with apologies to Sarah Kay

I’m nine years old. John and I are on Boogie Boards. He’s going into the surf and gliding back in while I play in the tide because I am a horrible swimmer. We hear a whistle. It’s his dad, sitting in the lifeguard chair, waving for us to come back because we’ve drifted too far down the shore. We pick up our boards, drop them by the lifeguard stand, then grab shovels and start “digging for water.”

I’m ten. My friend Evan has joined us for the day and we’re on the playground. We’re sprinting around a wooden merry-go-round, trying to get it moving as fast as possible so we can hop on and then jump right off. He’s much better than I am at catching air, but it doesn’t matter because those few seconds before I land several feet away are the closest I ever get to flying.

I’m eleven. My sister and I are always trying to get a good volley going with our Pro Kadima paddleball set. After one too many frustrated sighs and digging through the sand for the navy blue ball, she goes back to the blanket and I decide to see how many times I can bounce the ball off the paddle. After I get past 100, I join my dad and my sister in creating a sandcastle that he expertly helps us sculpt using the edge of a credit card.

In all honesty, these may have been from the same summer. They may have all happened repeatedly over three or four summers. The years at Barrett Beach on Fire Island are all one continuous memory that begins when I’m probably about five or six and ends in the middle of junior high school. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, if we were free on a weekend (or sometimes a weekday when school was out), we’d head over to the marina and catch the ferry to Barrett, one of four communities that had ferry service running out of Sayville (the others being Sailor’s Haven/Sunken Forest, Cherry Grove, and The Fire Island Pines). At the end of the day, we’d get on the boat and come home, the smell of the beach staying with us as we hosed down our beach toys and ourselves in the backyard.

Barrett Beach has a rich history when it comes to Fire Island, one that begins back in the early 1960s when it was first known as Talisman and was a private community established by Michael Butler and Ahmat Ertegun. The Fire Island Pines Historical Society has a comprehensive look at how the two men built a small resort community that was only accessible by boat and consisted of a main building and cottages that were a mix of Mid-Century Modern and Japanese architecture. The atmosphere, according to the testimony from those who were there, was of a loose, continuous party, one of music playing at all hours and drinks in hand. Butler and Ertegun were both well-connected (Butler produced the musical Hair and Ertegun was a record executive), so they had more than a few notable visitors and Talisman is credited as the place where “The Twist” was introduced to America.

Of course, this was all history by the time my family and would go there in the Eighties. Talisman had been sold to the National Park Service in 1965 and the part with the resort was renamed Barrett Beach, with ownership eventually going to the Town of Islip. We always wondered about the big house just behind the dunes and by the playground, although never attempted to explore it because it was surrounded by grass we were told to stay away from lest we get Lyme Disease. Besides, I’ve always been a rules follower; in a horror movie, I’d be the guy in the group exploring the abandoned mental hospital who is afraid they’re going to get in trouble with their parents or the police.

So we’d go to the playground and then run back down the path to the beach to play in the water or run back to the marina so we could take the boardwalk through what we knew as Talisman–a stretch of nature/wildlife sanctuary just west of Barrett Beach that was maintained by the National Park Service and had a boardwalk trail that took you through the dunes to the beach. We’d explore that trail several times each visit, finishing back at our blanket to once again bother my parents.

I’m thirteen. Two weeks ago, I was in a terrible bike accident. My swollen lip has gone down and the scab under my nose has mostly healed. In a few weeks, it will become a keloid scar. We spend a week at Ocean Beach (so ristrictive in its rules that it has a nickname: “The Land of the No”). It’s overcast most of the week when it doesn’t rain and is so unseasonably cool that I’m wearing my Disney/MGM studios sweatshirt. I’m barely on the beach; instead, I spend my time reading the cover off a Batman comic I bought at the market and listening to Billy Joel’s Turnstiles on repeat. I don’t know it yet, but “indoors” will become a motif for the next few summers as I have laser dermabrasions and plastic surgery to get rid of the keloid and can’t be in the sun for too long.

I’m seventeen. The Key Club is on a “beach cleanup” trip at Sailors Haven. We’ve meandered through Sunken Forest, picked our way down the beach and are now killing the last couple of hours playing beach volleyball. Several of the guys have their shirts off. But I’m not an athlete nor popular and remain ragingly self-conscious, so I keep mine on. It could have been my “Oh wow, he’s secretly hot” moment, but I think nthose only happen in movies. And only when the character is a girl.

I’m twenty. My co-worker Jen and I are halfway through picking all the garbage off the beach at Robert Moses State Park when one of the lifeguards runs up to us and invites us to drink with them at the lifeguard shack. We’re still on the clock, but he does give us each a beer as a consolation prize. After we’re finished with our pick, we sit on a dune and drink them, talking about mundane stuff while the sun sets.

When a friend in college asked me what I did for “beach week,” I had no answer. In fact, I didn’t even know what “beach week” was. The beach was always a $7.00 ferry ride away and I and a number of my friends worked over there in some capacity. She, of course, meant taking a week and heading down to the Jersey Shore, Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City, or maybe even the Outer Banks or Myrtle, places where there was a ton of stuff to do and more than one way to get into teenage trouble. My only experience with a beach like that was a day at Mission Beach in San Diego when I was fourteen. My beaches are not the ones that get put in postcards, swimsuit calendars, or feature David Hasselhoff. They’re unassuming, the ones with a dock, a path, a concession stand, and a playground, none of which has changed in decades.

But who would want it to?

Barrett Beach–Fire Island as a whole, really–is one of the few things I view with pure nostalgia, allowing the rose-colored classes to stay on my face. Avoiding splinters on the boardwalk, tetanus on the playground, and ticks near the dunes. Hearing the gray-green Atlantic kissing the shore then going back out. Seeing the miles of uninterrupted shoreline that seems to go on forever, even though I’d go to Point Democrat on its west end more than a few times as a field worker. Smelling the burgers and fries from the concession stand, an ode to grease that makes them the best thing you’ve ever tasted as you sit at a sheltered picnic table. I have no idea if any of these things are even there any more, but have decided that doesn’t matter.