52.22... Ocean
Highest that I know of in Explore- #236 on 9.27.07
For as long as I can remember, I've felt viscerally tied to the ocean.
One of the rare clear memories of my first few years, when we lived in New Jersey, was of my father walking along a boardwalk carrying me on his shoulders. He would stand at the rail and we would gaze out over the water to the horizon for what seemed like forever. I think it's because of that that I've always vaguely associated my love of the ocean with him. He had grown up in Germantown, Philadelphia, and occasionally when I was older and after my younger siblings had arrived, we would vacation with the extended family- grandparents, aunties and honorary uncles, and a gazillion cousins- in Ocean City, New Jersey... escaping the heat in the same place his family had when he was young. Salt water taffy and carny rides and boardwalk pizza vendors who expertly spun dough on their fingers ... it was a paradise for impressionable kids like me.
When I was five we moved to a small house in Stratford, Connecticut that was just half a mile from the ocean, and the town's very modest Short Beach. I was there again a few years ago when my siblings and I tried to look casual walking out to the water all dressed up in our funeral clothes to (illegally) scatter my father's ashes near the shore where he'd held our hands as children, and walked his dog daily in his later years. There was a nice architect-designed recreation center and bath house there that day, and a slew of modern condos (probably time shares) lining the beach. But in my childhood, the only things there were a splintery and weathered shack with half doors where you could stand in line to change into your bathing suit, a cooler where a high school kid sold ice cream sandwiches and cold soda, looking bored unless a pretty teen girl walked by, and five ramshackle cottages on the edge of the beach which town residents could rent for a week or two a year.
Every year that we didn't go to Ocean City, my grandparents- who lived in the other half of our duplex- would rent one of the innermost cottages for two weeks. As an adult I kind of shake my head at the notion of "going on vacation" less than a mile from your home, but as a child those trips were magical and something you looked forward to all year. You could swim before breakfast. Noone yelled at you for tracking sand into the house. The adults were always in a good mood. Best of all were the Friday nights. My grandfather would go to a great fish market and bring home buckets of fried fish, french fries, cole slaw, and ice cream. After the feast, after the dishes were taken care of, and just about when the sun was hitting the horizon, the yellow screened-porch lights would be turned on and the games would come out. Yahtzee & Dominoes & Go Fish & Scrabble. The kids would be on one team and the adults on the other, and somehow the kids always seemed to win every game. Later, when the younger kids were falling asleep, as the precocious oldest cousin I was allowed to sit at the table with the adults while they played 500 Rummy and Canasta. They'd make me some equivalent to the popular Shirley Temple to make me feel like I was having a "high ball" like them, and by the time I was in 4th grade, they were letting me sit in on the games. It felt like a momentous rite of passage.
That beach is also where I learned to swim; our local playground would bus us there two afternoons a week for subsidized lessons. Of course, learning to swim in the ocean has its disadvantages as the tides have a will of their own that doesn't conform well to classes at a particular time, so every other week we'd have to walk half a mile past the lighthouse to find water deep enough to dive into. Most of my companions would "belly-ache" about the walking, but I adored the lighthouse, so secretly- and illogically- hoped for more low tides.
Between the weeks at the cottage, and the fact that I was usually the only one on the swim lesson bus who couldn't wait to get there, I developed an obnoxiously proprietary attitude about the beach. An attitude that only got worse when I was about 10 and discovered it was a great and quiet place to study by myself in the fall and spring. Or I should say it was a great place to TRY to study. I'd read a few pages, or do a few math problems, and then my arms would drift to my knees and I would commence to staring at the horizon. Or counting the waves. Or giving names to my favorite seagulls. Or picking up starfish to look at the under side. Or collecting shells. Or following a crab. Or digging for clams. Or, or, or, or.............. the distractions were endless. After the first year, I began to really resent it when the warm weather came and other folks seemed to think they belonged there too. Harumphhhhhhhhhhhh!
Just before junior high school we moved an hour north, and inland. Something felt quite wrong to me the first few months, and it took me about that long to realize it was the ocean I was missing. I couldn't smell it any more. There were no shore birds flying overhead. Storms felt different. I couldn't hear the comforting rhythm of the tide kissing the shore. I was bereft... as if I'd lost a best friend. It was years before I'd live near the shore again. In high school and college I put away my "attitude" about "other people" on MY beach occasionally so I could enjoy outings with my friends (especially in college when beach days inevitably ended up dancing at beach-side bars where the guys were hip and the rum drinks accompanied some hot blues guitarist), but to this day I prefer an empty beach in October to a lively one in July. And I much prefer the lonely rocky beaches of Maine to the sun-bunny playgrounds of San Diego or Miami.
In1973, I worked for the summer in the English coastal resort town of Cromer, not so far from Norwich. I was a lowly waitress and budding bartender, so with an insincere apology, the proprietors showed me to my room in the damp, dank basement of the hotel complex I was working at. The hotel sat on a cliff right above the ocean, and I forgave every iota of mildew in that room when I discovered that the tide broke loudly on the wall beneath my window. It was thunderous and my roommates complained about it all summer, but I found it to be the most comforting sound I'd ever heard. I don't think I've ever slept as deeply as I did that summer.
Most memorable about that summer were the late nights when I, and the co-workers I liked, would close down the bar and take our own drinks (saved up all evening when patrons insisted on buying us one) out to the beach to dance and party. Almost every one of those impromptu gatherings would end up with all of us lying on the beach staring up at the moon, and philosophizing about politics (we were from many countries) and existentialism. I'm pretty sure it was one of those late nights when I came to fully understand the powerful connection between the moon and the tides... an important and compelling concept for me. It's also when I developed the notion that I could never live very far from the ocean. There's a sense of infinity for me that comes from watching the horizon over the tide, and a sense of connection to everyone and everywhere, that is unmatched anywhere else for me except- perhaps- in the/my buddhist notion of karma.
I've lived in the Boston area now for about 27 years, and though I live only a couple of miles from the shore, I don't actually see it near as often as I'd like. Somehow, though, knowing it's nearby is enough for me. Often you'll see a gull swoop overhead... and when a storm's brewing you can smell salt in the air. It's easy enough to get there by subway, and sometimes- when I've been away too long- I make the trip.
My sweetheart Matt- who feels about the desert where he grew up much the same as I feel about the ocean- says that the first few years he lived in Boston he only felt at home when he was crossing the Charles River on the subway, because it was the only time he ever felt like he had breathing space and could see the horizon. I understood that intellectually the first time he said it, but didn't understand it emotionally until he took me there and I got to experience how much that endless horizon feels like gazing out to sea.
Matt wants to move back to the desert sometime, and I used to despair that one day I would have to make a choice between the ocean and him. But then the first time we travelled to southern California together, he pulled out of his pocket a stone he'd collected from a beach in Maine on one of our trips there, that he'd brought along specifically to skip it off the Santa Monica Pier... connecting in a small way the east coast ocean with the west coast one. And I knew in that minute that he understood. And that I could go anywhere with him, without fear of losing my connection to the ocean. It's part of me now... like breathing.
52.22... Ocean
Highest that I know of in Explore- #236 on 9.27.07
For as long as I can remember, I've felt viscerally tied to the ocean.
One of the rare clear memories of my first few years, when we lived in New Jersey, was of my father walking along a boardwalk carrying me on his shoulders. He would stand at the rail and we would gaze out over the water to the horizon for what seemed like forever. I think it's because of that that I've always vaguely associated my love of the ocean with him. He had grown up in Germantown, Philadelphia, and occasionally when I was older and after my younger siblings had arrived, we would vacation with the extended family- grandparents, aunties and honorary uncles, and a gazillion cousins- in Ocean City, New Jersey... escaping the heat in the same place his family had when he was young. Salt water taffy and carny rides and boardwalk pizza vendors who expertly spun dough on their fingers ... it was a paradise for impressionable kids like me.
When I was five we moved to a small house in Stratford, Connecticut that was just half a mile from the ocean, and the town's very modest Short Beach. I was there again a few years ago when my siblings and I tried to look casual walking out to the water all dressed up in our funeral clothes to (illegally) scatter my father's ashes near the shore where he'd held our hands as children, and walked his dog daily in his later years. There was a nice architect-designed recreation center and bath house there that day, and a slew of modern condos (probably time shares) lining the beach. But in my childhood, the only things there were a splintery and weathered shack with half doors where you could stand in line to change into your bathing suit, a cooler where a high school kid sold ice cream sandwiches and cold soda, looking bored unless a pretty teen girl walked by, and five ramshackle cottages on the edge of the beach which town residents could rent for a week or two a year.
Every year that we didn't go to Ocean City, my grandparents- who lived in the other half of our duplex- would rent one of the innermost cottages for two weeks. As an adult I kind of shake my head at the notion of "going on vacation" less than a mile from your home, but as a child those trips were magical and something you looked forward to all year. You could swim before breakfast. Noone yelled at you for tracking sand into the house. The adults were always in a good mood. Best of all were the Friday nights. My grandfather would go to a great fish market and bring home buckets of fried fish, french fries, cole slaw, and ice cream. After the feast, after the dishes were taken care of, and just about when the sun was hitting the horizon, the yellow screened-porch lights would be turned on and the games would come out. Yahtzee & Dominoes & Go Fish & Scrabble. The kids would be on one team and the adults on the other, and somehow the kids always seemed to win every game. Later, when the younger kids were falling asleep, as the precocious oldest cousin I was allowed to sit at the table with the adults while they played 500 Rummy and Canasta. They'd make me some equivalent to the popular Shirley Temple to make me feel like I was having a "high ball" like them, and by the time I was in 4th grade, they were letting me sit in on the games. It felt like a momentous rite of passage.
That beach is also where I learned to swim; our local playground would bus us there two afternoons a week for subsidized lessons. Of course, learning to swim in the ocean has its disadvantages as the tides have a will of their own that doesn't conform well to classes at a particular time, so every other week we'd have to walk half a mile past the lighthouse to find water deep enough to dive into. Most of my companions would "belly-ache" about the walking, but I adored the lighthouse, so secretly- and illogically- hoped for more low tides.
Between the weeks at the cottage, and the fact that I was usually the only one on the swim lesson bus who couldn't wait to get there, I developed an obnoxiously proprietary attitude about the beach. An attitude that only got worse when I was about 10 and discovered it was a great and quiet place to study by myself in the fall and spring. Or I should say it was a great place to TRY to study. I'd read a few pages, or do a few math problems, and then my arms would drift to my knees and I would commence to staring at the horizon. Or counting the waves. Or giving names to my favorite seagulls. Or picking up starfish to look at the under side. Or collecting shells. Or following a crab. Or digging for clams. Or, or, or, or.............. the distractions were endless. After the first year, I began to really resent it when the warm weather came and other folks seemed to think they belonged there too. Harumphhhhhhhhhhhh!
Just before junior high school we moved an hour north, and inland. Something felt quite wrong to me the first few months, and it took me about that long to realize it was the ocean I was missing. I couldn't smell it any more. There were no shore birds flying overhead. Storms felt different. I couldn't hear the comforting rhythm of the tide kissing the shore. I was bereft... as if I'd lost a best friend. It was years before I'd live near the shore again. In high school and college I put away my "attitude" about "other people" on MY beach occasionally so I could enjoy outings with my friends (especially in college when beach days inevitably ended up dancing at beach-side bars where the guys were hip and the rum drinks accompanied some hot blues guitarist), but to this day I prefer an empty beach in October to a lively one in July. And I much prefer the lonely rocky beaches of Maine to the sun-bunny playgrounds of San Diego or Miami.
In1973, I worked for the summer in the English coastal resort town of Cromer, not so far from Norwich. I was a lowly waitress and budding bartender, so with an insincere apology, the proprietors showed me to my room in the damp, dank basement of the hotel complex I was working at. The hotel sat on a cliff right above the ocean, and I forgave every iota of mildew in that room when I discovered that the tide broke loudly on the wall beneath my window. It was thunderous and my roommates complained about it all summer, but I found it to be the most comforting sound I'd ever heard. I don't think I've ever slept as deeply as I did that summer.
Most memorable about that summer were the late nights when I, and the co-workers I liked, would close down the bar and take our own drinks (saved up all evening when patrons insisted on buying us one) out to the beach to dance and party. Almost every one of those impromptu gatherings would end up with all of us lying on the beach staring up at the moon, and philosophizing about politics (we were from many countries) and existentialism. I'm pretty sure it was one of those late nights when I came to fully understand the powerful connection between the moon and the tides... an important and compelling concept for me. It's also when I developed the notion that I could never live very far from the ocean. There's a sense of infinity for me that comes from watching the horizon over the tide, and a sense of connection to everyone and everywhere, that is unmatched anywhere else for me except- perhaps- in the/my buddhist notion of karma.
I've lived in the Boston area now for about 27 years, and though I live only a couple of miles from the shore, I don't actually see it near as often as I'd like. Somehow, though, knowing it's nearby is enough for me. Often you'll see a gull swoop overhead... and when a storm's brewing you can smell salt in the air. It's easy enough to get there by subway, and sometimes- when I've been away too long- I make the trip.
My sweetheart Matt- who feels about the desert where he grew up much the same as I feel about the ocean- says that the first few years he lived in Boston he only felt at home when he was crossing the Charles River on the subway, because it was the only time he ever felt like he had breathing space and could see the horizon. I understood that intellectually the first time he said it, but didn't understand it emotionally until he took me there and I got to experience how much that endless horizon feels like gazing out to sea.
Matt wants to move back to the desert sometime, and I used to despair that one day I would have to make a choice between the ocean and him. But then the first time we travelled to southern California together, he pulled out of his pocket a stone he'd collected from a beach in Maine on one of our trips there, that he'd brought along specifically to skip it off the Santa Monica Pier... connecting in a small way the east coast ocean with the west coast one. And I knew in that minute that he understood. And that I could go anywhere with him, without fear of losing my connection to the ocean. It's part of me now... like breathing.