July 3rd at Dog Beach

Down the beach, in the direction of the state park, a fleet of cabin cruisers rode at anchor, captained by the cream of Emmet County middle management. They leaned on the rail, bronzed guts spilling over brightly-colored plaid or floral board shorts clearly designed and cut for younger, trimmer men. They barked into cellphones, annoyed at the disturbance clearly but this was, after all, only the 3rd of July and so their minions back at the dealership or brokerage still needed guidance. Their wives sat back at the stern, wearing big sunglasses and impractical jewelry and sipping boxed wine from Solo cups. On the bow, their bikini'd teenage daughters lay out, inviting the Sun and the eyes of the boys, who returned the favor with gusto, cannonballing extravagantly from neighboring boats or lunging for cheap plastic novelty footballs in displays of youthful machismo.

Out in the bay, the patrician class bobbed in their sailboats. These were the people for whom a cabin cruiser was nothing more than the rankest trapping of petite bourgeois vulgarity. Motor boats made wake and made noise, all droning motors and pulsing music and yelping kids. These were the people who talked about "Detroit to Mackinac '88" without irony. No one knew what they did out there, but it probably involved wine and very expensive shoes and plotting a course for here or there.

The beach itself was far more egalitarian, a bubbling mix of locals, aging hippies and high school kids mostly, and the downstaters, the Fudgies, in town for the Fourth, perhaps camping in the park, their trailers and RVs ensconced cozily in the pine groves behind the dunes. They made sandcastles, tossed beanbags, smoked cigarettes and drank lukewarm beer from cheap coolers full of water, ice long-since melted. They read big hardcover books that displayed the author's name in 300-point type above images of revolvers and fighter jets and vaguely supernatural things and shapely women in evening gowns. One particularly enterprising group had succeed in burying a tween girl up to her neck in the sand. She looked like an extra in a spaghetti western who had really pissed off the Comanches.

This was the Dog Beach, so named because although it was contiguous with and in effect an extension of the state park beach, it was not technically in the park per se, and so existed in a kind of limbo between the DNR and the City. Practically, this really only meant that people could bring their dogs, who splashed extravagantly in the surf, diving for tennis balls and frisbees and sticks and generally enjoying life far more than any of the poor benighted H. sapiens in attendance could possibly imagine.

And then there was me, bobbing alone in the waves fifty-or-so yards off shore. I was beginning to think about my bald spot, which I was now pretty sure I had not applied sunscreen to. I was thinking about how I didn't really want to leave the water, though, because although I like swimming I'm not a beach guy and I can't stand getting all sandy. Decisions, decisions. Oh well, to hell with my bald spot. If my stupid scalp didn't want to get sunburned now and then it shouldn't have let all that hair fall out out of it, right? And so I splashed into my ungainly backstroke and paddled a little farther out into the Big Lake.