Every summer for nearly a decade we have been fortunate enough to have friends who have invited us to join them at their beach place. They are very kind, inviting us for a weekend of conversation, good food and relaxation. The location has changed over time, and the weather dictates our exact schedule. But the basic outline of our getaway includes all the normal vacation to-do's: bike rides, barbecues and as much ice cream as we can stomach.
Of course, the main event, and one of the highlights of having a beach vacation at a beach house is you get to go to the beach. Every group that has a similar experience, be it family or friends, has their own set of rituals and rhythms involving what they bring and what they do, but it likely involves a subset of certain activities. Chairs, umbrellas and blankets are schlepped. Locations are scouted. Base camps are set up, and then the festivities commence. Those include people watching, dozing, walking to the water's edge to cool off, and jumping in the waves. Cold drinks and salty snacks are consumed, supplemented by trips to the snack bar for hot food and cold ices. If kids are involved there is likely a bucket and shovel component, be it to build a castle, dig a hole or bury a sibling. And perhaps highest on the list is sitting, staring at the ocean, doing nothing, and not feeling guilty about it. Rinse (quite literally) and repeat.
Our outing this year was no different. But as I looked around I was struck by the similarity to the same type of outing we had done more than a dozen years ago with other friends, the same as when we had visited relatives at the shore 15 and 20 years ago, and before that when we had rented assorted houses and taken our kids away for a week before school started. Come to think of it, it was the same when we were kids, and our parents did the same with us. Indeed, I suspect that with some very minor modifications, it was no different for them and their parents, and on and on back fifty and even a hundred years.
That's something you can't say about almost anything else. There is no space, no activity, no part of our lives that has remained essentially unchanged for a decade, let alone the last century. While the pandemic certainly had massive impacts, well before that things had changed and shifted, some faster than others, but unmistakably different. Work? Decentralized and remote to be sure, but driven by technology the workplace of today is unrecognizable from fifty years ago. School? Classrooms are still there, but teaching methods and modalities have evolved way past composition books and weekly readers. Transportation, entertainment, shopping: the list is endless and the changes mind boggling.
But the beach remains the same. There are of course cosmetic changes. Swimming "costumes," especially for women, have changed. Umbrella technology has advanced, branching beyond simple sunshades to entire cabanas that fit in a carry bag. Games have evolved, from simple throwing a ball to sand darts and paddle games and other bouncy things. But if you were to drop a turn-of-the-century person into the middle of Jones or Seaside or Rehoboth today, odds are the only thing that would make them feel out of sorts would be the bikinis.
As if to reinforce the static nature of the environment, where we were I noted a lifeguard standing up on his chair and signaling the next station. No walkie talkies or cell phones here, he was using flags to spell out something in semaphore like it was a naval exercise in 1922. I went over and asked if that's what he was indeed doing. "Yeah," he replied like I was an idiot, "beach semaphore." It's also worth noting he looked just as bored as lifeguards have for eternity, something else that hasn't changed.
Sometimes you need a simple place, one that you don't have to constantly adapt to. The shore in all its iterations provides that refuge. No new app, no new software, no battery that has to be charged. As simple as one of the characters in this summer's hit movie, "Barbie." As Ken says, "Yeah, because actually my job, it's just Beach."
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Marc Wollin of Bedford hates using anything above SPF 15. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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