You Can Keep the Beach

The snow is falling in Southwest Ohio and I’m thrilled to be here instead of with you poor folks who have the misfortune of being on a beach somewhere. Give me the frigid Midwest any day – I hate all things balmy. This stems from the few times I have been to the beach. My experiences there have been characterized mainly by two things: sand-chafing and near-fatal sunburns. I’ll save the sand-chafing for another time.

I was endowed by God with what some would call pasty-white skin. And actually, that phrase really fails to capture the severity of the situation. It is the total absence of color. We’re talking albino-baby-hiney white.

In the summer of ’97, my wife and I drove to Charleston, South Carolina with some friends for the 4th of July. For those of you educated in the West Virginia public school system, South Carolina is a land right next to the big water. Our friends, Jason and Renee, were actually from Charleston, so we stayed with Jason’s parents. No sooner had we arrived than Jason’s dad told us to rest up for a long day at the beach the next day. Oh, goodie.

The word “beach” automatically makes me feel self-conscious, so it was unnerving to see Jason’s mom staring at me with a concerned look on her face. “You’re gonna need sunscreen,” she announced, “Big-time.”

I’m not mentally crippled. I not only have a healthy respect for the sun, but also a realistic understanding of my skin’s propensity to burn. So I didn’t appreciate the obvious advice or that the attention of everyone in the house was drawn to the fact that my skin looked like I’d spent the whole of my days in a cold, damp cave. I had already stocked up on a sunscreen so thick that it came with a putty knife. “I think I’m set,” I replied.

Even though we arose at the crack of dawn to get to the beach as early as possible, every living soul in SC was already there waiting for us when we arrived.

I’d gone swimming in public before so I was accustomed to the usual responses to my whiteness. Some wince. Some point. Some cower. But not a soul misses my arrival. There are the mothers who nudge their small children and remind them it is impolite to stare. There are the buffed teenage boys who openly mock me. There is the 80-year-old man in need of a brassiere, who furrows his brow and proclaims in what he perceives to be a near-whisper, “Holy cow!” And as sure as the sun coming up there is always that one Mother Teresa-type who casts a compassionate, you-poor-thing gaze at me as if I was unrecognizable as a human being. But it’s okay. Everybody needs attention, right?

I applied and reapplied the sunscreen/paste at twenty-minute intervals for the entire day. This was not my choosing. I think I could have gotten away with forty-minute intervals, but Jason’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. I overheard some young men placing wagers about how long I would last until being flown to the burn unit. But to the surprise of everyone in Charleston, eight hours under the scorching sun had done nothing to mute my deathly pallor. It is a testament to the engineers at Johnson & Johnson.

I was feeling rather triumphant as I surveyed my still-pasty flesh before getting dressed to head back to the house. That is, until I glanced at my feet. For some reason that still escapes me, in applying the twenty-five-or-so coats of sunscreen over the course of the day, I had somehow overlooked the tops of my feet. From my ankles to the brown hair on the top of my head, I was as white as a ghost. From my ankles down, I was as red as perdition’s flames.

I looked like a giant, lit cigarette.

The next few days are a bit of a blur, but there is one scene that still plays vividly in my mind from time to time. I see myself sitting on the floor beside the bed the next morning whimpering like a frightened little girl as I try to wish my shoes onto my feet. It was at that moment that I swore to myself I would never again set foot on sand.

Give me a snowstorm any day. You can keep the beach.

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