I love people watching. The summer is the best time for it. Sitting on the beach in the shade of other people’s umbrellas, watching them live their lives. Seeing all the people my age run into the water as fast as they can so they don’t chicken out from the cold lake water. Some a little younger are mimicking the ‘Acclimatize’ meme. Older people are up on the boardwalk watching as well, mostly watching the little ones making sand castles on the waters edge, making teams to fetch water or broken mussels to help out.
The season’s just beginning, and I got there early enough to watch the freshly raked sand be turned into a mass of indistinguishable footprints from the people going back and forth. If you look, there’s some tire tracks from an off-road stroller someone pushed down the beach an hour ago. That family had left not long after because of the heat. The ice cream shack is open, and the line is following along the boardwalk, the order only occasionally interrupted by kids running up to their parents before running back to the sand.
The grassy area is filled with people, too. Way more than there used to be. But people have barbecues running, and the smells mingle with the sunscreen and bug spray people have begun putting on. There’s the smell of a fire pit drifting on the wind from someone’s property upwind, a feat considering the downtown core behind us. It smells like summer.
The sun begins to set, the smells lean more towards bug spray to ward off the mosquitoes and black flies, and the restaurants are beginning to fill up as people start to pack up for the day. The person I was borrowing shade from left half an hour ago with their kids, there’s sand castles lining the shore, some kids are hurriedly filling in holes as their parents are calling them over to get changed into some dry and comparatively less sandy clothes —it doesn’t matter what you do there will always be sand in any bag you bring, I think there’s still sand in my bag from last year— coercing them with snacks or dinner. The sun sets on them in a way that getting a low angle will make it seem like a tall tower in a fairy tale.
The crowds file out. All that’s left is a group playing water volleyball, a few elderly couples walking the boardwalk, and me. I sit here staring at the sands left in disarray, not by junk or garbage, but by humans leaving their mark, however temporary it may be. Rains will wash away the footprints. Maybe, one day, they’ll be set in stone, left for someone in the future to find and come to the realization that people lived here, really, lived here.
Every one of these footprints is someone going through something. Something wonderful? Something terrible? Only they really know, we as an observer, can only speculate. We can take joy in that speculation. We may never see that person again, but they will still leave an impression.
Someone said that everyone that appears in your dreams is someone you’ve seen before. That person you speculate about could carry on with you in your dreams, even if you don’t realize it. So do some people watching, notice the small things, like the footprints in the sand, or interactions between strangers, you might find a little joy.
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