Writer’s Rant
March 3, 2025
The Ocean
I was not born or raised near any beaches. The closest beach was at Allegheny State Park /Red House Lake. I think they must have hauled the sand in to make it a beach. The closest sea was actually a lake, Lake Erie. Back then, you could take a match to it and set it on fire. And the closest ocean was, and still is, the Atlantic. I was first introduced to the ocean as an infant. My mother was from Gloucester, Mass. and Cape Ann, north of Boston. I don’t remember much about it, except that the ocean was always cold (around 68 degrees in the summer), but my mother loved to swim in it. The rest of us would just shiver and watch her from the shore. I don’t think my dad, who was in the navy, thought much about swimming in the cold north Atlantic.
I had an uncle, aunt and cousins who moved to Tampa Florida in the late 50’s. We had another aunt who lived further south in Venice. Growing up, we took yearly Easter vacations to Florida. Sometimes we would go to the Clearwater beaches and other times to beaches near Venice. Both were on the….dare I say….Gulf of Mexico….But it was just a gulf, not an ocean, and we were just yankee tourists.
I attended the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut. The school and campus is located directly on Long Island Sound (on the Connecticut side, of course). It was nice to look at, but I never saw anybody swim in it. Me included. I’m not sure why, except there was really no beach, just a lot of rocks. And it was just a Sound, not an Ocean.
When I first married, I married a Long Island girl whom I had met at Bridgeport. We ended up living on Long Island for 18 years. We were never more than a 15 or 20 minute drive to the beach (except in summer traffic). Long Island has a lot of beaches, because, after all, it is an island, accessible only by $25 bridge fares. Some of the famous and not so famous beaches are Jones Beach (where literally a million people from NYC go every summer), Fire Island (reachable by ferry only), East Hampton, South Hampton (and other beaches around there inhabited by the rich and famous), Robert Moses, Stony Brook, Crab Meadow (Northport), Crescent Beach and Fleets Cove Beach (Huntington), Cedar Beach (Mt. Sinai), Tobay Beach (Massapequa), Smith Point (Shirley), Cupsogue Beach (Westhampton) and Gilgo Beach (Babylon). There are others too, but just too numerous to mention. The beaches were beautiful, but crowded. Consequently, they got dirty. And we seemed to go less and less to the beach each year.
When we moved to North Carolina, we were about 140 miles inland from the nearest beach on the Atlantic, Wrightsville Beach (near Wilmington and Carolina Beach). We would go on occasion but found the beaches on the Outer Banks, though a five hour drive, nicer and less crowded. We rented a house there in the summer with some local family and some traveling in from the north, for about ten years in a row.
A few years ago, I purchased a small place right on Bogue Sound. Its on the mainland, right across from Emerald Isle and about a 15 to 20 minute drive across the bridge. The island faces south and runs east to west, much like Long Island and I think is one of the most beautiful beaches on the Atlantic coast.
Which brings me to today. My bestie is off to Aruba with her girlfriends, so I decided to take a little trip myself. Its still a little too chilly up north so I made my way south for a week, primarily to spend some time alone, writing, here in my favorite spot in Florida, Daytona Beach. It just so happens its bike week. Yay. It’s a little noisy sometimes, but the people are all friendly and happy, so I am enjoying it. I was able to finish two chapters today in my new book and hope to finish it by year end. But we will see. I am not in Hawaii, but I will say it anyway: Aloha.
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