We drive at a breakneck speed in an open-air taxi around winding roads that climb higher and higher away from the marina that sits at sea level. The air is hot and heavy, as if it carries more weight here than back at home, freighted with the scent of salt water and coconut and something spicy but citrusy. We pass Cinnamon Bay and I clutch at the edge of the taxi’s door frame, sure that we’re going to drop right off the sheer face of the cliff to our left every time a truck comes whooshing past us without slowing down.
I’m too little to remember much of the trip, aside from my terror at having to snorkel, and refusing to let go of my dad’s hand the entire time as we watched rainbow-colored schools of fish float past us in the warm blue water.
Later I’ll go back, again and again, to the tropics: to teeny Pine Cay in the Turks & Caicos where you can cover the length of the island on your evening run, to Virgin Gorda where scalloped swathes of white beaches border the hilly peaks of the island’s interior, to a catamaran sailing in the waters off Jost van Dyke.
Each place has the same feeling to it: my arms slick with coconut-scented sunscreen, the delicious gentle sting of salt water drying on sunburned-turning-deeply-tanned skin, the wisps of hair around my face becoming blonder with each passing day.
It’s not until I get older that I experience winter beaches; to me, they’ve always been a hot weather, ice cream-and-swimming-and-bare-toes kind of place.
But then I go to windswept Nantucket and jog to the lighthouse in gloves and a sweatshirt, watching white-tipped waves the color of pewter crash against the rocks. I spend a winter in Maine and wander the rocky, pine-tree-lined shores of Popham Beach. I buy a house on the very tip of Long Island and swim year round, spending dark afternoons in January and February watching snow drift down into the scalloped swoops of sand at Orient Point.
It makes me particularly love this poem, “Quahogs” by Frank Gaspar, and that feeling of frigid seaside air:
It was for the wind as much as anything.
It was for the tidal flats, for the miles of bars
and the freezing runs between them,
blued and darkened in the withering gusts.
For the buckets, for the long-tined rakes.
For our skin burning and the bones
beneath, all their ache. For the bent backs,
for the huddle toward warmth beneath
our incapable layers, how we beat
ourselves with our arms. The breath
we blew, the narrow steam that spun away.
How we searched their tell-draggle marks.
Then the feel of them as we furrowed. Then it
was surgery and force together. Like stones.
Opal or pearl or plain rock, ugly except
they were beautiful, their whorls and
purple stains. The bucket’s wire cutting
with their weight. For the sky blazing, its
sinking orange fire. For the sky’s black streaks
with night rising, winter-sudden. Back,
shoreward, home, the tide creeping like a wolf.
For the little stove warming, its own orange fire.
The old pot, the steam, the air in savor,
the close room, the precious butter, the
blue fingers throbbing, our bodies in all
the customs of weariness, the supper,
succulent of the freezing dark sea come up,
and hunger, its own happiness, its own
domain immeasurable. It was for the hunger.
The hunger. The coziness; the warmth; the “air in savor”; the “precious butter”.
Here’s what I like to eat after reading that poem, or traversing a cold wintery beach, my cheeks red and my fingers numb and the day growing dark and dusky.
Sausage, Kale + White Bean Skillet with Crispy Buttered Croutons
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen Every Day
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
about 2 cups cubed bread (I like sourdough or ciabatta or brioche)
1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage, casing removed and crumbled
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (15 ounces) cannellini beans, rinsed
3 cups loosely packed torn kale leaves
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
pinch red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons fresh thyme
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/4 cup water or broth
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Heat the butter and olive oil in a large, deep skillet (I like an extra-big cast iron pan for this).
Add the cubed bread and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until just starting to brown.
Push the bread to the side and add the sausage and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally and breaking the sausage up into very small pieces with a wooden spoon or spatula, until the sausage begins to brown and is fully cooked through.
Add the beans and kale and cook for a minute or two, then add the salt, red pepper flakes, thyme, and rosemary. Cook for 30 seconds, then add the water and sherry vinegar, and cook for another minute or two—until the kale is just wilting.
Remove from the heat, stir the croutons in, and garnish with grated Parmesan.