BEACH NATION

Growing up, my family skied.

- BY DAVID LITT

We hiked. While no one would ever have described us as mountaineers, our vacations nearly always involved verticality. What really made us mountain people, though, is that we weren't beach people. On its face, what set us apart was elevation, but really the divide ran much deeper. In the mountains, you pick a point and work hard to get there. If you're hiking or climbing, the goal is above you.

If you’re skiing, snowboarding, or mountain biking, the goal is below. Either way, in the mountains, a sense of satisfaction and wonder comes through hard work and achievement. You earn your views.

Beach people, on the other hand—well, I didn’t really get beach people. I understood beach activities: boogie-boarding, bodysurfing, fishing. But just hanging out on the sand, sitting on a rickety chair in the shade of a flimsy umbrella, with nothing but a book or human being for company? That didn’t seem merely strange to me. It seemed scary. The Jewish Talmud refers to sleep as one-sixtieth of death. That’s more or less how I felt about hanging out at the beach.

And so, as fate would have it, I fell in love with a beach person. Jacqui grew up 10 minutes from the Jersey shore. We were 25 years old when we met on OkCupid in its 2011 heyday.