You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Carmel Beach.
This mile of sand hidden away on the Central California Coast is a golden oasis in a state known for oasis’.
Carmel Beach is .08 of a mile long, snuggled between world-famous Pebble Beach and artistically renowned Carmel By The Sea.
Whenever I come to Carmel, I must visit the beach. It’s a requisite, a chronic to do list.
There’s something about the ocean. The finality of the land yielding to the dreams of the horizon. It’s the roar of the waves, the constant rhythm of life, the crashing of water onto land, only to watch that water suck back into the void and begin the process over again.
So I go to the beach and punch my check list, yet again.
Only this time, it’s different.
Maybe it is the warm Labor Day Weekend.
Maybe it is the magnetic draw of the ocean.
But Carmel beach is crowded.
It is 8 beers in a crowded six-pack.
It’s relatives saying their leaving Friday staying till the following Monday crowded.
I gaze the beach. My eyes are assaulted by the clutter, the visual pollution of humanity.
People are filling up every square inch of sand.
It looks like a cat box that has not been scooped.
It is Tiananmen Square without the tanks.
It’s New Years Eve in Times Square with less urine.
The crow is non stop like the line for breast milk at the Octomom’s house.
PANDA
The walk down Carmel beach can be desolate.
Depending on the weather, it can be cold and wet and windy.
The bay is hardly tropical. It’s often 58 degrees.
Surfers without a wet suit are future hypothermia patients.
It’s not the kind of weather that is going to attract Sports Illustrated bikini models.
That’s why Labor Day 2015 is so very unusual.
It is wall to wall people. It is hot and summer like.
It feels like a beach day.
It feels like a beach in El Salvador, not Carmel, California.
I am bouncing into people, saying excuse me like it’s black Friday at Target.
I am a territorial pin ball in a game without flippers or bumpers only sweat and man breasts.
I don’t even know what that means, but I find it disturbing.
I am hearing accents from all over the world.
I am hearing American verb tenses that don’t exist in the English language.
I am seeing body types that should be outlawed without a shirt.
I see 8 man tents just beyond the 1st dune.
I see families crammed inside this tent, sealed off from the elements.
I feel like going up there and slicing open the mosquito netting.
“This is the beach Essay. Take your Wal-Mart plastic shelter and get out in the sand.”
As I look for a pathway free of cellulite, I notice one constant.
Dogs.
Lots of Dogs.
Carmel is a city that outlawed ice cream on the sidewalks at one point in its grizzly history.
But dogs?
Who needs leashes.
It may be the most dog friendly dog beach in America.
They sniff each other’s asses and then prance into the surf to chase each other’s tennis balls bobbing in the surf.
If you have a dog, you stop and let your dog visit with the other dogs. You hope they don’t fight. You hope they don’t fornicate in public. You hope that both dogs say good morning and move on.
But it’s always a four-footed crap shoot, this Carmel dog beach thing.
Some of this feels like Carmel. Some of this is not the Carmel Beach I remember.
The Carmel Beach of my youth came with a Clint Eastwood wink and silent “Go ahead, make my day.”
The Carmel Beach of my youth came with a sea otter casually laying in a kelp bed breaking open an abalone with a rock, while keeping a watchful eye out for a great white shark.
Back in the day, surfers tried to stand on 3 foot swells and surfer girls waited for them on the sand.
But this Carmel Beach is different.
It’s more like a prison break in East L.A.
It’s cholos and tattoos and long jean cut off shorts.
What?
Did no one read the new ordinance?
It feels less refreshing and a little more like a heat rash under your arms.
This beach day feels like an INS crack down at the border.
There are swim suits fashioned out of dungarees and plastic shopping sacks.
There are shades of unprotected white skin and flabby belly’s.
I keep walking, my head on a swivel, shocked, surprised, wondering how this is possible.
I usually don’t wonder if I am going to get a shiv to the back.
Today?
I’m thinking about it.
Where is my Carmel Beach?
The quiet world of lily white joggers and occasional tourists pretending the water isn’t 58 degrees.
The beach is about a mile long. It continues into Pebble Beach where the golf course rises majestically above the dunes.
It is sterling and magnificent.
It’s a public golf course that only costs $650 to play.
That sounds public, doesn’t it?
As we walk down the beach, crossing the invisible barrier into Pebble Beach, the feeling of a possible drive by shooting dissipates.
I see less Wal-Mart plastic huts and more 5 million dollar mansions.
I stop and relish the open space around me.
I smell the breeze and it is filled with salt air and inspiration, not body odor and jail house stank.
I kick the sand and it is pure and white.
It took me a mile to find my Carmel Beach, but I finally did.
At least for today, it is nestled between the rocks and the golf course at the end of the sand.
I turn back and look at the menagerie I just passed through.
It is a circus of funk, a subway station in Tia Juana, a hairy underarm of humanity.
I will return that way soon.
But for now?
I turn my back on the throng of out-of-place miscreants.
I look at the 100 yards of beach before me.
The surf pounds the shore like it has since the beginning.
The air is crisp and clean and the faint bark of a sea-lion can be heard some where around the next grotto.
I smile.
This is my Carmel Beach
Life’s Crazy™