Every single weekday, I commute to Tampa from the beach. For many people in that sometimes-overwhelming population hub, the beach is a pretty, yet impossibly distant place. For others, it's a vapid playground utterly devoid of culture. I vehemently disagree.
In the past year, my neighborhood, Sunset Beach, has gained a degree of notoriety, portrayed (more or less accurately) as one of those MTV spring break nightmares that make intelligent women of childbearing age fantasize about tubal ligation.
My community is indeed a place of extremes. Multi-million-dollar homes line the intracoastal. Tiny wooden apartments, carved from homes once built for sailors, sit among manicured rental cottages. Some neighbors walk their little drop-kick dogs up and down the block; others peddle their beach cruisers in almost-straight lines. In the daytime, it's pin-drop quiet, except for the birds. At night you'll hear loud, live blues or bluegrass issuing from the tiki bar down the way. And the smells: This time of year, a thick honeysuckle scent drenches the air, but once you're within 50 feet of the beachfront joint that draws debauchers to my neighborhood by the thousands each week, it smells like someone's poured the contents of a deep fryer onto the sidewalk.
To the outsider, Sunset Beach is a cross between Beach Blanket Bingo and Shaun of the Dead, a sun and Patron-soaked intellectual black hole. For those of us who live here, these assumptions work to our advantage as well as our detriment.
Every weekend morning, holidays and rainy days notwithstanding, begins the same:
Canadians and retirees amble in the cool sunshine of early morning beachfront. They leave. Shellers extract the few intact shells embedded in the sand. They, too, exit. Then, the day staff at Caddy's mops last night's rain and whatever else into the street. Soon enough, the quakes begin.
They're small quakes to be sure, but to the local who's just gotten back from a beach run, they are a sign of what's to come. They're the sounds of the bumping bass, issuing from vehicles in search of parking that will not cost the same as a round of Jager bombs. These quakes cause ripples in our coffee cups à la Jurassic Park.
The fact that this neighborhood (and one beachfront liquor-selling establishment in particular) attracts so many people (no matter how plastic they may be) is refreshing. It has to be. After all, these throngs are flocking to my beach, the place I adore like a spouse. Maybe they're here because they were drawn to its profound beauty, or to the existential quandaries that can arise from being at the physical edge of a landmass.
Or not.
Spend an hour amidst the flying footballs and saltwater-soaked issues of People, and it's clear that for this crowd, the appeal ain't cerebral.
Granted, one of the many appealing aspects of life on Treasure Island (of which Sunset Beach is part) is that it is legal to booze on the beach here, as long as a given beverage is not contained in glass or, according to an ordinance passed last year, a full-sized keg (I'm dead serious). Of course, with the ability to fearlessly sip a rum and diet whilst wiggling one's toes in the tide comes the ability to guzzle 18 dirt beers and subsequently seek out a shark to punch.
Exhibit One: The bartender is slammed. It takes about 15 minutes to order food and beverage here during peak hours. There's a small crowd at the corner of the bar that's barking incessantly at her. "Twenty chicken wings!" shouts one of them, a girl who's probably 19, every time the bartender passes by. "Twenty chicken wings!" She's rude. Embarrassingly rude. Her friends do the same thing. No "please" or even a "can I get." Then they get scrappy over their bill. I don't even think they tipped. The bartender is surprisingly tolerant (she's probably seen a lot worse).
Exhibit Two: A little later, I'm at the beach spot that's pretty much reserved for locals (that's another thing: I have supreme neighbors). One of them has a sailboat that's anchored a few hundred feet off shore. "Unbelievable," he suddenly exclaims. Apparently, two random people had climbed aboard. Since I'll use any excuse to be out on the water, I volunteer to help him steer and secure the dinghy he uses to get ashore so he can throw them off. When we get there, I wait in the small boat, hoping things don't get ugly. Within a minute, a guy and a girl about my age (mid- to late- 20s) crawl out of the cabin. They say they're from Portland, Ore., and they're pretty tickled at the fact that they just got busted getting it on in a stranger's boat. Surprisingly calm, though not amused, about the whole thing, my neighbor makes them swim to shore. Before the girl jumps overboard, she turns to me and says, "Wow, I'm gonna write about this when I get home."
Me, too, sister. Me, too.
These are the kinds of debaucheries one can witness regularly in my neighborhood. Yet there are also some unexpected points of light. Waiting for a beverage a few weeks back, I struck up a conversation with the girl next to me, who happened to be a teacher. Governor Crist had just vetoed Senate Bill 6, so I asked her what her thoughts were. An interesting discussion of Florida politics ensued.
I love this place too much to believe it's nothing more than a booze-and-Jimmy-Buffett-fueled breeding ground for select target markets.
And while these throngs swarm the beach like flies when the sun is high, at the end of the day they go away. And the beach is ours again.
Kate Bradshaw is senior reporter in the news department at 88.5 WMNF-FM.
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This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.