Every time I go to the beach these days, I can only think about climate change and how much plastic is floating around in and across vast swaths of the ocean. A PBS documentary I once barely caught the end of informed me that the sea's complex currents turn all our detritus into its own island somewhere off the coast of Indonesia. Garbage Island or whatever. I don't remember. Someone shared on Twitter the other day news that some VC out in Mountain View is launching a plan to develop Garbage Island into salable land. Environmental Timesharing is what he's calling it. We've built on garbage before, he claims. Many landfills have been turned into successful parks and nature preserves. I recall the jungle gym at a park just outside the dump where my dad used to take his busted appliances and other junk. One time my sister cried when my dad got rid of an old Hoover. She just hates change, my mother said.
There used to be a time when I went to the beach and didn't think about climate change at all. I only started thinking about it after I'd been to college, where one grows up enough to realize it's your future that's going to burn. At first you're resentful of your parents for birthing you in the 90s and going on all those road trips. Then you realize climate change is a systemic problem that won't be fixed until capitalism is overthrown. This is very comforting. Before I started thinking about climate change, I considered the beach to be boring. In the liminal years between childhood and adulthood during which one pretends not to enjoy the pleasures of either younger or older people, I didn't have anything tangible to need relaxing from. A child finds delight in all elements of the beach, in the constructive properties of sand, in the sea life skittering beneath the gray-green waves, in swimming just as an activity. An adult uses the sound of the sea pushing and pulling its contents across the sand to return to some kind of primeval state of being which is a fancy way of saying 'a time before cellphones.' People sell plaques and pillows at stores called "Vacations #20" that say "Beach Vibes." The vibes probably have something to do with the calming machinations of the tides. Perhaps also with beer.
My mother is an expert beach-goer. She lathers herself up and bathes under the sun for hours, sleeping or reading. I can't do that. My back gets sore and after an hour or so I become too concerned about skin cancer. I don't find the sun beating down on me relaxing, plus the wind keeps me from realizing just how toasted my fragile dermis is getting. Maybe relaxing is anathema to me. I've always had to be doing something at all times. That's why on this trip outside I plop down a rusty folding chair from the beach rental's garage and read Naomi Klein. This does not alleviate the anxiety about climate change. I go inside and exchange Naomi for Sally Rooney who is at least funny. Several other people on the beach are also reading Sally Rooney because of the new Netflix show. I don't like this book either. Every Sally Rooney novel I've read is about being justifiably alienated from yourself and others and behaving all solipsistic-like around your ostensibly left-wing friends. I reject solipsism and do not feel alienated around my friends. I find the assumption that everyone of my generation can be distilled into the kind of people Sally Rooney writes about mildly offensive. I wish I had a third book to read. It occurs to me that maybe I'm just unhappy. I pull out my phone from the beach bag in search of Twitter. There's sand in between the case and the device. A part of me feels the urge to throw the whole apparatus into the ocean, to contribute, in my small way, to Garbage Island.
My dad's been sitting in the rental house all day watching TV. He's got a scar on his chest from where he had heart surgery a couple of years ago. My sister runs out in her Volkswagen Beetle to grab Chinese food for lunch. She, with some irony, put those stupid car eyelashes on her headlights which make me laugh every time. After she returns, we open fortune cookies. Mine says "Someone will love you when you're twenty-three." I'm twenty-seven. There's a miniscule QR code in the corner of the strip of paper. It turns out the fortune cookies are guerrila advertisements for some teen singer's new album. Dad goes downstairs to take a nap. My mom and my sister clean up the mess. I take out the trash. When me and my sister were little girls, my mom used to take us to this cheap resort in Myrtle Beach called the Sea Mist. We'd fill Walmart bags full of mini cereal boxes and Little Debbie Honey Buns and share a suite with my mom's friend and her kids. Last time I heard, the friend's little boy worked at the county jail and the girl died after falling asleep at the wheel in the middle of the night. For two months after I got the news, I was afraid of every car that passed too close to the sidewalk.
During those old beach trips, we'd take 95 South for about four hours in my mom's fat Buick Roadmaster. Past all those racist fluorescent Pedro signs for South of the Border, a tourist trap marking, via a tall tower topped with a fiberglass sombrero, the border between North and South Carolina. The Buick had these third-row bench seats which we dubbed "all the way in the back-back." The seats faced the rear windshield. Some time in the early 2000s the safety regulators found out that those kind of seats killed more kids than usual because they didn't have airbags and were banned. This was before the government used 9/11 and the economy to stop banning things that caused harm.
At the Sea Mist, there were many swimming pools and water parks. One water park was more a wading pool with various attractions for kids who couldn't swim yet. Red and yellow concrete mushrooms that rained from their edges. Unsatisfying kiddie slides. Regular playground equipment that just so happened to be submerged in two feet of water. Surrounding the park was a brief, unmotorized lazy river you had to get out of to go to a bigger more sprawling pool, five feet deep at the far end. Signs posted around yelled No Diving but those words were intended for adults, not for the small-enough children who could still plunge into the relative depths with impunity. I was one of them. I used to be so light in the water, so athletic, capable of retrieving all kinds of diving rings and weighted neon-colored sticks even without goggles, my eyes impervious to chlorine. I was so utterly unafraid of drowning. Now when the ocean gets up to my hips my heart flutters and I no longer see the point in swimming.
One of the last years we went down to the Sea Mist, we stayed in the middle of the complex, insulated from the big pool and the kiddie park. The resort had a kidney-shaped indoor pool caged in a solarium that nobody used unless it rained. Surrounding it were wooden troughs filled with plastic plants. Everything echoed in there, a soundscape best described as "sloshy." A child is delighted by the idea of an indoor pool because 'indoors' and 'pool' don't really go together and the concept feels mildly transgressive. Children are also unconcerned with the inherent problems of maintenance and mold and air circulation that come with putting a shit ton of water in a tightly-enclosed space. My sister almost drowned in that pool once but my mom jumped in to save her. I wanted to be the sole recipient of my parents' attention and didn't much care for my sister when I was younger and yet I was always afraid something would happen to her, especially at the beach.
Outside the solarium, I discovered my favorite of the several pools. I didn't understand what point it served or why it was there. It seemed like the resort planners just plopped a pool in some extra square footage because they had it. The pool was three feet deep from end to end, a plain, dumb rectangle bordered with equally plain navy blue tile. Surrounding it, a phalanx of stately sixties No-Globe lamps, big white orbs on black poles, each beaming a soft radiant light. At night, they held guard in an almost funereal fashion. No one ever went in that pool. There were better pools. Maybe that's why I liked it. While others were in the water parks, I went to that pool several times, swimming from one end to the other for purposes unknown, perhaps just to be the only one there. Two lonely things converging. I can still remember the chlorine smell, small child-feet grazing the pale blue paint of the concrete, wax-plugged ears listening to the chop, chop, chop of the doggy-door filter. Thinking of nothing. Not of the other children, not of climate change, not of how my mom told me I would soon begin growing breasts, not of the inconceivable vastness of the future, not of the ostensible purposes of beachgoing. Nothing. I merely looked up at the fronds of the palms, felt the chemical water carry my body. Each time I made a lap, I counted every one of the eight globes, four on each side of the pool.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And back again.
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