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hole on the beach
Sunday, June 30 2002Today was Ray's birthday, and he was celebrating it at a place called Long Beach, located on the southern shore of Long Island, not far from the eastern limits of the Borough of Queens. To get there, Gretchen and I caught the Long Island Railroad at Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue station. For the record, I would just like to say that the Atlantic Avenue train and subway station has to be the ugliest in the entire MTA system. By ugly, I mean impermanent and dingy: makeshift blue-painted plywood-and-duct-tape walls, accented here and there by iron support poles painted in a black and yellow barberpole pattern.
Though not exactly Amtrack, the Long Island Railroad is a genuine train system. The cars are complete with comfortable high-backed chairs and bathrooms (though these are frequently in a less-than-ideal state). We rendezvoused with Ray and his posse at the Long Beach train station; they'd actually all been on the same train we'd been riding. Like seemingly everyone else getting off our train, some in our party went into a supermarket near the beach to get provisions, particularly plums. In this case it was just easier to shoplift, despite the presence of a guard.
Unlike the "free as in beach" mentality of California, it actually cost money to get to the Long Beach waterfront. Gretchen and I just walked past the guy collecting money and there were no ramifications. When one carries the discount card of confidence, lots of things people pay money for suddenly become free.
Once we'd set spread out our towels, applied our lotions, and erected our umbrellas, I quickly lost interest in the social aspect of the day and launched into a one-man construction project. While the others played cards and kept up a continual banter of jokes and comic insults, I dug a hole. In the course of two or three hours, I managed to dig all the way down to water level some five feet from the surface. Though I never tasted the puddle that formed around my feet, I assume it was ocean water.
Digging such a hole was an enormous undertaking, particularly since I had no tools but my bare hands (and one of my flip-flops). Not only that, but the sun was hot and I hadn't really had a proper breakfast. By the time I hit water, I was covered with sweat and a little light in the head. So I waded to the ocean, lured by the troughs and punished by the crests. The waves were actually pretty big for the Atlantic Ocean, comparable to a mediocre San Diego surf (though the water was much warmer). Lots of people had boogie boards and few even had genuine surf boards. Being in the ocean for the first time since living in San Diego, I was again treated to the wonderful mathematical precision of the intersecting waves and the shifting complexity of momentary peaks and hollows. Though others in my entourage had been smoking pot, I hadn't been, though I could nonetheless recall how I felt back in San Diego when I used to wade in the ocean while stoned. I looked around me at the other Homo sapiens and thought, here we were, land-based creatures wading out to the limits of our survivability, thrilled at the sheer power of the ocean. Again I was surprised to find myself feeling that it was a more sublime experience than simple recreation.
Back at my hole construction site, my efforts were not going unnoticed by a little boy at an adjoining beach towel. He was seven to ten years old, I think. For boys of that age, nothing is more interesting than a hole in the ground. I myself worked on several "hole digging projects" when I was a kid, and in each of these the hole was an end in itself.
Anyway, the kid managed to finagle his parents' permission to help me build my hole, even though I never explicitly told him I wanted his help. And then there he was at the top of my hole helping move sand that I'd just tossed out. Later he descended into the hole and our roles reversed. He kept hollering out to his mother, "look at how deep this hole is!" Meanwhile, I was pretty much satisfied with my hole and went to relax on my towel and sun myself. By this point the kid was about as obsessed as I'd been and he wanted me to help him. He kept asking for assistance and Gretchen (who, surprisingly enough, is even less tolerant of children than I am) had to tell the boy several times that I was done with the hole and that it was all his now.I never even learned this boy's name, but at the end of the afternoon when his parents were packing up and leaving, he said that we'd have to dig an even bigger hole next time we saw each other on the beach. Actually, his first idea was that we'd simply enlarge this hole the next time we came to the beach, but then I gently let him in on one of the cruel realities of the world: nothing on a beach is permanent. From the way he spoke of today's experience, it indicated to me that it had been life-altering for him. He'll probably dream about digging really big holes for the rest of his pre-pubescent life. As an adult some day he might even build himself an underground house in hopes of recapturing the long lost joy of his childhood. Most of the money of adulthood is, after all, spent trying to make up for deprivations of our youth.
When our entourage was packing up to leave, several of us thought we should fill in my hole so no one would fall into it and break a leg. I hated to see my creation destroyed, but of course they were right. So, with only four or five of us working, it only took about two minutes to undo an entire afternoon of digging.In the evening I was working on finding a way to continue protecting Bathtubgirl's members-only content areas after her trial copy of Webquota expired, but all the alternatives to Webquota were too cumbersome and complicated to deploy. So I cut short my effort to go out to dinner with Gretchen. We'd be dining with Ray and his entourage (a slightly-different group from the beach posse) at a Mexican restaurant called Elora's in Windsor Terrace (just south of Prospect Park).
To get to Windsor Terrace, we rode our bicycles down Prospect Park West, passing massive festivities at the park's band shell along the way. It was just one evening of a multi-week festival called Celebrate Brooklyn - I plan to see Yo La Tengo there on July 12th. This was the first time Gretchen and I had ever used our bicycles to go some place together (as opposed to just riding around in the park).
Unlike our strangely alcohol-free afternoon on the beach, tonight Ray and his birthday celebrants were drinking frozen margaritas from pitchers. This (and a lack of places to dig holes) put me in a considerably less anti-social mood than I'd been on the beach.
The burritos are, it turns out, rather small at Elora's, though they come slathered with sides such as rice, beans, and salad. The service was surprisingly bad, though in a charming poor-ability-to-remember-things sort of way. Everything on the menu was fairly cheap, though that's how it's supposed to be at a Mexican restaurant.
While eating at Elora's, I experienced a feeling that, for descriptive purposes, I will call "the Downtown New York Prejudice." Basically it goes like this: in New York, one tends to feel in some way vaguely disadvantaged and uncivilized with respect to people who are "more downtown" than you. Conversely, one tends to feel more urbane with respect to people who are "less downtown." Since Gretchen and I rarely venture "less downtown" (further "out" on the subway) than where we live, I rarely get the opportunity to feel "more urbane" than the parts of New York I visit. Tonight, however, I actually did feel a twinge of urbaneness while dining in Windsor Terrace. It's ridiculous, of course, since I'm really just a displaced country hayseed and it's entirely on account of freak luck that I live where I do, but twinges of prejudice are not the sorts of things easily dismissed with rational analysis. Biking back home through the park, we encountered a large crowd of people marching down the park's circle road, pursued by a slow-moving police car. From the center of the throng, a single blue and red flag was flying. Absolutely everyone in the crowd was black, and few of them seemed to be speaking English. Gretchen stopped to ask someone what the marching was about and learned that it had something to do with Haiti.
Seeing these people marching in unison about something, whatever that something was, gave me a vicarious thrill. I wasn't part of their world, but it gladdened my heart to see them enthusiastic about their identity. There's a big difference between being tribalistic about a tiny little group to which you happen to belong and being enthusiasitic about membership in an overbearing and increasingly anti-democratic superpower. For the most part, I support the former and am frightened by the latter. When a vast powerful majority begins acting like their tribe is "the greatest" and members of it belong to a special exclusive club, that's where tribalism and nationalism begin to cross the boundary into fascism. To me, flamboyant, repetitious mass-displays of American patriotism (or, for that matter, opportunistic God talk) constitute a form of bullying, not much different from the ubiquitous pictures of Stalin in Soviet Russia. A crowd of Haitians in New York will never bully anyone, but a throng of white guys in Birmingham, Alabama, well, that's an entirely different story.
Responding to my on-the-spot words of support for the Haitian and other minority marchers, Gretchen agreed, saying, "that's why I like being Jewish." 
Onion domes on a building in a run-down area of Brooklyn along the Long Island Railroad.
A hole I dug.
Me working on my hole.
Ray, the birthday boy, plays cards.
A random kid showed up and spontaneously began helping me dig my hole.
Yeah, all boys this age are fascinated by holes.
My shadow to the left and that kid's shadow to the right.
Amy, one of Ray's friends who commonly shows up at Ray's festivities.
Gretchen.
Child labor is cheap. That's Ray's friend Carmen talking on her cell phone in the near background.
Another view of the hole.
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