On a white-sand beach, my body and my belongings amount to so much refuse. I sprawl there, fish-belly torso visible from space and round where I wish it was sharp. My buttoned shirt parts down the middle, jagged like the edges of an open wound, exposing flesh that is tender, swollen, and red. I close my eyes but see myself through the eyes of those around me and I become bitter and small- not at all unlike the ocean that shifts like a cat at my feet.
‘‘The Intimate Ocean,’ formed through the vigorous coupling of nature and performance art, manages to fit all the salinity and lunar movement of its larger cousins into an area just ten feet in diameter at high tide. Home to a small school of fish and a family of bluish crabs, the ‘Ocean’ hardly qualifies as a ‘pond’ in regards to size but makes up for it in questionable technicalities and the earnest condescension with which visitors treat the thing.
On any given weekend they arrive, visitors with knowing half-smiles and eyes that roll about in their heads to say ‘We, too, are in on it.’ They take up their small sand shovels or roll out lavish towels and, in the style of communal seating, cram together on the 31’ beach that encircles ‘The Intimate Ocean.’ They enjoy themselves, or, pretend to enjoy themselves, crafting miniature sand castles and reclining in mock worship of the sun.
The joke, of course, is that it is forbidden to mention the smallness of ‘The Intimate Ocean’ and outright blasphemous to suggest that, in regards to fun, the size of the thing is a limiting factor. As a society that has more or less embraced the ideal of the individual, the meta-climate of ‘The Intimate Ocean’ insists that we grit our teeth and smile when a stray foot collapses our moat or a careless elbow finds its way into our ribs because we experience the pain as part of a close, if temporary, community of beach-goers.
And when we do clear the sand from our eyes and look out over the ‘Ocean’ we see not the horizon, but the opposite shore.
And from a ways off, it does look nice.’
-traveler
