Rockaway Beach 1954

Rockaway Beach, NY -- 1954

I loved the look of the wet sand at the ocean’s edge when waves broke and spread like foaming maple syrup on French toast up the slight incline to dry sand and the feet of lazing sunbathers. And afterward as the water receded back to its source: the vast whole of the Atlantic. 

The crashing sounds of peaking waves as they broke, and their ensuing forces pulling my feet deep into sopping wet sand, the disappearing sand castles of yesterday's kids, children’s pails and shovels forgotten, to be tossed about in tidal changes, replaced in the water’s retreat by my sense even then as a small boy, that the ocean was primal; it would claim its own, and it would steal others’ no matter how exciting it appeared, or the outer waters' calm suggested otherwise. 

In those moments, I owned little, but a child's awareness and the thrill in anticipating diving into the next great breaker. 

Those Rockaway Beaches and the Atlantic Ocean taught me more on summer days than many formal classrooms have for decades since.