Beach Treasures
by Robert P. Barsanti
The other morning I joined some friends in an early beach walk. We were on the south shore traipsing along in the fog. When you walk a beach, you absent yourself from the passage of time. Waves have always battered the shore of the land, whether humans, dinosaurs, or cockroaches walked the shore. Sand has always accepted the beating of the waves, morning, noon, or night. The Visa card payment schedule pales next a rolling set of combers.
I learned the trick of beach walking years ago; don’t walk near the water where the sand is soft, instead walk on the seaweed. I am sure that the elfin youth of little regard can dance like sandpipers along the edge of the sea, but once you become a man of substance, you tend to trudge like a moose. A firm pavement of kelp springs up under you like fresh sneakers.
In the past, when Nantucket was a truckstop between New York and Boston, such a walk would have afforded you a view of some of the finest ocean-going 18 wheelers of the age. Schooners and clippers would cross the horizon several times a day. And, several times a year, one of those trucks would jackknife in the sea and wash up in bales and beams onto the shore. Many of the island homes of that age featured beach treasures either in the roof, attic, or front rooms. Today, you could probably find a few pressure treated 4 x 4’s and some coconut coir rope in the same place.
I have left far more beach treasures than I have found. Shoes, books, clothes, and sandwiches have all been left to the sea or the gulls. By myself, I am absent minded. Add two boys and a supply train of juice boxes, toys, and clothes, and the possibilities of loss grow exponentially. Once I lost my car keys in the sand. While my consort fumed beside me, I walked back to the beach, found where we had been sitting, and, to her amazement, fished the keys out. It would have beeen more amazing had I not been so practiced at it.
The boys have come of an age where they can do many of the things their father can do; they can swim, they can body surf, and they are very good at losing important things in the sand. At the dawn of summer, they went to Sesachacha Pond with the wagon train of supplies. In a spasm of childish delight, they launched a tie-dyed toypedo into the murky water and gave it to time and the turtles.
So, our project for the summer has been a search for the toypedo. We grease the kids up, leave the house in the early afternoon, arrive in Quaise, strap our goggles on, and hit the water. Within a minute, the usual water games commence and the search continues only with our feet. I doubt that our feet will find much; Davy Jones probably has a new pool toy. Still, stranger things have been spit back up from the sea and left on the beach.
A friend and colleague of mine, from long ago, recently popped up on Jetties Beach with her two boys pulling her like kites. We let the children chase each other in the wind around the plover enclosure while we had coffee. Her life was pleasant, her children fun, and her tragedies mundane and human. She lived on St. Thomas, her husband designed wonderful houses
for folks with wonderful bank accounts, and she had switched from teaching adolescents to dribble with their left hands to teaching kindergartners not to dribble. I listened to what she said, but I kept hearing how she spoke and how she laughed.
Our memories do wonderful things, but they can’t keep the whole of experience at our fingertips. We shorten things into brief little tabs and titles, then file it away. When I remembered her, I remembered in shorthand how she looked and what she had done. In the flesh, the short hand became music and the music swelled in her voice. Neither of us wished to travel back into that country of the past (unless it was to buy real estate), but we had both forgotten the treasures we had left there until the sea tossed it back to us.
In July, the island gives many treasures. The strawberries come in the early days of the month, as do the blackberries, and bluefish. The fireworks flash several times over the Sound, the wind turns to the southwest, the waves build, and the oldest continually running windmill occasionally grinds corn.
But I have come to appreciate finding old friends on vacation and walking the streets for a day or a week. I have come to an age when I can find former students, colleagues, and blood enemies walking pleasantly with ice cream cones in their hands and smiles on their faces. As long as they aren’t living in my house for the week, it’s great to meet them. While the times come back, the friendships do as well. The occasional dinner out is a small price to pay to find these folks again and to hear their voices.
However, now that I spend more time off-island, I have learned who the real beachwalkers are. When I come back to the island, I look for the old faces and voices of my past. I walk along the empty beach, next to the same waves that have rolled in, and will roll in, for millions of years. I look for the beach treasures I lost over the decades and wait to see what the sea will return to me, if anything. Home is the place where you wait for your toypedo to come back to you. And sometimes it does.
