Notes from a family trip to the beach

Arrival


I arrived at Myrtle Beach airport on Sunday morning. My parents picked me up. They had talked of going to a local evangelical church directly from the airport, but thank the LORD this did not happen. I had woken at 4am that morning, showered, shaved, packed, and walked through the ghetto to Temple train station to catch the 5:19am to the airport. I was somewhat tired and didn't feel like singing praise choruses.

We went straight to the condo my parents had rented. We took a walk on the beach and at some point waded out into the water. I body surfed and my knees scraped against the pebbles near the shoreline. We went back to the condo and my parents went back to the airport to pick up my sister and nephew.

Erika

The hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever it was, called Erika descended on Monday. It was not terribly powerful. The rain was soft. The wind was steady but not strong. It lasted all day. Still,  it was our second day at the beach so we went for a walk in the morning. We walked along as the waves rolled in, my 4 year old nephew stopping to dig into the sand every so often. Making sandcakes in his hand he would dip them into the water and the waves would dissolve them. My father (Pop Pop) said that the ocean was eating the sandcakes. I imagined our ancestors along the shores of Europe telling similar stories to their young ones twenty thousand years ago.

I was seduced by the ruckus of the waves in the storm. I couldn't hold back. I entered on my hands and knees, crawling backwards letting each wave crash upon me and push me forward and then the next one drawing up the receding tide would pull me back deeper. Deeper and deeper I went, basically operating to the bare minimum, letting myself be tossed and turned by the glorious power of nature, waves, fractal chaos, perfect order, all in one. From time to time I would exercise my leg muscles, pushing off forward to the shore and being completely taken, still not in control despite my thrashing limbs. Salty water entered my nose and mouth and eyes. I rose to my feet looking up at the rain falling, allowing it to clean the stinging liquid from my face.

In the afternoon the storm faded, the sun seemed to come out, but every time we went back outside it started to rain again. At some point I stepped out onto the balcony and yelled, "Hey everybody! There's a rainbow out here!" They all came out and marveled. "Where do rainbows come from, Wesley?" my mother asked my nephew. "From the rain!" he said, but she chided him: "Noooo! Rainbows come from God! It's his promise that he will never destroy the world with a flood again." Wesley seemed confused. I said nothing. The ocean eating the sand makes more sense.

The Nice Young Lady

On Tuesday the weather was sunny. The ocean was calm. My parents went out the earliest it was legally allowed to set up umbrellas on the beach. An hour later, I went out there with my mother and my nephew. My mother was watching Wesley dig in the sand so I said I wanted to go out into the waves. It was nothing like the storm. There was no passion. No power. No being drawn into a trance. This is how it would be for the rest of the week whenever I went into the water.

A minute or so after I was chest deep I saw a woman wading out toward me. With my glasses off, I couldn't tell what she looked like. I thought she was older than me by a decade or more. She came close, about 20 feet away. I still couldn't see her face. I said nothing to her. What was I supposed to say? She floated away, northward about 50 feet and then came back. Then she floated away again.

I went back to shore. My mother asked, "Did you talk to that nice young lady who waded out after you?" I said no. I couldn't even tell that it was a young lady without my glasses. "Oh," said my mother, "It looked like she wanted you to talk to her." I was somewhat taken aback. I guess being a 30-something bachelor, people just expect me to talk to strange ladies in the ocean, even my own very religious mother. I had no idea. My general self diagnosis of being a failure in all social situations descended heavy upon me. And as I sat on the beach with my glasses on and watched the nice young lady come ashore and saw what I had not seen before, well...it didn't help much.

I would continue to see the nice young lady throughout the rest of the week. I even passed her on the street while wandering the near dead town of North Myrtle Beach by myself. But we never spoke. Perhaps we could have spoken but I suppose that it was up to me and I supposed that I had already blown it. Later that day, I was drifting in the ocean with my mother and she informed me that down in the South was the place where I would meet a nice conservative Christian girl. I agreed. Down in the South. In the ocean.

Pizza Shop Location Screw Up

Wednesday was pretty much the same as Tuesday. The ocean was calm. We went down to the beach twice; once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In the evening my parents and I went into Myrtle Beach proper, to check out the board walk. This board walk was only a few blocks long, the section with actual boardwalk-type attractions was only two blocks long. We had been told that the boardwalk in Mytle Beach can be very seedy, but as we walked down the two block stretch with the stores, all we saw was families and thought it wasn't so bad.

After the boardwalk ended the walkway continued as a cement promenade. We continued on it, but there were no more stores, just hotels about a hundred feet off of the promenade. Things were very dark and quiet. We encountered a beggar, begging for money. We saw small groups of shady looking people drinking from bottles in paper bags. My father asked if I thought we were safe. I said I thought we were but I could now understand the "seedy" description. We walked to the end of the promenade where there was a pier with restrooms. Then we walked back.

At the section of boardwalk with attractions we went into an arcade looking for pinball, but there weren't any pinball machines. We all got ice cream cones at a concession stand. My parents both got black raspberry and I got peanut butter fudge. Things had changed in the last hour. I have to admit that it felt pretty seedy. We went back to the car and drove home.

Up until now, my mom had made dinner every night. But now my parents were talking about ordering pizza for dinner on Thursday night. That would be my last night in Myrtle beach, as I flew back to Philly on Friday morning. Various options were discussed. On the ride back from the boardwalk to the condo I made sure to point out pizza shops as we neared our destination. But my father had thought it best to order from Papa John's.

When we got back to the condo I used my phone to look up reviews of the different pizza shops I had seen on the way home, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was impossible to tell whether or not they would be better or worse than Papa John's. When my father looked up Papa John's online he found it strange that he was being told there was a location at the exact address of our condo. This was obviously wrong. There was no Papa John's so close by. But when I looked at the results he was getting on his laptop it clearly showed that there was.

I decided to go to the Papa John's web site and do a location search by entering the zip code of the condo. The results showed that the nearest Papa John's was about a mile away on highway 17. For some reason, when I showed this to my dad, he become enraged, thinking that I was somehow claiming that he did the search wrong. I explained that I wasn't disagreeing with him, but that I just thought there was a mistake on Google Maps. But he insisted that he had also searched the Papa John's web site and that's where he had seen the incorrect location. I didn't know what to make of this. My father said "You're really pissing me off!" and stormed out of the room with his laptop slamming his bedroom room.

Later, laying in my own bed, sleepless, I took my phone and looked up the Google Maps erroneous location of the Papa John's and submitted a report to Google saying that the location was incorrect.

Turtle Feed

Thursday was yet another calm day on the beach, for the most part. My father drove me to Kinko's to print my boarding pass for my flight back to Philly. Then we went out onto the beach. Then we came inside and had ham buns like every other day that week. Then we went outside to the beach again. But it started raining. And soon it started raining very hard. We packed up all the umbrellas and beach toys and went inside. The storm got worse and worse.

My parents had decided that they no longer wanted to order pizza for dinner. Instead we were going to Ryan's Buffet, a franchise owned by the same corporation that owns Old Country Buffet. When we thought the storm was subsiding we all got into the minivan and headed toward Ryan's out on highway 17. But the storm was not nearly over. It was like we were driving in a river. All of the roads had at least six inches of water flowing over them and sometimes over a foot. We overshot Ryan's missing the driveway and had to turn around and come back. A huge hassle in the storm.

Inside the food was both delicious and horrible. I think I gained 15 pounds from that one meal. There was four kinds of fried fish, two kinds of fried shrimp, a salad bar with four kinds of lettuce and every kind of salad ingredient. There was meat loaf, tacos, chicken teriyaki, pizza, black eyed peas, collard greens, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, tater tots, buttery "Texas" buns, three kinds of soup, and about forty other options, not counting dessert. It was Kids Night and my nephew got two helpings of cotton candy from a middle aged lady dressed in a mediocre clown costume.

After leaving the buffet, we went to an outdoor shopping center situated on a lake with floating wooden bridges. We walked around looking at the different shops and discovered a small pond filled with carp and turtles. For a quarter you could purchase some kind of food to throw in the water. My father and my sister each bought handfuls of the food and doled it out to my nephew. We knelt on the the artificial stony shore of the pond and dropped brown nuggets in the water in front of turtle faces. They were so eager for more they climbed out of the water but then became afraid and immediately dove back in. After four handfuls of food, my nephew was bored, but I was still picking up scraps that had fallen on the edge of the pond and tossing them to the turtles.

We looked at a few more shops. Wesley threw a temper tantrum because my sister wouldn't buy him a camouflage colored snake plush toy for $16. I was the one who had to grab it away from him and place it on a shelf above his reach. We walked back to the car parked near a pizza shop called Ultimate California Pizzeria, and drove back to the condo and went to sleep.

Something Is Coming

I awoke at 7am. My flight was at 10am but we were leaving at 8am. I took the last of many showers in the condo that week. I sat with my mother eating cornflakes. "Make sure, when you get back," my mother said, "that you read your Bible every day and get ready, because something is coming. Change is in the air. We know not the time, but it is coming." I assume she was talking about the rapture, but I said nothing. I just ate my cornflakes.

My parents dropped me off in the airport. I had two beers in the bar before the flight, even though it was only 9am. In a few hours I would be back in Philly.