The Beach
This week, I visited Santa Cruz, California. My intention was to see a good friend. I was excited to reconnect with my friend since she moved away from Utah. I was also thrilled to see her new location. She had spent much of her life in the Santa Cruz area, and now she was back, returning home.
During Covid, my world got smaller, and I wasn’t able to visit the places I wanted to. I’m an adventurer, and my adventures had to happen closer to home. While I feel as if the Wasatch Mountains are my true home, I love to visit the ocean. Being in Santa Cruz was an opportunity to visit it the ocean. This trip did not disappoint. I was able to feel the sand between my toes. While it wasn’t warm enough to swim, I was able to creep close enough to the breaking waves to feel foam on my toes and jump from the chill. The waves were making music, beautiful crescendos as they crested and fell back into the water. Birds were everywhere: pelicans on the jetty, sandpipers with their long beaks digging for food, and sanderlings running up and down the shoreline hunting for food while they escaped the surf.
I have been going to the beach for as long as I can remember. There are pictures of me as an infant at the beach. I have ones with me sitting on my grandmother’s lap. She and my grandfather spent their summers at the beach. I remember the ritual. We would pack up our bathing suits, beach chairs, towels, and sunscreen and set out for the beach. My parents roused me up early in the morning, and I sat in the backseat of the car waiting to get to the beach. I don’t remember how long it took to get there; it just seemed like ALL DAY. Once I was old enough to make the drive myself, I discovered it usually took under 90 minutes to get to the beach.
I have that distinct childhood memory I shared in my blog post Ski Day. I went into the ocean with my mom. She held me up so that I wouldn’t get hit by the terrifying waves. Considering I was probably about 3 feet tall at the time, the waves really weren’t very high. Every time a wave came, I would scream and scream, terrified of being overtaken by the water. My mom would easily pick me up and hold my head above the water so that no water entered my mouth or nose and I could see above the wave. As soon as the wave passed, I would shriek, “Again! Again!” It’s one of my most treasured memories of my childhood.
As I grew older, my parents and I still visited the beach. In New Jersey, where we lived, beach season didn’t officially start till Memorial Day, and it ended on Labor Day. I remember one year, when I was extra lucky, we went to the beach on the weekend just after Labor Day. I felt like we were sneaking in, as if the sand rolled up, and we wouldn’t be able to find the sand after that first Monday in September.
When I think of the beach now, I can close my eyes and smell the surf and sunscreen, hear the muffled conversations going on all around me, and sense the surf crashing in the background. The surf has always been magical to me. The water is smooth and wavy, then suddenly it picks up in a big swell of water and comes crashing down along the shore. When I was younger, my primary beach visits were to the Atlantic, though I had a few trips to the West Coast of Mexico. These were at resorts where the ocean was more tamed by the bays that the resorts sat in.
I believe it was 1999 when I first took a real look at the Pacific Ocean. I was in Australia on the Sunshine Coast. Here, the surf was wild and there were signs up warning about the surf. As usual, I was excited to be at the beach. I was also cautious. No one wanted to go in the water with me. So my then husband stood out on the shore screaming, “be careful!” at regular intervals. The water was untamed. I sensed its power. I felt insignificant, not in an unimportant way, but in a way that I felt my connection to the earth was like a grain of sand on the beach. I couldn’t control those waves, so I had better respect them. I was grateful for the water, taking me on an exciting ride. As the water receded, I felt the salt sticking to my skin. Without the usual chatty conversation that I heard on my New Jersey beach, the crescendo of the waves crashing was even more significant. On that day, I fell in love with the Pacific Ocean.
I was fortunate to visit the Pacific Ocean numerous times since that day. I later swam with some amazing fish in the Great Barrier Reef. I snorkeled in the South Pacific and off the coast Bali. All of these places reminded me that there’s another world out there in the ocean. Ariel of The Little Mermaid might want to “be up where the people are,” but I want to be in the sea! The sounds and sensations that happen when I hit the water are so powerful. When I visit near the ocean, I like to sleep with my windows open, so I can be lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves.
While I didn’t stay close enough to the ocean to sleep with the sound, I was still grateful for my ocean visit this time. I watched a sunset, put my feet in the sand, and heard the crashing waves. I sit in gratitude knowing the ocean will still be there when I leave; it will be waiting for my next return.
