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| (High tide/high ground) |
Sunday my friend and I
plan a trip to the beach. Yes, this is
New England, and yes, it is autumn, but today the temperature soars into the 80’s
with full sunshine. Did I mention that
this is New England? Did I mention that
it’s fall?
Both of us wake up feeling
crappy. She has a bad headache and I
have a pain that feels like my left kidney is about to jump out of my
back. I am also struck with vertigo. I’ve had this before, and it freaks me out
every time it returns – I walk sideways and totter into things. At 6:15 Sunday morning, I almost catapult
through a glass window in my den, all the while hopping mostly on one foot and
yelling, “Oh … OH … OOOOOOOOOOHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” as my hand gets caught up
in the slats of the blinds when I lose my balance yet again.
My friend and I rally,
though; she and Tylenol meet up with each other around 4:00 a.m., and I pop
naproxen shortly before 6:30 a.m. By
9:30, we’re good to go. This is the
latest we’ve ever left for the beach on a hot day, plus it’s a weekend. We have no idea what we’ll find when we get
there.
Unfortunately, our
favorite parking space, #1913, has been swallowed into the construction
zone. We are stuck with a space that is
between two access staircases to the sand.
Instead of walking 45 seconds to the beach, we have to walk a whole 120
seconds. It’s almost too much, but,
again, we rally and make the two-minute trek to the water’s edge.
Despite the recent chilly
nights, the water is still amazingly comfortable. Sure, the website claims the temperature in
the ocean is about 61 degrees, but we go swimming anyway. Okay, we take short dips because it’s too
darn hot to just sit in the sun baking.
Lots of people are in the water: surfers, swimmers, casual waders. It’s a perfectly wonderful summery beach day.
Except, of course, for the
fact that it’s autumn in New England.
Driving to the beach we
notice how many leaves are changing already, how some trees are already losing
their battle with keeping covered, and how some harvest-themed decorations are
already out. Yet for the four hours that
we are at the beach, there are a couple of times that I forget, completely and
totally fail to remember that I have been teaching for three weeks, and that I’ve
already broken out the leather driving gloves multiple times on chilly
mornings.
We collect about 100
pounds of rocks (this is not an exaggeration – five bags full and two trips to
the car later) for my friend’s home garden, then head down the road to our
other friends’ condo. They host us for a
short visit then encourage us to walk to another nearby beach, but we’re
beached out for the day. I can’t even
believe that’s possible, but it has been such a perfect day, such a hot and
wonderful and salty and sandy day, that we decline and start heading home.
We are shocked to find
ourselves locked in a highway traffic jam.
We never leave the beach this late – after 4:00 on a Sunday
afternoon. We learn from the radio that
the traffic is backed up even further behind us, past the tolls, past
Portsmouth, into Kittery and beyond. We
bounce on to a shorter highway and we sail smoothly back to town, miles away
from the sound of the surf hitting the rocks, miles away from the smell of the
salt in the air, miles away from the warm sand under our toes.
By the time I post this, I’ll
be just getting up to start another school day, but I did grab a few rocks of
my own. I’ll bring at least one to add
to the collection on my desk. When a
student notices that I have a new “paperweight,” I’ll maybe tell the beach
story from Sunday about how we kept having to move back until we were off the
sand and trapped on the higher ground of rocks when high tide rolled in, or how
some kid tried to jump off the ten-foot wall into the rocks below (like this
might be a good idea), or how the mom and her son both got wiped out by the
same wave and her paddleboard and his surf board both flew over the surf and
whacked the same random guy almost simultaneously, or how upset we were about
the Italian greyhound whose owners thought it was a good idea to make it sit in
the sun for hours with no water and no shade, or how we damn-near strangled
three girls who played on the nearby jetty and screamed like cats in heat every
time a wave came within five feet of where they were sitting (then they left
their trash behind and we really did want to strangle them).
Bye, bye, beach. Bye, bye, summer. Bye, bye, salty hair and clothes and skin.
Don’t forget about us; we
certainly won’t forget about you.
