There are people who run on the beach, but I prefer to walk. We visit the coast too rarely to rush it, and each point of contact my body makes with sand feels sacred. Removing shoes, I slow my pace to the heartbeat-steady pulse of two bare feet into the womb of wave foam.
There are places where I will myself to praise; but walking in the waves, worship happens to me. I receive it like the salt wind filling my lungs, lifting my hair, beating my shirt. It makes me five again and daughter small. Blown sand stings and sticks because I am made of earth baked in sun. It seems to remember me.
The ocean makes for a strange patron saint, because it does not pretend to be holy. It is definitively unfair, unsafe, and dark. Minister of tsunamis, haven of hermaphrodites and two-headed mutant things. Animals that eat their own young. Passive deep-sea worms, mooching like couch potatoes. Brutal water wars fought with fish teeth. There are children who drown here and get bit by wild, unseen things. And I am terrified. Because I touch water that touches water where ugly nightmare life lingers in places beyond light, like the dragons I push down into my soul and refuse to face.
This unbridled world is monitored by teenagers sitting on lifeguard chairs. Their little, muscular, roasting bodies stare through zinc oxide into forces moved by the moon. They watch fat guys on floaties trying to get wi-fi, dangling white soft legs above the rugged deep. They watch, waiting for their call to micro salvation; which seems to be the most guardians of flesh ever accomplish, if that much.
Yet deep calls to deep. Waves touch my shins, and I feel the energy of bodies standing in this water through time. I am bathed in their having hurt and in their having been hurt, for we all come to the ocean needing to reinvent ourselves, or escape ourselves, or to be baptized into something new. I am washed in the waters of much I cannot understand. And in the camaraderie of our corporate minutiae, surges smack our backs, knock us down, give us tactile proof that we are neither alone, nor fleshly whole, nor holy flesh.
Some people prefer abandoned beaches; but I need to be among the people, weaving between them, smelling their coconut sunscreen, hearing bits of their language. Passing into and out of their space, we exchange the crescendo and decrescendo of ten-second intimacy. And we notice things about one another we wish we didn't, because they hardly seem polite.
Like jello bottoms swinging dimpled out of tired bikinis.
And rotisserie-brown beach folk with caramelized flesh. They look crunchy. I feel a weird urge to drizzle them with BBQ sauce instead of sunscreen.
There are sturdy peasant bodies with short, strong hands I visualize squeezing Jersey cow udders. They would play milkmaids on the BBC.
A willowy romantic carries her hard-bound book into the waves. Dream in her eyes. Wearing a tunic. Long dark hair twisted into a knot.
A woman tall and angular, spray-tanned, too skinny and dyed blonde. Arm cooly woven through a man's. He is an accessory. Implanted breasts are the only softness protruding from an expensive red bikini. Head held aloft, it floats on her neck. She thinks she is the winner. I think she is hard and ugly.
Old couples pass wearing linen in a way that seems like linen is all they ever wear. Even in November. I envy age and rest.
There is a beautiful, deep chocolate bosom larger than my legs. It makes me feel less female. I envy the exotic beauty of high, African cheekbones and satin skin that looks as if it wouldn’t wither in a hundred years.
Eighty-something white woman walks the coast in a two piece. Skin hangs like a paper fan folded off skinny bones. She has the spiked white hair of an athlete.
Someone's mom wears a grey cotton sports bra with an ipod tucked inside. Her stomach pours forth beneath it, then tucks itself into a bikini bottom at some indeterminate point. She dares the world to comment. I envy her abandon.
Mullet man sitting beneath a tent. Skynard blasting. Surrounded by made-in-China flags, one dug into sand for every branch of the military and the POW’s. He leans back in a folding aluminum lawn chair, owning something defiant by the way he holds beer in a cozy.
There are perfect twenty somethings. They are confident in the parenthesis of having used and having been used, thinking they know how that exchange works.
Peach-fresh thirteen-year-olds, watching the twenty-somethings. Is he looking? Giggle. Is he looking?
Couple in love. Intertwined. They are the only two people in the world.
Family speaking Spanish, casting lines. They are catching good things. Happy children help bring in the food. They are adored, and it's little wonder. Such huge, deep eyes.
Forty-something and fighting it. Running shorts. Tight legs stretched into fibers. Determined.
Two sisters. The lesser beauty multiplied with a tossed smile. The greater negated by self-absorption.
Old man. Plaid shirt tucked into pressed khakis. Calisthenics. Arms up. Two steps. Arms out. Two steps. Fingers curled. Wrists in a circle. Two steps. Smiling and nodding, left then right. Left then right.
Asian couple. She wears a huge straw hat and shirt buttoned up to the neck to shelter porcelain skin.
Drunk frat guy dancing with abandon. His friends are laughing. He’s got some good moves. I want to dance, too.
Slathered redheads. I can hear their delicacy sizzling like a plate full of fajitas.
Little girl crying. Pink blow-up floaties on her arms. She has sand on her hands, and it bothers her. She needs a nap.
Women on their stomachs. Bikini straps undone.
Guys strutting in threes. Looking at girls.
Bocce families. Frisbie throwers. Kite flyers.
Introverts with Kindles.
Pack mule dads looking tired, shoulders burned, carrying four chairs, two floaties, and a toddler.
And me. Walking too white. Thirty-nine and lanky with big, ugly feet and five extra pounds around my stomach. Eye bags. Crooked nose. Wearing clothes that were nearly still in style seven years ago.
All this flesh of ours. Comedic and syncopated and wonderful. Hinting at something forgotten. I feel joined to it. Married to it by the breathing grace of ocean.
This morning I watched a guy reel in a shark nearly three-feet long.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said when I asked. His eight-year-old son was watching. I thought he was joking, so I continued to ask questions. Fishermen talk about their catch, I’ve spent my life with them. His eight-year-old son put his head down.
“I don’t want to talk to you," his father insisted.
So, I walked away. I walked until someone explained that shark fishing was illegal, and then I understood that he was frightened from an hour of casting his son’s character into the waves.
Salt water tastes like tears. Sometimes I visualize the flood, when the deeps burst open and the heavens poured down, as a cosmic mourning. For much is not as it should be, and it hasn’t been for a good long while. The unjust, and the nearly wonderful, and the tender, and the grotesque abide here. And I have been all of them.
So creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth. The mutations. The infractions. And the weeping washes over us in a pulse, bathing our bodies corporate, bathing our strains, and bad judgments, and imperfections. Tide rising. Tide falling. Like a woman in labor taking breaths between sobs.
For we are more than we seem. And we are more than we try to be. Shadows of royalty, crowned in tourist visors.
