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Growing up in Sourthern California in the early 1970s was a bit like raising a dog: you put it out in the back yard on your way to work, and then let it in at the end of the day for supper.
For my friends and me, the ‘70s was a time of freedom that is no longer found on the sandy beaches of California. Our mothers went back to work because they were trying to recapture what they thought had been taken from them, and children, for the most part, were left on their own. The term "latchkey kid" hadn’t been coined yet, and being on your own wasn’t necessarily bad.
And so it went in the summertime, that one parent or another rounded us up, dropped us off with our sack lunches at the beach around nine o'clock in the morning, and another parent picked us up at the end of the workday.
My best friend and her three sisters lived across the street from me. It was thrilling to lose myself among sisters when all I had was older brothers. My parents limited sports and music to convenient before-and after-school activities, so our free summers spilled out in front of us like a wide-open sky. Dropped off in one place, we spent the day wandering between the bayside and the oceanside, crossing busy streets. We always ended our day in the same place, waiting with sandy, damp towels for a parent to pick us up.
We knew the lifeguards by name, and they knew us. I don’t remember now how many adults ventured out on the beaches of Newport then, but it didn’t seem like many. Tourism, though it existed, wasn’t what it is today. We usually picked Thirty-sixth Street Lifeguard Station #18, and it seemed as if the faces were all familiar. It’s as if we homesteaded our spot in the sand, and it remained ours for the rest of that summer. We could leave our beach towels and our bags filled with peanut butter sandwiches, warming bottles of water, ripe tomatoes, and pulp novels. I still think that nothing tastes quite as good as a large, slightly warm tomato, the seeds and juice running down the sides of your mouth as you bite into it. We ate them like apples and, when they were gone, we dashed into the water to rinse ourselves.
Megan was six years old, I was eight, Siobhan was ten, and Tara was eleven during that first summer we spent at the beach. Kathy, their oldest sister, rarely went with us. She and her friends were too cool to hang out with the likes of us. I remember thinking it was better that way. She always tried to boss us around, and since we mostly fought with her, having her along was a reminder of the things we were trying to leave behind. Even though we couldn’t verbalize it, going to the beach was our escape, and the older we got, the more of an escape it became—free of parents, free of chores, and free of the emotional frustrations we experienced at home. Sometimes, when we met people there, we lied about our ages and names. We made up stories about who we were and occasionally we even used bad accents as we pretended to be European. During that time, I always wanted to be someone other than who I was.
So many summer beach days over the years have made the time and experiences run together in my mind. For example, I can’t recall ever being stung by a jellyfish, but when I see a jellyfish sprawled out on the sand, I feel the prickle of heat and tingling on the bottom of my feet. I instinctively know that not even a wasp's sting hurts like the brush of a jellyfish.
However, I do still remember some events, and some even stand out in my memory. Like the time we sneaked away from Megan to go back to the oceanside because she didn’t like the waves. We left her in the sun on the bayside for two hours facedown, and, as she slept, we splashed in the waves. Later, when we returned to the bayside, we found her wandering the shoreline looking for us. Sunburned, she looked like a bright red lobster.
And I remember the times when one or more of my brothers occasionally accompanied us, usually leaving us to ourselves. Sometimes, though, they followed us into the ocean out past the waves and pretended to be sharks, pulling on our legs, holding us under until we could no longer hold the air in our lungs and we writhed to reach the surface again.
The beach is still the place where I feel calmest and most at peace. At the ocean, I am more alive than anywhere else. There, I can escape from the reality of my life, from the emotions that hold me back. I can feel free. Even the memory of a jellyfish, though painful, creates an ache and longing inside me to go back to that period in my life.
I don’t live in Southern California anymore, not even close. I live inland among rivers and lakes—and rivers and lakes are nothing like oceans. There is no salty breeze in the air, no crashing waves to lull me to sleep. And this is what I miss most, the unpredictability of the waves, the way they can pull me under then fling me about before they spit me back on the sand. I miss the sound of them as they crash, the way they carried my shouts out to sea and tossed them away, holding on to my secrets. I miss diving down to the bottom of the ocean and holding my breath until I felt my lungs might burst or collapse. Sometimes I tried to hold on longer, hoping someone might think I’d gone missing. Then I could wake up on the shores of a different ocean and start all over somewhere else.
BIO: SARAH BAIN is a writer and editor living in the Northwest. She has work forthcoming or previously published in Imagine Magazine, Long Story Short, The Loss Journal, The Philosophical Mother, moonshinestill, and more. She is currently working on a memoir.
Contact Sarah at: sarah@bainbooks.com. |
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