Beaches

There is something about a beach, freshwater or ocean, that pulls me irresistibly into a good and generous mood. Find me on the beach anywhere in this distended world and I'm liable to treat you to the best meal available in a hundred mile radius, or offer you a string of pearls, or at least build a sand castle with you. Whatever is fine and decent in my usually crabbed and crusted soul expands like a Ja-Ru Magic Grow Capsule whenever the shore is near.

Growing up in Minneapolis, I often walked or biked down to the Mississippi shore around the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. Now gentrified, homogenized, and sterilized, the Mississippi shoreline fifty years ago was an overripe, pungent, fascinating landscape of lazy carp gulping sewage direct from large brick tunnels, littered with bed springs and beer bottles, and smelling of peppery weeds and urine. Waves slapped at the speckled, gritty shore as coal and grain barges majestically sailed past in water that was a peculiar kind of brown -- more of a stain than a color, with diesel rainbows wavering on top of it. 

Sitting on an elm stump, I watched the crows and pigeons wheeling in the pale blue sky over the water as the sluggish tugboats thumped sullenly by. There was always something interesting to pick up on the shore. Snags of driftwood. A large leather boot with a black rubber sole. Solitary burned out headlamps bobbing in the backwash. And slack rusted steel cables that ran out of the river and up the steep wooded riverbank to who knows where. I yanked them out of the muck in a vain attempt to see what mysterious objects they were attached to, but never succeeded in finding an end point. They were dangerously untwisting with age, with individual steel threads broken off and forming vicious pointed spikes. Only the mercy of the water gods kept me from jabbing myself and perishing with septicemia. 

I also cavorted on many a lakeside beach in Minneapolis. Always on the lookout for minnows, tadpoles, turtles, and frogs. Dragonflies perched on the cattails, owlishly observing my efforts to corral a shiner in my cupped hands. As a boy I always felt overpressed with useless and capricious rules imposed on me by hoards of adults, but when I was by the water those same stifling ukases always seemed remote and unenforceable. I grew up believing that the beach meant freedom.  

When I arrived in Venice, Florida, at age 18, to attend the Ringling Brothers Clown College, I was met with a tantalizing and intoxicating smell that curled my toes. Saltwater! 

I spent every spare moment at the beach in front of the Venice Villas, where I shared an apartment with five other students. I relished standing stock still in the sand as the water washed over my feet and they gradually sank into the fine grains right up to my ankles. A canal emptied into the Gulf a few yards down the beach, forming a lagoon where alligators patrolled for little white poodles that old ladies incautiously brought down on their flimsy leashes to exercise. 

 There is no breeze to match a saltwater beach breeze. It stiffens the hair and picks at the eyes. Hunger and thirst are magnified into an insane animal lust that can only be satisfied with grilled red snapper steaks, mugs of steaming crab bisque, baked potatoes the size of bowling balls, and flagons of hissing mineral water (what did you expect: the drinking age in Florida was 21.) A half dozen veteran Ringling clowns had their winter homes in Venice, and they had me over for such meals on a regular basis -- I think they were half enthralled and half repelled by the stamina and urgency of my ravenous gluttony. I ate a dozen oyster fritters in one sitting at Swede Johnson's house -- a feat of digestive folly that inspired the old clown to nickname me 'Pinhead' for the rest of my professional career with Ringling. 

A few years later I was in Thailand as a missionary for my church. There are nearly two thousand miles of beach in Thailand, but Elders on a mission for the Church were verboten to go anywhere near them. A swim in those inviting tropical waters meant being sent home, defrocked and disgraced. So I could only gaze longingly at those luscious beaches from a sanctified distance for two whole years.

But twenty years later I returned to teach English, a sad and divorced middle-aged waif, and began a steamy love affair with beaches from Kho Samet to Khrabi that soon cured my melancholia. 

On a beach in Thailand you first rent yourself a large canvas deck chair, at one hundred baht for the full day. (That's about three American dollars.) You station it under a nearby palm tree and immediately send one of the little boys that hang around the beach like sand fleas to the nearest bamboo seafood shack for a banana leaf filled with shrimp fried rice, for 50 baht. Also some green papaya salad that is prepared with a mortar and pestle and that is concocted with a generous portion of lightly boiled shrimp and raw crab. (It's a lot of fun to spit bits of crab shell, like a kid spitting watermelon seeds.) After your repast, you stroll down the pure white sand and take a leisurely dip in the water, which is the temperature of lukewarm soup. Thoroughly refreshed, you return to your deck chair for a snooze. When you awaken it's time for another dip, and then, as the tropical sun begins its descent and the breeze freshens to a cooling caress, a lovely girl comes by to offer a foot massage for two hundred baht (about six American dollars.) At the same time another lovely young thing may come by to offer a haircut or a manicure. And the kanom jiin vendor stops by to see if you'd like a bowl or two. After your foot massage it's time to walk along the beach awhile, looking for bits of brain coral and sea glass to take back home for the whatnot cabinet. Chances are good you'll run into a not-too-sober mahout with his baby elephant in tow, and for 20 baht you can take all the selfies you want with the cute little pachyderm. Even ride it, for another 20 baht. Time for one more swim and then settle back into your deck chair as the local Thais start a driftwood bonfire and pour out their hearts with traditional romantic ballads while they pour in gallons of Chang beer. 

One may, of course, meet Someone on the beach in Thailand, and then the night becomes more than gem-like stars and dazzling moonlight that reflects playfully off the gentle waves. Or one may not. If the latter, there is always a nearby pier where the fishing fleet has dropped off a fresh catch of something or other that goes into a communal pot of spicy curry. A bowl of it, with rice, will set you back 20 baht. 

You end the night with a freshwater shower on the beach, which costs all of 5 baht. And then toddle off to bed. 

Since Thailand has over sixty school holidays during the year, I had plenty of opportunity to enjoy the beach just as described above. When I had to leave Thailand due to some work visa issues, I felt I was abandoning the nearest approach to Paradise a man could have in this nasty old world. It's been eight years since I left those entrancing beaches in Thailand. Today I look out my patio doors as the snow settles over the grey Wasatch Mountains for the winter. But I've got my memories of those glorious beaches -- and a bit of brain coral tucked away in the drawer where I keep my stamps, fountain pen, and envelopes.