beach

At one time or another, we all want to reach the beach.

Martha and the Muffins, knowing it’s out of fashion and a trifle uncool, still want to watch the sun go down on Echo Beach.

Soldiers on D-Day, in their landing craft, wanted to land on Omaha Beach and survive crossing the beach and live to fight on.

Vacationers in Orlando take the Beach Line expressway to Cocoa Beach to get to the Shack on the Beach and frolic in the waves and enjoy margaritas and the sun.

The last lingering survivors of nuclear war in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach wanted to reach a beach of hope, and, finding it empty, found that, quoting Eliot, “In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.” And then they faced eternity.

Once or twice a week all summer long, Aina and I rush to the ferry for the fifteen-minute trip to Toronto Island to set up on the beach and relax and imagine ourselves far away. 

And once or twice a week all summer long, we go swim at the Sunnyside pool and then sit at the boardwalk café watching the beach volleyball players on Sunnyside Beach, the beach that inspired the song “Echo Beach.”

If we travel to another country where there is a beach, we try to stop by it, to see the sand and waves.

When we relax on the beach, we sit on the sand and stare out at the waves. Behind us is solidity, life, assurance. Ahead of us is the liquid stuff of life, a home for countlessly many other living things, a playground for us within limit and reason, and outside of limit and reason a place of unlimited and unreasonable danger. (For fish, the perspective is reversed.)

On the beach, we watch the waves come in. We see the expanse of the water beyond, stretching to the horizon. What we are not looking at is the firm and consistent supports of our life and identity; what we are looking at is change and danger. But, as Jenny Holzer wrote, “It is fun to walk carelessly in a death zone.” When we are in a dire condition, the beach is the place of safety or of threat, the place where we are dry or drowned; but when life is calm, it is relaxation, worries behind us, limitless potential before us. 

And under our feet is sand: the ground stones and bones and shells of the ages, at last settled in a shifting mass that can take erasable traces, words and images to be washed away, but when you leave you always take some sand with you.

Your interface with daily life is like a beach. The beach is your eyes, your mouth, your skin. The waves of life lap at you. Sometimes the tide is low and you have room; sometimes the tide is high and you are restricted or already on the way to drowning. 

And when the sand has not seen water in some time, it is soft but yielding and hard to walk on. And when the sand was recently under the waves, it is hard but easier to walk on.

When life is dire, you just want to reach the beach and cross the beach and survive. And when life is good, you want to set out your blanket and have your food and drink in the sun and hope you don’t eat any sand. You are there with close friends and closer strangers, and for a few hours you are officially relaxing.

Where does this word beach come from? We aren’t entirely sure, just as we aren’t sure where any given grain of sand might have started. But as likely as not, it’s from a word for ‘bank’ that came from a word for ‘brook’ or ‘stream’ – Old English bece, related to Dutch, German, and Swedish words for ‘brook’ or ‘stream’, including Old German beck, which I carry with me every moment of my life as the second syllable of my surname. My own hidden stream, my own secret beach.

And throughout my life I seek to reach the beach. Not always the place of relaxation, the place where I can look across the waves and relax on the sand, but always the moment in time and space where I have all solid things behind me, and all fluid things before me, and I am at the point of letting go, accepting the changing nature of all things and also accepting that I will always take a bit of every moment with me. Letting the waves roll, letting the sand shift. As The Fixx sang on their album Reach the Beach, “Stretched by fewer thoughts that leave me … Holding onto words that teach me … Saved by zero.”

And yes, Aina and I reached the beach today, and we relaxed on the sand, gazing at the waves and the stretching horizon. And now we are home again.