement. I suspected they were talking about thigh gaps.
One seemed to be the dominant personality of the group, assured enough in her existence to let her voice carry the loudest, while the two lying down were noticeably silent. At one point, the ringleader (I am assuming) asked if anyone wanted to walk around, get food, “do something else?” to which no one replied. I thought about how when I was younger, playing outside with other kids, we constantly had to be doing something. Once you were tired of one game, someone had to ask “do you want to do something else?” and you’d have to sit down and run through the long list of activities you could reasonably do. You’d pick another, and play it until the same moment of boredom arose again, and repeat the entire cycle, lest you have a moment unoccupied, even if the occupation was spending 20 minutes figuring out what game you were going to do next.
The ringleader and the seated girls got up a few minutes later, purportedly to go get food. Shortly after they left, the two girls who had been quietly lying down “woke up” from their naps and started chattering about quickly, so fast I had a hard time catching whatever they were laughing about before they moved onto another joke and started cracking up again. I wished that they’d just been at the beach themselves, and wondered what it was about the ringleader and the other girls that had made them so quiet — why it was that they seemed to light up, literally, only after the rest of the group left. Maybe they really were just napping before, but the way they started bouncing off each other felt like I was watching (or listening) to two people who existed best, or their friendship was the most pure, when it was performed privately. Then I thought about how friendships between women are so romantic. I lifted my head to readjust my towel, and saw one of them had blue low-lights in her hair and freckled shoulders.
About 30 minutes later, the rest of the group returned from the boardwalk – a fact I only heard but didn’t turn my head around to observe. As the ringleader came into earshot, I heard her say “you will not believe what just happened,” her grin audible in the way she emphasized the “BEEE” in believe, and the inflection in her voice at the end of her sentence.
What had happened on the boardwalk was this: two boys had come up and asked one of the girls (I’m not sure who) out. And not on a date, but out to a party. One of the boys was in school at the University of Delaware. When this fact was shared with the group, their reactions led me to believe that the girls were likely freshly graduated high school seniors.
“That’s never happened to me before! I’ve never been asked out,” one said.
“Like not even on a date?”
“No! I mean, I’ve never really been hit on by a stranger.”
The glee in her voice, whoever had been the lucky recipient of the invitation, was sweet, initially, and I couldn’t help but smile beneath the shade of the book I was still holding above my face, pretending to read. Never Been Asked Out couldn’t hide the surprise, joy, and maybe confusion that these boys she’d never met selected her of all the girls on the boardwalk (and probably most importantly, of the friends she was with) to approach and invite to their party – that apparently, for the first time in her life, she’d been appealing enough just in her body to warrant their unsolicited attention. The wholesomeness deflated after a few seconds in my brain, when I thought harder about men, and being 17.
Never Been Asked Out replayed the interaction as you do when you’re giddy and drunk on an ego-boost – out of order, screeching “oh wait I FORGOT the best part” and retelling the memory five different ways to make sure she’d captured every detail as best she could. There had been a handshake (“I was like, ‘what is this, a business meeting?!’”) and an exchange of addresses.
They all seemed to be too embarrassed to admit individually that any of them actually wanted to go to the party. Even the ringleader, her voice still the loudest (and now often speaking for Never Been Asked Out) was hesitant to make the decision for the group, that they would indeed make an appearance at the College Boys’ party tonight. There was a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of “we shouldn’t go… jk haha unless?...” At one point, Never Been Asked Out said she thought if anything, they should go “because it’d be funny,” and I recognized that familiar urge to characterize your participation in things as “a bit,” rather than admit to yourself and others that whatever you’re doing, or want to do, or has been done to you, actually means something to you, else you reveal some of your susceptibility to the allure of validation, attention, whatever. Never taking anything, including yourself, too seriously, acting “ironically,” is what some (not I) would call…self-protection? Cowardly avoidance? Again, some would say.
In the end, they all agreed they should at least go for a few minutes and “see what it’s like,” because “it’d be funny.” They moved onto a conversation about the University of Delaware, where one girl in the group seemed to be headed at the end of summer. (Another case for going to the party, ironically, of course.) By this point my arms had grown tired of holding the hardcover I wasn’t reading, and I’d flopped over onto my stomach, pushing little pieces of sand around with my fingers in front of my face. I thought about telling them I didn’t think they should go to the party, and that plenty of boys in the years to come would approach them with similar advances that should be turned down, too, but decided it wasn’t my place, and I would be very annoyed if some girl who looked around my age patronizingly gave me prudish advice after spending an hour eavesdropping on my and my cool, young friends’ conversations.
I went back in the water one more time, and when I got out, the girls were gone, though their stuff was still there. I sat criss-cross on my blanket, my towel wrapped around my shoulders, looking at the water, trying to focus on the midwestern field stuff, the endlessness of horizons, the small feeling you get at the ocean, but I couldn’t land on anything unique or original. Or anything worth writing into my notes app.
With the girls gone, I fixed my attention on the large family to the left of me — the adults who were huddled under a cluster of umbrellas, beers in koozies, koozies shoved into the arms of their soccer chairs. Just like with the group of teenagers, it was easy to identify the dominant personality in the group: a large man in a gray cut-off t-shirt, maybe in his 40s, dark hair with something between scruff and a five-o’clock shadow on his face. He was joking, in mixed company of men and women, about the women he used to date and how he used to date them. I was only able to grab bits and pieces of his stories. One had something to do with, I think, getting caught kissing a woman while on a date with another woman. He was laughing the hardest out of anyone in the group at his own stories, and I sort of wanted to hit him. One woman sitting diagonally from him in the semi-circle kept asking questions, prodding for more detail in his stories, and I couldn’t decide whether I thought she was doing that to manage the discomfort of the situation or because she actually thought what he was saying was entertaining. I put my headphones in and rolled onto my stomach again to dry off.
Around 4:30 p.m., crispy and in dire need of an ice cream cone, I packed up my stuff. (The week-old sandwich was very bad, but I had eaten the whole thing anyway.) Standing, I faced the group of teenagers, now back at their blanket. I melted a bit when I saw them – not in a creepy way, or even a nostalgic way, just in a way that felt like I should really tell them to stay home tonight, and not go to the party. But I just walked by them, up the ramp, off the sand and onto the boardwalk, towards the ice cream place I passed on the way in.
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I cried on the way home and still can’t figure out exactly why, not that one always has to have a reason to cry. I felt a bit lonely, I suppose, and sad, observing people interacting with one another all day as I sat with myself, even though that was sort of my whole intent in going to the beach – to observe a new place (Delaware!), the ocean, strangers, and think of something interesting to say about it. The predominant emotion underneath everything was sadness, though, and that’s quite possibly the least interesting thing to write about, I’ve realized.
I thought about trying to work that field theory business – the way our behavior is a result of our individual brain working with the forces of the brains of the people around us and the material conditions of our environment – into some astute comment on the way the teenagers, the big man with the cut-off t-shirt, the woman in the pink bikini, and I were all sort of together in something at the beach, all operating with the ocean and the horizon and endlessness in our “fields.” But that seemed too cerebral of a theme for a day where the most interesting thing I did was eat soft-serve in a sugar cone.
So maybe it’s just that I went somewhere by myself, spent a creepy amount of time making characters out of the people around me, and forced 3,200 words out of it. Isn’t that what, like, a majority of writing is anyway? At least I can rule out “travel writer” from my list of potential life paths!
thx for reading xD