2. June, 2012, Southern Delaware
When my mind starts to wander towards travel, I often think of the Anthony Bourdain quote that reads:
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
My goal, since I was a teenager, was to leave something good behind.
Many travelers young and old credit Bourdain with igniting their deep passion for trekking to the back corners of the globe that some may not even know exist, or for flying to those wonderful places that everyone knows exist. I do and I don’t. This passion spawned from many roots for me, and having the travel channel on as the soundtrack of my adolescence was certainly one of them. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to travel often. My middle-class Pennsylvania family preferred the safety and monotony of beach resorts to the mountains, so the trips of my adolescence were to resorts in Cancun, Jamaica, and Nassau.
Usually, we didn’t even make it that far. When I was only three my family purchased a wooden shack of a beach house three blocks from the Atlantic and beside a pine tree that shed so much you couldn’t see the driveway. They named it Sibling Revelry for rental purposes and slowly began reconstructions.
Travel for my family tended to consist of pilgrimages from our sleepy Pennsylvania nook down Route 1 South to the Delaware coast. Nevertheless, I loved it. Every June, I could feel myself waking back up.
Dewey Beach is a small town nestled into the coast of Delaware. To the south is a stretch of land with nothing much populating it except for a dusty beach highway, wetlands, and some raised fish shacks. Many years later I’d fall in love with a man from this stretch of coastline. To the north is Rehoboth Beach – a town interwoven into Dewey by a trolley line and miles of sandy shore with no set border.
Dewey attracts a crowd of predominantly college students who work odd jobs over the summer in between semesters at the University of Delaware. Beyond them, the town is home to a small but mighty year-round population of retirees, young families, and others who work in Wilmington or Dover by weekday and lounge in an almost desolate beach town on long weekends and holidays.
On Memorial Day Thursday, I eagerly packed my duffle and loaded into my mother’s navy-blue minivan for the two-hour trek. Farmland cascaded in front of me as the van cruised through Kent, County. Summertime was here once more.
The cottage was always changing. In 2002, Grandpa Jerry gave us the housewarming gift of a wood-paneled hot tub that me and my cousins splashed around in, pretending it was a water park in our own backyard. He passed in 2008. In 2004, a new room was added above the back porch with yellow walls and a king size bed that fit me, my sister, and my two cousins all snuggled up elbow to elbow until a parent kicked us out, back to the room with three beds that the four of us shared.
Changes were constantly made (a pool was never put in, although we begged) and the house always seemed to feel like another family member, wearing and tearing with salty winds and hundreds of people circulating in and out through the summer seasons, renting our home. My aunt placed a seafoam-colored guest book above the mantle, over the years guests have praised the charming cottage with its house kayaks, big back porch, and proximity to nearby restaurants.
In 2006, we got heating and better ventilation, opening the house up to even more fun from December to March. In 2007, the house was painted yellow and given a navy-blue front door that you had to pull toward you while turning the key to open. I didn’t master this skill until well into my teen years.
I’ve never had much prospect for the future, and I loved the beach because time seemed to stand still there. The house changed with the seasons; seashell clad mansions were constructed on blocks beside our modest home; different people move in and out of different houses, but something about Andrew Avenue, three blocks from the bay and three from the Atlantic, never seemed to change that much.
Memorial Day of 2012 was upon us, and my family made the usual pilgrimage down Route One South. I sat on the right and my sister on the left of my mom’s new Honda Pilot with purple earbuds in as the scenery of rural Delaware rushed by us. I was 14, skeptical about the concept of starting high school in two months, and ready for what felt at the time like the last summer of adolescence before starting a new chapter of life. The Pilot kicked up white pebbles in our driveway and my dad killed the engine in front of the old cottage.
My sister and I grabbed our bags from the trunk and plopped them on the wooden floors of the house that had been there since the 1960s. In the backyard, my uncle was in the middle of constructing what looked like a giant inflatable pool beside the rotting shed. In 2014, we replaced the shed with a new one after an infestation of mold from years of being hit by coastal storms made part of the roof cave in, exposing sand-crusted beach loungers and cracked boogie boards to the heavens.
My sister and I grabbed our bikes; mine a chartreuse beach cruiser with a white basket that I still ride to this day, and my sister a pink Huffy with tassels spouting from the handles that unfortunately, she traded in for a new one the next summer season. With our dog Penny tethered to my frame, we headed out for a ride around the development behind us. Penny ran by our side. The sun was setting as we made our trek to the Rehoboth Bay access 3 blocks from the cottage. As always, we halted our bikes and enjoyed the view of the water turning pink. Horseshoe crabs made ripples on the water that evening. The sound of pulsating music from North Beach and drunk twenty somethings traveled across the bay. As my dad liked to call it, ‘amateur weekend’ in Dewey had just begun. It took me three more summers to start drinking and truly understand exactly what he meant by that.
After my family’s traditional first-day-back-at-the-beach-house-dinner of steamed blue crabs, clams with drawn butter, buffalo wings, and a plain cheese pizza, we decided to head out to the inflatable pool—our yard’s newest addition.
The pool had filled to almost a quarter of its capacity. We dove in. Swimming, skimming on boogie boards, and chatting about nothing. What kind of conversation could we have had? I was fourteen and they were eleven.
My cousins and sister got out, rinsed off, and headed inside to watch a movie or start a card game, Hearts was a favorite of my family. I stayed back and laid down in the pool that slowly continued filling with water. My body was encompassed by the water’s late May chill, yet my eyes and nose stayed above the surface.
In two months, I’d start high school, a short walk from where I went to middle school yet a world away from who I knew myself to be. In four years, I’d start college, and whatever would happen after that was beyond me, it’s just now coming to me at 25.
Neighbors died and new ones were born, houses were torn down to make room for new ones, families were made and broken, and I was just there, at 14, pondering what exactly the meaning of life was supposed to be.
Eventually the silky voice of Jimmy Buffett protruded through the water. My parents were smoking cigars and playing pinnacle on the twinkle-light illuminated back porch. It was time to go inside.
