Big Falls County Park (not the actual ocean).

Marylanders go to the beach the way you go Up North. You have your family cabin in the woods; my family had a townhouse on the Delaware shore, a three-hour drive away – the longest car trip imaginable.

For the two decades of my childhood, going to the beach was my summer vacation, and it suited me perfectly. We’d build castles, dig pointless holes, jump waves, and weave back and forth in the surf like sandpipers. At night I’d fall asleep listening to the memory, the aural afterimage, of the waves’ rhythmic susurration.

Every visit, we’d boast that we could walk far enough to reach where the sand ends, but we never meant it. The sand is infinite; there’s no point in trying.

By the end of our stay, our skin would be tight with salt and sunburn, our tummies packed with bushels of blue crabs and sweet corn, our hair scented by tangy sea air.
Now I live 1,134 miles from the family beach house, and that seems like the longest road trip imaginable.

I try to enjoy the beach and relax, but today the falls’ unvarying grumble deflates me. It has none of the breath-like meditation of ocean waves. Today the trees lean in like overbearing acquaintances at a Christmas party. Today I whisper a rhyme I’ve recently invented: “It’s good for me to see the sea and not to see another side.”

Outside Fall Creek, as we bump along a gravel road at five miles an hour, my kids marvel/complain at how long the trip is.

“It’s not that long,” I mutter. We had planned to be doing something else today. We had planned to be driving through Illinois at this very moment. Illinois and onward and eventually to Delaware. But 2020 has different plans.

Instead, I’m taking my son and daughter to a beach. Not a capital B Beach, not a Beach with waves and salt and seaweed and real seashells – regal conchs, opalescent oysters, alien sand dollars – but Big Falls. There’s water and sand and a cool waterfall. Which is fine. It’s fine. It’s all fine.

Well, it’s not really fine. We didn’t get to the Beach last year, we aren’t going this year, and who knows about next year. My daughter only remembers what she’s seen in pictures, and even my 8-year-old son has just a vague memory of my favorite place on Earth. If we only rarely go, how can they come to love it as I do? What will soothe them if not the echo of waves?

These questions are on my mind as we walk the sandy path from the Big Falls lot. The path narrows and narrows until we spill out of the woods onto a very finite patch of sand.

I try to enjoy the beach and relax, but today the falls’ unvarying grumble deflates me. It has none of the breath-like meditation of ocean waves. Today the trees lean in like overbearing acquaintances at a Christmas party. Today I whisper a rhyme I’ve recently invented: “It’s good for me to see the sea and not to see another side.”

I know the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this COVID world, but it still sucks.

Someone forgot to tell my kids that it sucks. They chatter happily as they search for rocks, “cool ones.” When they amass a collection, they drag me from my pity party of one to inspect them. The rocks are river-smooth and streaked with glitter. My daughter organizes them based on their quotient of fairy magic.

There’s not much sand to explore, but we do anyway. We discover coyote paw prints (we’re saying they’re coyote because why not) and heron tracks, which are more elegant than a tiny sandpiper’s. I trace one, marveling at its size.

“Mom!” my son calls from the water’s edge, “Watch! Mom!” He wades into the river, and my instincts do not urge me to his side; the Eau Claire is low and lazy.

Suddenly, I remember that at his age, I did not play much in the waves. Whenever I tried, a big one would swallow me. The insides of waves froth white and beige and look like Chaos. I preferred the tame sand and shallow tide pools that collect by the dunes after storms. The waves frightened me.

My son bends to the right like I taught him, though I didn’t skip stones until I moved to the Midwest; it’s impossible on the ocean. He double pumps a forehand, and the flat stone rolls off his finger. It skips long once, then six more times before sinking.

“Whoa!” I say. “A personal record!”

He quietly beams with a quiet smile on these quiet shores that he is perfectly suited for.

For the first time today, I feel a genuine smile on my face. This is fine. Really.

“Mom, someone once skipped all the way to the other side.”

“You think so?”

“I know it.” He picks up another stone and sets to trying.