For the first time in over a decade, I physically retraced the routine. I detailed this childhood ritual in the first paper I submitted in college. Regrettably, the original essay is lost somewhere in an old folder or file, but the title, Quarters & Mints is etched in my memory; sharped by its sound and smell.
What are in your pockets?
Stories of the routine pay tribute to my late grandfather, William Randall Harris III, who was known to friends as Randy, but to family as Pop. One week every summer, like clockwork, my sister and I would fight over who was first out the door to accompany Pop on his daily walk to retrieve the newspaper—it was me. Pop made this five minute morning stroll from the beach condo to the front desk one of my favorite childhood memories.
It took two delayed flights, a bad experience at the Thrifty Jacksonville Airport rental counter and a one hour drive in a rented Kia Soul in a late afternoon thunderstorm for me to finally return to Jekyll Island, GA. The Villas by the Sea condos are no longer painted brown, but the former family condo number 233 is still there. Up the stairs and to the right, but the red door is now blue.
The routine was a slow meander through side paths dodging the elaborate webs of banana spiders (the really big ones). Imagine two little girls skipping alongside their grandfather to the hum of cicadas and the many many bugs that creep and crawl in the sticky, humid heat typical of summertime in southern Georgia.
The front desk and cafe were in the same location albeit with different operating hours. While it was disappointing to discover that the cafe no longer served breakfast, I was most disheartened by the disappearance of the game room and missing pinball machine that would have been tucked in the back corner. I always imagined returning with a pocket full of quarters to play one more game. Pop’s pockets always jingled with quarters—enough for a newspaper, a few rounds of pinball and my favorite, a York pepermint patti.
Baby waves and baby me.
The upgrade was the saddest little enclosed room, empty sans a computer, unused desk, fax machine, and a trashcan (also empty). The vibrancy of a mini arcade with flashing lights, vending machines, and the spring loaded sounds of bouncing balls were all painted over, replaced by the grim silence of barren white walls behind locked doors.
My mom picked up a free local paper that was on a nearby table next to the travel and tour brochures. And that too, was just as depressing.
The end of the routine was always a pit stop by the pool to dip our toes in and test the temperature of the water. Here, the upgrades improved the pool and added extra seating areas. I bypassed the locked fence, and dipped my toes in, imagining my younger self getting excited for the day ahead.
This is the part of the routine, where Pop would ask for a water report, as if asking “what is the weather like today?” I found the water nostalgic and the weather bittersweet.
As the bugs continued to bite, we ventured on, sweating our way past the parking lot and the new plastic playgrounds to find Driftwood Beach. My sister looked for the sign she remembered to have said “8th most romantic beach”, but we couldn’t find it.
We did find the familiar fossilized, dead trees, uprooted or half buried, scattered along the sandy shores—the same ones that I spent my childhood climbing. When I was younger, I thought these strange gnarled trees were a result of some kind of catastrophic storm, most likely a hurricane. But the real cause of what my grandmother refers to as the ‘petrified forest’ is decades of erosion.
Although on this particular visit, shortly after hurricane Debby, we did learn that bones had been found on the beach. Archeologists were excavating the bones, ruling out human remains, to identify an old horse, which they estimated to be over 12,000 years old. These bones were thought to have submerged as a result of the most recent storm.
I had just finished reading Christine Lai’s debut novel, Landscapes, where the main character is an archivist attempting to record what is left of a collection of art, books, and other ephemera amidst a crumbling estate in an apocalyptic future. Throughout the book each loss is carefully categorized:
Toning and wear along the edges. Imperfections due to moisture. Damaged by mold. Fragile condition; affected by damp and pests. Extensive worming throughout, obscuring portions of the text.
A quote by Louise Bourgeois found at the beginning of Landscapes a novel by Christine Lai
The novel also begins with a prologue about the nineteenth-century English painter, J. M. W. Turner, noting his decision to record ‘the wreckage of the old fortress’ rather than Ehrenbreitstein’s reconstruction. In an interview with Amanda Paige Inman about Lai’s themes on archive and ruin, Lai shares that she associates ruins with the idea of rebuilding rather than despair or dystopia; connecting ruination to romantics.
“The flowers and the weeds that grow through the ruins, they’re symbols of hope.”
Christine Lai on Archives, Ruins & her Debut Novel Landscapes
The landscape of spindly branches and sideways trees with woven roots, emerging and disappearing beneath the sand and sea are hauntingly beautiful and ruin-esque. Here, loss is textured. Sun-bleached trees exhibit a collection of weathered surfaces, sculpted by wind and water. Each tree is it’s own archive:
Riddled with holes. Peeling. Curling and coiling. Gaps and grooves with deep valleys and indentions throughout. Waterlogged. Bent, buried, and bare.
I was only in Jekyll Island a few days, but I returned to Driftwood Beach multiple times. In the morning, mid-day, high and low tide. It was surprisingly comforting that the former maritime forest known today as Driftwood Beach had remained the same as it was in my childhood memories. But I wonder, what will be left to find in the next hundred years?
