Jersey Shore Magazine
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/141619
Home Port My Shore, My Compass j e r s e y s h o r e • s p r i n g 2 0 1 3 H 66 by Christine Menapace ow do you wax poetic about your thumb? You don't. the beach as a child. But this is the reason. It was just You take it for granted. It's not thought about. It's life as we lived it. I had my beach gang, special friends I just always been there. It always will be. It's essential. It's saw only in the summer because they lived in neighborpart of you. It's necessary. Life without it is possible, but ing towns and thus, went to different schools. We were certainly strange to imagine. constantly in motion, all day. Belly boarding in the surf, For me, the beach is like that. A part of me, essential, then running to the bath water temp of the pool, waiting yet often taken for granted. I moved to coastal New Jersey with hordes of other children cascading over the edges of in third grade. Since then the beach has quite literally the pool for adult swim to be over. All of us jumping in at been my compass. I know at any given point where I am once in a chaos of childhood joy. My friend Tori and I playin relation to the ocean. One could say I live in a world of ing "secret spy" with our goggles and laughing underwater boundaries. I can at the women who only drive east so seemed to bob far until boom, like buoys withthat's it, I can't go out actually swimany farther. Others ming. Stopping would say I live life only to drink cold on the edge. The cream soda out of sandy edge of a a sweaty can with massive continent. my legs stretched A place that may out on hot planks have boundaries, of boardwalk. Then but always affords later, my mother you the perspective driving us home, of looking afar into stopping for fresh seemingly limitless corn on the cob stretches of blue sea at the farm marand sky. When you ket. But most of live on the ocean, all the delicious you are constantly feel of slipping my reminded, simply exhausted sunThe author's daughter. by the visuals of kissed little tengeography, that there's a large world out there. year-old self into a cozy sweatshirt of total contentment Perhaps that's why I love to travel: Russia, Africa, once I got home. Europe, Mexico, Costa Rica. So too do many of my friends Later came the teen years and my unisex beach gang who grew up here. But somehow the dunes, the pull of the of fearless belly boarders morphed into a gaggle of silly tide, the drag of shells on sand, always reel us back home. self-conscious girls who had no idea of their stunning I've come to believe sand may have magnetic properties beauty. I see us in every laughing group of girls who stroll to those of us who grew up with it between our toes. For the sand today. The swimsuits may change but the social what significant life event did not eventually lead us to dynamic never does. They always travel in packs, desperate the beach? No prom night was complete without watching to be noticed, but averting their eyes when they are indeed the sunrise. No wedding was official until surf was in the noticed. Because they are of course magnificently beautiphotos. No misery was fully cried out until the jetty was ful in a way they will never truly appreciate or fully realize soaked with salty tears. No new life had truly experienced until many, many years later. The beach is made for them. his world until his toes were dipped in the ocean, his The breeze lifts their long hair while the sand warms their mother holding him aloft like a giant swing. More than a freshly painted toes. place, the beach, your beach, is your personal touchstone. Ah, the romantic life of a coastal teenager! The numerA place of large and small moments. ous covert nighttime beach excursions, sometimes sadly When you grow up on the ocean, the small moments cut short by the cops. The first piece of jewelry I ever accumulate quickly. There is no significance to them. It is received from a boy given to me on the jetty. Nighttime an everyday act to be at the beach. It is not a vacation, it skinny-dipping with girlfriends. Eating hot dogs at the is not special, or noted, or photographed excessively. I'm Windmill. Eating hot dogs at Max's. Having my fortune continued on page 42 always a bit surprised how few photos there are of me at