The ocean strand is covered with half-dressed women, boys and girls sprawled out like goats and satyrs hugging the shore and each other. It is the playground of the sexes.
At many bathing resorts Sunday is anything but religious. The cross gives way to Cupid’s bow and arrow. The Bible is the book of nature done in calf. Brown lads lie with their heads in the laps of half-naked brunettes, forgetting that to do so and not mean harm is “hypocrisy to the devil” who tempts their virtue. They make no attempt to hide under beach umbrellas. One may question their propriety, but neither their nerve nor shape. Their speech is low, but if actions speak louder than words, their conduct is often vulgar if not vicious. We saw a place advertised as the “safest beach,” but without falling into the deep water we fear the devil’s undertow is carrying many out beyond their moral depth. “Love one another” is the favorite text, and the “laying on of hands” is not omitted. All the flesh-pots were not in Egypt. Cleopatra had a good time on the Nile and “Clara” has the same time here. We saw many couples and decided that more marriages were made on the beach than in heaven. Position in society is everything. Here there was everything in position. Heads in laps, arms around waists, boys in girls’ laps, girls in boys’, legs linked, or arms and legs tied up in lover’s bow-knots. All were taking “Sea”estas in their “surge” suits. The sight was very “surf”eiting. In this Cupid school we saw girls with pearly teeth, but with no pearls of wisdom; many who could paint their face, but not paint a Madonna; girls who could play with the boys, but not the piano; the only apparent study was that of anatomy.
Breakers on the beaches are divided into three classes: ocean-breakers, law-breakers and heart-breakers. California is a fruit state and we looked everywhere to see the “peaches” on the beaches—but most of them were dried, and there were more old Iowa valetudinarians and bearded bipeds than anyone else. Timon of Athens was a misanthrope who went to the seashore to get away from mankind. Had he come to this beach, the day we were there, he would have prayed for a tidal wave to wipe it off the map.
Scripture says of the beautiful lilies, “they toil not, neither do they spin.” Of these painted, half-dressed, lounging, walking, posturing beach-combers with their dry feet, we say, “They toil not, neither do they swim.” We came away from the beach that Sunday with a composite picture of pop-eyed, pot-bellied promenaders in the sand, vulgar Venuses, wobbly wenches, living links, heavy-hipped hags, sinuous, shrunken men, tattered tights, tousled head nymphs, and vain cock of the walks admiring their own shape and gazing on their feet and fingernails.
We wish we could forget the bather’s singularity and angularity, the plethoric paunch, the blinking, bawling, calling, sprawling, mawling, drawling, squalling figures that defaced the beauty of the sky, the sea and the sand. Oh, the water cataracts running and dripping from shaking sides, heavy hips and swinging busts! If Ulysses and his crew sailed by this shore with its sweating sirens and howling hurdy-gurdies, they would stop their ears—but not for fear of being enticed ashore.
The poet sings of the “smile” of the sea—we do not wonder at laughing waves when they see some of the freak styles. What are the wild waves saying? Some things we think we better omit. To watch this beach of bathers is like having a front seat at the Winter Garden Follies. The visitor may study the contour of beach and bathers. Here he meets the living skeleton of angles and the bag of bones, as well as her heavy-set sister with all her capricious curves, crests, elevations and depressions. How unlike the pictures in the Sunday supplements, and how like the caricatures in the comic supplement. When first they appear all nice and dry they are passable, but look at them if you dare and can, when they take a dip or flop and come out with their homely lines all emphasized. No Greek statues, no things of beauty and joy forever, but shattered, disenchanting dreams, or nightmares rather.
Farewell to this flotsam and jetsam, foam and scum, these sand-flies. If you want to have a “good time,” go to the beach where the volume of nature and human nature is “wide open.” The text books you should bring and study on the seashore are Shelley, Burns, Sand, Crabbe and Bacon.
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Dickory, dickory, docking,
The mouse ran up her stocking,