They travel in packs. Hillbillies -- and their more refined brethren, Hillwilliams -- like to travel in packs and bunk together. They ignore the maximum occupancy rules. There are a couple units down here bursting at the seams with people. And I'm sad to say, many of them are from Maryland. (Buster has deep familial roots in Maryland.)
World Cup carryover? This year, for the first time I can recall, soccer balls outnumbered footballs on the beach.
Botched bocce. Bocce is a popular beach game. The broad expanse of hard-packed sand makes an ideal court for a bocce game. Note to first-timers: Bocce balls are bowled underhand,
not pitched like baseballs. And the game does
not involve rolling the balls into holes dug in the sand. That would be golf.
The tattoo wars are over. And I lost. It's quite apparent that the lovely Mrs. Gammons and I are the last two people on earth without a tattoo.
Just like home. Back home, I'm the volunteer manager of our community pool. Some of the kids call me the "janitor", because I often pick up trash around the grounds. Down here, some people (Maryland hillbillies) leave their detritus all over the pool deck and courtyard -- cups, cans, orange peels, cigarette butts, bottle caps, etc. The concept of "trash can" eludes them, or maybe they're waiting for the maid. Just like home, I pick it up.
Jacques Custodian!
Sunday services. Here's a definite sign of the south. The cable TV service in our condo has 77 channels and on Sundays, a full 14 of them are dedicated to Bible-thumping. When you're down here, you're given every opportunity to get right with God.
Buy two cars and they give you a howitzer. Another sign of the south. A local car dealership, Addy's Harbor Dodge, is running a big promotion right now. If you buy a new car, they'll give you a free shotgun or rifle. Seriously.
Audio beach foul? Ruling needed. There are various beach fouls. The two most common are 1. Inconsiderate people who ignore the personal space buffer zone and get unnecessarily close, and 2. Improper swimwear, which usually means too much person stuffed into not enough swimsuit. But is
too much music a beach foul?
The other day I found myself in a Bermuda Triangle of audio overload, in the midst of three radios/boomboxes. One was playing country (duh!), one was tuned to a local top-40 radio station, and one was playing a 60s/70s channel on XM radio. All three were in competition and none of them could be heard for long over the others. It was just music cubed, and it was sort of annoying. At least they weren't playing the
Rush Limbaugh Show or the
Come To Jesus Hour. I might have stroked out right then and there. But was it a genuine beach foul? I'm uncertain, so I'm gonna need a ruling on this. Consider, discuss, and get back to me.
Can't fool Mother Nature. A few readers may recall that 15 years ago, give or take, there was a big dredging and beach reclamation project all along the Grand Strand. The difference between low and high tides here has always been dramatic -- perhaps 250 feet of beach width or more -- but back then, beach erosion was allowing high tides to cover the entire beach and come perilously close to beach-front buildings. So they dredged up a bunch of sand, built up the beaches, and established a protective barrier of sand dunes. To a large extent, it worked. The dunes look great, but there's no stopping beach erosion. Now the full-moon high tides come right up to the dunes, and again the beach virtually disappears. It's a reminder of who's really in charge. Sooner or later, Mother Nature will always reclaim your reclamation project. Especially at the shore.
Nature lovers. Today, some of the Maryland Mensa Society managed to find a turtle. Decent size, too -- maybe 10 inch diameter shell. Where did they find a turtle? On the dunes. Are you allowed to be on the dunes?
Hell no! That's why they're roped off and have signs that say, "Stay Off the Dunes". What did they do with the turtle? Brought it up to their condo and let six little kids fuck with it and try to feed it potato chips. Brilliant. At least it wasn't a loggerhead. It was a standard-issue box turtle, but still, where were the grown-ups? They were messing with the turtle, just like the kids. I hope somebody put the poor turtle back in the dunes.
You can always count on the Particular Individual. You can count on him to turn the most superficial, innocuous little pleasantries into something unnecessarily hateful and political. (Regular readers may recall the Particular Individual, or P.I., as a hardcore ultra-conservative retiree -- a friend of a friend, and a regular during our vacations down here.)
One morning, we encountered each other on the beach. I was carrying one of my beach reads, a work of historical nonfiction. P.I. asked, "What are you reading?" I showed him the cover and recited the title: "
Lawrence In Arabia." "What's it about?", he asked. I told him it was about the famous British soldier T.E. Lawrence and the Eastern Front during World War I, and I read him the subtitle, "
War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East."
He harrumphed and said, "I wonder what they'll write about our country ten years from now -- how America turned into a Socialist nation."
Oh please! Too damn early for all your wrong-ass shit, P.I.! I didn't say a word, just silently stared out to sea, and P.I. walked away. What a douchebag.
