The sandy, salty, gritty, seductive landscape that draws us back every summer
For years, Toronto’s beaches were the punchline to jokes about pollution and radioactive mutations. Our beaches left a lot to be desired – both in the water quality and the ambiance. Having a highway a few hundred yards away isn’t exactly the postcard-perfect image most people are seeking from their beach trips. Even those who frequented the beaches steered clear of the water. Lake Ontario is cold, algae-filled, and murky, like its Great Lake cousins. But in Toronto, it also carried pharmaceutical pollution, E. coli, and unpleasantly high levels of pollen that sometimes left a bizarrely yellow smattering along the shoreline.
I was around 10 when the city finally opened the beaches up for swimming. For many, it was a hard sell. It’s difficult to brave the lake when you’ve spent your entire life being warned not to swim in the city. For the first few seasons, it was rare to see many people other than open-water athletes further than knee-deep in the lake. But as heatwaves hit and fears faded, Toronto’s beaches gradually replaced their unfortunate reputation and became a site of joy, community, and yes, even swimming.
The beach brings out a certain primitive joy in people. The simple action of sitting near sand and cold, murky water is not something that seems appealing. Combined with an increasing fear of sun damage, it seems odd that we would not only tolerate the beach, but seek it out and mimic it when we can’t visit the real thing. Every summer, beauty trends re-emerge that give the appearance of sunburnt skin and salt-dried hair.
My cynical side is inclined to view it as an obsession with leisure. Beach culture, including fashions and beauty trends that can be copied without ever actually stepping onto a beach, signify that the individual has enough free time to spend lazing around on hot sand. Salty hair and ‘sunkissed’ (read: peeling and sunburnt) skin indicate that this is a large part of your lifestyle. Add in impractically tiny bikinis and neon coverups, and now you look like this is all you’re doing with your day. You’re not just walking along the boardwalk on your lunch break – you’re going to be sitting here until Labor Day.
But on the beach, a quick glance around can show that many people abandon this picture-perfect fascination once they settle in on their blankets. For every person diligently moving their bikini straps every 20 minutes for an even tan, there are those who have surrendered to the heat and relaxed into the seaweed-scented water. For an environment so often portrayed as a gallery of models picking each other up and hot lifeguards to impress, the beach actually allows many to relax into their own world and blissfully ignore their fellow sunbathers.
The beach allows a nakedness that we wouldn’t accept elsewhere. This altered social expectation extends past the sand – bikinis and board shorts are common sidewalk attire in beach towns and campgrounds across the country. Self-conscious beachgoers might don a cover-up or towel wrap, but even this is more skin than most of us would show if we weren’t near the shore. Allowing others to see us nearly naked seems to let us drop our other apprehensions in favor of the most basic of pleasures. Sun, water, nature, and time without distractions leave us somewhat vulnerable. Being naked and without modern distractions shows who we are at our most basic to our peers and neighbors, in a way we rarely show ourselves.
Spending time at the beach tells the world that we are content with what we have. We are happy with basic pleasures, even if we can’t own them and mold them to be perfect. We are happy with the sun even though it burns us, the sea even though it stings our eyes, and ourselves, even if we are sweaty and salty and comparing ourselves to all those around us.
Our love for ‘gritty’ aesthetics often doesn’t extend to an authentic grittiness. Workwear graces the runway, but blue-collar careers are seen as low-class. We love grungy, ripped jeans, but only purchased that way and ripped with precision. But our love for the salty, sweaty, sunburnt beach look extends to the real thing as well. Even though we poke and prod at the way we look on the beach, we go back summer after summer and relish in the messy, revealing pleasures of just existing near the shore.
Monday in Green 
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