YNever step into the same river twice. But we can step into the same ocean, it seems, every January when we take our first swim. The end of the year has passed, bending my head under the waves, feeling the rushing cold and the sting of salt, shivering like a dog when I come to the surface, washed clean.
When I was a kid, it was Phillip Island. It was a green canvas tent in my grandfather’s backyard. My chipped foam surfboard scraped against my skin as I lay there, just floating in the strait between the island and the mainland, never daring to get into the actual waves. It was the acrid smoke of mozzie coils and the oily texture of battered flakes from a fish and chip shop. Shower under the tank stand. The sun burns our skin until it peels.
Well, for my kids, it’s Point Rhodonite Beach in Anglesey, Victoria. At low tide, the beach is wide and pockmarked with lukewarm puddles that are ankle deep. The hot sand cools under your feet as your path home enters the belt of trees between the beach and the parking lot. A flat, wide rock platform juts out beyond the tip, appearing and disappearing beneath sheets of bubbling water.
He doesn’t have a canvas tent. Instead, we found rental beach house after beach house that was rebooked the moment we left (or a frantic online search for a place on the “right” side of the Great Ocean Road, one after another). (It was put up for sale at an outrageous price). Slips, slips, long-sleeve rashes, and sun tents won’t cause skin peels. But it’s always the same beach, same routine, half-hearted attempts to do something today again, back to walking and reading and taking something home for dinner.
The point seems to be that the seven days of a particular week in January are a blur. Details and dates blur together over the years, creating an overall feeling of one summer that lasted throughout my childhood. That’s how Phillip Island feels in my memory. It’s as if every year a door opens and you walk through it into a place where your parents are always around, the sun is always shining, and getting dressed means putting on a T-shirt. All we had to do was decide to visit, as if the place were eternal and always existed. As if you could still do that.
That ended when my grandfather passed away. His house was sold and some of the money went toward the only overseas vacation of my childhood. We spent two weeks in a campervan in New Zealand. There, the children argued and fought, and I refused to read or look at the mountains. I was probably 11 or 12 at the time, so I probably quickly lost interest in family beach vacations. Perhaps that abrupt end cemented the island in my memory, turning it into a looping summer day, playing in the back of my mind like a movie on a home projector.
Those memories are why I love the idea of returning to just one place over and over again. Why do I stick to the same beach every year? I want to give children familiarity and repetition that tricks the human mind into thinking things will last forever. Part of me thinks that my older child, a really young man, wouldn’t go to the beach right now if they paid me, but in the back of my mind I see the ripples refracting on the yellow sand and the little crabs. is a miracle and I wish they had ice cream before. Dinner is not only allowed, but encouraged.
His younger brother still loves the game and is too young to realize that things will change. It means that the adults who move around him like so many constellations in the summer evening sky are not always there. That there will be many bad days.
sign up for 5 great reads
Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may include information about charities, online advertising, and content sponsored by external parties. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and are subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
After newsletter promotion
So we return again and again, hoping to build his inner landscape just beyond the door that memory always opens. It is a place where everyone is together, nothing is missing, and the essence of life is the sun on his skin, the wind on the water. And the moment when he, hot and tired, jumps from dry land into the elemental waters.
