The Waters Wide

The Santa Monica Pier doesn’t rate very high in anyone’s travel guides to America--maybe not even of Santa Monica--but here, for the price of parking, you can watch the end of a great migration.

This, the end of Interstate 10, is where landlocked travelers come for their Balboa moment, when they first lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean--which turns out to be quite a bit bigger and bluer than “Baywatch” made it appear back in Indiana. Fresh from their tinted-window rental cars and custom vans, they blink and cower from the sun like coal miners.

For someone who has never seen the ocean, this is no small life moment. The effect is amplified in Santa Monica, where, because of the bay’s geography, the sea doesn’t just lie flat on the horizon but seems to rise up and tilt forward, like wine coming at you in a glass. A lot of people just stand there and stare, their shins glinting in the sun.

The finish line is not the pier, of course, but the water. Shoes in hand, they negotiate the last hundred yards of sand in bare feet. Only when they are knee-deep in the green-white surge does it seem they have finally arrived. Splashdown.

There is a choreography to all this, even a kind of ritual: Inevitably, men baptize themselves with a little seawater on the backs of their necks and steal a glance at the sun, as if getting their bearings in a world that’s just gotten a lot bigger. Is this a mannerism we’ve picked up from some old movie? Did Gary Cooper rub water on his neck just so? Did Balboa do the same?

Keep watching. Every few minutes you will see pale-skinned parents chasing kids running hellbent for the surf as though they mean to drown themselves.

Touching the waters of a place is the final sacrament of travel, a confirmation of arrival so widely practiced that a whole industry has sprung up to support it--call it tourism on the edge. I was in Scotland last summer, in a place called John O’Groats, a wind-blistered village whose entire reason for being is to support visitors’ communion with the North Sea at the northernmost point of the British mainland. There, as in Key West, Fla.--southernmost point in the continental U.S.--is a marker where travelers can have their picture taken.

I stood for my picture but was left unsatisfied, so I wandered over the dune grasses leveled by the wind and onto the white strand, walking until the North Sea surf filled my boots.

The world is full of such places, catering to “pushpin” travelers like me--people who mark their geographic conquests on maps. Every year, thousands make the long and difficult trip to Tierra del Fuego at the austral tip of South America, an ice-bitten, unsheltered end-of-nowhere at 54 degrees southern latitude, more hospitable to puffins than people.

Crazy, right? I’m going in October. There ought to be something grand and high-minded to say about such a trip--something about possessing the world. And don’t we all want it to revolve around us? But the fact is, travel also has a lot in common with basement-bound hobbies such as stamps or toy trains, the methodical collecting of superlatives, the oddest and the rarest, for their own sake. I’ll earn that pushpin when I put my hand in the Drake Passage.

My map of the world has pins all over. One winter solstice I was in Kirkenes, a remote mining town on the rimed tip of northern Norway. The midday sky shuddered with the aurora as I drove to the shore of the Barents Sea, onto a vast, silent rock peninsula, so black and glossy it was like sitting on a whale’s back. Across the water I could see the lights of the Russian submarine pens. I scooped up a film canister of ice-scaled foam and headed back. Been there. Done that.

Travelers are skeptics. It isn’t enough to see the bronze statue of Juliet in a courtyard in Verona; it must be touched, or even groped (uncountable hands have polished Juliet’s breasts bright). Snapshots and souvenirs fill closets. The felt memory in your hands never goes away. Touch authenticates. And where water is the defining essence of a place--the Dead Sea, Niagara, the Hellespont--you have to get wet.