The Beach
Last Friday night, I slept for like two, maybe three hours, and woke up a blasted skeleton of a human on an already humid Florida morning. We were in Tampa for C.’s college friends’ wedding, sharing an Airbnb with like eight other people, with whom we had stayed out too late at a mostly terrible bar.
I had previously sworn off Airbnb once before, and I regretted my lack of resolve for a number of reasons (the pool was dirty! what the hell!) but none more than being roused from sleep by someone’s drunken laughter at 4:30 a.m. Once the sun started coming up and I was still awake, I thought, fuck it, and got out of bed.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Tampa, but there is not really a lot to do—or, if there was, we were far from it, in a suburban neighborhood surrounded on all sides by four-to-six-lane stroads. It was not particularly nice, which added to the disappointment of being awake.
Luckily, one of C.’s wiser friends had rented a car. Once he and another friend were up, and we were all sitting around the dirty pool, we thought—wait, let’s go to the beach!
It was a 40-minute drive, but when we made it there, I’d already started feeling better. Also, getting breakfast that wasn’t a Starbucks egg bite probably helped—but C. noted that he felt the salt air doing its part to slowly bring us back to life.
This beach was, according to TripAdvisor, the “#1 beach in America.” I must report that it was perfectly great but certainly not superlative. (Sorry to TripAdvisor, it was a bit crowded.) Still, I fucking love the beach and am lucky to have seen lots of beaches of all stripes, all around the world. Like, they’re all good beaches, Brent! How could one complain if there is a shore or at least somewhere dry to sit, and some water to swim in?
Here in New England, our ocean can be somewhat hostile—cold water, seaweedy, sharks—so any Gulf of Mexico beach always feels like the equivalent of being kissed on the forehead vs. getting punched in the face. Floating in a few gentle waves—I guess you could say it was like a secular baptism, me brought into the love and light of the world. Really, I just felt so much less like shit and much happier to have been on this stupid planet, which sucks sometimes but also has beaches for us to occasionally enjoy.
Plus, isn’t it nice to share an adventure with someone? Even if it is that it is 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday in Tampa, on a morning when you barely slept and are desperate to go anywhere else. I looked at the four of us, sitting on a curtain we’d taken from the house (there also were no towels! what the hell!), and thought about all the places we could’ve been, but instead, we were here. The #1 Beach in America.