To Singing Beach (an ode)

On one of the last days of August in the year 2000, I discovered a beach on the North Shore with my friends Jon & Joshua & Rebecca & Jen.

It was my first summer near an ocean. It was a day heavy with clouds and chill, but it was the last weekend of the summer. It was our first trip to the beach.

The cabbie who drove us the 6.9 miles down to Manchester-by-the-Sea from the center of Gloucester (where we had gotten off the train, alas, to no beach within walking distance) told us that the sand squeaks when you walk on it, and it did. Hence, "Singing Beach." It was the whitest, finest, lightest sand I've seen north of Florida and there is enough to dig a hole and bury a man up to his neck. Joshua only went as as far as his waist.

Joshua and Jon (August 2000)

That day was the beginning of my love affair with Singing Beach.

On Saturdays and Sundays the Rockport line train leaves from North Station at 8:30 or 10:15 and gets you there in 50 minutes, plus the stop off at the drug store for the newspaper and soda, plus the half-mile walk along Beach Street.

Singing Beach doesn't have a boardwalk. The backside is bordered in boulders and scrub and the houses of the wealthy up on a bluff. When you enter from the bathhouse and pass hundreds of children with their rainbow pails and sand castles and parents dozing under umbrellas, clustered at the entrance, walking down the squeaky sand a half-mile towards the rocks on the far end, you are rewarded with quiet broken only by others who choose to make the similar trek.

I took the first boy in Boston I really, really liked to Singing Beach one Sunday night in September, after a Patriots game, to escape my roommates and to lay in those dunes next to those rocks and entwine bodies and mouths and watch the moon rise over the ocean.

I took my sisters, visiting from Minnesota, to Singing Beach on my (nippy, windy) 30th birthday to hang with the dog walkers and dodge the waves.

Kristin & Missy (March 2003)

I make it a personal edict to get to Singing Beach 5 times per summer. I usually go by myself. Yesterday was the first day this year worth going.

It seemed to be the first day for many people, because it was the first day this year where there was no choice with what with what to do with such a day. 85 degrees. No clouds. No humidity. The beach was mandatory. I took the 10:15 train with my Sunday Times and my Vanity Fair and my makeshift lunch of raisins and carrots and rootbeer.

Singing Beach was very, very crowded, even down at the quiet end. There was a line for the ladies bathroom. A line for slushies. A line for Captain Dusty's ice cream. The bay was full of sailing ships. The surf was cluttered with walkers and frisbees and footballs and bodies of every conceivable shape in suits bodies should be fit into and some they should not have.

But there is always a reward for staying on past the 5:30 train back to Boston, waiting for the 7:51, when the sun goes down on your shoulders. At that hour, teenage boys with their stick-out ribs and long flowered shorts and impossibly muscular backs attack the surf with wakeboards and a sprinting energy and heedlessness I don't remember possessing at any age.

(It's July. The water temperature yesterday was 63 degrees.)

At that hour, too, you can risk a trek onto the icy sand (but not quite the icy water) to cool your feet and not get run over, when you haven't yet realized that your entire back is turning ruby red from the day.

Karin (July 2009)