A Day at the Beach

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But soon I was to feel another nagging insistence. As everyone knows, there are no bathrooms on Fire Island’s beaches. I had forgotten about the frequent demands of my kidneys when I so cavalierly decided to forgo the water taxi. I had no idea how far I had to go. I tried not to panic. I had been walking for quite a while; I was probably fairly close to Ocean Beach.

“Excuse me,” I said to a woman walking her dog. “How far is Ocean Beach?”

“Ocean Beach?” she said, incredulously, as if I had asked her for directions to Osaka. “Oh, you have quite a way to go.”

I nodded morosely, and watched her and her dog slowly recede towards the south. I looked around. To the north, there were the tiny forms of children prancing around in the surf. To the south, the lady and her dog, and farther on, a few prone bodies in the sand. Behind me, though, were the forbidding windows of a half-dozen beach houses; who knew what condemning eyes gazed from within?

Oh what the hell, I thought. I unzipped my trousers and opened the floodgates. Right into the foamy sea. No need to feel any guilt, I thought. It’s not like it’s a swimming pool. It took a little longer than I thought. I could see a jeep coming towards me from the north, possibly a police car. Come on, come on, I said to myself, pushing with muscles I don’t even know the names of. I zipped up in time to see the police car roll pass me. They waved. I waved. They moved on. I moved on.

Farther on, I found a horseshoe crab on its back, just beyond the reach of the tide, its spiny legs squirming in the air. I stared at it in horrified fascination. Its spiny tail wobbled futilely in the air. I will save this creature of the sea, I resolved, in spite of my revulsion to it. The problem was I didn’t want to touch it. I looked in vain for a nearby piece of driftwood. Finally, I took one of my shoes out of my bag, and tried to gently turn it over. I got it partway up and slipped. The crab panicked and tried to cushion its fall by bending its pointed tail into the sand. Now it was propped up by its tail, forming a kind of crustacean lean-to, legs wiggling furiously. I tried again and managed to flip it right side up, and it immediately begin to crawl in circles. “No, no,” I told it. “The sea is that way.” Round and round it went. I began to wonder if I had somehow broken it. But I didn’t know what more I could do to return it to its ancestral home. Some people approached, and I guiltily abandoned the crab to its own devices.

By the time I saw the blue water tower of Ocean Beach in the distance, my feet were raw, eroded, as it were, by the surf and sand. I decided to put my shoes on, seemingly a simple operation, but nothing is simple at the beach. I wanted to get the sand off my feet before I put them in my shoes, which involved the complicated operation of sitting on my butt, sticking my feet in the very tip of the tide, and then drying them off with my sock. The problem was that the rising tide came in so quickly that I barely had time to wipe off my foot before I had to scuttle back to avoid getting soaked. I was also distracted by a nearby woman sitting cross-legged, apparently attempting to meditate. I worried that my butt-scuttling presence was somehow corrupting her spiritual growth. I eventually managed to get one foot shoed and socked, and then, while holding the finished foot in the air, clumsily dressed the other. I hoped the woman would think I was practicing some form of yoga.

As always, I felt much happier in my shoes, and though I walked near the edge of the water, I was careful to avoid getting my feet wet. I finally spotted a landmark I knew, an elegant wood-paneled house with a large circular window featuring a telescope. I knew that house, not only because it was near the entrance to Ocean Beach, but also because I coveted it. I thought that if I lived there, I would learn the secrets of the stars. While I was standing there looking at it, the tide sloshed over my shoes, so that my feet made sad, squishy noises all the way home.