Bill Bryson I'm a Stranger Here Myself

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adopt another. I hope so because the one thing about being a skunk is that you don't have a lot of
friends.
In the meantime, partly as a mark of respect and partly because Mrs. B. caught one in the eye at an
inopportune moment, we have stopped playing food games even though, if I say it myself, I was
comfortably in line for a gold.
A DAY AT THE SEASIDE
Every year about this time, my wife wakes me up with a playful slap and says: "I've got an idea.
Let's drive for three hours to the ocean, take off most of our clothes, and sit on some sand for a
whole day."
"What for?" I will say warily.
"It will be fun," she will insist.
"I don't think so," I will reply. "People find it disturbing when I take my shirt off in public. I find it
disturbing."
"No, it will be great. We'll get sand in our hair. We'll get sand in our shoes. We'll get sand in our
sandwiches and then in our mouths. We'll get sunburned and windburned. And when we get tired of
sitting, we can have a dip in water so cold it actually hurts. At the end of the day, we'll set off at the
same time as thirty-seven thousand other people and get in such a traffic jam that we won't get home
till midnight. I can make trenchant observations about your driving skills, and the children can pass
the time in back sticking each other with sharp objects. It will be such fun."
The tragic thing is that because my wife is English, and therefore beyond the reach of reason where
saltwater is concerned, she really will think it's fun. Frankly I have never understood the British
attachment to the seaside.
I grew up in Iowa, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so to me (and I believe to most other
lowans, though I haven't had a chance to check with all of them yet) the word ocean suggests
alarming things like riptides and undertows. (I expect people in New York suffer similar terrors
when you mention words like cornfields and county fair?) Lake Ahquabi, where I did all my
formative swimming and sunburning, may not have the romance of Cape Cod or the grandeur of the
rockribbed coast of Maine, but then neither did it grab you by the legs and carry you off helplessly to
Newfoundland. No, you may keep the sea, as far as I am concerned, and every drop of water in it.
So when last weekend my wife suggested that we take a drive to the ocean, I put my foot down and
said, "Never-absolutely not," which is of course why we ended up, three hours later, at Kennebunk
Beach in
Maine.
Now you may find this hard to believe, given the whirlwind of adventure that has been my life, but in
all my years I had been to American ocean beaches just twice-once in California when I was twelve
and managed to scrape all the skin from my nose and chest (this is a true story) by mistiming a
retreating wave as only someone from Iowa can and diving headlong into bare, gritty sand, and once
in Florida when I was a college student on spring break and far too intoxicated to notice a landscape
feature as subtle as an ocean.
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So I can't pretend to speak with authority here. All I can tell you is that if Kennebunk Beach in Maine
is
51 anything to go by, then American beaches are entirely unlike British ones. To begin with, there
was no pier, promenade, or arcades; no shops where everything is miraculously priced at S1; no
places to buy saucy postcards or jaunty hats; no tearooms and fish and chip shops; no fortune tellers;
no disembodied voice from a bingo parlor breathing out those strange, coded calls: "Number 37-the
vicar's in the shrubs again," or whatever it is they say.
Indeed, there was nothing commercial at all-just a street lined with big summer homes, a vast, sunny
beach, and an infinite and hostile sea beyond.
That isn't to say the people on the beach-of whom there were many hundreds-were going to go
without, for they had brought everything they would ever need again in the way of food, beverages,
beach umbrellas, windbreaks, folding chairs, and sleek inflatables. Amundsen went to the South
Pole with fewer provisions than most of these people had.
We were a pretty pathetic sight in contrast. Apart from being whiter than an old man's flanks, we had
in the way of equipment just three beach towels and a raffia bag filled, in the English style, with a
bottle of sunscreen, an inexhaustible supply of Wet Wipes, spare underpants for everyone (in case of
vehicular accidents involving visits to an emergency room), and a modest packet of sandwiches.
Our youngest-whom I've taken to calling Jimmy in case he should one day become a libel
lawyer-surveyed the scene and said: "OK, Dad, here's the situation. I need an ice cream cone, an
inflatable lounger, a deluxe bucket and spade set, a hot dog, scuba equipment, some cotton candy, a
zodiac with an outboard, my own water slide, a cheese pizza with extra cheese, and a bathroom."
"They don't have those things here, Jimmy," I chuckled.
"I really need the bathroom."
I reported this to my wife. "Then you'll have to take him to Kennebunkport," she said serenely from
beneath a preposterous sun hat.
Kennebunkport is an old town, at a crossroads, laid out long before anyone thought of the
automobile, and some miles from the beach. It was jammed with traffic from all directions. We
parked an appallingly vast distance from the center and searched all over for rest rooms. By the time
we found a rest room (actually it was the back wall of the Rite-Aid Pharmacy-but please don't tell
my wife), little Jimmy didn't need to go any longer.
So we returned to the beach. By the time we got there, some hours later, I discovered that everyone
had gone off for a swim and there was only one half-eaten sandwich left. I sat on a towel and
nibbled at the sandwich.
"Oh, look, Mummy," said number two daughter gaily when they emerged from the surf a few minutes
later, "Daddy's eating the sandwich the dog had."
"Tell me this isn't happening," I whispered.
"Don't worry, dear," my wife said soothingly. "It was an Irish setter. They're very clean."
I don't remember much after that. I had a little nap and woke to find that Jimmy was burying me up to
my chest in sand, which was fine except that he had started at my head, and I managed to get so
sunburned that a dermatologist invited me to a convention in Cleveland the following week as an [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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