NONFICTION - Honorable Mention

A Rocky Path to the Beach
Deanna Duby,
Milton, Delaware

                I think that if one is born and raised in the middle of the country --- say, Kansas, as I was --- she can be forgiven for being indifferent to beaches.  In my defense, even though I was far from them, I wasn’t unaware of the country’s coastlines.  I knew that beaches and the ocean existed.  When I was five, I actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a ship.  I just never had a great desire to go sit on a beach and watch the sea, or to immerse myself in it.  It’s possible that that ocean voyage was a factor in my lack of interest, since I was seasick for part of the trip, and observed a lot of other people getting even sicker, among them, my mother.  So “ocean” was not a word that called up pleasure from my memory banks.

            When I was eleven, my parents took me to Miami Beach.  It was a long car trip from Kansas to Miami, and I spent most of it sleeping in the back seat.  I do remember one of our overnight stops along the way, in Memphis, Tennessee.  Until that stop (this was in 1956), I had never seen “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs on water fountains and public restrooms.  I was stunned to see the reality of segregation.

            When we arrived in Miami and I saw my first real ocean beach, I couldn’t wait to get out there.  We had made this long journey so that my father could attend the Lions Club convention, as he had just been elected to a high state office in the club.  I was excited, too, as the highlight of the week for me was going to be riding on the Kansas float in the big convention parade.

            Once we had checked in at the hotel, my father went off in search of convention registration, and my mother and I headed for the beach.  We both slathered ourselves with Johnson’s Baby Oil.  (It is outrageous in retrospect, but this is what passed for protection against sunburn in those days.)  We stayed on the beach for only a short while before my mother was ready to leave; she was hot, worried about sunburn, and ready to unpack.  I begged to stay awhile longer by myself, and she relented.  I agreed that I would only stay for another half hour, swim close to the lifeguards and the family with whom we had gotten acquainted, and she greased me up anew with the baby oil.  (Another note for those far younger than I:  In those days, there was nothing unusual in a parent leaving her child alone on the beach like this.  The world was a different place, where abductions were practically unheard of, new acquaintances on the beach looked out for kids, and fear did not rule our lives.)  I was fine; so fine that I didn’t watch the time.  I swam and ran on the beach, oblivious to what was happening to my skin.  My mother had fallen asleep and didn’t notice that I hadn’t returned.

            This trip to the beach was my only one during our Miami stay.  By that evening, I had blisters on my shoulders the size of silver dollars (something else you don’t see much anymore), was having chills, and screamed in pain if anyone touched my skin.  My father called a fellow Kansas Lion who was a doctor, and he took one look at me and sent us all to the Emergency Room.  They packed me in ice, lanced and treated the blisters, and sent us back to the hotel with medication.  I spent the entire rest of our stay in the room wearing only pajama bottoms, my skin covered with the white lotion the ER doctor had prescribed.  No more beach, no parade float, no fun.  To this day, fifty-two years later, I can still see that hotel room and my blue and yellow pajama bottoms, smell that lotion, and nearly feel the tears that burned my cheeks as I watched the parade out of the hotel window.  Is it any wonder that from that day forward, I wasn’t much drawn to beaches?

            I did like swimming.  My childhood summers included daily trips to the municipal pool in our small town, where I learned to swim and dive.  The fun only lasted until a couple of years after the Miami trip, however, when I hit the age where girls were ruled by body image.  I realized how chubby I was, and no longer wanted to be seen in a swimsuit

            In high school, my friends and I discovered what passed for “the beach” in south central Kansas.  There was a private lake about ten miles from our town.  The owner had installed decked pavilions that passed for boardwalks and dance floors, installed jukeboxes in several spots, and strung lights in the trees.  He also put picnic tables out among the trees surrounding the lake, opened a concession stand, and charged admission to the place.  His name was Courtney, and he reversed it to name the lake Yentruoc.  It was THE place to go during high school summers.  It wasn’t Rehoboth Beach, but we probably had as much fun as Rehoboth-goers did in those days.  I continued to be self-conscious about looking fat in a swimsuit, so I covered up a lot, and spent most of my time on the shore.

            I reached the age of majority with practically no thought of beaches, no longing for a life by the sea, and I would have been perfectly happy to live my life in a land-locked location, as long as it wasn’t in Kansas.  I couldn’t wait to escape from my home state.  I read the Sunday New York Times in the high school library each week, picking out plays I wanted to see, and, as a drama major in college, I fantasized about my arrival on Broadway within a week of my graduation.  It didn’t turn out that way, though, and I found myself teaching high school speech and drama in Kansas in 1967. 

            When a college friend wrote and announced that she was attending San Francisco State College and living on Haight Street, and invited me to visit during the summer, I was packed and ready to go as soon as school was out.  That was 1968 and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in April.  In June, three or four days before I was leaving, Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.  The world seemed to be going insane.  The morning after the Kennedy assassination, my father stated simply, “You’re not going.  There’s too much craziness in the world, particularly in California.”  I pleaded, I cajoled, and finally persuaded him of how responsible I was, how far San Francisco was from Los Angeles, and how far away I would stay from all the drug-crazed hippies.  (I guess he must have forgotten that my friend lived on Haight Street.)

            I not only went, but by mid-summer I’d called the school district where I had signed a contract for the next year, and resigned.  I had fallen in love threefold:  with a man, with San Francisco, and, perhaps most significantly, with freedom and adulthood.  In spite of being in California, I had not fallen in love with the beach.  It was beautiful to drive by, and occasionally to walk on, but northern California shores are no Miami Beach.  The Pacific is wild and cold.  In addition, the man I had fallen in love with was a Saudi Arab --- so no beach lover he!   

            The only time I remember going to the beach in the nearly two years I lived in San Francisco was a Saturday morning when my roommate (we were still living on Haight Street) and I took a picnic, our books and blankets, and settled in on the sand.  It was a lovely day when we arrived, sunny and a little chilly.  We wore shirts and shorts (no swimsuit needed).  Shortly after we arrived, the sun went behind the clouds and never came out, and when we got up to leave, we realized that our legs were very badly burned.  This is how I learned the lesson that you can get a worse burn when it’s cloudy than when the sun is shining.  This experience capped my long run of bad beach karma.

            I moved from San Francisco to Tucson, Arizona (notice the lack of a waterfront?) to attend graduate school, and in 1971 I moved to Washington, D.C.  From my arrival there until 1987 (that’s 16 years!), I crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (the route to the beach) exactly three times.  The first was with friends who had taken me to Annapolis and then across the bridge.  I was so terrified of that huge bridge and the immense distance down to the water, that I took one look and spent the rest of the crossing cowering in the back seat with a coat over my head.  Then, a beach-loving friend persuaded me to go with her to Rehoboth, after I had exacted a promise that she would drive across the bridge. Rehoboth was a sleepy little town in those days, and I remember turning left onto the road into Rehoboth from Route 1 amidst total agriculture --- no stores, no gas stations, no nothing.  The trip was okay, but the beach was, for me, ho-hum.  The third crossing, to attend a friend’s wedding on Kent Island, was the first time I drove across the bridge myself.  I courted heart failure, but made it across and back.

            Given all of this, is it any wonder that in the late 1990s, as my partner and I began to discuss retirement, I resisted the idea of retiring to the beach?  I share my life (and have for 21 years) with a woman who is a native Washingtonian.  As a child she came to the beach every year with her family (they were coming before there was a Bay Bridge, and she remembers the ferry ride).  The beach and the sea permeate her soul.  Loving her as I do, how could I deprive her of living near it?

            We visited other potential retirement locations and tried to find compromises.  It’s not that I hated the idea of the beach; I just had no need for the beach in my daily life.  My ideal retirement home, I said, would be Tucson or Santa Fe (I’m always cold and wanted that desert warmth).  Hers, she said, would be somewhere on the Maine coast (she’s always hot and craved the cool breezes and cold winters).  What were we to do? 

            In the end, we not only retired to the Delaware beach community (after falling in love with the charm of Milton), but we moved here three years before I retired and I had to commute weekly over that damned bridge!  My phobia was finally cured. The first time I actually changed lanes on the bridge, I knew I was okay.  Until then, my routine crossing had included white knuckles gripping the wheel, driving slowly in one lane, staring straight ahead to avoid noticing how high I was and how much water was out there, feeling my heart pound in my throat.

            Now, I walk on the beach regularly, I smell the sea air, I love the rhythm of the breaking waves.  I watch the swimmers and surfers and look for dolphins far offshore.  I search for sea glass.  The sea has not taken the place in my soul of the big wide sky on the flat Kansas plain.  But I have to admit that after all of the painful “beach moments” in my life, I’ve come to have a true affection and healthy respect for the beach, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else.  Who knew?

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