Letter from Georgica
My grandmother used to say that once you had sand in your shoes you could never get it out. At the age of seven or eight, which is when I can remember first hearing it, I did not completely understand what she meant. Clearly, I did not have a well-developed sense of metaphor. (I know this is more a simile or a proverb, but if you develop a syntactical sense, it ought to be metaphor.) Only later, when I set out traveling on my own, did I start to grasp it. And I think it is true: once you become accustomed to beaches, especially as a child, you will always return.
And return I do, day after day, most days of my life. My favorite walk is from Georgica Beach, at the western end of Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton, to Georgica Pond, about a mile and a half to the west. I have walked along this shoreline hundreds, and perhaps thousands of times. I wish I could say that being afoot on the sand inspires great thoughts. As I hike I have occasionally thought about important decisions in my life, but at other times I have come and gone completely empty-headed. Perhaps I do not have enough of the poet in me, which makes me sad, and also confirms my early deficiency in metaphor.
Last Sunday morning I ran at a leisurely pace along the beach. I had been to five July Fourth parties the night before—some annual, like the Steinbergs, Rick Marak, and the Della Feminas, and some perennial, and now it was my time alone. The sand was cool and wet under my bare feet. As waves broke, the seawater rushed in, crashed against my legs and splashed up to my chest. I felt the radiating warmth of the sun on my back and shoulders. I had not planned to swim and had not brought a towel, but the sea was beckoning, cool and beautiful in the early July sunshine. I wanted to experience it in every way, so I dived in under a small, friendly wave.
I swam to one of the three rock groins jutting into the ocean. They were constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers many years ago as part of a planned erosion control project that was never completed, and from what we now know, it was a bad idea. The jetty was teeming with life: several different kinds of seaweed, barnacles, tiny mussels by the tens of thousands on each large boulder. The breaking surf was filled with air bubbles, the air above it with sea spray, both evanescent, there for one moist, briny moment, gone the next. There is a tide related ecology unique to the shoreline. It’s different from that of the sea and the upland beach and dunes. I’d like to learn more about it someday.
The light at the beach is always changing: vague and soft in the early hours, etched sharp and clear at mid-day, then golden and horizontal in late afternoon. And wonderful at night also. Before the Hamptons had so many pools and so many social events, the beach was our center of life. We would have picnics several nights a week, and often bigger beach parties. I see beach parties with lots of kids now, but not too many parties for adults. People seem to want more intense entertainment. The best time to have a beach party is early August, during the several nights of the Perseid meteor showers. I like to eat just before it gets dark, build a small campfire, and then lay on my back watching the shooting stars for a few hours. It makes you feel very small but nevertheless glad you have a place in this universe.
Even the big guys are small on the beach. We are all small under the huge sky and endless horizon, the sea stretching to the south for unimaginable lengths, while the dunes on the north are all we have to anchor us.
What is the source of our pleasure in being at the shore? Why this extraordinary sense of comfort and well being? Part of it relates to the senses. But for me there is another part to it, a remembered safety. All the years of knowing the beach as shelter, perhaps as salvation. Knowing it as a friend. That’s why I like to see kids on the beach. I remember being there as a youth, and I silently celebrate the continuity. How lucky we are to be in a place where such simple traditions are simply there, unremarked on and unremarkable. How far we are from the pain and suffering of so much of the world.
Is this what it means to have sand in your shoes? My grandmother could never have imagined the complexity and prosperity of this time and place. But she knew something valuable about simple pleasures, and I hope that I do too.
Our beaches in the Hamptons are special but not unique. There are so many beautiful beaches. I’ve been happy on crowded coves in the south of France and on sequestered coves of Aegean islands, in the warm waters of St. Barths and the shallow surf of La Jolla. But when I walk along our beaches—at those moments I am quite sure that there is no place else, no other beach in the world, where I want to be. And when I put on my shoes after the walk I will surely get sand in them, and probably in my house, and possibly in my bed. I am convinced I will never get the sand out.