Beaches 20 - Uncle Chester Us
Beaches 20 was not a resort. There were no boardwalks, no neon signs, no arcades throwing pixelated light onto rain-slicked pavement. Instead, there were miles of gray-gold sand, interrupted only by drifts of seaweed and the occasional horseshoe crab shell, upturned like a helmet from a forgotten war. The water was bracingly cold even in July. Fog could roll in by lunchtime and stay until supper, muffling the world into a white cocoon. Yet it was ours. Uncle Chester guarded it with a quiet ferocity. “You don’t tame a beach,” he’d say, squinting into the horizon. “You borrow it for a while. Then you give it back.”
As the years passed, the “us” in “Uncle Chester, Us, and Beaches 20” began to change. Cousins grew too cool for family vacations. Grandparents stopped coming. My own parents, once young and laughing in the surf, began to move more slowly, preferring the shade of an umbrella to the shock of the waves. But I never missed a summer. And Uncle Chester never changed—or so I told myself. In truth, he was changing the way the bluff behind his cottage was changing: imperceptibly, then all at once. His hands, always calloused, began to shake when he poured his coffee. His stories, once crisp as a gull’s cry, looped and wandered. Uncle Chester Us Beaches 20
In the arithmetic of the heart, twenty is the number of years it took me to realize that Uncle Chester was not teaching us about beaches at all. He was teaching us about time—how to stand before its vast, indifferent ocean and not look away. How to borrow a stretch of shore, love it fiercely, and then, when your knees give out, hand it to the next person who will sit in the canvas chair and watch the waves. Beaches 20 was not a resort
Uncle Chester was not a blood uncle in the strict genealogical sense. He was my father’s best friend from a war they never discussed, a man who appeared at every family cookout with a cooler of mackerel he’d caught himself and a joke so dry it flaked like sand. By the time I was ten, he had become an honorary fixture: the uncle who smelled of low tide and Old Spice, who wore the same frayed khaki hat year after year, and who owned a small, weathered cottage just back from the dunes of what we simply called “Beaches 20.” The name was not official. It came from an old wooden mile marker, half-buried in sand, that read “20” — perhaps twenty miles from some forgotten town, perhaps the twentieth access path from the county line. To us, it was a coordinate of joy. The water was bracingly cold even in July
The number twenty is a threshold. It marks the end of childhood’s second decade and the beginning of the long, uncertain corridor of adulthood. But for me, twenty is not just an age. It is a latitude, a longitude, a scent of brine and Coppertone, and the ghost of a man named Uncle Chester. To speak of “Uncle Chester, Us, and Beaches 20” is to speak of a specific geography of the soul—a stretch of coast where the Atlantic gnaws gently at New England’s edge, where beach grass bends in salt-crusted wind, and where a gruff, sun-leathered man taught a pack of wild cousins what it means to stand still and listen.
So here I am, twenty years old, writing this from a blanket on the same patch of sand. The wind is cool. The gulls are crying. And somewhere, in the flat light lying on the water, I believe Uncle Chester is keeping his promise, too—watching over Beaches 20 until the rest of us return.
