Romancing the Gulf of Mexico
Despite an unorthodox childhood we had one traditional pastime: the summer vacation to the beach. We stayed at “Orange Beach Cottages,” where pastel cottages named after flowers nestled on a rustic spit of land. Tall loblolly pines, old and craggly, provided shade leading up to the bay. We played at the land’s edge for long hours swatting mosquitoes, chasing minnows, and paddling in the shallow water.
When I moved back to Alabama in adulthood I described the sugar white sands of the Gulf beaches to my husband Joe, who grew up in Massachusetts on the rugged, rocky shores of the Atlantic. He did not believe me. “Let’s go,” I said, and we loaded our three little girls into the car and off we went.
We stayed at the same Orange Beach Cottages. Nothing had changed. The girls played on the ramshackle pier, we ate hotdogs on picnic tables under the same tall pines and tossed and turned at night on thin mattresses, the metal coils poking our sunburned backs. We took the girls to the proper beach at the state park once a day but spent most of our time at the bay, sheltered from the glaring sun.
The Orange Beach Cottages were razed just months after our visit. We continued our family trips to Orange Beach, but now we stayed in high-rise condos. While nothing compares to the sugar white sands and glorious blues of the Gulf, my childhood beach was gone. Only the Gulf State Park Pier remained as a testament. Ever spooky, ever evocative, ever brimming with buzzing lights, a blue-billion bugs hovering round, mumbled conversations from fisherfolk, the pier stood steadfastly on, unchanged since my childhood. We visited at night, avoiding the daytime sun.
One year a hurricane foiled our plans and we decided to try a new beach vacation. Somewhat randomly we found a beach in South Carolina with no high-rise condos, one grocery store, and acres and acres of protected wetlands. We have returned to this spot annually for the last 18 years.
My first venture back to the Gulf was to a conference in 2013. Alone, after the PowerPoints were saved and the computers shut down, I retreated to the Gulf State Park and dug my feet into memories of the wild beach of my childhood. I visited the pier where I was overwhelmed with a deep melancholy.
Since then, I’ve returned to the Gulf for more conferences, and lately a few girls’ trips with my friends Helen and Darby. Far from the adventures of my childhood visits, which brimmed with sand fleas and the stink of organic ocean decay, you could call these trips reading retreats. We hole up in the condo during the heat of the day and read, then take our wild reading ways to the beach when the sun is low, hunkering under the wide umbrella, swiping Kindles and turning pages to the sound of the waves. Eventually the sun sets behind the condos to the west.
I don’t mean to yuck anyone’s yum, but every time I arrive at that stretch of road girded by high-rise condos with barely a hint of the glorious body of water on the other side, my heart clenches and I have to remind myself to breathe.
The last time I went to the Gulf I sat on the shore and watched the waves, the sand, the few shells that washed up at my feet, and apologized for my disappointment. “You are still the same, wild creature,” I whispered to the vast body of water before me and the scrappy dunes behind. “It’s not your fault, what they’ve done to you.” I tried to release the heavy sorrow I feel for all the wild places into the evening breeze.
As I write, we’re reeling in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.* The loss of life and livelihood on the Florida beaches is horrendous. I understand human suffering and I do not make light of anyone’s pain. But when I hear folks talk of the costs of building it back, I cringe. Build it back? Why not let wetlands be wetlands and do their job of protecting the shores? Why not go inland?
Maybe it’s time to relent to the wildness of the Gulf, the oceans, the storms, the forces of nature that we will never control. Maybe it’s time to reexamine exactly what it is we love about our beaches, and if that is what we’ve built there, maybe we never loved the beaches to begin with.
Mary Dansak is a writer and a retired science education specialist living in Auburn, AL. She can be reached at maryfdansak@gmail.com.
*This essay was originally published as a column in The Auburn Villager on October 6, 2022.
