The start of a beach week is always special. But as your week begins, someone else’s is ending. For those heading to a familiar place each year, the annual pictures taken in the same place create a collage of change, of times’ inevitable march forward. Perhaps nowhere else is this as noticeable as the inevitable rise and fall of the tides.
Walking around the streets of Avalon on Saturday morning, you see the weekly renters packing up their cars, hugging family members before the journey home. The months of anticipation, the excitement that marked the start of the journey here, have accelerated to vacation’s end and a more subdued trip home.
For you, the trip is just beginning. But you know that a few days hence, you’ll travel home envying the cars you see packed up and headed toward the shore.
The beach week is filled with a good book, walks on the sand, time in the cool water and a slower pace of escape. The tides rise and fall with the rhythmic crash of waves. The seagulls’ shrill cries overhead remind us that we’re here at the water’s edge once again.
In the early morning, there are few people and it is mostly quiet. A few surfers head into the water. Some people set up chairs, staking an early claim on their beach territory for the day. The rest of their crew will follow later with canopies, coolers and beach toys in wagons they wheel to their spot.
Here and there people are surf fishing. Further down the beach a lone osprey circles above the water. All at once she rises straight up before a sharp turn downward directly into the water and emerging with something in her mouth that she quickly gulps down mid-flight. Within a minute other ospreys are in the area. A few hundred yards farther down the beach, the arching fins of dolphins are swimming south. They start circling to feed on fish. In the distance, a fishing boat is headed out for an early start.
Back up the path to the house the lifeguards are assembling for a meeting before another beautiful day. They call roll “Martin, McDonald, O’Reilly, Parker…..”
For them it may be another day of work, but for others it is a special day of vacation. The lifeguards are a part of a whole community that largely exists to support a tourism industry that peaks for just a short period of time marked by Memorial Day and Labor Day.
The town has changed quite a bit. Forty-five years ago when we first came here the town was full of small beach bungalows: an affordable escape drawing middle-class families from places like Lehigh Valley and the Philly suburbs. Professors and teachers, who had entire summers off back in the days before email and cell phones, could decamp to the shore for weeks at a time.
Professionals from Philly had their families stay there all summer and commuted to the shore every Thursday night before returning early Monday mornings. Even now on the early Monday morning walk you can see people in business attire throwing a bag into the back seat before getting into their cars and heading home for the work week.
Across time, there are still some constants. They’re still serving up great breakfasts at The Fishin’ Pier Grille and the 29th Street Deli at the Avalon Supermarket still has phenomenal hoagies. The Princeton and the Windrift in Avalon and Fred’s Tavern in Stone Harbor are all still there, but they, like so many other places, have been updated.
But as times changes, so too did the town. Bigger money, bigger houses and bigger attitudes are here now.
So too has the family dynamic for summer vacation. Travel youth sports teams and a slew of scheduled summer activities make it nearly impossible for families to find even one week to get away together. Maybe we’ve lost something without a week when a family has to go away together to create smiles, laughs and build connective memories. For a time in my own life, I lost almost a decade between visits to Avalon. Then on a July Wednesday phone call in 2011, my mother asked what plans we had for the weekend.
“It’s just your dad and me down here. Why don’t you guys bring the kids down?”
So we did. And that Saturday, like he did every day he was in Avalon, my father would walk the beach early in the morning and then walk again around 5 p.m. after the lifeguards and the crowds had left for the day. I can still see him speedily walking across the sand toward the kids. At age 84, he was still walking 6 or 7 miles a day.
That day, he sat down to watch my kids play at the water’s edge. The late afternoon sun gave the water a dark blue hue and bathed the smiling kids in a glorious aural glow. It was the first time our five kids had been to the beach with my parents; the first time my father had seen them there. It would also be the last. There was no way to know that cancer would be discovered four months later.
And so as a family packs up at a beach week’s end, they do so looking toward the next trip, with the hope that they will all be here again for the moments that bind them together across the years. And if they are present in the moment, they can capture so much more than a snapshot to mark time’s passage.
