My friend Carl from Sweden, who I knew back in boarding school in the Stone Age of the 1980s, told me at a class reunion some years ago that he agreed with the theory that human society emerged at the water’s edge. At the shores of the lakes, ponds, rivers, oceans, and bays in the primordial past. If I’m not mistaken — I may well be mistaken? — this hypothesis is associated with the phrase “the aquatic ape”: the theory that early humans, gathering by water sources, learned to forge bonds of truce or negotiate between groups around this shared resource. They had to. The riverside was where the food grew, and the water to drink; different tribes and wolfpacks couldn’t just eternally gather there only to fight and bite one another; they needed to learn to talk and to get along. Peace like a river. Peace down by the riverside.
It’s high season for bonfires and I was thinking of the bathing apes at a beach picnic on Monday night at Georgica. Little monkeys, swinging orangutans, and great apes, picnickers of all sizes and shapes frolicked knee-deep in the sea froth as heat lightning illuminated a cloud in the southeast sky in bursts and flashes of rosy peach. There were at least three picnic parties at Georgica that night.
I’m at home around a beach bonfire, more at home than almost any place else. (Save, perhaps, how at home I also feel in my own kitchen, working in front of my grandmother’s persnickety propane stove from the 1960s with the six burners, the two ovens, the two broilers, and three generations’ worth of grease in its tiny crevices.) The cold at your back, the heat on your face, the Milky Way above, the smell of smoke saturating your clothes and hair. . . . My own primordial, personal past is absolutely rooted in the glow of a beach bonfire, rooted in the sand, like beach grass — no, like the sea-rocket, Cakile edentula, that grew in thick green patches in the interstitial space between the dunes and the waves down on Gardiner’s Bay at Promised Land in my childhood, a fleshy, succulent-stemmed, resilient plant that could withstand salt and storm blast.
We were constantly cooking things down on the beach in the 1970s. We cooked kielbasa and skewers of teriyaki chicken and peppers on a miniature, portable hibachi rig that our family friend Peter Dohanos had invented, by setting a regular metal household colander into a small wooden benchlike stand (the colander held just enough coals). We cooked things on sticks, over a bonfire with flames that shot up higher than our wee heads. We set hard clams directly onto a heavy metal grate recycled from . . . from some industrial purpose lost in time. We simmered bouillabaisse in huge stockpots on an open flame. This went on weekly, or even more frequently, throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Like many local people of my age — barreling willy-nilly through my late 50s in the direction of 60 much more swiftly than I had intended — I have a hard time repressing my own sense of territoriality when I am on the beach. I am a total unreconstructed ape, frankly. I have to force myself not to beat my chest and bellow when I see some stranger piloting a Bronco at speed toward my own group, as we huddle around the fire in the dark of night, headlights coming over the dunes like the eyes of some strange beast or wild boar. The beach is where the class tensions — the resentments, the us-versus-thems, the rich-versus-poors, the animus against Come From Aways — come to a boil. (There, and in the parking lots of the Hamptons, obviously.)
One time when I was about 19, I was down on the beach at Indian Wells at night with a group of friends, whooping into the surf in our underwear. It wasn’t very late, maybe 9 or 10, when a group of strangers — teenagers we didn’t know — appeared and built their own bonfire, maybe 30 yards from ours. In those days you didn’t take supplies to the beach to build a bonfire but just scavenged whatever wood had washed up, piled it into a rough pyramid shape (to act like a chimney), then set it ablaze with the matches or Bic lighter someone would inevitably have in their pants pocket. (Everyone smoked then, even kids, and we all carried matches and lighters. It was a very smoky, sooty age.) But we were used to being left alone on the beach after dark, weren’t accustomed to others showing up and claiming their own patch of sand around which to do exactly what we did: drink and make out and act foolish, with toes pushed down into the cold sand beneath the upper sand layer that was heated to glass-melting temperatures by the flames. Naturally, someone in our group happened to have brought a handful of bottle rockets with them on that particular night. (Was it me? I cannot recall. But I do love a good bottle rocket.) We crept up into the dunes, crab-crawled on our bellies in the direction of the strangers’ bonfire, and then lit the fuses, sending a volley of one, two, three bottle rockets into the sky above the strangers’ heads.
This was not my finest hour. I recall it with distinct shame.
One of the From Away boys stood up and — turning away from the light of the fire to face the direction from which the fusillade had come, the deep pitch-black beyond the fire glow — shouted with righteous indignation, “What are you doing?! There are girls here!” (I thought that was hilarious! There are girls here.)
We need to get along down by the waterside. We need to cultivate peace and keep reminding ourselves of our own civility. No one owns the ocean, not even a Bonacker, not even me. (I’m being facetious. I hope you can hear that. Obviously, even me.) Despite this grown-up truth — nevertheless — the high wind off the ocean puffs its cheeks and blows like a bellows on the old coals of primitive resentment, reigniting them and making them glow orange again, when I see one of these commercial bonfire companies setting up a catered prefab bonfire, complete with matching folding chairs set in a circle, a picnic table, tiki torches, and the requisite metal fire tub, which is dug into a hollow in the sand.
I’m often at the ocean here in the village at the end of the day, for a heavenly swim in late afternoon or early evening, when the crowds have gone and the sky is at its most mild and picturesque. I say “hello” to the evening plovers and read approximately two pages of “Excellent Women” by Barbara Pym, sitting on my single beach chair, which I angle so that I see no one and nothing but the surf. This timing, however, means I’m usually down there on Georgica or Main when the workers for the beach party companies arrive to set up their for-profit bonfires. The truck comes down to unload exactly at the stroke of 6 p.m., when the law permits, and we — the few bathers who are still lolling in the calm at the end of the day — rise to our elbows and stare at the trucks with indignation.
Examining my soul, I cannot justify my annoyance at the sight of these diligent workers, who are only doing their thing, making their honest buck, providing a service and then cleaning it up, leaving no trace, doing no one any harm. But it brings out the ape in me.