Beaches
Is a beach the lip of the ocean, or the gums of the land? Do beaches end at the waterline or run deeper? I looked it up and found that what we call beach, the dry part, is actually a “berm,” and a berm has a crest and a face, and then comes the “swash zone” – great name – which is the part that gets wet and dry, and then we reach “the longshore bar,” which extends much deeper.
Very little about a beach is called beach at all.
Sand beaches can be many hues, including pink, white, and black. In the summers when I was a kid, we’d go to Mt Desert Island in Maine to see my grandparents, where there’s a locals’ beach called Hunter’s with no sand at all, just mottled rocks that look like dinosaur eggs, spotted white, black, and pink. And if the waves are up, they make great, gurgling-granite sounds, when the sucking rush of outgoing water rumbles hundreds of them around.
This year on Christmas, my wife and I went to the beach. It was packed. In Los Angeles, a beach gives a sense of the people – where else does the entire region convene? I don’t mean Malibu, the fancy beaches, but pretty much anywhere else you can find it: the incredible L.A. diversity.
I guess an empty beach doesn’t move me; in that case I just want the water. What makes a beach beautiful for me is people in all their forms. Children struggling to run in the sand. Hairy men in all their hairiness. I always bring a book, I always swim, but mainly I’m there for people-watching. I like beaches as tableau.
One time during a beach cleanup, I found a Bible buried in the sand. And lots of condoms.
Speaking of condoms: In the late 1930s, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann and their wives were walking on a beach south of Los Angeles when they stumbled on condoms, endless condoms, ejected by a sewage treatment plant. (I wrote about this in Everything Now.) Huxley noted: “The scale was American, the figures astronomical. Ten million saw I at a glance. Ten million emblems and mementoes of Modern Love.”
I love Persuasion by Jane Austin. I love On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. I don’t think I’ve ever read a truly great novel on a beach that actually involves a beach, but thinking of it now, I want to.
During lockdown, we invited friends to meet us on my birthday at Dockweiler Beach in the afternoon. At dusk, when the lifeguards went home, we all dug a hole in the sand, dumped in wood and lit a fire. We did it the next year, and I’m planning to do it again – for an East Coaster, it feels like the most California thing ever? If only because we’re never the only ones: within thirty minutes of sunset, the horizon darkly glowing, a string of tiny fires suddenly extended half a mile in both directions, north and south.
I try to go to the beach every two weeks, though that’s a lie of sorts; “going to the beach” is a pandemic phrase I still use. It came from when the public beaches were closed, and instead I’d go out to our terrace on a Saturday afternoon with sunglasses, several books, several magazines. I’d roll out a towel atop a yoga mat, take off my shirt, open a beer. Post-pandemic – can we say that? – I still do it and call it the same thing. It’s a zero day at home, a couple hours of no demands. Which is basically what I want from beaches: that feeling of nothingness, that we’re all just sand in the universe and I’m sand, too.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters:
A bunch of recently mixed music, with grime, pop, jazz and techno
A new documentary I’m excited about, and a wild old one I just discovered
A big thriller of a novel that you’ll finish in a snap
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly short essay about something beautiful from author Rosecrans Baldwin. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas of things to love, plus a longer piece once a month written on the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️
If you ever find that beach novel LMK!