October 25, 2016

And this mighty swayed bough of the lake

Rocks cool where the morning hath smiled;

While the dim, misty dome of the world scarce awake

Blushes rose, like the cheek of a child

-William Wilfred Campbell, Morning on the Beach

xxx

I’ve been thinking about the idea of the “beach” itself, mulling over its connotations. I find that is has become a rather domesticated term. When one hears the word beach, I think the most common images that spring to mind are those of white sand, clear bathtub-warm blue water, colorful umbrellas and beach towels, kids shaping castles out of plastic buckets, adults drinking beer out of ill-disguised water bottles and Pepsi cans. The word beach has abandoned its wild origins for more groomed and tame connotation. If one wants to describe a cold, craggy place where the land meets the sea, they might say it is a “shore” or a “coastline” before saying it’s a beach.

My parents are from South Africa, and they have a clear definition of what constitutes a “real beach”: white sand, big waves, in a sunny hot part of the world. I think this view is common to most in our society: the beach is the place we see in movies set in California or Australia, where people surf and sunbathe and fall flightily in love for the summer. My poor gray beach seems a different species entirely from these conceptual paradises. Though the word “beach” technically connotes the concept of something that occurs naturally in the wild, it is often associated today with manicured sites of tourism and carefully-managed recreation. So I interest myself today in how beaches (in our culture at least) came to mean more a type of paradise, and less the natural phenomena which they are.

I found an essay at the history.ac.uk website called The seaside resort: a British cultural export, written by John K. Walton, a professor at University of Central Lancashire. The essay traces the origins of beach resorts back to the 1720s, where they had their start in Whitby and Scarborough. As the “upper strata of eighteenth-century English society” became increasingly concerned with their health, convinced that industrialism was a poison only nature could cure, the inherent restorative powers of the ocean accounted for the increased popularity of the seaside resort in the 20^th century, where it played “a central role in the development of tourism as a great international industry”. Carefully maintained beaches and seaside parks grew in popularity around the world, as people believed time spent in and near the sea served as a physical and mental cleansing experience, a belief that survives to this day. (10)

I drew several parallels between Walton’s essay and the Tina Loo essay I read for class. As Loo points out in her essay, the creation of parks and hunting grounds aimed to satisfy the bourgeois desire for a “sportsman’s paradise”. Members of hunting clubs manipulated wilderness to better serve the requirements of their sport. Within these sites of carefully-maintained nature, hunters believed their “wild” surroundings to be inherently healing and transformative, purging their spirits of the toxins of modernity and industrialism.  (11)

This belief is shared by seaside vacationers. Our idea that nature purifies rings especially true in oceans. We perceive them as possessing a natural resilience to human materialism and intervention. We can’t cement over the ocean, and from the shore we can’t see the pollution, the damage wrought by thousands of oil spills and garbage tankers, the way we would see litter and chopped trees during a forest walk or mountain hike. We can imagine the waves we hear having sounded the same at the time of Earth’s creation, we can imagine the salt we smell in the air as coming straight off rocks that have existed for thousands of years. This quality of immortality and constancy sends people flocking to the seaside when they feel the pressures of modern life squeezing them breathless. Beach resorts owe their popularity to our shared sense that simply being in the presence of moving water can wash away our earthly troubles, leaving us rejuvenated and renewed. And even though Willow’s Beach lacks the manicured attractiveness and warmth of most of these resorts, I still walk there when I am stressed over a deadline or family problem. We have been very critical in our class of people who see nature as a balm to what ails us, but at the end of a tough day, the sound of waves breaking over rocks soothes me. No amount of critical thinking can reduce that.