"Beach Ride"

“Let’s ride to the beach!” I said, one foot touching the ground and the other poised on my bike pedal ready to take off.

“Which one?” Dad asked.

“We haven’t gone to Headlands for a little while,” Mom said. 

And off we went. Usually it wouldn’t be safe to have a conversation in the middle of a street, but ours was different. The strip of pavement serviced only two houses, first our neighbor’s yellow sided one and then ours with darkly stained wood, before dead-ending into the woods. The water line was aimed up in the air after our driveway creating a fountain which would coat the branches of a nearby pine tree in ice come winter. 

We turned right, onto Jordan, passing the old baseball fields. They hadn’t been used for baseball for about twenty years. Now they were the grassy meadow home of a herd of approximately forty deer. As we rounded the curve–proclaimed by black arrows on reflective yellow signs–the field turned into an old pine tree farm. The precise rows occasionally sullied by one of the sixty foot giants crashing down to their grave. 

The pine trees gave way to the wet marshland that surrounds our little island of sorts, tall reeds reaching up and bushy cattails swaying in the breeze. Most people didn’t think of Headlands as an island, but there were two ways to get to it and both required you go over a bridge. It just wasn’t as obvious because of the surrounding marsh which just looks like four foot high grass. Every few years some stupid high schoolers will catch the marsh on fire. The fire spreads with incredible speed through the dry tops of the reeds, sending up huge clouds of black smoke. But then it just grows back.

We slowed our bikes to turn right again. Headlands Road used to go all the way along the shoreline with grand houses overlooking Lake Erie, but then the houses on one side started falling into the lake and soon several sections of the road followed, leaving only a fragmented remnant of itself. I started testing my brakes, just to be sure they wouldn’t fail me. We were about to go down the hill and I didn’t like losing control of my bike and crashing, which had already happened a few times. 

Right next to the road was the sledding hill which would become littered with children in winter but was currently serving as the hangout of several pairs of Canadian geese and their growing goslings. My parents flew past me, peddling on the downhill, racing to the entrance. I glided at my more leisurely pace, swooping around the curve and onto the bridge over Shipman’s Pond. A couple of boys sat on the edge fishing and a man and his wife paddled further out in kayaks. 

Rounding the second curve, the beach entrance came into view. The highway literally dead-ended into the beach entrance so I was careful to check for absent-minded drivers flying past the stop sign. Swerving past a family of ducks waddling from one stream to another, I finally caught back up with my parents. We wound our way through the parking lot, being careful to avoid the sandy patches before stopping for our final reward–the rocky pier stretched out and was finally crowned by the white lighthouse with red roof. The sunset spread across the sky, reflecting in the unusually calm water. A hush fell on the beachgoers as the flaming ball dipped to it’s final farewell.