Early Western physiology held a theory that the human body
is made up of four humours—earth, air or wind, water, and fire—with no mention
of sand or beaches. I began my life with close ties to the first of the above
humours (earth or dirt). For most of my young life, once a month, we drove to
Fernwood, just outside of McComb, Mississippi, to visit my grandmother who
lived much of her life working the earth as a sharecropper’s wife. As children,
we judged a good day at play by the amount of dirt in the bathtub at the end of
the day. The red clay of the piney woods of Southern Mississippi runs deep in
my blood, in spite of all of those childhood baths.
In my early childhood in South Louisiana, Daddy added water
to the mix of humours, making the hybrid humour of mud. We boated on local
rivers and vacationed every year at Lake Bruin in north Louisiana, spending
entire days in, on, and near the water. Only our suntans prevented us from
turning into human prunes. Daddy bought a motor boat, and we learned to water ski.
Locally, we spent a lot of time on False River, an oxbow lake near Baton Rouge.
Ultimately, Daddy bought a small camp on False River where we swam and fished
off the pier, and he barbecued long past the time when his motor boat pulled
its last skier.
Yet my life was still effectively bereft of an inner beach. Occasionally,
we went to the man-made beaches of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Locally, in the
summer we spent time at a tourist attraction, Thunderbird Beach, a combination
of carnival rides and beach. In college, occasionally we would drive to the
beaches of Pensacola. (Of course, beaches were secondary there.)
As an adult, as my quest for my inner beach continued, I
moved away from the mud humour and back toward the earthy humour. I became a
dedicated gardener, over the years planting kitchen gardens, edible flower
gardens, ornamental flower gardens, and serious vegetable gardens. One year
during my serious gardening phase, I fed myself all summer from my garden. That
experience with self-sufficient gardening taught me that I did not want to
follow that ideal dream of many hippies, after all, of buying a farm and living
off the land. Serious gardening is physically demanding work! These days,
modifying the old Greyhound Bus motto, we patronize farmer’s markets and leave
the gardening to them. Still, I did not find my inner beach, in spite of the
sandy soil of some of my gardens.
During this earthy, unbeachy time, I still dabbled in water.
We took yearly kayaking trips at my family reunion. Inspired by these trips, I
bought a kayak about 10 years ago and did some kayaking on local lakes.
After living 20 years in the mountains of Upstate New York, I
finally found my way to the beach humour. Water and wind erode rock (which is
not an original humour, although some people have rocks in their heads) to make
sand. When you combine water and sand, you get beaches. At Schroon Lake, we
have our own strand of strand, where I craft themed sand castles, depending on
my whim.
In 2015, the beach humour in my life greatly expanded when
we spent four weeks on the Atlantic Ocean at Folly Beach, South Carolina.
Finally, I found my inner beach. In my next beach-themed blog, I will write
about living with my inner beach.
The companion piece to this blog entry, “Beach,
the metaphor,” relates an experience in which a summer school student finds
her inner beach.
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