Today on the beach, I watched a kid playing in the sand, He scooped up sand in pre-shaped plastic containers and then dumped them out: stars, a turtle, and a series of boxes. The tide, on its way in slowly, lapped at the first, so he added to his little kingdom a giant wall to stop the water.
I remembered.
The first time I ever saw the ocean was English Bay, Vancouver. My brother and sister and I were there with our grandparents visiting our uncle and “his roommate”. Our joy that first day at the beach was pure, and we built a little kingdom as well. My brother was more concerned with building something concrete, height and shape and structure. Me, I had another goal. With a series of trenches, walls, and driftwood barriers, I was going to protect it all. The tide might come in and wash away other people’s kingdoms, but not ours. I was going to circumvent all that. As the waves lapped ever closer, I grew more frantic in building up walls for the water to batter against, and deeper, longer trenches for it to return to the sea.
I wonder now at that innocent hubris, the frenzied certainty that whatever I was doing would be enough to in fact stop the tide. I wonder how that perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat has shaped me since. I wonder how I knew, even so young, that some things had to be fought against. Rage, rage, against the coming of the tide.
You know how this story ends, of course. The tide comes in, and it washes away the wood, it fills the trenches, it flattens the walls. Some things, you cannot fight against. Eventually, everything returns to the sea.
But it’s the fight! The fight that matters.