Arwen Adams Bicknell

My husband is a mountains guy. I am most avowedly a beach girl.

The first one that I can recall visiting was Zuma Beach as a kid. My parents would load me into the car, sometimes with my uncle, and we would sweat it out in a gray-green Buick over the pass from Mission Hills. But nobody in our house ever got up before daybreak, which meant that by the time we got there, we would have to drive around hoping and stalking and searching for a place to park, and then we would hike from the car to the water with a blanket, chairs, a Thermos of iced tea, maybe a cooler of beer for the grownups. My parents were just starting out and my mother has always been allergic to throwing money around, so there was no getting food from the concession stands, and to this day I have an irrational feeling of hostile envy when I see a kid with a sno-cone. I have vivid memories of gritty peanut butter sandwiches and thermos cups of tea with sand in the bottom of them—it was unavoidable; the wind at the beach is always 90 mph. (In hindsight, it was probably just as well I never got a sno-cone. I probably would have managed one mouthful before calamity ensued.)

Once we had staked a spot by the water, things would calm down a little. My mother—whom I resembled a bit as a tot—was a blonde, bronzed, California stereotype in her bikini and sunglasses and Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil. My Midwestern father—whom I took after in later life—was not so lucky: In the days before 50 SPF sunscreen, his beach days involved ballcaps, long sleeves, blue jeans, and sneakers. I don’t know why he persisted in coming along on those outings; I really don’t.

But for all the discomfort and hassle, the beach was a blast. I loved going. My dad would sit and read and drink an occasional beer while my mom and uncle would body surf and play frisbee and drink a similarly occasional beer. When I was very small, I was plonked down at the shoreline and ordered not to go anywhere unescorted under threat of death (although the adults took turns watching me). But I wanted to be like my mom! I wanted to jump in the waves! I wasn’t so stupid as to think I could surf—and we didn’t have any surfboards anyway—but that kid stuff was so insulting! So my mom took me “body surfing” (in water that was probably up to HER waist) and held me by the wrist while I got my face soundly pounded into the sand and learned that the shoreline was just fine, thanks. I do not recall how many beach days this lesson had to be retaught, but I did eventually get the message. And as I got older and bigger, I was allowed out up to my knees. And then my waist. By the time we left California, I was seven and allowed to go out far enough that I would get washed down the beach a ways with the current and have to walk what felt like 9 miles (but was probably the length a football field) back to our blanket.

Which is a thing to note: Walking in the sand is fun if you’re just in it for a stroll. But it’s also actual work. A walk on the beach is no walk in the park, so to speak. If you’re not moving along the actual shoreline where the water hits land and is packing things down a bit, you’re burning a lot of calories. My mom and uncle used to talk about the Quarter Mile Coronary in Santa Monica, where retirees would head out for a stroll and keel over from the strain. Add that to the fact that things are much farther away than they look, and it is quite possible to wear yourself out long before you reach any sort of goal.

From the ages of seven to 13, we lived in Illinois, between the Mississippi and Rock rivers. Riverbanks have their own romance, but it was not the same at all. I was bigger, the water was calmer, it seemed like I would have to work a lot harder to get hurt or lost. No body surfing, for sure. I don’t actually remember ever trying to swim in either of those rivers—we were generally more concerned with keeping the dog from running off into the woods or the water than we were with actual human pastimes.

When I was in sixth grade, we moved to Tampa and I was introduced to bay beaches. My mom was lazy, so we never drove the hour it would have taken to go to a nice Gulf beach like Clearwater or St. Pete. Instead, we usually went to Picnic Island, which was a nasty place in the 1980s. Lots of hypodermics and garbage. All that noise about Florida’s white-sand beaches? I had decided that was a big fat lie: Picnic island was nothing but a big gravel bed. When I got older and started sleeping over at boys’ apartments, their bathtubs always reminded me of Tampa Bay—filthy, tepid water that is completely unrefreshing, never gets deep enough to serve any purpose, and leaves you dirtier when you get out than you were when you got in. I decided if it wasn’t a California beach, it wasn’t worth the effort. Plus, we moved farther inland when I was 15, which meant going to the beach was once again a bit of an undertaking.

My “meh” attitude lasted until I was 17, when my friend Judi and I would use days with no classes to go to the Real Beaches on the Gulf. (Note, it was never the Gulf of Anywhere for us, if we referred to it at all, it was just “the Gulf”—but more often it was “Clearwater” or “St Pete” or “Indian Rocks.”) Those were some great beach days. Crowded, windy, and sandy, for sure, but the water moved a little, wasn’t 50 degrees but also wasn’t 90, and was kinda fun to swim in. The best part of those days was that security was much laxer than it is today, so before we made the drive home, we would pick some shorefront hotel, saunter into their outdoor pool area, and rinse off. It was fantastic.

Over the ensuing years, I would move back to California and body surf (but never surf-surf) and then decide I was too old because it was too cold. I would spend one weekend looking at the ocean in Ensenada but not swim in it because I didn’t want to mess up my hair. I would move back to Florida and be too busy to play in the water much, but would spend a lot of time at beachy bars and grills, and one time I would see the water in Key West through alcohol-blurred vision. I would walk along the beach in Boston. I would have morning sickness in the middle of the afternoon at the Dead Sea. My parents would move to Orange County and I would take the toddler kid there on vacation to look at the tide pools in Newport. That same toddler would get bigger and sprint along beaches in Oregon and Washington, and at a slightly more advanced age would strip down to his boxers on a beach in Alaska in August and play in the ice-cold water until I worried that his feet would fall off. We have played on beaches in Hawaii and along the entire Eastern Seaboard, and we spent a lot of happy hours in Chincoteague and the Outer Banks. On my last visit with my best friend from college before she died, we went to Asbury Park in the dead of winter and I finally got to see what snow on the beach looked like after wondering for 20 years if it was as magical as it sounded. (Answer: In some ways, yes, in others, no.) And after a lot of years of not getting around to it, the hubs and I saw some Texas coastline, which was also quite lovely.

So why did I retire to Illinois, not a grain of sand in sight? Because that’s where the farmland is. And I have beach vacations to look forward to!