Life's A Beach

The Annual Beach Recap, featuring a Surprisingly Low-Key Particular Individual, Buster's Beach Wildlife Adventure, the Latest Trend in Ink, the Worst in Swimwear, The Locals View of Tourists, and Thoughts on Pelicans.

We returned three days ago from another trip to Surfside Beach.  This year marked our 20th in a row, which is hard to believe and possibly even a little silly.  But still fun.

New buddy Don (a.k.a. Horry County Sherriff McAlister Brown) had a flight snafu in Pa. and couldn't make it, and our Ohio contingent is dwindling.  This year it was just us and Jim & Tish (and they could stay just a few days).  Even so, we polished off a box of oysters, a gin bucket, some boiled peanuts, and other regional delights.

But mostly it was just us and our old South Carolina friends, including the Particular Individual who, in the past few years, has treated us to anti-government rants, global warming denials, and called us communists. This year the P.I. was generally well-behaved.  Considering us a lost cause, he unloaded his "knowledge" on unsuspecting "Chris", a relative newbie in the S.C. gang.  (He just married into it.)  I studiously avoided the P.I.'s endless soap-boxing, but did overhear him telling a cornered Chris that "Israel is the new Satan."  Oh, I see.   Last year, P.I. said that Muslims were Satan.  Is there a different Satan annually?  Jeez!

The Particular Individual is like the Henny Youngman of right-tard quackery -- he's got a million of 'em!  And if you give him ten seconds, he'll take two hours.  Poor Chris admitted to us privately that he finds P.I.'s monologues tedious, but he doesn't quite know how to extract himself gracefully, so he just sits and listens politely.  Fuck that, bro!  Around P.I., ya gotta stay agile and mobile.  A moving target is hard to hit.

But ol' P.I. was fairly low key, which was good for everyone.  Although after I told my falling-squirrel-hit-me-in-the-head story, he did find a way to segue into his own story of a high-powered rifle which will blow a ground hog into smithereens.  And this relates how?  Rodents, I guess.


Speaking of animals, I had an interesting wildlife encounter on the beach.  Afternoon of the second Saturday, our attention was drawn by the sound of a bird squawking horribly.  It was a sea gull with a broken wing, thrashing around on the sand, terrified.  Apparently, a thoughtless boy threw a rock at a group of gulls and by dumb luck actually hit this poor bird.  It was a bad compound fracture -- the wing was twisted 180 degrees, bleeding, and appeared to be in danger of literally falling off.

Not  the actual sea gull.  Ours was in much worse shape.

Nature being cruel, this hapless creature was being set upon by other birds.  Starlings, crows and other gulls swooped and circled.  ("A minute ago, you were my brother.  Now you're just lunch.")  A small crowd of people gathered to shoo away the other birds.  Children stared in morbid fascination.  Free advice began to flow, ranging from "Just twist its neck"  to "You can set that wing with popsicle sticks and duct tape".  Naturally, no one stepped forward to do the neck-twisting or duct-taping, but something had to be done.  I told the group I'd walk down the beach and ask Vlad the lifeguard to radio the beach service to at least remove the poor thing from the beach.

Vlad walked up with me to see for himself.  He radioed the beach service.  A beach service guy on a 4-wheeler soon pulled up and said there was nothing he could do, but he'd radio the police and get their take on it.  The cops called him back and said the local Animal Welfare Rescue Clinic was closed on weekends and there was nothing they could do.  The beach service guy drove away and Vlad returned to his chair, and we were back to square one.

I said we should throw a blanket over the gull (it was pecking frantically at everything, its beak was big and sharp, and I'd seen The Birds) and move it off the beach.  A guy from our condo complex agreed to help me. But just then a pair of women beat us to it, covering the bird with their beach blanket.  I helped them off-load the critter in the relative safety of tall sea grass in the dunes, but we all knew that our terribly wounded birdie had no chance and would very soon be a goner.

Oddly, after making our dead-duck "deposit", on-lookers gave us a round of applause.  (We did not take a bow.)  A few minutes later, the beach cop on duty finally pulled up on his 4-wheeler and asked, smiling, if the sea gull had "flown away".  Ha-ha.  I told him where we stashed the bird, and he said that it was all we could do and was for the best, especially since Animal Welfare was closed until Monday and he himself couldn't really help.

Nature may be cruel, but it can also be merciful and quick.  The next morning, Sunday, I checked the spot in the grass where we placed the gull, and there was nothing to be found.  Gone, just like that.  Circle of life.

About midday, there was a sudden commotion near the waterline.  It was the same damn sea gull!  Unbelievable!  Not dead, not gone, still flopping around and trying to fly on one wing, its other wing a grisly piece of meat dragging in the sand.  It's the Jesus Gull!  The Die-Hard Gull!  The Chuck Norris of sea gulls!  Stephen Sea Gull!  Definitely one tough old bird.

This time, another guy and I waved our T-shirts and chased our bird back up the beach and into the dunes.  We covered it with a shirt and the exhausted bird just sat there.  Again came the same broad spectrum of suggestions about what to do.  ("Are you a veterinarian?  An expert in avian physiology?"  "No, but I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.")

I noticed a beach cop -- a different one -- patrolling on his 4-wheeler, approached him and told him my strange story of the unbreakable sea gull with a broken wing, and asked if anything could be done.  Well, hell yes, he replied.  He explained that the entire area is a designated sanctuary for all shore birds, and as such, authorities can't just mercy-kill an injured bird, even a gull.  He said they were required to take them to the Animal Welfare Rescue Clinic.  But isn't that closed on Sunday?  Yes, he said, but there's a holding facility next door that will house the bird until Monday morning.

He rode his vehicle to where the bird sat, and called in to a fellow officer on the street who showed up at our condo with a pickup truck, gloves, blankets, and a big cardboard box.  The two officers pushed and prodded the gull into the box, I slapped on the lid, the boxed bird went into the truck, and away to much better odds of survival.  There was another smattering of applause from the other beach-goers.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.

Saturday's cop was completely unaware of the protocol, or maybe just lazy.  Either way, the moral of the story is:  If you're a sea gull and you insist on being injured at Surfside Beach on the weekend, Sunday's your best bet.

You always see plenty of tattoos at the beach and most of them are, of course, hideous.  The latest craze, which I noticed on several young men, seems to be having a tattoo of your last name emblazoned across your shoulders.  It's kinda like an eternal football jersey, or a convention name tag -- "Hi! My name is . . . "  If you feel you must indulge in this trendy ink, you better hope the tattoo artist can spell.  You wouldn't want to end up with "SMTH" across your back.

Any beach is a great place to check out the latest in swim wear.  Our beach is, unfortunately, still a place to a place where one can occasionally observe one of the all-time worst choices in swim wear, the Rebel Flag swim suit.  I saw a few and I'm sorry, but it's just offensive.  Which is, I suppose, the point.  "Yee-ha!  Bite me, ya damn Yankees!"

A related observation as to how we are viewed by the locals:  As vacationing tourists, we become economically significant but existentially loathsome.

Consider the pelican.  Imagine, if you can, swallowing your dinner whole and alive and having it squirm and wriggle as it slowly descends into your stomach.  Joey Chestnut got nuthin' on that!