The Beach

I was born within the scent of the sea. It must have been one of my first sensory experiences: after the pain of the forceps and the blinding light, the smell of salt. My mother, a country girl from backwoods Arkansas braving the wilds of Long Beach with an infant in her arms. Home alone in their one room apartment as Smitty worked or looked for work.  How old was I when she bundled me in a blanket and took the Red Car down to the beach? A few days? A week?

I know so little of that time in their lives. 

By the time I can remember, we had already moved inland. Some of my earliest memories are of riding in the back seat of a car over rolling hills and catching the first whiff of the ocean.  I would get downright giddy, bouncing with anticipation, surely driving my parents mad. Then we would crest a rise and there it was stretched out before me, vast and shining with brilliant light. 

Our last summer in Southern California I was 12 years old, almost full grown, strong. I still rode my bike to the public pool, but I was also spending more and more time laid out on my bed obsessively reading every book I could lay hands on. I was addicted to the printed word, to the point of losing friendships. But, I was still ready and willing to go to the beach anytime my parents offered. It was a long drive, over an hour, but we went often. Sometimes the whole family would go, but if dad was working, which was most of the time, we went without him. 

My mother could not swim. She never learned; neither did her sisters. She brought my older cousins along whenever she could talk them into coming, but sometimes it was just the four of us, my brothers, my mother and me, drawn by the great salt sea.  I learned to look for a change in the sky before smelling the salt, a silvery light low on the western horizon. I would throw open the doors as soon as the car stopped and tear out for the water, Mom holding my baby brother by the hand hollering for me to hold on. After awhile, we got it down to a system: us kids carried the gear and scouted ahead, spread the blanket and waited hopping with anticipation until she released us to the sea.  She must have brought a book or a magazine along with our bag of sandwiches and bottles of pop, but whatever she did to pass the time, she did it on land. Sometimes she would walk down to the water's edge, wade in up to her ankles and splash water on her arms. Mostly she sat on the beach and watched us venture farther and farther out with each passing year.  

Those last few summers at the beach, I was old enough and strong enough to swim out beyond the breakers, lay on my back and drift up and down on the swells. I would wade out until I had to leap my highest to keep my head above the breakers, catch a wave, ride it to shore and then do it over again for hours. When I got tired, I played at the water's edge, tumbling in the surf, sitting in the wet sand as the retreating waves sucked me down. Sometimes I walked miles down the beach to a breakwater, hiked out to the end as the open ocean broke around me, and walked back again.  

Shit happens at the beach. I’ve been slammed to the ocean floor and tumbled uncontrollably more than once. Ah, to emerge out of terror and chaos into sweet oxygen, eyes running, saltwater streaming from my nose, knowing I've cheated death; that's a feeling I'll never forget.  I was even stung pretty badly by a jellyfish once.  Still, she took us to the ocean and let us run wild.

She was a brave woman, my mother. No doubt about it.