The Sweltering Beach Pilgrimage

A Southern rite of passage...

I’ve been covering some pretty weighty topics lately. And I have some more to come soon. So I felt as if I owed you something a bit lighter.

Southerners go to the beach. They go every summer and they go like devotees of a religion which views salt, sand and sun as sacraments. When I was a child, it was the habit of my family to go to North Myrtle Beach, SC; often to the area called Cherry Grove. Now, while the ‘Via de la Myrtle’ is a kind of holy journey to many, I know that it isn’t for everyone. Others in the South, and all across Appalachia, have their own favored spots where they go to bake in the relentless summer sun. All I can do is assume that there are parallels, so I give deference to all of those who go to Wilmington or Nags Head, NC; to Destin or Panama City, Florida. But “as for me and my house,” we were devotees of North Myrtle Beach.

I grew up in West Virginia, as I have previously stated. The connection between West Virginia and Myrtle Beach is more than geographic; it is almost legal. My brother-in-law who was living in WV as a young man once had a cell-phone service that included Myrtle Beach as a local call. When I came back to West Virginia to work, my wife and I were looking at local gyms. Clerks would say, “where are you moving from?”

“South Carolina,” we smiled.

“Why?” the asked, genuinely puzzled at our break in interstate protocol.

In truth, it may be biological. Like salmon whose line have spawned in the same streams for untold ages, people from the Mountain State find Myrtle Beach nearly irresistible. I suspect that West Virginians may actually have a gene segment that causes this behavior. (And also like salmon, no doubt a lot of our fellow West Virginians have been spawned in the assorted hotels, motels, dunes and camp-grounds of the Carolina coast.)

Exhausted, broke, dangerously ill, afflicted with lung and heart disease, we will do everything in our power to put chairs in the sand of that overpriced Carolina garden-spot and watch the children play and scream like animals in the surf.

As I child I recall traveling with my folks, eating lavish breakfasts (which I seldom did in normal life) and shopping in busy, colorful beach stores where mysterious and tragically painted hermit crabs climbed the walls of cages and begged for the sweet release of death.

Every year we purchased a new inflatable float which would be used for one season to float in shallow, non-threatening waves (Dad played in the waves a bit, but my mother was always terrified of the water and I leery of the ocean then…and now. Thanks “Jaws”).

The raft would then go home and be rolled up and tucked away in a box next to Christmas decorations or old toys; I doubt if any of them ever returned to the sea. Each year’s hermit crab would survive a while, then cross over the Poseiden’s bridge and be buried in decidedly non-aquatic West Virginia soil. (Although, there used to be oceans there in epochs past, so maybe it was full circle.)

In high school Myrtle Beach took on new meaning. Some kids, some cool kids, went to a dance club called Mother Fletcher’s, which served BEER! You had to be 18 (the drinking age then) or have a fake ID to get into that place, located next to the great entertainment monstrosity called The Pavilion. A Mother Fletcher’s t-shirt conveyed enormous status in the high school social hierarchy. No, as a matter of fact I never did have one; thanks for opening that scab! I think my wife did, but she was much cooler than me back before we met.

Perhaps more important to some (well, to me) was the ability to obtain fireworks. Beautiful, dangerous fireworks! Bottle rockets, mortars, M-80s, sparklers, long strings of firecrackers. Brought home like holy relics from Jerusalem, these were worth their weight in…well, not gold but respect. (Yes, I have all of my fingers but I did once discover that modeling clay on a firecracker, with BBs embedded, made a tiny fragmentation grenade.)

My memories of those times are treasures. And I have continued to accrue them as an adult with my wife and children, and our extended family.

This year we spent a week in Cherry Grove, SC at a beach house right across the road from the calming and slightly E Coli infested Atlantic ocean. We met Jan’s family there. Her father, her brothers and sister, our kids and our nephews and nieces arrived and left in various shifts of a few days (adult kids are like that…you take what you can get). We enjoyed one another enormously, resting and eating in the standard, tall rental house on stilts, three stories high.

I was initially concerned that I wouldn’t have a chance to stay in shape by running; it turns out that going up and down the stairs all day every day was more than enough. Up and down, up and down and before long I was actually in better shape then when I arrived. Although I did gain probably 100 pounds because I couldn’t stop eating cookies and chips. So maybe it was a wash…

Of course, we indulged in what we always do at the beach, which is ridiculous amounts of fresh local seafood. By which I mean, it was once local somewhere, but then most of it was flown from that local to local stores in South Carolina. Sure, some of it was from the nearby waters, like the shrimp, but most of it wasn’t. And we sure didn’t eat oysters because there’s no R in July, after all!

A beach trip is always a time of epiphany to me. This year was no different. This year I realized (or was reminded) that after a certain age, beach attire is just…how shall I say it? Unattractive.

I am not throwing stones in a glass house. I put on my trunks, put on my t-shirt, slipped on my flip-flops and realized that there was nothing attractive at all about my appearance. At the ripe (and glad to be here) age of 60 years, I might be better served in a monk’s robes than in flowered swimming trunks and a tank top, stretched across my slightly protruding abdomen. (It’s why I prefer winter clothes. They cover a lot of sins…like gluttony.)

Most men, who have brought children and spouses to Myrtle Beach, are in the same boat. We understand one another. We nod as we pass. “Hot out here, ain’t it!” We brought our women with us; we didn’t come to find love, we have love. If those women didn’t love us they wouldn’t be seen in public with us in our camouflage hats, cheap sandals and “I am Groot” t-shirts.

So we put those embarrassing clothes on our unhealthy bodies, spray on some cancer preventative coating, load up a bag of stuff we won’t use, drag a couple of beach chairs and ‘flap flap flap flap’ across asphalt the temperature of a jet-engine onto sand the temperature of the earth’s core, then plop down to see how long we can endure it. Why? We do it because it’s nostalgic and fun, and the families laugh and play while our wives who always manage to look adorable, and who worship the sun, can read novels about buff, romantic Highlanders for hours, unperturbed, while we men feel the skin peel away like some old saint being flayed alive. Ah the beach!

That was my epiphany for this year’s beach trip. Maybe it’s not that I wish I looked better; maybe it’s just that I don’t like getting older. But I still have a beautiful woman and kind, smart children who love me. (So pass me the danged Oreos, OK? Yeah, double stuffed, what are we, animals?)

The trip was, as always, a win. We cooked and napped, read books and told stories, we played cards and discovered that our nieces are scary good card players. And we learned that it’s just possible Jan’s dad made a lot of money playing pool in his younger years. A thing he just laughed off…

We were also pulled into the mystical vortex of miniature golf. For most of the year we live happy lives without mini-golf, but take us to Myrtle Beach and we absolutely have to knock a golf ball around suggestively posed lady pirate statues and great plastic dinosaurs viciously guarding holes like they were nests. If I were betting, I’d say the dinosaurs may have gone extinct, thanks to some Bermuda Triangle magic, by choking on multicolored golf-balls knocked into their gullets by over-heated vacationers sweltering in the night under florescent lights, surrounded by shockingly unnatural blue water where tiny turtles are being blissfuly poisoned.

Ultimately, I think the great gift of the beach and the beach house is that it gives us a few days of blessed proximity to the people we love the most. Soaking in their smiles and voices, their hugs, their laughter and hearing about their adventures from the past year. That’s worth the price of admission every time.

In time all of the families drifted off on our separate ways, back to normal life, back to the sweltering summer in Appalachia, sans beach. Still warm but not as soothing, as we can now look forward to the chilly 89 degrees of Septenber.

I suspect that as long as we’re above the ground, we’ll find some way to drift back to North Myrtle Beach, or the general area. We’re Mountaineers afflicted with the shore. And it’s just who we are. But we have learned not to buy any more hermit crabs…

But hey, there are worse things than going to that beloved and now cluttered coast. Like Methamphetamine, or Lyme Disease. Or spending too much time at Disney World. (I kid, I kid! Sort of…)

Later I’ll talk to you about our stop at Buc-ees’ in Florence, SC. I love big America, but I do have some things to say about an excess of beaver themed products…

Edwin