Notes from the beach

When I was seven-almost-eight, we went to Corfu for a holiday. (It's a Greek island, sort of shaped like a seahorse, mostly off the coast of Albania. My father pointed across the sea and told me that I was looking behind the iron curtain, but I didn't know what he meant.) It was the first time I'd been on a plane since I was two, the first trip abroad (apart from to England, which doesn't count) that I could recall, and it left me with a host of wonderful memories that were purely my own, not merely things recounted by others or pasted into a photo album that I might think were half memory, half family lore.

Will Dash remember our trip to the beach this summer like that? Is it sufficiently different from daily life? Is he old enough? What will be the parts that stick, that live forever in his mind and come back with startling recall?

Last week I sat on the sand where the waves came in, showing my children how to dig a moat around a sandcastle and wait for the water to fill it. I showed them how to make mud pies with their hands, how to wriggle their feet down into the sand as the ocean recedes, how to turn their backs to the waves so they don't get splashed in the face. By our third day on the beach, I watched my son wander away a little (a very little) on his own, intent on collecting smoothed shell particles, dragging out a channel in the sand with his heel. I showed his sister that I could write her name in the sand, and how the ocean would erase it mercilessly. It was all new to them, and I was the keeper of wonderful discoveries. 

The sea has always been a part of my life, since I grew up with a view of Dublin Bay from my bedroom window (up a hill, half a mile or so from the coast). My school was so close to the sea that  seagulls would wheel outside our windows looking for scraps of sandwich. When bored (or just plain lost) in maths class, I could gaze out at the horizon, watching a cargo ship make its way slowly across the bay, or the ferry head off to Wales from nearby Dun Laoghaire. 

When I was feeling antsy and adolescent, full of pent-up stuff, and the need to be great, or do something, or justify my lonely existence [dramatic flounce], I'd walk briskly to the harbour road and pick my way down to the rocks, where I could sit with nothing further between me and the small island just off our shore. The Irish Sea is not a very pretty or spectacular one - it's not the romantic, exotic Pacific; the sparkling, freezing Atlantic; or the softly lapping Mediterranean - but it has its moods of grey stillness or glorious blue-green or angry energy all the same. I'd sit there until the swell had taken my feverishness and smoothed me over, and then I'd walk up the hills home again.

I've always been drawn, when looking at maps, to the end places. The tips of land, the pointy bits. So when I first saw the Outer Banks, those long sandbars down the coast of North Carolina, punctuated by lighthouses, I decided we should go and visit them some day. Of course, when we got there my somewhat romantic expectations of a verdant and windswept isle were somewhat dashed - after all, one long sandy beach is pretty much the same as another, whether it's Brittas Bay or South Padre Island in Texas or Duck, NC - and with two small children in tow, we didn't get to drive as far as any of the lighthouses, to find out what these particular end points of the world looked like.

But still. I introduced my children to this side of the Atlantic Ocean, the other side of which laps up against such hospitable shores as Roundstone and Achill Island and Dingle, sites of my own family holidays many moons ago (and not in Greece). I showed them how to make mud pies and moats, and they tasted the salt water for themselves and watched the sand crabs scuttle as the waves receded. It's enough.