Oh extreme beaching! How I love thee. You offer a euphoric season of full body, mind, heart pleasure next to my bigLake. To end this practice is the most painful marker of change every September. And 2020 is no ordinary year.
Body
As the Duluth hillside changes to fiery pink, I reckon with the last of my bibliophilic excursions to Park Point beach. The beginning of the end equals leaving my pop-up sunshade at home, no longer needing to apply gobs of sunscreen, the hourly avoidance of shadows with subtle scoot of beach blanket towards water to follow waning warm sun of early evening. The final blow- to protect precious parts only partial immersion in the water is recommended.
We see a small handful of 80 degree days each year in Duluth. Every single one is precious to this Miami born queer who revels in high temps and sweat (as my fellow Minnesotans melt). Even on “hot” days, our bigLake can be icy cold depending on wind direction. Anything from the south sends away warm surface water. One to three foot rollers out of the north allow me to ‘swim’= stay in the water, skim the sandy bottom enveloped in absolute quiet, tread water with a hyper focus on the horizon.
I’ve perfected the art of changing into my bathing suit in the car on the way to the beach. I don’t want to waste a minute after work. Even during a pandemic year, between Canal Park traffic and getting ‘bridged’, almost every tourist filled trip down to the water provides a few minutes where I can de-bra my top half and swim trunk my bottom.
Changing. We all are. Because of global health crisis and uprisings. Over seasons. Who we are as queers and writers and lovers. Author Molly Wizenberg of The Fixed Stars says late in her memoir, “We are constantly writing the novel of ourselves, inventing more of it on demand, to be what the world asks of us.”
Heart
Occasionally I invite a friend to join me or decorate the waterside weekends with visitors. Beaching always figures into Duluth trips, summery unplanned plans. Some of my people come prepared to have maximum amounts of fun. Snacks and innertubes. Go Pro camera and snorkel gear. A few don’t even own swimsuits. One splendid old dog paid his last respects to the bigLake in July- sandy hot happy afternoon goodbye.
Books though are my constant companion no matter water temps, company, fly sitch and UV index. Extreme beaching plus rapturous reading is the most beloved, sexy, seasonal love. The place I bring everything the world throws down- and let go.
I devoured more than two dozen reads on warm sand seven feet from frigid fierce festive Lake Superior. My committed-to-as-many-pleasure-filled-afternoons-on-the-beach-as-possible-each-week-to-survive-Covid practice started with laugh out loud fabulous feminist irreverence in Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens (summer read perfection found in a Lil Free Library). I then cried and salivated and sighed and shouted aloud ‘Fuck yeah!’ as I swam from Biased to Cowboys to Remember to What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use to Give the Girl a Knife to The Giver of Stars to Me and White Supremacy to Clap When You Land and finally Wizenberg’s The Fixed Stars.. So much YA fiction and poetry too!
“Extreme” beaching during a pandemic lent peace, safety and consistency. Every book I lugged down in a canvas bag or shoved through an unzipped inch of my cooler offered escape, glee and opportunity to grapple with some part of self and our frayed world.
Mind
Wizenberg uses her own story alongside night sky metaphors to say “although the stars seem stationary to the naked eye, astronomers know that every star is in motion and that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties.” She adds, “The constellations we see are temporary human creations, our effort to draw order and meaning from a mostly unknowable universe, to tell ourselves stories, to guide our way home across endless oceans.”
I sink deeper into sun-warmed sand as Wizenberg throughout The Fixed Stars lets go of cultural constructs of monogamy, queerness, essentialism, and romance. She grows beyond the limits of a relationship and astutely tailors notions of self. I revel in rich language and endless lit references. I simultaneously stand inside her inner circle and outside an established primarily straight, monogamous audience.
As I lay still on the beach, the place I am the only place I want to be, I feel contentment alongside a constant craving for more, radical, queer. In Uses of Use, the brilliant Sara Ahmed maintains focus on what “governs queer bodies.” Taking up questions of class and affect, Ahmed connects “queer usefulness with happiness and virtue, evincing the ways capitalism baits us by moralizing productivity that imitates equity while retaining white, hetero-sexist power structures. To idle then is to both queer, and cease to function, is to cease to be..“
Ah yes there it is. A radical queer anti-racist critique I can use- to go deeper into my waterside pedantry and idleness. The confluence of both is what these days next to my bigLake offer. I realize by extreme beaching with books all summer, I’m betraying the capitalistic conditionality that says “move constantly” or go home/be ignored.
Spring summer now fall, I’m back in my studio instead of reading and writing on the beach. The pandemic keeps me staring at the same horizon. However, I see new things. In her powerful debut novel You Exist Too Much Palestinian queer writer Zaina Arafat requotes Proust, “the real voyage of discovery is about having new eyes. And I leave here today with a brand new pair.”
By returning to the same place next to the water most afternoons, I remember to make room for what lies undetected in the midst of chaos and routine. The beach offers me the middle- between what is stationary and moving, queer and conventional, our inner and outer worlds. I’ll be back next summer with the same still abandon.