BEACH READ

Though they've changed over the years—but only a little— the twin Bahamian sanctuaries of Harbour Island and Eleuthera are still perfect for going slow in high style

- By Adam Sachs Photographs by Ana Lui

A residential street on Harbour Island

Let us now praise foraminifera.

Tiny maritime creatures, too simple to be classified as animals but absolutely alive, they grow protective shells like microscopic mollusks and attach themselves by the billions to coral reefs. They live and feed happily there until they die and the ocean pulverizes their shells to powder.

It's hard to pick out a single foraminifera on its own, but collectively these single-cell organisms, posthumously and in aggregate, form the key ingredient that makes low-lying outcroppings of carbonate rock in the archipelago of the Bahamas so alluringly special.

Shout out, specifically, to homotrema rubrum, the variety of foraminifera that produces a bright pigment that turns its shell red. Happily, this is the kind that feeds out on Devil's Backbone (and the other coral reefs surrounding Harbour Island and its longer, lankier sibling, Eleuthera). When their shells are tumbled and pummeled by the waves and bleached in the sun, they leave a pink slurry that is circulated by the sea and deposited on shore, where it mixes with the typical flotsam of coral and quartz.

And that's how the powdery pink-sand beaches of Briland (as Harbour Island is locally known) get their color. How pink depends somewhat on the angle of the sun, the cycle of the tides (damp sand reflects deeper color), and how much you want to believe. But the pink is not a mirage. It's real. A pale peachy undertone that sometimes feels like a trick your sun-saturated eyes are playing on you.