My earliest memories of the beach are not prepossessing. Every May, starting around my seventh year, we would hike from the genteel suburbs of Anne Arundel County through the wild wastes of Delmarva to Ocean City for Maryland’s annual Knights of Columbus convention. The Atlantic coast in May is, almost invariably, cold and rainy. Before the riotous crush of graduating high schoolers flood the resorts, Ocean City’s archetypal beach-town tackiness is relaxed, and the real nature of the place is on display: a slowly rotting village on the edge of the great chaos that David Foster Wallace called an “engine of decay.” Going to the beach is a fundamentally melancholic activity, an almost ritual enactment of the long journey toward the end of all things. Going to the beach is the experience of death.
That isn’t a knock, of course. I enjoy the beach hugely. I like the sound and smell of the sea. I like fried seafood. I like sitting on the sand, and watching the newest baby (who I am beginning to suspect is somewhat dim) trying to eat it. I like staring out into the watery beyond, falling asleep, and getting sunburn (to a point). Sunshine and cheerful crowds are a pleasant diversion overlaying the basic indifference and gloom of eternal Oceanus. I even enjoy paddling around in the surf, although I am a poor swimmer and quietly believe everyone else is having a private laugh at me. I like the stupid stores full of plastic crap for defacing the beach with little temporary scratches, which will soon be swallowed up and obliterated by the great nothingness.
I’m by nature a paranoid and even superstitious traveler. For years, there were a handful of books that went with me everywhere—Pindar, the Symposium, the complete Larkin, Catullus. I don’t even like Pindar; it’s just what is done for a propitious trip. This tendency has been over time suppressed by the exigencies of traveling with other people, particularly children; bringing the “right” impedimenta gives way to bringing the necessary impedimenta, like diapers and sticker books. The beach still brings out the savage bachelor within, though. It’s bad luck to go to the shore without some Heidegger. Indeed, while two out of the past three trips to the shore have found me without swim trunks, a cause of near despair for my wife, I have yet to be caught without, at the very least, the slim little ’80s volume titled Early Greek Thinking. It just feels right, anyway.
This time I’ve got Early Greek Thinking and the old warhorse, Being and Time. I’ve also got Lucretius and Horace and an e-reader with a variety of interesting titles I always intend to get around to. I have yet to crack any of them, because I am swamped with work. I invariably end up working on beach trips, which also feels right. Life goes on, irrespective of the primal void. (“Postmen like doctors” indeed. What about journos?) Working has another benefit: It keeps me from getting totally annihilated when I fall asleep in the sand. I am a poor applicator of sunscreen, despite some painful lessons, including an embarrassing episode which found me the color and texture of fried bologna on my first beach trip with the (then future) in-laws.
The in-laws are polite about my antics at the beach, as they are elsewhere, but I try not to push too far into the realm of eccentric haplessness, lest I find myself taken in hand. I make sure to drink fairly seriously, so as not to seem antisocial or to let down the side. I certainly do not talk about death, or how I think it would be kind of nice if it drizzled a little one day.
“The shore” looms fairly large in the Marylander’s consciousness, along with the Bay and the O’s and our splendid state flag. It’s the place you spend most of your ordinary life trying to go. It’s where people vacation and then retire. I don’t think that makes it any less like death. We’re all headed toward the same place.
This all is not to make going on vacation horrible, I think, but to soften the countenance of Brother Death. The beach’s bittersweet mix of light and dark is nowhere better expressed than in “Margaritaville,” a song of great brilliance produced by one of the shallowest musicians These States have ever produced. I find it agreeable, anyway, the light and the grit and the salt wash, although I wouldn’t mind if, just for an afternoon, it was cool and rainy and the true nature of the place disclosed itself—I could work and drink and watch the children dip their feet in the edge of eternity. In any case, I guess I will settle for watching the baby eat sand.
