Anyone who reads this blog with any kind of regularity (your
reading habits, not your bathroom habits) knows about my friend with Cat TV
(bird feeders in her backyard), the friend who edges her garden with large
beach rocks. We usually scour the
boulder formations that jut out of the water in North Hampton, but today …
today I discover Beach Rock Nirvana.
(Insert transcendental musical tone here, purely for dramatic effect, of
course.)
I also meet some new friends along the way, which is an
added bonus when you have the social life I do.
(You people do understand that I can hear you snickering all the way
through the Internet, right?)
My good pal Sal invites me to crash a beach date with her
and her long-time friend Patty. I try
numerous times to talk Sal out of inviting me because I don't want to hone in
on anyone's plans. Sal is a very popular
person for many reasons but mostly because she's wicked smart and wicked funny,
but she keeps inviting me places which means either she likes my company or she
lost a bet. Whichever it is, I arrive at
her house by 8:30 a.m., ready to go make my usual bizarre first impression on
Sal's unsuspecting friend.
We arrive in Rockport, and as soon as I meet Patty, I am
silently (I hope) in my head (I double-hope) chanting the words from one of my
favorite old movies, Freaks: "We accept you, we accept you. One of us, one of us…" Yup.
Sal was right. We're going to all
get along just fine. We pile into the
van and head to the resident parking area for Pebble and Long Beaches.
As soon as we pull in to park, I am taken aback by the giant
mountains of beach rocks. The rocks,
most of which are the size of softballs, some larger and some smaller, form
what looks like the Great Wall of China along the lot and disappearing around a
corner. On the other side of this
formation is Pebble Beach. To the right
and over a small bridge is the sandy and inviting Long Beach. The area is beautiful, the beach nearly
deserted, and the tide is coming in. We
opt for Long Beach, but not before I take a picture of part of this giamundo
collection of perfectly shaped garden rocks.
I need to show this to Cat TV friend; she might not believe it without
the proof.
The tide is coming in, but the ocean is unusually calm
today, even for this wide-mouthed bay. The
three of us set up our chairs on the relatively deserted beach. About thirty minutes later, as if on cue, our
Flypaper For Freaks radar kicks in automatically. Three women, dragging chairs and
paraphernalia behind them, set up almost directly in front of us. Seriously.
This entire section of Long Beach is wide open, and they plant
themselves not ten feet from where we are sitting.
I admit this must be all my fault. Weird people with no sense of boundaries seem
to attach themselves to my orbit all the time like moons or parasites or really
painful hemorrhoids (as if there might be any other kind). Patty and Sal assure me that this happens to
them, too, like when they go to empty movie theaters and one person will come
and sit right next to or behind or in front of them. Ah, something else we have in common this
whole Flypaper For Freaks curse.
These women are not like us.
They do not contain their conversation to normal air space boundaries with
an occasional guffaw for effect. When
Hurricane Sandy obliterated parts of the Jersey coast, a lot of people who
usually vacation there made reservations along the New England coast,
instead. These women are clearly from
that crowd. They are loud, they are
boisterous, and they speak with enough nasal inflection to keep an ENT clinic
in business for decades. They rapidly
become annoying not just because they are perched too close, not just because
they are abrasive and coarse.
These women are annoying because they are yelling over each
other about a note. A stupid note. A motherfucking dumbass note. They are arguing over some note that someone
sent that somebody else received that was never answered and the fallout from
the note and the way the note was written and the note the note the note blah
blah blah. One woman, clearly the queen
of the Jersey mouths, has raised her voice to such decibels that the Atlantic
is rising in response to the shock waves she is creating in the
atmosphere. She is so loud that I cannot
hear Sal next to me nor Patty on the other side of her.
Finally the Jersey woman farthest away from Mouthzilla
manages to scream for the eighteenth or maybe it's the hundredth time,
"But she nevah GOHT the note!"
"Oh."
Mouthzilla takes a long breath.
The tide calms. The universe
shifts back to equilibrium.
"Oh." She breathes
again. "She nevah gooooooooht the
note. Ahhhhhhhhhooooooh."
Eventually the two minions with Mouthzilla pretend to be
sleeping, and silence is restored to the beach.
We can hear the light surf sounds again, and the sky is no longer
cracking open allowing the verbal vibrations to escape into outer space. If Carl Sagan is right, some aliens will be
intercepting our earthly transmission in a few light years, and all they'll
hear is, "She nevah gooooooooht the note…" Then their little alien ear buds will explode
and the universe will be saved from invasion.
We dip in the water a few times after Sal's initial
hesitation. She broke her little toe and
it has a cut on it. She knows the salt water
is going to sting, but we assure her if she can count to ten, she'll be
fine. We convince her that "it will
only hurt for fifteen seconds." We
decide to make that our new work mantra, and into the water she goes. (Okay, Patty and I have one hand each on her
back, our other hands are firmly gripped on Sal's forearms, and we are dragging
her into the water with us.) Sal is
either an incredibly good sport or she recovers quickly because she claims the
open cut and salt water do not make her toe sting. Success!
We float around a bit.
A lone boy of about eight is dunking himself in the water, and he
decides he is going to instruct me on how to hold my nose and just fall backward
into the ocean. "It's easy,"
he tells me, "you can do it! Try
it!" He chats with me for about three
minutes. I turn my back for a second, and when I turn back again, he is
gone.
Holy crap, the child
has drowned. I instantly panic and
start searching through the water, which is crystal clear today. Where
was he last? Where did he go? How did he go under so fast?
It takes me several long moments to realize the little shit
abandoned me when he realized I wasn't going to do any nose holding, and he is
far up the beach by the embankment building sand castles with a child his own
age. Damn, I've been dumped again.
It's okay. As soon as
I leave the water and get back to my chair, where Sal and Patty are already
waiting because I'm a nut and stay in the chilly water longer than what might
be considered normal, I encounter the Smoking Woman (probably married to the
Smoking Man from the X-Files). She is
directly downwind from me, so every time she blows out a puff of smoke, I
inhale it. My friends offer to move, but
I figure she'll have one smoke and then tan or swim or something that normal
people do at the beach. Three cigarettes
later, we move forward to the damp sand, leaving Smoking Woman behind us a few
yards.
After polluting her lungs chain-sucking for twenty straight
minutes, Smoking Woman decides to go for a dip.
She asks us to watch her stuff for her.
She is polite enough, but really.
No one is going to take anything -- her stuff is set up several yards
from the waterline. But then she makes
the fatal mistake of listing the things she does not want stolen, things we
never would've known were there had she not opened her mouth: cell phone,
Kindle, wallet… While she is putting her
legs in the water, we seriously consider moving her stuff around on her blanket
just to psych her out. After she returns
and we tease her that we fought off Ninjas who tried to get her belongings, we
all become old friends chatting away for a few minutes.
This move on our part, this small talk noisy stuff, has
disastrous consequences. We have awoken
the sleeping New Jersey contingency.
Damn. Mouthzilla sees her prey
stirring and like a NASCAR green flag she is off to the races once more,
spreading her opinion and carbon dioxide like the Great Plague of Europe.
About this time the tide starts receding at a rapid pace,
and the estuary feeding into the ocean becomes a small river of rapids flowing
under the footbridge. Children flock to
this with body boards, sailing under the onlookers and shooting out into the
bay where we are swimming. They are
having a blast. Sal and Patty and I look
at each other and start wondering if the kids will let us try it for an
offering of a few bucks each. We know,
though, that it isn't cool anymore if old fogies are participating, so we watch
until the river is too low for them to body surf any longer then step into the
water near their route. The undercurrent
is still strong, and we float a little bit to get a tiny gist of the fun the
kids have been enjoying.
We pack it in after five-plus hours of fun in the sun and
head back to Patty's for a glass or two of sauvignon blanc. Patty is moving from the Rockport house, and
it's one of those sentimental afternoons where the right things are falling
into place and something better is in store for her, but still it is a wistful
moment. Even though I just met her, I
feel for her, for this quaint house with its charming rooms and its calming
seaside colors and its quirky chalet addition and its old New England
personality. How lucky she is to have
put her stamp on this house the same way it has put its stamp on her.
It is a good day. I
meet some new friends, one of whom I hope to see again (Patty), one that I'm
glad I saw again (the nose-holder) when I thought he drowned, one it would be
funny to see again (Smoking Woman), and one I hope to never see again (Mouthzilla). I am thankful for Sal my already-pal, for
Patty my new-found pal, and for friends I still have who are crazy enough to
still be speaking to me after all these years.
On the way home, I text a picture message to my Cat TV
friend showing her the baseball-sized rock I have gotten for her garden,
pilfered from the Great Pebble Wall of Rockport. After all, there's an old Girl Scout song
that goes, "Make new friends but
keep the old, one is silver and the other …. likes beach rocks."
Or something catchy like that.
