the word beach

It's over: midnight comes, pumpkin carriage.

In a few days, for most of us, the beach will cease to be a present to return to being that future that sweetens other more hostile presents, that dream that we chew as a reward when the reality of each day becomes harsh.

The beach has become a decisive gear of our civilization: the place of being others.

The word beach is very common: in all our languages ​​we say it the same —

,

,

,

— and it comes from the fact that it is flat, flat, beach.

In fact, dictionaries define it like this, as a "more or less flat coastal sandbank or rocky area."

And they explain that the beach is “a geographical feature next to a body of water, which consists of loose particles.

Those particles that compose it are usually made of rock, such as sand, gravel, pebbles, or from biological sources, such as mollusk shells or coralline algae.

So many times strict definitions fail to describe what they define.

Because the beach is one of the most characteristic products of these times.

It had always been a confusing, almost dangerous place: that strip where the sea and the land collided, a hostile space, indefensible, open to attacks from the elements and other pirates.

That is why the cities were not built on the beaches but a little further back, inside, sheltered.

But around 1860 some French and some English decided that it was elegant and healthy to go for "sea baths" and walk under umbrellas and strut and

to each other.

The beach was an invention of the rich of the 19th century that, little by little, with effort and struggle, the poor of the 20th century took over —and they ended up giving it its meaning.

There is a glorious image of the workers of the Front Populaire, France, 1936: they had conquered, with weeks of strikes, the right to paid vacations and they went en masse to discover the beach.

Since then the beach began to be what it is.

But, even if it is appropriate, the beach continues to be that mestizo, ambiguous place, where the solid and the liquid are mixed, where our habitat ends and gives way to a space that does not support us.

Perhaps that is why the beach creates a different legality and that is, I suppose, its best offer: to offer a space where the usual rules no longer apply, a carnival that lasts two or three weeks.

(There always was: all religions, all societies always had very strict rules and a moment to break them into a sweet heap. Saturnalia or bacchanals or carnivals or fallas or

; for us, that moment is a place and we call it a beach. )

The beach creates a parallel reality: the vast majority would not do in other places what they do on it.

He would not walk around in loincloths and panties, he would not lie on the ground, he would not look at others in those ways, he would not huddle so much, he would not sleep in public, he would not forget the clock, he would not drink freely, he would not kiss freely, he would not dare what there does dare.

For this reason, due to its controlled breaking power, the beach has become the symbol of leisure: being on a beach is, in principle, not doing anything that one would not want to do, doing what one missed while doing all that which in general does not want to—and that we call, for lack of a better name, work.

Although the beach also has, of course, its rules and obligations: to begin with, you have to have a good time —and, for many, there is nothing more terrifying than that duty to enjoy.

Even so, that interruption —that carrot— is what men and women need to go back to doing all that they don't —always— want: the beach is a necessary invention, decisive in the social economy of our lives.

And, also, in the dry economy: we know that there are countries that still live, primitive, from the people who visit their beaches.

It probably won't last long: between climate change, ruthless use, uncontrolled construction, erosion and my nephew Toño's cube, they say that in a couple of decades the world will lose a fifth of its beaches and, by the end of century, half

By then, surely, those who do these things will have already invented the new carrot.

We are, after all, their rabbits.

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