Beach Tarball Bingo

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Beach Tarball Bingo

The real question is why tarballs are called tarballs, since they are neither tar nor balls, and can’t be used for roofing or for games.

Last week I spent a few days at Crystal Beach considering such matters, but not deeply.

Frankie and Annette’s movie beach was always perfect – impossibly clean sand and impossibly clean teens in an impossibly clean early 1960s vision of youth. Perhaps the closest in real life is China Beach near DaNang, but whether the young in Viet-Nam are permitted to be young is much in doubt. If the goose-stepping comrades would give over persecuting Christians and Montagnards and each other they could all score some major tourist euros, yen, pounds, and dollars by developing the beaches of Viet-Nam.

In truth, no beach is a cinema image, no more than Bambi is a documentary about the ecosystem of a forest. Any beach is where the relatively few bits of land encounter the dominant oceans on this water planet, and that means conflict: tides, storms, bacteria, mosquitoes, debris, and predatory wildlife.

Consider the pelican, often cartooned as a comic figure with a bulbous beak. In reality the pelican is a somewhat sinister, pre-historic-looking creature that joins with its comrades to fly in attack formation not unlike those old films of Stuka dive bombers. The pelican’s long beak is designed for strength and violence in wild dives into the water to kill and devour.

And then there was the shark, which turned out to be some old, pre-Ike carpeting rolling in the surf.

Crystal Beach was never crystal, but last week some extra oil showed up, mostly attached to dead vegetation and to walkers’ feet. Local television news featured discussions on whether the oil was BP (nee’ British Petroleum, nee’ Anglo-Iranian) or just some ordinary old oil unworthy of notice. The seabirds appeared to continue to fly and fish, and the waves broke as usual between a rusted propane tank and a concrete septic tank, bringing in their usual nightly quota of driftwood and foam cups.

The beach is more than sand and water and critters. It attracts not only vacationers but residents, some of them more colorful than Frankie and Annette. I encountered a fellow who had braided his long white beard into a long white rope. Just why he had done this is subject to speculation. Perhaps he had finished his library book, or possibly his cable was off, and he needed something to occupy his leisure hours. Or maybe he just wanted some attention, so here it is.

The signs at Crystal Beach are mostly hand-lettered, which adds to the charm, and point the ways to little shops and grocery stores and marinas and restaurants (no shoes, no problem) and surfboard rentals. In law motor vehicles aren’t permitted on the beach; in practice one rattles by occasionally, usually slowly and usually carrying rental toys or maintenance equipment. Folks saunter along the beach looking for shells, and in the evenings build driftwood campfires and swat ‘skeeters. Life is summer-slow at Crystal Beach, and the breeze is warm and salty, and the waves are the same ones that First Nations people fished and played in centuries ago in their food-gathering wanderings. Yes, sometimes the best restorative for the jarred nerves of modern life is sand between one’s toes, and a few hours of not-thinking.

The nights are made even more slumberous by the soothing, sibilant sounds of the sea, which can be heard and felt comfortingly through the air-conditioned (I will give up my air-conditioning when Al Gore’s minions pry my hot, dead fingers off the thermostat) walls of a lovely rental house atop its sturdy piers.

Crystal Beach is a little world on the edge of the planetary sea, a world I visit only occasionally but which is very important to me. I am glad that people live there, people who don’t shave or put on makeup every day and who almost never wear shoes and who give their boats funny names. I hope that they are never regulated out of existence and that their (and our) peninsula is never made very prosperous, for then it wouldn’t be ours anymore. The world needs plywood hotdog stands, bare feet, soda shops made out of abandoned trailers, accessible beaches, the smells of salt air and mosquito repellent, and sand and cheesy snapshots and happy memories of happy hours by the Gulf of Mexico.

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