I’m not sure what this is…

Evening fell crashing around like the waves on the beach of the small town I grew up in. I smiled, watching the water lap at the broken up cement tossed at the edge of the lakeshore, the lower portions stained by the lap, lap, lap of water against its solid bulk. I watched the gulls fly in the sky, calling out to each other, spontaneous diving down into the water from above and emerging with small fish in their beaks.

The park bench was hard, the wooden slats painted a plain green, the wrought iron arms shaped like vines of some large leafed plant, but not one which I recognized. I spent a lot of time here, my book next to me on the bench, its pages marked safely with a scrap of paper folded neatly into a rectangle. It didn’t matter what the title was, I read it while I sat there, the wind cooled by the blue-green water of the lake. I sat there, watching the people walk by, the tourists dressed in their funny little outfits, all matching and smiling those too big smiles. I tried not to roll my eyes at them, these people who came to our sleepy little town on the weekend and then climbed back into their cars to run back to the city. I often wondered why they came here, what drew them to my little world. But honestly, I didn’t care what brought them. I just watched them walk up and down the streets, decked out in their tourist clothes. I watched them stand in line to pay the five dollars to spend the day on the too hot sand of our beach. I liked watching them as they waited in line, or sprawed out on the sand as they baked under the too hot sun. Sometimes I’d watch them from the water itself. Being a local, I could swim at the beach whenever I wanted to, I skipped the line and and flashed the little patch on my beach towel. I’d walk around the shop where the older kids ripped off the city-folk on raft rentals. We laughed at them as they tried to lay on those silly mats of rubber on the continually wavey water to only end up at the shoreline again minutes later or spilling over when a bigger wave upset the rectangular green-yellow slab. It was fun, in a sad way, mocking those city kids.

We’d meet up there, Dave, Chris, Curtis, the other Dave and I, and then swim out to the piers. They weren’t real piers but they were built the same way, the long poles imbedded into the lakebed, with trusses afixed with wooden dowels and then planking laid down to form a smooth white surface. Real piers of course weren’t so white and were mostly there so the boats could tie up when their owners weren’t out cruising the lake. None of us had a real boat, but we all wished we did. If we had a boat, we’d be able to get away, to drive out into the middle of the lake with a cooler full of booze and get ripped and have a blast. Just like everybody else… We didn’t think that big, but the beach was fine… And well, it had one thing going for it…

See, there was a really good thing about living in this little tourist trap town that I didn’t really understand until I moved away.

When the city dwellers came to town, they’d bring their families, and that meant new girls. It wasn’t that our girls were unsightly or standoffish or prudish or anything, but we lived with them all year round, these new girls were exotic. They came into town and we didn’t know them at all. And we wanted to, badly. And well, city girls were different, they didn’t mind as much when we were goofy and forward and well… I guess to them, we were the exotic ones.