TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

It feels like a quintessential American experience, taking your kids to the beach. I remember trips to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Ocean City, Maryland, when I was young — road trips in the family minivan, because it was more affordable to get a family of five to the coast by car than by plane. (My first flight wasn’t until I was twenty years old, but that’s another story for another day.) 

Some years, instead of ocean trips, we would drive north a couple of hours to Sandusky, Ohio, and stay on Lake Erie. We could swim there, build sand castles, and eat saltwater taffy. These memories are so clear in my mind. Eating fried clams. Collecting shells. And, hilariously, the time my dad wore his money clip into the lake, and the waves carried it away, along with all of our vacation cash. Well, it’s funny now.

I’ve taken my kids to Holden Beach, North Carolina, a few times. They’ve been to the beach as toddlers and as teenagers. Yes, we had fried clams and saltwater taffy. Yes, we collected shells. The American beach vacation experience is pretty much the same for them as it was for me, forty years later. 

Today’s poem took me right back there and reflected my own experience back to me—in a way that helped me see it differently. That’s the power of a good poem.

Vacation
by Sara Moore Wagner

At the Carolina coastline, the sea
laps up to the sand in great gulps.
I want to burst
on this beach, be remade,
as Osiris. Instead, I put my children
to bed sticky with salt,
with bits of shell hidden in the follicles
of their hair. In the morning, the radios
are all playing some tired country
song about the ocean, about girls
in the ocean. When I stand 
up to adjust my top, a man stops 
to say hello. I want to know the right
words to heal this country on the edge
of this country—look out,  I say,
over that big ocean is another world.
Remember all those ships
on this very shoreline, cutting through
it as birthday cake, not sharp,
not craggy, not a pumice stone, sweet
cake. On the other side of the ocean
is not another world. Look out.
We are born from both the sea
and the sand, trace our American
heritage to the Appalachian Mountains
of Ohio, that great melting pit of loss 
which still in the tired hills contain
fossils of the sea, were made from sea.
Make our lineage coastline: there is here
and there is there, that great blue
which is somehow warmer than the air
above it. The man tells me predator
fish wait just beyond the sandbar.
Hello fish, hello sky, hello America, you 
crowded beach of pushy people covered
in sunscreen, taking up more space,
claiming a spot early, playing your music
so loud it drowns out the sound of the gulls
crying mine mine mine mine mine.

"Vacation" by Sara Moore Wagner. Used by permission of the poet.