Originally published July 24, 2017
When Isabel was 7 years old, my mom's family reunion was in Branson, Mo. She was small enough to compact into the back seat of our convertible VW Bug, snug between a cooler and a pillow, with an over-the-seat fold-down desk for activities and a DVD player and headphones for entertainment. It took us a day and a half to get there. Branson was not our choice for a summer vacation and, frankly, many family members gave Aunt Flossie a hard time for choosing it. We come from all points of the country - California, Washington, Minnesota, Arizona, and South Carolina - so it made logical sense, to meet in the middle of the country. But Branson? It's like Atlantic City and Vegas mashed together but with mid-western sensibilities. And no gambling. There were lots of families there, walking from attraction to attraction - the Oriental acrobatics (that was their name, I'm not being racist), the butterfly garden, the Ripley's Believe-it-or-not attraction, the house of wax, the country music show, the Titanic museum (which was in the shape of the actual Titanic).
Yes, we paid money to go to the wax museum.
It seemed odd to me, though I couldn't exactly put my finger on what was so odd about it. Until it occurred to me: These people - who live in the middle of the country - cannot drive to the beach in an afternoon. It's a 16-hour drive to Myrtle Beach from Branson. Even Gulf Shores, Ala., which technically is not the ocean, is a 12-hour drive. It was a shocking and stunning revelation. I felt claustrophobic. I was confused. I was light-headed. I had to ask a local what they did about that. Oh, we go to the lake, someone told me.
We did experience one of their lakes. We took a duck boat ride - the one where the bus turns into a boat. They let Isabel drive. I guess that's ok on a lake. No waves.
The lake? The lake? That is not the beach. That is not salty, sandy, windy, wavey, pluff-muddy beach. Far from it. Literally. Even though we're not from South Carolina, my mom and dad raised me as a South Carolinian. Which means we went to the beach just about every summer when we were little. We went to Hilton Head Island as kids, but moved up the coast a bit to Litchfield Beach just after high school, where we have been going religiously ever since.
That's my mom in the foreground, and me when I was about Isabel's age.
I say religiously in a serious vein, as we have a repeatable liturgy that we practice every year. We've been practicing this particular one since Isabel was 4, just after I divorced. My mom decided we were all going to the beach, and that was that. Grandma and Papa, my brother Karl, wife Renee, his three kids, me and Isabel. In the south, families vacation together. The beach vacation and bi-weekly family dinners have been the bedrock of Isabel and her cousins' childhoods.
Right, a beach picture from about 7 years ago.
Our pre-beach liturgy goes like this: Start talking about the beach in January. Reserve house in February. Start pre-tan by sitting outside on warm days in March. Check beach chair, tent and float inventory in April; reorder if necessary. Solidify meal plan in May. Begin packing in June. Drive to beach third week of July, when it's guaranteed to be hotter than hell. Once we arrive, beach liturgy begins: Pizza on Saturday night. Church on Sunday: the Baptists go to Pawley's Island Community Church; those of us with actual liturgical needs go to Holy Cross Faith Memorial. Go to beach. Go to pool. Ride bikes. Mom's meatloaf for dinner. Monday: gG to beach. Go to pool. Go to Pawley's Island seafood store for fresh fish, and vegetable stand for lowcountry corn and tomatoes. Fry fish, gnaw corn, slice tomatoes. Tuesday: Go to beach. Go to pool. Ride bikes. Renee and Karl cook dinner. Wednesday: Go to beach. Go to pool. Afternoon: Go to Hammock Shops, to the Christmas Mouse, purchase annual Christmas Tree ornaments with Grandma. Try on clothes in Affordables. Maybe something fits this year, maybe not. Get something luxurious in the Kitchen Shop. Renee and Karl go out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Thursday: Go to beach. Go to pool Ride bikes. Family dinner out, Captain John's, or Rustic Table. Depends on the year. Used to be Community House until they closed. Frank's, too expensive. Friday: Go to beach. Go to pool. You get the idea. We do very little other than eat and go to the beach and buy Christmas ornaments. There's just no time. What with all the beach sitting we have to do. When Michael joined us 7 years ago, we took beach sitting up a notch. We bring a 10x10 tent and bury it in the sand, the soft, white, hot sand, away from the hard pan of recently washed beach. (We discovered why you don't put a tent on the hard pan four years ago when the wind lifted our shallow-ly set tent and landed it on a lady's head next to us. Always, always put it deep in the soft sand, and cement it in with a sand-castle bucket of water.) We bring drinks and snacks for days, books for hours, towels for sand and water, low slung chairs and bottles of sunscreen. Each day ends with a swim in the pool, to wash off the initial layer of sand, salt and sunscreen. That makes showers optional. We're at the beach. Hygiene is optional.
Right, our tent this year. That's Michael, Madeleine and Renee under the tent. I'm trying to even out my tan. Yes, that's what color I tan.
Last year Michael and I didn't get to go to the beach, because he was working on a school assignment all summer, and work needed my onsite attention. At the time, it seemed an easy thing to give up, and necessary, and important, but later in the year, my body and soul began to ache for it. It was like I was missing the nutrients that one week of saltwater and sand gave me every year. I didn't realize how important it was to me. As we began to ramp up for the beach this year and it came time to answer that annual question What are you doing this summer? I answered like I always do: "We're going to the beach." "What beach?" "Litchfield." Which is where people from Upstate South Carolina go to the beach. In Middle Tennessee, however, the response was: "Where's that?" "Just South of Myrtle Beach," I said, which, frankly, didn't clarify it for Tennesseans. "South Carolina." I had to say. Tennesseans, you see, don't go to South Carolina beaches. They go to the gulf coast, which really isn't the ocean. It's like a big inlet. Yes, I'm going to be particular about that, because while South Carolina beaches aren't exactly known for their surfing, there's barely a movement at the gulf coast beaches I've been too. They're like a lake. At least in South Carolina, we can boogie board if the weather's choppy. You can't get to the beach in an afternoon from Tennessee, either, but the 9-hour trip was imperative after last year's miss. This year we rented a house with an elevator, because my dad can't do stairs anymore. If you're not familiar with beach houses, they're all on stilts and there is no first floor, especially on the SC coast, after Hurricane Hugo moved about half of the real estate market back a block in 1989. Since there aren't that many houses with elevators, that meant this year's pre-beach liturgy began in November 2016, when I reserved our beach house for July 2017. So I had 8 months to prepare for our week at the beach. Like I was giving birth to a week at the beach. The beach greets you at Georgetown, when you cross the Great Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers as they dump out into Winyah Bay on their way to the Atlantic. It's not the water that greets you first, though; it's the sulfuric smell of paper, produced by International Paper for more than 90 years. Those unfamiliar with it may find it offensive, but South Carolinians mark it as a smell of the beach, or, as my friend Erin Ryan said, "the smell of bread and milk." Many SC families have been raised by it. As soon as we hit the bridge separating us from the mainland, I roll down my window and let the warm pungent air wash over me and down into my lungs. I want it to permeate every pore. It confirms that I am at the beach, on the coast, where saltwater and sand await to clear my blemishes and smooth out my rough spots. Our house was a block off the beach, but on the inlet, with a 200-yard dock that bee-lined over a cooking marsh to a floating dock designed to wander with the ebb and flow of the tide. At low tide we could hop off the dock and walk into the middle of the inlet, stepping over tiny hermit crabs, sinking slightly into the soft pluff mud. The marsh would pop and burp, as plant and sea life adjusted to exposure. It smells at low tide, of decaying flora and fauna, the necessary circle of life in a place that is wet and dry twice each day. It's a smell you don't get used to, but that also confirms deeply that we're in a different place, a place unlike any other, where crabs skeedaddle sideways and fish even jump out of the water to enjoy the hot sun. At high tide we watched the ripples of schools of fish as they patrolled the shallow creek, diving deeper so hopeful fishermen don't stand a chance.
Sunset off the back deck. It was a long dock.
The ocean is a big place. I have practiced private ocean liturgies over the years as well, being in different emotional places in my life when we go to the beach. I have thrown many a worry, obsession, guilt, mistake and sin into the ocean; some I've had to throw twice. I've also mantra-ed prayers of thanksgiving at the ocean, and have used it as a complaint department. I have come into communion with it as I caught a wave on the boogie board, as well as have been disciplined by an unseen wave, throwing me underwater and pushing salt up my nose and down my throat. It's God's central repository for all that we need to drop off, and a basin in which we can reaffirm our own personal baptism. This year I mostly stared at the ocean, sitting under our new purple tent (ordered in April). I couldn't even read; I was transfixed by the waves, that come - not ironically - in waves, sets of three, that you can feel when you stand in them. So I stood in them, too, trading time between trying to communicate cosmically with them and letting them simply wash over me. The waves are easy, knocking you about gently, while in the water you feel the pull of the undertow - a significant amount of water going ocean-ward, under the water coming in, building up to more significant waves, the kind you want ride in on a boogie board or dive directly in. You can either face them, or get faced by them. Either way, to ride on top means you have to jump on it at exactly the right second, just as diving in requires precise timing so that you dive at the apex of depth so as to not scrape you chin on the ocean floor, but miss the folding crash that can crumple you and spin you like unsuspecting laundry.
Right, Michael catching a wave on the boogie board. He rode it all the way in.
The ocean is messy. You can't drink the water, though you are submerged in it. Sand sticks and scratches, but a long walk in it can wear away calluses or rub a new blister. The wind whips hair, turns pages prematurely, and reorients sand in an unwelcoming way. The sun warms and burns. Ice melts.
God does a lot with water. He created it. He shaped it so the children of Israel could escape bondage.
As the priest blesses water:
We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Now sanctify this water, we pray you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that those who here are cleansed from sin and born again may continue for ever in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, be all honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
Somewhere between the smell of the pluff mud, the frying of fresh fish, and the crash of the waves, the beach cleanses me and heals me. I can't imagine living in a state where you can't get to it in an afternoon.
Seriously. The museum was shaped like the Titanic.
But it most definitely was not crossing the Atlantic in Branson, Mo.
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