The Beach Is For The Birds

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE explain the beach to me? What if you’d never seen or heard of a beach and someone suggested you spend your holiday at a place where there’s a large, hot, windy expanse of ground-up stones, bordered by freezing water in such a state of agitation that going near it is like being targeted by Russian police water cannons at an anti-Putin demonstration, except the water has things in it that eat you?

- P. J. O’Rourke

A place where your children will be fried until they blister, burst, and peel like hot dogs left too long on the grill? Would you go there? You would, I discovered, if your wife and kids insisted. So we rented a cottage on the beach.

On is a beach-cottage-rental technical term meaning “closer to the ocean than Cincinnati.” We had to drive to the beach. Or, I should say, we had to drive to the beach parking lot. The beach was north of Boston. The beach parking lot was someplace out near the Lexington and Concord battlefields. An Ironman triathlon is, shall we say, a day at the beach compared with getting to the beach from the beach parking lot carrying a beach umbrella, beach towels, beach toys, beach bags, and a beach picnic in a beach cooler the size of, well, the beach.