Life starts at the beach
A friend is anticipating the arrival of a potential romantic interest, to whom he wishes to reveal the glories of Los Angeles. Her plane arrives at LAX in the afternoon, but what to do first?
Take her to the beach, I say. He looks at me as if I were crazy. He is a native Angeleno, and native Angelenos are very weird about the beach.
For some reason, they do not understand that for most of the residents of this country the idea of walking barefoot on a sun-laved beach in the middle of December is nothing short of miraculous. Hand-holding is almost inevitable. Kisses will no doubt follow.
Native Angelenos don’t seem to have quite grasped that many people spend many dollars and many hours in transit each year just for the opportunity to squinch their toes in the sand, maybe do a little body surfing.
Many Angelenos have never seen the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the weeks following local high school graduations or Jones Beach on Labor Day weekend. They may have never met, as I have, perfectly sane and well-educated middle Americans who Have Never Seen the Ocean.
I am from the East Coast, so the Atlantic has, for most of my life, been in reasonable driving distance. By reasonable, I mean, as most Americans probably do when speaking of the beach, under four hours. Then I moved to Los Angeles, and on my first Thanksgiving here, my boyfriend took me for a pre-feast walk on the beach. I stood barefoot in the sand in shirt-sleeves; the sun was so bright it made me laugh out loud, and looking down Washington Boulevard, I could see snow on the San Gabriels. I thought I would die of happiness.
Sure, it’s cozy to gather about hearth and board while the icy trees outside clatter against each other in the wind and the snow fills the sky like fallen stars, but you know what? Most snow doesn’t come in those big lazy lovely flakes. Most snow comes fast and hard, making it difficult to see or even breathe. Cold toes ache and cold fingers burn. After a few days, leaden skies are more depressing than romantic, and icy roads can ruin a holiday in no time flat.
This is why your most enthusiastic L.A. residents often hail from North Dakota, Minnesota and the great state of Wisconsin. These are people who can appreciate a beach. Dude.
The natives, on the other hand, tend to sigh and roll their eyes when a trip to the water is suggested, even in the summer months. Especially in the summer months. It may be 278 degrees in Thousand Oaks, but the beach is “juuust tooooo crooowwwddded.” No parking, so many teenagers, so much noise “and all that fried food everywhere.”
This from a population that made the Galleria a national icon.
Those who live at the beach are often the worst sand snobs around. I know a man, very well since I am married to him, who lived blocks from the beach for years. During the time that we were courting, he went walking on the beach with me exactly three times; the second time, I tried to persuade him to sit with me and enjoy the soothing pulse of the water. “I’ll get sand all over me,” he said, standing in the frozen nonchalance so often adopted by men who have inadvertently wandered into the ladies lingerie department. “Let’s go get tacos.”
But now that he has kids, he has realized that sand has many fine qualities not shared by, say, mud or grape juice. In most cases, sand brushes right off.
It would be easy to say that native and longtime Angelenos are simply spoiled. The beach has always been there, sometimes cleaner, sometimes dirtier -- why get excited about it? But I fear there is more to it than that; I fear they have forgotten their roots.
A natural place to gather
This is a city constantly fretting about public space. Is there enough of it, does everyone have access to it, is it designed well, why don’t we use it more?
Outsiders, especially, love to obsess about their fresh and trenchant theory that this “city lacks a center.” Well, this city is more electron than proton, so its center shifts and changes to keep up with time and culture clutter. This confuses people who come here looking for, inexplicably enough, Trafalgar Square or the Roman walls.
What this city does have, and always will have (the apocalypse notwithstanding) is an edge. Angelenos don’t need a traditional center; in fact we avoid them because they are static, claustrophobic and, more often than not, there’s no comfortable place to sit. At the cocktail party that is American culture, Angelenos tend to hover at the fringes -- we’re the ones flirting with the catering guy, flipping through the host’s mail, arguing in a corner about the integrity of digital animation or playing video games in the kids’ room. This is how we like it -- present, but doing our own thing.
For such a people, the beach is a natural gathering place, the one boundary that must be respected. Here at the edge of earth and water we gather, sharing an experience in which conversation is possible but not required. Here we all are, the city’s glorious smorgasbord made flesh, equal in our vulnerability and our devotion to a force huge and gorgeous and completely indifferent to us.
You cannot keep a beach private, try as some Malibu residents might, any more than you can carve a wave up and mount it on your wall. Here, the line in the sand moves moment to moment and the only constant is communion. Between the elements and people. The beach is like no other place on earth, and we accept that, attempt no comparisons. People who refuse themselves such a place because it is too crowded have no business living in Los Angeles, because this is what Los Angeles is all about.
Oh, in the city with many centers, we run ourselves ragged with things that may or may not matter, but the beach has our back; it will remind us where we stand in the grand scheme of the universe. Barefoot, with any luck, in shirt sleeves, laughing aloud in the middle of winter.
