The icon of my childhood summers was a briny stretch of sand scant feet from our shingled rental cottage about a mile out from the beach town of Chatham, Massachusetts—which in my youth consisted of little more than a post office, a general store with a soda fountain and rack of comics, and a shop filled with lobster traps, maritime tchotchkes, and driftwood. It exuded rustic unpretentiousness.
We answered Chatham’s beachy call for four weeks every summer, all tumbling into the family car—four kids and our parents—for the 12-hour ride to Cape Cod. The cadence of those summers was exquisite. Think swimming, sailing, burying ourselves in waterlogged sand, and scavenging for periwinkles, horseshoe crabs, and other marine creatures (though 1 failed to persuade my mother to keep a small, beached sand shark as a pet).
I remember rainy nights and sunburned mornings. Family charades and drowsing off to the sounds of the ocean. Being mesmerized by the oyster shuckers’ deftness at Thompson’s Clam Bar and entranced by the slap of the waves, Beatles tunes, the pungent smell of dune life, and the tasty comfort of clams and lobster boiled on a gas range in our sand-strewn cottage.
Chatham and its ocean fringes offered a life as simple as sunrise. Now I take my children to a different beach town, with the hope that they will create their own sandy memories. For your own taste of the shore, see our celebration of a handful of great American beach towns on page 44- (One of them happens to be Orleans, about ten miles north of Chatham.) Go wiggle your toes in the sand and take pleasure in the fact that the essential beach experience endures—if you know, as we do, where to find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment