I am a beach person. I love the feeling of sand sticking to my skin. I love to hear the waves crash on the shore. I love to watch the pelicans fly by in their v formation, and the black-headed seagulls swoop down to steal a stray pretzel or peanut shell. I love to feel the salty water cool off my sun heated skin. I love to watch the clouds roll in on the afternoon breeze. I love the possibility of finding a shark’s tooth or perfect shell left behind by one wave, only to be stolen by the next if your eyes or fingers aren’t fast enough. Most of all, I love the possibility of spotting some creature that doesn’t live on land, and exploiting it for my amusement.
My family and I just got back from our first week at the beach. We usually go to the beach for a couple of weeks every summer, as often as we can score a free stay at my in-law’s condo and my husband can take off the whole week. We load up the back of the SUV, taking our own sheets, towels, snack food, and bottled water, as if we were going to a third world country instead of a beach town with Walmarts a’plenty. Once there, we slather up with gallons of sunscreen and tote our chairs, buckets, shovels, and an umbrella down to a spot on the sand, leaving only for bathroom breaks and a long lunch. We eat dinner out every night, because I deserve some kind of a break on our vacation, and I make it my personal goal to eat a different kind of seafood every night. Every day is pretty much the same as the next, and we only vary the routine if sunburn plagues us.
When we first started taking the kids to the beach, they weren’t so sure about it. I don’t know if it was the vastness of the ocean that concerned them, as compared to, say, the backyard pool or the bathtub, or maybe the loud pounding of waves was too similar to the sound of thunder. E, my older daughter, wouldn’t even put her feet on the sand. She was never one to like being dirty, and sand felt, well, sandy. Both my daughters were scared of the ocean itself, how it was there, then gone, then back again, how it could be calm and peaceful one minute and knock you over the next. But we loved to explore the tidal pools in the early morning or late in the afternoon, when, if we were lucky, we could maybe find tiny little hermit crabs, a sand dollar or two, or even a big whelk, its stomach foot planted firmly in the wet sand. They were simultaneously enthralled and disgusted by what we could find, and while they didn’t want to touch the creatures, they would never tire searching for them.
As they got older, we kept going to the beach, and now they hang out in the water for hours, unless they go ass over teacups in a big wave, or some wildlife gets too close for comfort. When the water gets to be too much, they retreat to the sand, usually settling for making a drip castle near the water, because a good sand castle takes attention to detail and patience, neither of which they have. We like to park our asses in the sand right at the water’s edge and dig with our hands, hoping to find some bivalve mollusks or sand fleas. Sand fleas are hard to catch since they are quick little buggers, but the bivalves are much easier to find and equally fun to watch replant themselves in the sand.
This past week, we did just that after one of the girls got one faceful of sea water too many. E’s friend AJ was staying with us, and the three girls plopped down in the sand and began digging. What began as just another drip castle morphed into an entire community development project. I grabbed a big bucket and shovel and joined them, because digging in the sand alone when you are over forty is odd, but joining the children is good parenting. We found a few sand fleas and a ton of mollusks. E even found, much to her disgust, some kind of long, thin, stringy bright red sand worm, which freaked her out but made the rest of us laugh because we weren't the ones who touched it.
June is a big month in the world of bivalves, and full grown mollusks with this stringy stuff hanging out the backs of their shells were everywhere. I grew up calling these types of bivalves coquina, but whatever they are, they are plentiful and easy to dig up by the handful. AJ sat cross-legged in the sand, and as we dug up the clams, we placed them on her legs. Soon she had dozens of them on her. The more we found, the more we put on AJ’s legs. The next thing you know, all the bivalves are trying to do what they do naturally: rebury themselves. So their little siphons and clammy parts started creeping out in their attempt to dig into AJ’s leg. Obviously, they did not have the skills or wherewithal to understand that a human leg is not, in fact, their home in the sand, so they just sat there pathetically opening and closing, their clam bits touching AJ repeatedly.
“Yuck,” AJ said.
“It looks like they are licking you,” I said.
My daughters and AJ decided to help the coquina out by creating a new home for them, which they called “Mollusk World.” I should point out here that my daughters routinely mispronounce mollusk. Instead of a soft “o” sound, they like to go with a hard “u” sound, so it comes out like “Mule-losk.” I could correct them, but I really like their version better. Anyway, Mollusk World was more than just a pit in the sand. It had a main area, which was a pit in the sand, but it was surrounded by a bunch of other pits. There was the restaurant, complete with little chairs and tables made out of sinking shells, and next to it was a boutique. I asked what they would buy there, but no one answered me.
My favorite part, however, was the hospital. The girls had made a collection of the mollusks with all that stringy stuff hanging out of them. For some reason I told them was how the clams breed, so they decided the shells were pregnant and going to have babies. They were quarantined from the rest of the mollusk community and placed in their own pit, which had been outfitted with oyster shell beds, one for each allegedly breeding bivalve. My daughter S was playing nurse to the shelled creatures, making sure they were moist and content, adjusting them on their individual shells like they were in a delivery ward.
They played with their bivalve victims for a while, until they got too hot from sitting in the sun and had to return once again to the ocean. By the time the girls finished body surfing, the tide had moved even farther out and their entire community was oven baked, dried out like an old seafood buffet. Which reminded us it was time for lunch. We all ate vegetarian.
1 comment:
those poor Moolosks really needed a bivalve hospital after S was done with them.
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