MANY of us have childhood memories of the beach. For members of the baby boom generation, who grew up in the golden age of American beach culture, those images are typically idyllic: pure, clean sands, peaceful, paradisiacal. I myself was born a bit earlier, and my own recollections of the beach — at Atlantic City on the Jersey Shore during World War II — are quite different. I remember a wreck-littered, oil-stained strand that bore witness to the dangers lurking just offshore.
Today, with climate change and other modern misfortunes, the world’s beaches are again under assault — by oil spills, overpopulation, rising sea levels, hurricanes, tsunamis. You can’t help wondering what impressions of the shore this generation of young people is forming.
The notion of the beach as paradise is a relatively recent creation. Until the 19th century, the shore was associated more with toil than leisure. For those who made their living from the sea, the shore was fraught with anxiety. The coast constituted a threat, the place where wrecks occurred and the stench of death wafted from beached whales. Fishers and mariners preferred to face their houses inland, literally turning their backs on the sea. To mariners, to be “on the beach” meant to be out of work. On Prince Edward Island, in Canada, famous today for its beautiful beaches, those who came down to the sea for anything but work were said to be “chasing the shore,” a somewhat odd behavior.
For a long time, much of the North American shore could be approached only from the water. Big Sur, in California, was not served by a road until the 1920s. (Even today many coastal communities in Newfoundland are still cut off from the interior.) In effect, the shore belonged more to the water than to the land. Today, by contrast, beachgoers arrive by land and remain onshore for most of their sojourn by the sea.
The beach was the last part of the shore to be discovered and settled. And for many years after, the shore was so smelly and littered that fashionable sea resorts built piers and boardwalks to elevate their guests above it and the lowly souls who labored there. It wasn’t until the 20th century that sand beaches became popular and basking there in the sun became fashionable.Continue reading the main story
The shore used to be the most fluctuant of all boundaries, terra incognita on most maps, a place of constant comings and goings, not just of waves and tides, but of an infinite variety of edge species, including our own. Many thousands of years ago, our evolution as Homo sapiens began on the southern shores of Africa; we seemed to be quite comfortable living not just on but also with the shore. Not until the 18th century did we begin to draw firm lines between the water and the land, calling it the coastline, something that would come to have an increasingly hard edge in the modern era. Today, the tide line is where human movement stops. As the historian and photographer John Stilgoe has noted, the beach has become a place for looking, not doing.
The beach, like the mountaintop, offers us an unobstructed horizon. Herman Melville described the landlocked water gazers on Manhattan’s waterfront in the mid-19th century. Today, people are more likely to gather on beaches, where the view is unobstructed by maritime activity. The travel writer Paul Theroux found the British at the beach in the 1980s, patiently looking out to sea regardless of the weather. The novelist W. G. Sebald observed the same thing in Germany, where beachgoers were intent, it seemed, on putting the world behind them.
Beaches today are where we turn our backs not just on the world at large but also on our inland selves. They are a sanctuary, groomed to remove all distractions, sometimes including the other creatures that once made them their home. Beaches are thought of as a place where time stands still, devoid of a troubling past but also of an ever pressing future. We visit the beach knowing that, like another sanctuary, the pilgrimage site, it is not a place where we really belong.
Beaches have become some of our most artificial and vulnerable environments. They are often designed and constructed according to the specifications of the tourist industry, built of sand mined elsewhere and maintained at the cost of millions. Natural beaches are where sand stops for a moment to rest before moving on; our anthropogenic shores preclude movement and have to be resuscitated. We are forgetting how to live sustainably with the beach.
Death no longer haunts the shore in the form of broken ships and rotting whales — for it is the beach itself that could be dying.Continue reading the main story