Learning to love the beach
Some thoughts on sand, floating, growing older
I didn’t like the beach growing up. I hated the smell of sunscreen and how sand found its way into everything. I didn’t understand the families with their containers of cut fruit, their card games, their umbrellas and striped towels, their bluetooth speakers, their drinks packed in ice.
I was an Indoor Kid. I liked libraries. I liked reading books in silent, air conditioned rooms. In the summer, I sat in the cool darkness of my closet, listening to audiobooks, eating slices of tomato sprinkled with sugar.1
I grew up in places with either an absence of beaches or else only terrible options.2 Sometimes my parents made the forty-five minute drive to Galveston so we could wade in the Gulf of Mexico which was inextricably associated with the BP oil spill and mutant shrimp.
This was the trip I made after prom. I did the driving, almost falling asleep at the wheel, dirt tracks on my prom dress because it had gotten stuck in the car door. We packed ten high school seniors in a beach house, played too much Truth or Dare, and tried not to think about leaving for college.
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My partner is the opposite of me in his feelings on beaches. He grew up in the suburbs of LA, a ten minute drive from a continuous, twenty-mile stretch of beaches, quiet Torrance Beach with its contemplative frog statue to Redondo Beach with its cheesy boardwalk which in turn transitions into Hermosa Beach, all perfect sunsets and oceanfront restaurants, Manhattan Beach with its piers and aquarium, confusingly LAX, and then Venice and Santa Monica.
He was in an academic pressure cooker but the beach felt like the release valve. Kids went there to watch the waves and remind themselves that nothing was all that serious. That, he claimed, was the difference between northern and southern California.
Until he went to college, he didn’t think much about the concept of “a beautiful day.” Where he lived, most days were beautiful and therefore ordinary. It was a nasty shock moving to the East Coast and learning that such a thing was not, in fact, guaranteed.
When my partner thinks of the beach, he thinks of running. He spent his years of cross country taking trips up and down that twenty-mile stretch, sometimes running into the hills of Palos Verdes with its horses and mansions, sometimes sticking close to the ocean, arguing about politics, singing Imagine Dragons songs, gossiping about the things you gossip about when you’re growing up.
For every stretch of beach, there’s an associated memory: Knob Hill with its water fountain, the place on the board walk that sold funnel cake, the uphill pushes, the sunsets that never grew old.
He told me these stories about beach running when we first started dating eight years ago. Back then, I didn’t like beaches and I didn’t like running. It sounded like the most miserable thing in the world.
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Funny thing about growing up—you become the opposite of yourself in ways you can’t anticipate. Over the course of the last three years, I’ve fallen deeply in love with running. For years I’d tried and failed to do this and for some reason, it stuck when I turned twenty-seven, was between jobs for four months and one day, on a whim, ran the Central Park loop with no walking breaks, something I thought was impossible, sitting on the grass afterwards, texting my partner, crying.
I’ve gone through seasons in my relationship with running; it started as a vehicle for building self-confidence, transitioned into a means of pushing myself and building a healthier relationship with ambition, turned into a way to meet new people.3
Lately, running has become a means of exploration, just a slightly less efficient mode of transportation than bike, car, or subway. I’ve run to and from work on what I like to call my “time travel run” going from the UES to Midtown East and the UN, then the East Village, LES, and Chinatown, everyone around me getting younger with each city block. Running downtown feels like aging in reverse, especially as I cross the Manhattan bridge. And then I make the commute back and get older.
It’s been a good way to see things: herons and alligators in suburban Texas, families of deer in Rockcreek Park, excellent running infrastructure in Shanghai and Guilin, too many stroads in lookalike American suburbs. I’ve run along the Seine at 5 a.m., listening to Ratatouille music, witnessed too many photo shoots, proposals, picnics, people walking hand-in-hand to count.
It is the best way to see other people, out and about, living their lives, to feel embraced in the crush of humanity and to get a real feeling for a city, how friendly it is to foot traffic, what it might feel like living there, should I choose to stay longer.
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While in LA earlier this year I asked my partner, where am I supposed to do my marathon training? and he replied at the beach of course.
Ok, I thought. Sometimes being an adult is doing the things you don’t want to do. He dropped me off and promised to come back in two hours or whenever I called him.
I’d timed the run so it was an hour before sunset.4 It was in the sixties with a cool ocean breeze. In other words it was a perfect and therefore ordinary day. I passed groups of kids playing beach volleyball. Women in bikinis traveled down the strand on bikes. There were dogs and there were runners and sometimes the runners were running alongside their dogs.
I got to the Redondo boardwalk and passed the clusters of men fishing, the sign that warned them which fish weren’t edible, the sinks where you could gut and clean them yourself. I passed the places selling Italian ice and calamari and funnel cake, all the things you eat to remind yourself you’re at a boardwalk. I passed a skateboard park, teenagers doing tricks, falling, getting up, many parked boats. I kept going.
The sun was starting to set when I reached Hermosa Beach. The sky turned orange-pink, the color nostalgia might be if it had a color. I settled in behind a group of shirtless dads jogging with their running strollers. They were chatting as they went. It looked like something they did often.
It was the kind of sunset that reminded me this was the city of angels and dreams. I was startled by the realization that it was beautiful. I never realized that a place I used to hate could be so beautiful, that I could see a place as one thing at one point in life and a different thing at another. It made me feel emotional in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
There’s something undeniable about a beach sunset, the way the light paints the sand and water, the way the waves rush to greet you. You give the thing the entirety of your attention and in that act, the experience feels larger. Beauty creates beauty creates beauty. I could learn to look forward to this, I thought.
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A week ago, I made a trip to the Rockaways for the first time in years. I took the ferry from Wall St with a stop at Sunset Park on the way. I’d only gone one other time and that was by subway. In the middle of planning a going-away for a friend, the thought bubbled up; it seemed the perfect excuse for an adventure.
There was a minor string of disasters. There’d been a heatwave in New York and I was coming back from a trip in LA where I’d sunburned my shoulders. I spent the day before slathering aloe on them and tapping lightly to test for pain. The forecast predicted rain.
I froze two bags of grapes, took inventory of what I could use to make sandwiches, and told my friends that this trip would happen by sheer force of will. The day of, I accidentally left for the ferry an hour early, doubling back sheepishly when my friends texted why are you leaving now?
By the time we got on the ferry, the day was unexpectedly cool and overcast. The ferry was miraculously empty. We made friends with a stranger who was also astonished at how empty it was, saying that usually the line to get on looped around and around. He was looking for ways to pass the time while his wife and son were in Portugal. We chatted about the upsides and downsides of living on the Upper East Side and I got recommended the Power Broker for the hundredth time. He took one of the frozen grapes when I offered the bag to him. It felt like a good omen.
And then we were at the beach. It was gray and the water was cold. There was plenty of cloud cover. In a million different ways, it felt small and unremarkable, reminiscent of all the trips to Galveston growing up, but I was overjoyed to be there.
I lay in the sand with friends and we talked about life, about things that were easy but mostly about things that were hard. We ate cut pineapple and protein bars and sago and things that didn’t demand much of us. They went biking. I read my book. We got pizza. We could see the airplanes taking off and landing at JFK and I was thinking about how every story is either a story of departure or arrival, that sometimes the two are one and the same.
It felt good to feel far away from the city. It was a feeling I was always chasing and had only found in a few other places: Inwood Park, Forest Park, Fort Tryon/The Cloisters, the Palisades. It is the feeling of being close enough to the place you love but far enough that you can get a new perspective on things.
In the stillness, I could hear the sound of the water, coming in, going out, like deep breaths. I thought about what sand is, just rocks that have been weathered over time, smashed over and over until they become something new, something softer.
I thought about how a beach is the boundary between one place and another, a protective buffer during storms, a place of transition that is itself always changing which turn in made me think about how recently life seems almost entirely about transitions, nothing stable or predictable or certain, difficult and beautiful at the same time.5
As we were leaving, I rushed into the water for the last time. I am a terrible swimmer but felt buoyed by its salinity. If I just lay on my back I could float on and on and on and on, watch the planes taking off and landing at JFK, arriving and leaving, everyone coming home eventually. It was a perfect day. We’d made it a perfect day by making the effort to venture out here together.
I dried off and packed my bags. Soon I’d be hugging my friends goodbye after we got off the ferry and I’d be shaking the sand out of my stuff for days.
I know this sounds strange but I assure you, it’s a common Chinese dessert
Suburbs of Toronto, Louisville, KY, and Houston, TX, what’s a girl to do
No better way to get to know someone than being stuck on a 20 mile marathon-training run with them :’)
For the sake of narrative simplicity I’m going to recount the run that went really well but in reality there were two or three pretty bad ones where I stupidly chose to run in the hottest part of the day and didn’t adjust my pace and was pretty miserable. Lesson learned.
I also feel particularly moved by sea glass and recently learned that sometimes it can take hundreds of years to form. It is so strange and lovely to me that the sea can be a scary place but it can also be a gentle one that wears away rough edges over time.