Beach Bumming

I grew up going to the beach almost every Sunday. My family lived about a half hour away from the closest beach, and we would make a day of it, whether we all wanted to or not. The day involved a lot of sweating, a bite or two of a sandy hot peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a few pees in the ocean, and a hunt for sharks’ teeth before the sunburn claimed our tender young skin. We would swing by Dunkin Donuts on the way home, which my sisters and I would consume in front of the Wonderful World of Disney, post-bath, in our matching summer pajamas.

My beach experiences as an adult are very different from that of my childhood.  My husband got a steal on a tiny condo at a foreclosure auction, and we stay there several times a year.  The condo is in the same building we have been going to since we met, which means I have been going to the same beach for my entire adult life. While I still enjoy a good pee in the ocean, I don’t have to eat a sandy sandwich anymore. I don’t have to peel my sweaty legs off a burning pleather car seat.  If I get hot, I can take a break in the ocean, or in the pool, or in the sweet, sweet air conditioning of the condo while catching up on my Food Network or SpongeBob viewing.  And unlike my childhood, when I didn’t go back to the next Sunday, I can get up and go again and sit with a book day after day until my husband has to go back to work or my kids to school or I just get tired of relaxing. That usually takes about a week.

My point is, I am pretty much an expert at the beach. I have achieved master beach level. 

Lately, I have witnessed some inappropriate beach behavior, bad beach etiquette if you will, and I feel the need to share it. Obviously, none of these faux pas were committed by you, but perhaps by someone you know. Not every beach has lifeguards or other authority figures ensuring public safety, so it’s up to all of us to do the right thing. Here’s just a few, but by no means all:

·        Stop it with leaving your tent on the beach overnight. When you rent a condo, you aren’t also guaranteed a prime location on the beach. Unless you are at a resort and have reserved a cabana, you don’t get your own personal square of sand. The beach is public and first-come, first-serve.  You people who leave your tent up for a week, you are the very reason most beach towns have outlawed the practice. Luckily, our condo is in a county that still allows tent use in the summer because we own such a tent. It weighs about seventy five pounds. Every morning, my husband hikes through the dune path with that thing on his back, and we all help set it up so he can sit and rest his hernia. When our day on the beach is done, we help him close it and position it just so on his back before he treks it up to our condo. The tent isn’t in the same spot every day because we don’t own the beach, and neither do you, tent asshat. Why don’t you try a little motherfucking courtesy next time?

 

·       Let’s talk about music for a minute. You think the music you like is the best, don’t you? I am a big fan of alternative. I have a friend who would rather listen to heavy metal. His music aggravates my TMJ, and mine makes him start his period. We both can agree on one thing: we hate country.  Why is it that the country music fans always set up their beach party right next to mine? I don’t want to listen to some pseudo cowboy singing about drinking beer while I watch you down a suitcase of Milwaukee’s Best, which, by the way, isn’t good for you. Alcohol dehydrates you, idiot, and drinking more of it isn’t topping off your fluids. Too much beer is not a good reason to crank up the twang; there is no good reason. When I go to the beach, I want to hear the waves crashing on the shore. I want to hear the birds squawking at each other over an old crab leg. I might even like to hear a giggle or two coming from a sand castle construction site. What I don’t want to hear is some off key yokel warbling about Jesus loving your gun toting dog in the back of your honky tonk pick-up truck with your toothless one night stand. You are not in your double wide, so turn it the fuck down.

·       Let’s try to secure our belongings, shall we? I try to be a nice person, but after running after your Tommy Bahama umbrella and your five thousand empty Capri Suns that got picked up by a breeze, I am over you. If I get hit one more time by your wayward raft, I will claim it for my own. If you want to leave your Cheetos bags all over the place, at least have enough to share with the rest of us. Furthermore, the dunes are not your storage bin. They are, however, federally protected land that may just help our children still have beaches when they have children. Let’s stop putting that stack of beach chairs on the sea oats. You can tote them back to your car or condo at the end of the day along with that tent you leave up. Jesus, you sure are lazy.  

·       I shouldn’t even have to say this, but the sand on the beach is not your goddamned ash tray. I want to look for shark’s teeth without picking through the butts of your cancer sticks. It’s just gross. Put them in one of the plethora of beer cans you have scattered under your beach tent that you are leaving up all week. You are such a dick.

·       A friend of mine posted a photo on Facebook last week of some douchebag who was surf fishing in the middle of the day. Noon o’clock isn’t exactly when the fish are biting, if you know what I’m saying. You know what’s happening at noon? Families. Children are boogie boarding. Teenagers are losing their bikini bottoms while jumping over waves. Large older women are trying to enjoy their romance novels in their sand chairs while the waves lap at their toes. None of them is prepared for an ER visit to remove your old rusty fish hook. How’s about instead you fish during regular fishing hours, you know, when no one else is using the beach and the fish are actually biting. There is something that has been biting a lot lately in the middle of the day, and that’s sharks. In the past few months, over eighteen shark attacks have occurred within a hundred miles of where my condo is, during the day, in the surf, not even deep water. The sharks are there because it’s their home. Could you do us all a favor and not invite them in closer for a snack?

The last time I was at the beach, I saw one of those surf fishing assholes, and I got really irritated. I sat there under my tent, watching him cast his line and slowly reel it back, while all around him, children played along the water’s edge. I sat there in my chair and got pissed. PISSED. I went on and on to my bored daughter about how dangerous it is to surf fish with the hooks and the sharks and all, getting angrier and angrier, when all of a sudden, he got a bite! He turned that little crank thing that winds up the fishing line and pulled and turned and pulled and turned until finally, he reeled in his catch. A baby shark. My daughter and I, mid-judgment, hopped up out of our chairs and ran to the small group who surrounded him so we too could see the baby shark. It looked so cute and angry, like a baby alligator, only, you know, more sharky. I even got a picture of my daughter holding it. We headed back to our tent and chairs while the fisherman flung the shark in the water, not quite past the breakers.

That was cool, my daughter said.

Yeah, it was. Also stupid, I said to her. Asshole fisherman.

The beach is perfect as it is. You can’t improve on it, but you can ruin it for everyone else. Try to remember that you aren’t the king of the beach any more than you are the center of the universe, so let’s aim to leave our narcissism at home and instead bring along a little common sense and decency.

And if I see you again, man who surf fished from the safety of your tent while blaring your effing country crap on your knock-off Beats speaker, I will beat you to death with your beer bottles and bait, and that’s a promise. Unless, you catch a shark, or maybe a ray, because I like those too.

Beware of Dog

Have you seen the Russian tampon commercial? Hopefully if you had not, you clicked on the link and caught up with the rest of us. Two of my male friends sent it to me, which is oddly flattering, although I hope it has more to do with my sense of humor than the desire that I die by shark attack during that time of the month. The part that makes it even funnier, funny ha-ha not funny weird, is that last week I was at the beach and, lucky me, I had my period.  Now, before you go thinking this falls into the Too Much Information category, just stick with it a little longer. I promise not to get all descriptive.

Anyway, one of these aforementioned friends, JM, had asked me if I was scared to go in the water while I was on my period because of the risk of shark attack. It is not important to know why he asked me that. Let’s just say it was happenstance that he had some sort of period/ocean curiosity at the same time I was menstruating at the beach, and so his question was unassuming and yet very timely. I explained patiently to him that I was a woman of my forties and knew my way around a tampon, and that I did not double as a chum bucket.

But is it a valid question, knowing that sharks can detect the scent of blood miles away? The Russians sure think so, and hell, are there even sharks in Russia? Let’s take a quick Google break. Okay, the short answer is there shouldn’t be, but because of the global warming hoax which apparently the sharks are in on, there are now.

So anyway, JM and I had discussed the likelihood of period related shark attack while I was at the beach, and not a day later, it was like a scene from “Jaws.” Not one of the good scenes when people get bit and die; rather, one of those scenes where everyone overreacts and it’s super annoying and you want them to get eaten by a shark just to make them shut up. Yes, I do root for for the shark.

My daughter and I were walking out to the beach when a man came up to us and asked us if we were going to the beach. That stupid question irritated me immediately, seeing as I had a beach chair in one hand and a bag of beach towels in the other, and I was wearing a bathing suit. No, idiot, I’m going to the Queen’s coronation, and I sure hope I’m not under dressed.

I remembered seeing this Einstein on the sand a few days before because at the time he was wearing an odd outfit, a green tank top and green swim trunks, the kind of green that makes you think this person must be colorblind. I politely told him that yes, we were in fact planning on going to the beach, and he said we needed to be careful because they had seen a shark that morning not even five feet from the shoreline. I asked him how big it was, and he said, again, five feet. He also told me that he had already informed the sheriff’s office, which would have reassured me if they were planning to arrest it.  I thanked him for his warning, and my daughter and I continued our way through the sand dunes to a lovely spot not too far away from the water line.

"Who calls the sheriff to report a shark sighting? That's like calling your dentist when you want a divorce," I said to my daughter.

As we opened our chairs and put down the bags and buckets, a woman walked over to us. She must have been the wife of the colorblind idiot town crier because she was also dressed oddly, in a Gidget style double knit one piece in red, white, and blue stripes. That suit had to be older than me, and I am not young. Come to think of it, I may have seen a picture of my grandmother in that suit, possibly with the same hair style. She asked us if we planned to go to the water, which made me wonder if this was the first time these people had been to a beach in the summer. Then she told me, get ready for this, that they had seen a five foot shark not five feet from the shore. Did they have a tape measure with them? I thanked her as I had with her husband, and she returned to her spot.

“Did they really see a shark?” my daughter asked me.

“I’m sure they did. They both think so, anyway,” I told her.

We sat there in our chairs, scanning the horizon and seeing, well, just a bunch of sand and water.

Another family stepped through the dunes, and before they could even get their flip flops off, the woman in the unintentionally vintage bathing suit swooped over to them with her warning about the shark and all the stuff about the five feet.  This family actually picked up their articles and left.

The colorblind man joined his retro wife under their umbrella where the kept a vigilant watch on the not even five foot waves lapping against the shore. Every so often, he would stand up with his camera and walk to the water, ready to document and possibly tag the man eating beast.

My daughter and I watched him watch the water and his wife warn other beach goers for about fifteen minutes, but then I got hot, so I stood up to walk to the water.

“Are you really going to go in there?” my daughter asked.

“Sure, aren’t you?”

“But what about the shark?” she said.

“I have news for you, honey,” I told her. “Every time we go in the water, there is a shark there. Where else are sharks going to be? Flying overhead?  That’s where they live, in the ocean. Let me ask you this: do sharks generally eat people? ”

“No,” she said.

“And what do they eat, seals?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said.

“Well, you are wearing a lime green bathing suit and you have long blond hair, and I have never seen a seal that looks like that. Plus, we’ve been sitting here for a while, and nobody has died yet. I think we’re good. And it’s hot, so are you coming or what?”

We bravely put our feet in the water, and then for good measure, I stepped out knee deep. And guess what happened? I got wet, and I cooled off. I didn’t even step funny on a shell and hurt the sole of my foot.

By the time the rest of my family came outside to join us, I had already decided to not tell them about the shark, not because I secretly want them to die, but because I didn’t want to seem like I was overreacting like the shark couple. I started to wonder if they were even real, or maybe, just maybe, they had been victims of a shark attack at that very spot, and now they haunted the beach, appearing only on the anniversary of their tragic deaths, waiting to warn families of the dangers lurking beneath the waves.

Later, I spent some time researching, and I didn't find anything about a fatal shark attack on that beach during the 1960's. In fact, it turns out that sharks do kill more people a year than tampons, but that's by accident. Sharks aren't even attracted to human blood. Sharks also kill less people than hippos. Hell, even more people are killed by their own dogs than sharks in any given year, and they are supposed to be man’s best friend.

Fear not the large fish with the rows of razor sharp teeth that is billed a killing machine. It’s just not that into you. And that goes double if you are on the rag.