Soul Place

My friend, Betsy, wrote a beautiful post on our email list about the power of place for her in her mountain home in the Carolinas. She is drawn to the mountains the way I am drawn to the ocean, finding peace and serenity in the nature that the mountains hold in their rugged embrace.

I am a water girl, a true Aquarian. I was raised in a city on Long Island Sound and from the earliest days, I found solace and release in the water, swimming in the gentle waves, diving down deep and doing somersaults, jumping off the float and seeing how far I could swim before scalding lungs made me surface.

When I wasn't in the water, I was smoothing my beach towel on the pier, pulling out yet another book, and propping my head up on my beach bag. Sometimes I just applied my Bain de Soleil and lay on my stomach and smelled the clean laundry smell of the towel, felt the grit of sand on my cheek and heard the buzz of people and noise fade out and the sound of the ocean and gulls crying take over.

The highlight of each summer was our family trip to Jones Beach. We were five kids and my parents had no money for vacations. But once a summer we went to Jones Beach. I'd wake up at 5:00, scanning the sky for troublesome clouds. My mother packed the enormous aluminum coler with sandwiches, grapes, and brownies, and Dad gassed up the Plymouth the night before. We always left insanely early at 7:00 a.m. because of the traffic.

Gong to Jones Beach, a long, state park created by Robert Moses on the south shore of Long Island, was physically taxing to all. Dad had to battle the traffic and overheated cars, and we all had to drag the cooler, chairs, umbrellas, and other sundries across what seemed like miles of hot sand. But the water, oh, the water! It was so different from our back water cove on the Sound. This was the Ocean! It had waves and undertow and huge breakers. It took nerves of steel to rush into the frigid water, get past the point where the waves could crash and drag you under into a green world of foaming confusion, and out to the calm, bobbing waters where you could float and ride the swells like a ride at Playland.

It was always over too soon as Dad would want to get home Before The Traffic. One time we had to leave as soon as we arrived because he burned his hand lighting his pipe and had to go to the emergency room. As I sat in the hot car on the way home, pressed against my sisters in their wet and sandy suits, my hair sticky and itchy, I would ask if we couldn't go back again this year. "We"ll see" was always the response, but we never did.

Later at night, I finally had my turn in the bathtub, and Solarcaine was applied to the sunburns we all had. I felt clean and totally exhausted and as I pressed my face into my white pillow, I could still feel the waves lifting me up and slowly letting me down. Up and down, up and down, I rode the waves in my bed feeling the ocean in my veins.

My husband and I are both ocean lovers now. We satisfy our longing for water and sand by our summer vacations on the Cape. But in between, we go to the beach. We rarely go to Jones Beach now, preferring to drive another twenty minutes to a less crowded park. My husband likes to go insanely early also. Only he likes to stop and make breakfast on a camper stove. We scramble eggs and perk coffee, and sit in the early morning quiet, watching the white herons gracefully picking their way through sea grass like Egyptian priests. My kids eat quickly, begging us to pack up and move to the beach side. Their boogie boards sit at out feet and they are anxious to conquer the waves and they've had enough of this quiet contemplation on morning. Soon we are setting up the umbrellas, applying lotion to small backs, and watching as they are lured out past the waves.

I have a nice camp chair I use now instead of a towel, but I still find a time in the day to shut my eyes, pull my cap over my face and drift off from the day, and feel the swells lift me up and into the ocean. Soon enough my husband announces it is time to go Before The Traffic.