On Surviving and Thriving at The Beach
How we confused thriving with more materialism, tips for a simple beach day, and a few things you should check out for the summer
Moonlight State Beach is the only beach in Encinitas with a big parking lot and an easily accessible beach. Once the sun burns through the summer marine layers, it becomes popular with the visiting tourist crowd.
To access every other beach you have to either walk down a long set of wooden stairs or criss-cross down a narrow sandy bluff. The former allows you to bring everything, the latter only the essentials, for exactly the same purpose: a day at the beach.
It was fascinating to watch the difference in approach between the locals and the tourists when I lived there. The locals wore a wetsuit and only brought a surfboard and a towel (at most), the tourists brought everything but the kitchen sink.
They had coolers, tents, camp kitchens, blankets, chairs, tables, toys, towels, inflatable mattresses, rackets, balls, boom boxes, and everything else you can imagine to make sure that their home at the beach was complete. Plus their damned phones.
“Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” – E.F. Schumacher
While the surfers were embracing nature, walking barefoot down the bluff, paddling into breaking swells, riding the beautiful waves created far, far away; the tourists shud every contact with nature, finding comfort in recreating suburbia on the beach, often staring blankly into their phones.
The contrast made a huge impression on me when I first arrived at the beach in the early days of the pandemic. Why even go to the beach if you can’t feel the sand in between your toes, swim in the ocean, and get tired, dirty, and sun kissed?
From being our natural origin, nature has become the sworn enemy that has to be conquered with every comfort known to man. People come, set up, and stay in their temporary beach dwellings, just like their safe and private homes in suburbia.
It was like night and day, walking between our small and secluded surfer’s beach and the big tourist beach with the parking lot and all possible amenities. When the day was over, our beach was still clean, their’s littered with plastic garbage.
On days when I stayed at the beach after the morning surf, I only brought a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, a book, a salad, suntan lotion, first aid kit, and a reusable water bottle. All stuffed in a 10-liter dry bag with a carabiner for easy storage.
Only the essentials to optimize the beach experience and minimize the negative impact on nature. Every single thing had a clear purpose and was used for surviving and thriving; being in nature on its own terms.
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.“ – Lord Byron
I had what I needed to survive – fuel, water, and first aid – and nature gave me everything else I needed to thrive: the peeling waves, the sunshine, the coarse sand under my feet, the wind in my face, and the experience of being fully emerged and disconnected.