Brant Rock Beach

 

BRANT ROCK BEACH 

When I think of Brant Rock Beach, I time travel fifty years. It is located south of Boston, on the bay side of Cape Cod. Nesting Brant gulls inspire its name.  During my childhood, my grandparents would often take my siblings, cousins and I there for a marvelous summer afternoon or even a whole day. We’d leave their house in Pembroke, Massachusetts, assigning the role of house security agent to Tinkerbell, their yippy Yorkshire terrier. Tinker expressed her disagreement with this role as we piled into two cars. “Yip, yip, yip!”

Ten people filled the “yellow bird”, a big yellow Chrysler, and a nickname less blue Pontiac. Off we’d go. Twenty minutes or so later, the swamps outside the window announced the arrival of salty waters. Beach-related businesses, such as scuba shops and kite stores, dotted the routes and we asked if we could stop for ice cream. “Certainly not now, maybe at the end of the day,” was Nana’s response. In the parking lot, we’d gather our pails, shovels and towels, scramble out of the car and make sure our flip flops were on. If not, we’d have burnt our feet on the hot pavement, even if we walked on the paint lines that divided the parking spaces. 

“Slow down, the ocean isn’t going anywhere,” Gramp admonished us eight children as we walked faster, faster, and faster, toward the right of way between houses that led to the beach. Sand slid between our feet and flip flops as someone – my little brother Scott? – Would yell, “Last one there is the rotten egg!”

Nana quickly stopped that race by threatening to take our ice cream away at the end of the day.

Seagulls screamed overhead as she warned us, “Keep your flip flops on. There’s always some dummy leaving broken glass around.” So, we’d rush up over the dunes, flopping our way to a spot in the sand. The strand of wet sand between high tide and low tide was relatively small compared to in Europe, but Nana or Gramp always made a comment like, “Oh, it’s high already, we don’t have to worry about the towels” or “It looks like it’s going out.” Many hands spread out a red blanket and laid several towels round it, and sixteen running feet headed to the cold water as my grandfather invariably yelled, “Don’t go out too far, and look out for the undertow!”

The water terrified Nana because she had lived through a “sink or swim” method of teaching as a child. Her uncle had thrown her into the deep end of a pool and she nearly drowned. Since then, she never dared to go in deeper than mid-calf. 

Gramp, on the other hand, taught us how to body surf. If you caught that wave at the right time, you could travel oh so far. He also loved to float on his back, sticking all ten toes out of the water with his head up, the rest of his long, lanky body straight as a board. He’d dare us to do the same. Yes, the cold New England water refreshed us as we dove in, splashing the hesitant ones among us.  

Of course, there were the sandcastles. You’d have to build them near the water because you’d have to give the tide a fair chance of coming over the walls. We gave them too big of a chance, though, because waves would always destroy our walls by the end of the day. Hole-digging entertained us, too. Maybe there were lost gold coins.

Sometimes, late in the afternoon, someone’s bladder would be too full to wait the whole ride home. “Since there are no public toilets, what should I do?” one of us asked Nana. 

“If it’s number one, just swim way out away from the other people,” she said. “Do your business there. Nobody will know.” If God knew everything, wouldn’t he know that? I worried.

On the way back to the car, we made a bee-line to the ice cream store. We’d get a cone with one scoop and “jimmies” (Bostonian for sprinkles). How fun it was to eat the top part first and then make a hole in the bottom of the cone. You’d have a funnel to suck your ice cream from.

Back in the cars, we’d sing “follow the swallow back home.”

            East is east and west is west, wipe that ketchup off your chest, follow, the swallow back home.

I have no idea what ketchup has to do with directions and birds, but we always sang it.

Back at the house, we piled out of the car into the driveway, and we heard Stinkberbell’s, my aunt’s name for Tinkeberll’s, welcome. Our skin itched from the salt and sand in the car, despite having taken five good minutes to brush it off before leaving the beach. We used the garden hose (whose water was slightly warmer than the oceans’) to spray our feet as Nana and Gramp went into the house and relieved Tinker from her guard duty. “Keep that screen door closed!” Nana would command. “We don’t want mosquitoes in the house.” Bang! Bang! Bang!

Shower time for eight children was an adventure. If somebody took too long, another would pound on the door yelling to hurry up. We’d have to hang our bathing suits and towels on the clothesline out back, before we could play basketball in the driveway or badminton in the backyard. We didn’t watch the TV there-- not even Sesame Street. We didn’t care; we had books and games and each other. 

It wasn’t always rosy, though. I’d bicker with my brothers and sister and they would with me. My cousins would with each other, but not with us. We wouldn’t waste precious cousin time on fighting. Sibling time was a dime a dozen.

Or so we thought. “Stop fighting,” Gramp would say several times a day. “One day you’ll grow up and realize how much you miss each other.”

How right he was.