The edge of what we know

When I was ten years old, my family spent a week at Cape Cod. We shared a little cottage with another family, but the other kids were not my age - and I was shy, anyway.

I kicked myself all week because I had only brought one book. It was titled Thirteen, a coming-of-age novel totally foreign to me because it was clearly written by an adult who had been thirteen in my mother's era. What the heck is madras, anyway?

Now, I'd like to go back in time and kick myself. That little cottage was all of two blocks from the Atlantic beach in West Dennis. I think I walked to that beach maybe once, taking in the beauty of the ocean, but not really experiencing it. I spent most of that week reading and rereading that one novel and moping in my room, which was my main luxury since I had to share a room with my sister at home.

When I was fourteen, my best friend Carrie and I went to Assateague Island with her family. I didn't feel all that well - my stomach was sensitive even then - and the island was rife with giant biting horseflies. Because duh, Assateague Island is where the ponies live. I remember the beach, but only vaguely.

From age fourteen to sixteen, I saw the Chesapeake Bay whenever I wanted. We lived in Baltimore, after all. And when I was sixteen, there was San Francisco Bay, on vacation with my family. I saw the Pacific Ocean whenever my parents could manage it, on our family vacations in California. When we buried my grandfather, I stayed with my cousin two blocks from the sea and visited it to say goodbye on the day we left.

The water always speaks to me, whether it's rivers or lakes or oceans or ponds. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean states that he is haunted by waters. I never saw it as haunting. The water speaks to me, and I am drawn to it, even when I barely notice it.

This comes to mind today*, because I am on a double-decker bus and it's making me a little bus-sick. It could be that I've eaten nothing in six hours and probably won't get to eat for another six hours, which was very poor planning. It could be the rocking of the bus, or my attempts to write while riding it. Jimmy texted me to give it time, let me get my sea legs.

But there's a woman nearby who is blaring whatever music she loves in huge earphones, which for some reason are not clamped over her ears but wrapped around her neck. That way we can all enjoy her music. It's fine enough, but distracting, especially since it seems to be one song oer and over with the same two lines of music. It never ends. Who records songs like that?

So I put on my own earbuds, with my white noise app: sea sounds. The sound of the ocean is on a timer to let me sleep.

I close my eyes, and instantly I see the ocean. But it isn't the Chesapeake Bay or San Francisco. It isn't the Pacific as it was the day after Granddad's funeral, or the island of Assateague, or the Mississippi, or even that long-ago West Dennis beach.

All beaches are Cocoa Beach.

It was the beach a block away from the Florida condo that my folks rented last summer. Shining white sand in brutally hot Florida sun, or shimmering silver in the full moonlight, it doesn't matter. It was the beach where I showed Jimmy the ocean for the first time in his life, and the delight in his eyes made me see it fresh as well. It was the beach where we watched the fireworks explode, and the kids built sandcastles. The beach where we drank overpriced margaritas in the moonlight and listened to the house band.

We sat on the sand the night after we got engaged, talking about all the sappy goopy stuff you talk about on nights like that, things that you never put in blog entries or tell other living souls, because the sunlight hurts them. It drags them out into the blaring light of What Other People Think, and it diminishes them. It is the things whispered in the moonlight that mean the most, and are reduced the most by examination in the light of day.

On the day we left, we visited the beach last. We were alone except for the birds, the three of us. Jimmy drew a valentine in the sand, and we watched the tide come in before we drove away.

All beaches have that magic to them. They force us to stand on the edge of what we know and contemplate something much larger than ourselves. But Cocoa Beach now has become all beaches to me, the edge of what I knew and a vast adventurous unknown before me. When I think of the sea, I think of that beach, of our names written in the sand, and his face when he saw the ocean.

All beaches are Cocoa Beach. And you know what? I'm just fine with that.


* This blog entry was written while I was traveling several weeks ago.