I Stopped Going To The Beach For Six Years Because Of A Spot On My Shoulder

The spot

It was the size of a pencil eraser and it sat on the top of my left shoulder, just where a shirt strap would sit, and I had it for about two years before I did anything about it.

I am a man who was raised to believe that going to the doctor is something you do when you cannot walk. My father had a hernia for eleven years. My grandfather died of something that could have been caught, and the family word for it, for my entire childhood, was "stubbornness", said with a kind of pride.

So I had a spot, and it changed, and I noticed it changing, and I told myself a story about it, and the story was that it was where a backpack strap had rubbed.

My wife found it, in the end, with her thumb, in bed, in a completely ordinary way, and she went very quiet, which is how I knew.

What the doctor said

I got lucky. I want to lead with that, because there are people who read stories like this and get frightened, and I do not want to be the reason for that.

It was early. It was shallow. They took it, and they took a margin around it, and the margin was clear, and I have a scar now that looks like a small white comma and that my son, when he was seven, called my worm.

But I had one appointment, about three weeks after, where the dermatologist sat me down and did not sugarcoat anything. She said the word that I had been not saying. She told me exactly what my skin was and what my history was, and she used the phrase "cumulative exposure" and then she explained what that meant, which is that all of it counts, every burn you got as a kid at a lake, every afternoon you spent on a boat at nineteen with no shirt on, all of it, and none of it goes away.

Then she said, and this is the sentence that ruined six years of my life, "You have to be smart about the sun now."

What I heard instead

What she said was, be smart about the sun.

What I heard was, you are done with the sun.

I did not decide this consciously. That is the part I have had to unpick with a therapist and, I am not embarrassed to say, with my wife, who saw it happening long before I did.

It started small. I stopped going out to mow at midday. Reasonable. I bought a hat, a proper wide one, and I wore it, and I got a little bit of quiet grief about it from a neighbour and I did not care. Also reasonable.

Then I started finding reasons.

The beach is a long drive. The beach is crowded on a Saturday. I have work. Somebody should stay with the dog. You guys go, I will get the car ready. Take the cooler, I will bring it down. I will just sit here for a minute.

For six years I was the man who drove his family to the beach and did not go to the beach.

The car

I got very good at the car.

I had a routine. I would park as close as I could, and I would sit with the windows down and the door open and my feet out on the tar, and I would read, and I would tell myself I was relaxing, and about every forty minutes one of them would come up the path all sandy and wet to fetch a drink and say, "Are you coming down?" and I would say, "In a bit."

I never came down in a bit.

I told everybody it was medical. That is the shameful part and I am putting it in because if I take it out the story is a lie. I let my family believe that a doctor had told me not to go on the beach, and no doctor ever said any such thing, and I knew that, and I let it stand because it was easier than saying I am afraid.

I was afraid. That is what it was. I had a scar shaped like a comma and every single time I saw the ocean I saw a dermatologist's office and the word she used, and I chose the car.

The question

My daughter was eleven. She is the one in the family who says the thing nobody is saying, and she has been that way since she could talk.

She came up the path, and she did not ask if I was coming down. She stood in front of me with her hands on her hips, dripping, squinting into the sun, and she said, "Dad, are you going to do this until I'm grown up?"

I said something. I do not remember what. Something adult and reasonable and completely empty.

She said, "Because I'm going to be grown up soon."

Then she went back down to the water, and I sat in the open door of a hot car in a parking lot and looked at the back of my own hands.

The un-solving of it

I want to describe how I fixed this, because the fixing was so much stupider and smaller than the problem.

I had been treating this as a moral issue. Sun equals danger equals I am a man who is not allowed at the beach. I had built an entire identity out of an appointment.

What actually solved it was shade. Just shade. Portable, reliable, boring shade that I controlled and that did not depend on renting an umbrella from a guy at eleven in the morning who was already sold out.

I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like the smallest possible answer to the biggest possible feeling. But it was the true answer, and I resisted it for a long time because it embarrassed me that the fix was equipment and not courage.

The first attempt was an umbrella and it was a disaster. Wind got under it in the second hour and it went cartwheeling down toward a family with a baby, and I ran after it, which is the most exercise I had gotten on a beach in six years, and I apologised to eight separate people.

The second attempt was a cheap pop up thing that was really a wind shelter with delusions. It gave me a triangle of shade the size of a bath towel that moved every twenty minutes as the sun went round, so I spent the day shuffling like a lizard, and the family made fun of me, which was fair.

The third attempt, which came after I actually did the reading instead of grabbing the nearest box on a shelf, was a proper beach tent with poles and anchors, and it changed my summers.

The first day under it

I do not want to overdo this. It was a piece of fabric on some poles on a beach in North Carolina and nothing important happened.

But I sat under it for six hours.

Six hours. I had not sat on a beach for six hours since before my son was born. I read most of a book. I fell asleep for twenty minutes and woke up with sand in my ear. My wife lay next to me with her eyes closed and did not say anything about it, which was the kindest possible thing she could have done, because if she had made it a moment I would have had to leave.

And in the late afternoon, when the sun got long and low and the light went gold and the burn risk drops off, I got up and I walked down to the water and I went in with my kids for the first time in six years.

My daughter did not make a thing of it. She just splashed me in the face, immediately, with no ceremony, and I understood that she had been waiting to do that for a very long time.

What I actually learned about shade, since I now have opinions

I have become the man on the beach that other men come and ask questions of, which is a comedy I never expected.

Here is what I tell them.

Anchoring is the whole game. Everything else is a detail. The wind on a beach is not the wind in your yard, and a structure that is not properly anchored is not shade, it is a sail with your family under it. I use sandbags now and I fill them properly, and I bury them, and I have never once regretted the ten extra minutes.

Size matters more than you think, and not for the reason you think. It is not about how many people fit. It is about the sun moving. A footprint that covers you at eleven does not cover you at two. Get more than you think you need, or accept that you will be shuffling.

And a roof alone is not enough, because sand and water reflect, and light comes at you sideways off the ocean all day. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why I was still getting color on my face while sitting in full shade. The beach tents that have some kind of side or wing that you can angle against the low sun are the ones that actually solve it, and the ones that are just a flat sheet on four legs are solving half the problem and looking good in photographs.

That is it. That is my entire expertise. Anchor it, oversize it, block the sideways light.

The thing I would say to the man in the car

We went back last summer. Same beach, same parking lot.

I know exactly which spot I used to park in, and I noticed that I noticed, and I drove past it.

I carried the beach canopy down myself, with my son, who is fourteen now and taller than me and who complained the entire way about the weight, and we set it up in about eight minutes with the practiced silence of men who have done a thing many times.

My daughter is fifteen. She lay under it on her stomach on a towel with her phone, and she did not talk to me for two hours, which is what fifteen looks like, and I was completely happy.

If I could go back and say one thing to the man sitting in the open door of that hot car, it would not be about sunscreen or hats or SPF ratings, and it would not be a lecture about checking your skin, although you should, and my wife would want me to say that here, so, check your skin.

It would be this: the doctor told you to be smart, and you decided that meant absent. Those are not the same thing. You have taken a manageable risk and turned it into a six year absence from your own children's summers, and the cancer did not do that to you. You did that.

There was a way to be in the sun and be safe at the same time, and it cost less than a good pair of shoes, and it was sitting on a shelf the entire time, and all it needed was for you to stop being ashamed of needing help.