The six teenagers arrive at a sheltered stretch of sand on Windansea Beach just as the tide is at its lowest point of the afternoon. It is a school holiday in February, and the day has dawned clear and sunny and it is now around 2pm and the temperature is in the mid-70s. Five girls and one boy, members of the same cheer squad or gymnastics team, are there to practice some of their more daring acrobatic moves in the sand. Or perhaps they’re just there to show off, to draw the stares of the sedentary beach-sitters on this popular stretch of Southern California seashore.
They shed their cover-ups and flip-flops, pile them on a rock with their towels, and gather on the beach. The boy looks to be about 14; he’s slender and wears his hair in a short brush cut. He’s sporting the brightest bathing suit of the bunch, knee-length shorts in a window-pane print of black and white, yellow, pink, and aqua. He stands there, grinning, then flings his body skyward in an effortless back flip, landing in the soft sand above the waterline and laughing with glee, with the sheer joy of being able to do something so thrilling and daring and making it seem dead easy. The girls join him, and the group forms a circle, facing each other, and then first the boy and then each girl in turn performs a perfect back flip, in sequence like a line of chorus girls doing a rolling wave of high kicks. They laugh and congratulate themselves and perform the stunt a few more times, glancing up at us each time, we the middle-aged observers perched in our beach chairs on the nearby rock ledges, to see whether we’ve noticed the precision and beauty of their achievement. We have.
Then one of the girls steps out of the circle and fetches a camera from amongst their things. The boy enjoins the others to line up and perform another stunt, a sort of aerial splits move, while the girl attempts to capture them in the camera’s memory. The boy counts “5, 6, 7, 8” and the five of them leap, doing a sharp pump of their arms and spread-eagling their legs, three feet off the ground, touching their toes with outstretched fingers. They repeat this a few times until the girl gets the shot.
A couple of grizzled surfers, potbellies straining against their black neoprene suits, arrive and perform the series of stretches that will enable them to ride the waves with minimal pain and hopefully no injuries, one more time, not the last time but maybe the second to the last. The teenagers line up and do one last trick, the camera poised and timer set so that they can all be in the picture. And then they don their sweats and flip-flops and collect their towels and leave, shouting “Shotgun in Rachel’s car!” and “Dibs on the Pringles!”, riding off together to enjoy the rest of this holiday afternoon.
We onlookers watch them go, smiling at the energy and enthusiasm of the young people, thinking about how our heads would spin if we even contemplated attempting such moves. The teenagers, full of life and justifiably impressed with themselves and eager for our attention, seem unaware and yet somehow perfectly aware of how beautiful and enviable they are. But what they do not know is that in this moment they possess the most flawless, lithe, and responsive bodies they will probably ever posses. They are unaware that we adults watching from the rocks, those in our 30s tending small children, and in our 40s enjoying the feel of the sun on our aging skin, and in our 50s and 60s wondering if we will be able to get up out of our low beach chairs, are remembering our own youths, about how we spent days like these on beaches like these, wearing daring bathing suits on our tanned bodies, frolicking and flirting and feeling our firm limbs effortlessly responding to our every impulse, laughing in the sun, innocent of the fact that this day of ease and pleasure would never come again, or anyway not ever exactly like this.
