Unfortunately, my childhood is a large portion of my life which I would be happier to repress and never visit again. It still comes back to haunt me in quiet hours like some kind of vengeful spirit. However, as much as I hate to look back on it out of sheer embarrassment, I’m forced to admit that in retrospect, many of these somewhat traumatic events are actually pretty comical. This is one of them.
If you’ve never been to Surfside beach, anyone who has can tell you that you aren’t really missing much. It’s really only a beach in the basest sense of the word. It’s a place where ocean meets land, so it earns the title by default. A single visit would be enough to show you however that it’s really not much more than a glorified mud hole. The sand is really more like really gritty mud, and the water year-round is a lovely shade of dirty mop-water. I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to ask to see my feet when I’m waist-deep in the waves or anything, but it would kind of be nice to see my ankles when I’m only ankle-deep. Regardless of the lack of visibility and sanitation, however, people still splash right out into those waves every year. I was one of those people until one fateful day in my youth.
I must have been in second or third grade, I can’t really remember which. My fruitless attempts to drive these memories from my mind have really only succeeded in scrambling my sense of age or time regarding when they happened, but the actual events remain clear as crystal. Anyway, the family had decided to take a beach day, so we packed up into the car with our sunscreen, various sand toys and beach chairs and headed out to the ancient wooden monstrosity that was Stahlman Park. The term “park” there is used fairly lightly.
There was a barbecue area off to one side, and there were a couple of playgrounds, but the actual facility itself was a large open room which was used primarily for weddings and church picnics. Most people really only used it for the showers and the easy beach access. It had been rotting in the sea breeze there since the 70’s, so the entire thing might as well have been one giant splinter.
Once we had gotten out to the beach and scraped aside enough seaweed to set our towels and chairs up, my brother and cousin and I began our usual beach day routine. First order of business was to dig a giant hole. Why? Because we were boys. There are few things more fascinating to young boys than digging giant holes to see what you can unearth, but since most fathers (including mine) frown on the idea of grabbing shovels and digging gigantic lawnmower-swallowing pits in the yard, the only place we were allowed to have at it was the beach. Once we hit the water table, we used the goopy slurry of groundwater, tar and sand to create all sorts of things like drizzle sandcastles and mudballs. …Actually, drizzle castles and mudballs are the only things you can make from it.
The next order of business is to try for the perfect balance of surface sand and water table muck to create the most stable mudball. The object was to make one that would bake solid in the sun and not break apart when you threw it at sandpipers and seagulls who got too close. At least until you got tired of waiting for them to get too close and started chasing after them instead. This game was always short-lived, however, because the parents would always put an end to it before much progress was made. I can only imagine their reasons behind it, but I’d imagine it had something to do with a combination of not wanting flying sand near their faces, and the knowledge that our mudballs would eventually and inevitably be turned on each other. I can’t help but imagine that it might also be the fear of what might happen if we actually did manage to pelt a sandpiper with a baseball-sized mudball and what exactly we would go about doing with it afterwards.
Naturally, the only thing left to do with a giant hole filled with something akin to quicksand is to bury someone in it. It was a process which left everyone involved covered in muddy sand and tar, and at least one of us buried waist-deep in a hole, trying to figure out how best to escape without losing his swimtrunks to the sandpit.
Now, as a child, I was somewhat more logical than my siblings and cousins. Their beach fun came unimpeded because they typically didn’t think too hard about their choices. I, however, thought about them a little too much. While I loved the idea of the beach just as much as the next kid, I was also unable to escape the knowledge that the beach was a giant collection of potentially painful hazards. First and foremost was the sun, which always managed to burn me no matter how much SPF Infinity sunscreen I was slathered with every twenty or so minutes, but somehow that danger was overshadowed by the many other hazards. The Surfside area is notorious for burrs in its grasses which are the size of playground gravel. One trip barefoot through the grass anywhere near the beach and your foot will look like you’ve been playing soccer barefoot with a cactus. Other hazards include the scalding hot pavement littered with shards of beer bottles and upturned crown bottlecaps, and of course, snakes in the saltgrass. However, aside from the constant worry over sharks, I’d never been too concerned over playing in the surf.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I was never really comfortable in the water out there. Something about the inability to see any part of my body was slightly unsettling, but I had a younger brother and cousin to keep up with and an image to maintain, being the oldest of the three. What I wasn’t prepared for that afternoon, however, was my first and most memorable encounter with a creature who has become one of my greatest nemeses on this earth:
The jellyfish.
A man o’ war jellyfish, to be exact. For those of you not familiar with your beachside demonology, the Portuguese Man o’ War or Bluebottle is not actually a jellyfish, but something known as a “siphonophore,” which is technically a collection of separate organisms which are incapable of surviving independently of the others. Regardless of technicalities, however, the little floating masses of goo and hatred look enough like jellyfish to me. Furthermore, in my encounter with one, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if it was or wasn’t really a jellyfish. Here’s how it went down.
I was swimming along, actually headed in to shore so I could get a coke out of the ice chest when all of a sudden, I felt something stringy wrapped around my upper thigh on my left leg. I figured I’d either managed to swim through a clump of sea weed, or my swimsuit was threading at the bottom, so I kicked around a little and it let go. As I got closer to shore, however, I noticed a particular burning sensation beginning to well up around my leg in that area. “Okay,” I remember thinking to myself, “I got stung by a jellyfish. I’ll just get out of the water. It doesn’t hurt that bad… Okay it hurts now… Okay, it really, really hurts now.” And before I knew it, my leg felt like it was on fire. When I reached the shore I was screaming and in tears, and I yanked up the leg of my swim trunks to find that the tentacles had clearly wrapped all the way around my leg at least twice.
Now, when I was regaling my elementary school secretary with this story on my daily trip to the principal’s office, I seem to recall some parts which may or may not have been true about how I battled an evil jellyfish while tossing around one-liners with all the wit my second-grade brain could muster. I believe it ended with me pulling it off of my leg (because in my mind, it was more like a stinging octopus thing) and throwing it as far away from me as I could. Then I showed her where it stung me and she gave me a hug and a coupon for the school store, like she did every day. She told me I gave the best hugs. I was proud of the fact back then, but in retrospect I’m fairly certain she thought I rode the short bus.
One part I definitely did manage to leave out of that version, however, was the part where I spent the next hour and a half in the Stahlman Park parking lot screaming bloody murder like a little girl as the salty air burned the living piss out of my already excruciatingly painful wound. Meanwhile, my father did his best to treat it. The first solution was naturally to pour some cold bottled water over it. While this seems logical at first, cold water actually intensifies the pain while hot water nullifies it. In addition to this, while salt water helps to relieve the pain and stop the venom, fresh water, such as the water found in water bottles, actually makes it worse. After learning that the bottled water wasn’t helping at all, the next step was to try vinegar which was oh so helpfully offered by a passing beachgoer. Now, vinegar is actually a fairly common treatment for jellyfish stings because it kills the stinging toxins. The Portuguese Man o’ War, however, is not a jellyfish. Pouring vinegar on a Man o’ War sting actually increases the delivery of the toxins and ultimately makes everything about it worse.
I was now in extreme pain.
Knowing of only one other remedy for jellyfish stings, my father set off to scour the beach for a bottle of meat tenderizer. Meanwhile, I was left standing by the car in the ever-blowing salt air screaming like a banshee and attracting the attention of just about everyone in the parking lot. Now, you can’t really fault my dad for leaving me there while he went for the meat tenderizer. He had the option of leaving his hysterical screaming child by the car, or carrying his hysterical screaming child around with him while he searched, which easily could have been misinterpreted as anything from child abuse to abduction.
Eventually the meat tenderizer was found and applied, and I wailed and sniffled the entire way home to the point of near hyperventilation.
Since then, I have been stung by at least one jellyfish every single time I have entered that water. Countless times on the legs, at least three times around the waist, once under my left arm, and at least twice on my neck. While I have yet to encounter a second Portuguese Man o’ War, I know they’re out there. Waiting. Looking to finish the job they started all those years ago.
Stupid siphonophores.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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