by Tracy Mayor ’83

It’s not just that the ocean is clean and cold, though it is very much both of those things.  It’s that it’s clean because it’s cold. Nothing lives in it, nothing the naked eye can see — no seaweed wraps around your legs, no jellyfish slime you. There is only water and waves and the unblinking sky and you.

Your feet go numb first, so that in the rare moments when you are standing rather than knocked to your knees by a wave, you stagger about in the foam like an old drunk. After a while your hands numb up. When you hold them to your face, they’re yellow and waxy-looking.

One wave you ride in a perfect body surf, the water churning underneath your belly as your upper half hikes out knifelike before the tumult. The next catches you full on and pounds your body into the sand, leaving you seasick and gasping as it washes back out to sea. These are things you learn only by feel and repetition, by staying in when every bodily sense says it’s time to get out.

Your hair is matted with sand, your eyes and lips puffy with saltwater and sunburn. Places on your body sprout a cold red rash, as if the sand and salt have actually abraded layers of skin from your body. Your lips are blue; your teeth are chattering. Your four cousins look the same, in more or less desperate straits depending upon age and body weight.

At last one of the adults up on the beach puts down her Silver Bullet, hidden in an athletic sock in observance of the no-open-containers law, and says to no one in particular, Holy moly, we need to get those kids out of the water.

You stagger forth. The hot sand burns your unfeeling feet. Streaming water, you go to hug your dry, sunscreened mother. Ha ha, you are so funny. She smells your cold oceany bite and feels your sleek head and your chilled gooseflesh and thinks that you have become less human than seal.

Later in the week, you will have quarreled with your cousins, both individually and in various groupings, and you will find your mother out on the back deck sorting a mound of wet beach towels. You will tell her that you never wanted this vacation, that it’s stupid, and that you’re ready to go home.

She will give every appearance of having heard you, but she isn’t really listening. She was raised this way herself, to believe in the redemptive moral authority of cold water, hard sand, chill wind, and pounding waves. It’s vacation, New England style.

I like to think of this essay as a little love letter both to my sons and to my own childhood, an acknowledgement of just how much the frigid New England ocean defines who I am and who they'll become.

– Tracy Mayor