The Beach

Tomorrow I'm off to the beach for a few days, and while I'll probably take along a laptop and a cell phone, I would like to think I will be getting away from most of my technological obsessions. I don't know why, but for some reason the beach seems to beckon one away from all of those entangling complications of normal existence. Apparently there's something restful in an encounter with some enormous body of water with nothing visible on the opposite horizon but a distant place where sea and sky appear to touch. When I was younger I would derive great satisfaction from simply lying on the beach for hours, occasionally venturing into the water to cool off, perhaps reading, perhaps just dozing. Nowadays, after the removal of more precancerous lesions than I care to count, I tend to look for some shady spot where I can stay cool and gaze lazily at the surf.

We've been told that all life came from the oceans. I don't know if that is part of the grand design or just the result of chemical and biological processes. But as a species we humans have been drawn to the sea for food, travel, adventure, and relaxation. The oceans are certainly the great engines of life on our planet. They feed us and make our weather. Those who make it their business to study such things have been bringing us troubling reports lately of great dead zones, where nothing much lives, and shifting currents that bring warm waters further north than we expect. The polar icecaps are also melting and making the ocean waters rise, threatening changes to our shorelines. How distressing to see whole Alaskan villages engulfed by the rising waters or coastal beach houses swept off the sands. But the oceans have always been engines of change.

I don't know why, but I like to say farewell to the summer by going to the beach. Perhaps it's because the beach is such a quintessentially summer place. Many beach communities exist primarily for the summer, when they waken from their winter hibernation and expand to welcome fair weather visitors like me. The spring and summer have always been my favorite seasons, but as I've grown a little older I've learned to enjoy autumn as well, especially the early days of autumn, when there is just a hint of change in the air, and the days are growing shorter, but still linger for a while in the cool evenings. And so on those last days of August I like to go down to the beach and look out at the ocean and think about time and engines of change.