In the event you’re reading this
and never go to the beach, you may stop reading now. Otherwise, this may be terribly significant
to your rights and well-being when visiting The Shore.
This morning’s newspaper, AKA:
fish wrapping paper, published an addendum to stories all summer long about
area beaches.
During the summer months, inland
folks look forward to visiting The Shore to not only buy salt water taffy and
cheesy t-shirts, goofy hats, over-priced food truck fixin’s, and bug repellent,
but also enjoy some time on the beach.
The beach is one of those places
that is bittersweet, in nature. It’s a
place where you can relax with a book or magazine, get toasty warm, catch a
nap, go fishing, and especially people-watch.
People-watching is an activity
that involves relativity. One sits at
the edge of the water wearing sunglasses.
As strangers pass by, the viewer critiques the viewee’s posture, gait,
size, cellulose, bathing attire, and overall appearance.
Once these less-than-perfect
specimens pass, we mentally store that gathered information to use as fodder
for one of those over-priced food truck dinners. But I digress.
As children, we were warned to
not sit in the sun without sunscreen, lest we eventually get skin cancer. Some years ago, we were inundated with public
service announcements regarding the dangers of melanoma. We were shown pictures of oddly shaped
freckles and things that were once called “beauty marks.”
We were carefully instructed to
monitor and regularly measure these deformities to better enjoy long lives
rather than succumb to this semi-preventable form of cancer.
So it was with interest that I
closely followed the fish wrapping paper stories of the “Summer of ’17 Battle
I say “working-class people”
because I feel that reflects the blue collar workers who annually schlep the
family, along with inflatable rafts, toy trucks, plastic pails and shovels,
blankets, aluminum folding chairs, plus a giant tote bag full of necessities
that Lawrence of Arabia would have died for.
They drive for hours to pay too
much for mediocre motel rooms, eat over-priced food, drive through
bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the beach, and one day into their vacation
have to deal with five more days of sunburns.
To alleviate this preventable
curse is a pretty simple solution: a beach umbrella.
For generations, people - like my
Dad – dragged a multi-colored canvass umbrella to and from the beach for roughly
fifteen years. I was well into my teen
years before I realized an umbrella was an option for beach entry.
Dutifully, Dad would meticulously
wipe down all our toys, chairs, and umbrella down to prevent that beach sand
from making the trip home with us. Alas,
nearly seven pounds of it did, each and every time. You would think we would be able to stay home
and enjoy the beach in our backyard after a mere couple of years. But I digress.
Still, the brain trust of varying
Shore towns has been focused on a mission to improve the annual vacation
pilgrimage to the beach by taking away your liberties.
Suddenly, umbrellas are forbidden
from use because they may fly away and injure a fellow beach-goer. Also outlawed are those popup canopies
because too many fair-skinned visitors set up enough to be eligible for their
own zip code. Now the geniuses in
Bethany Beach, Delaware, want to make your beach vacation more enjoyable via semi-tenable
statements.
These cancer preventers,
according to Bethany Beach officials with too much time on their hands, block
the view of the water and create an overly cumbersome path to the water,
itself.
It would serve Bethany Beach; Ocean City , Maryland ; and
Assateague Island , Maryland
and Virginia
Q: Why not focus on flying footballs and
Frisbees© rather than sun protection?
A: Vacation elsewhere.
I’m just saying.
