David Torrey Peters

Rubber Bands

At the beach today, someone had replaced the sand with rubber bands, rubber bands as numerous as the grains of sand had been. They came in all sorts of colors and gleamed bright and cheery under the sun-infused blue sky. Down by the water, where the rubber bands were wet, they glinted in the June light and their hues shone extra deep.

The kids got over their surprise faster than the adults. They ran screeching and laughing towards the water to jump and get bounced into the waves. Parents called to their kids in many different languages not to launch themselves out too far; but never having experienced such a thing, none of them could say how far was too far.

Other kids, lugging buckets and shovels and intending to make sand-castles, soon figured out how to make rubber band balls and lash them together with larger rubber bands to form funny globular castles. The beach grew dotted with little rubber band sculptures.

The boys made rubber-band guns with their fingers and spent their time snapping the bands at the bikini-clad rears of their girls, who feigned protest, but always looked delighted as the next threat approached.

Down at the water, a foursome of grey-haired women who spoke an Eastern European language let the waves pick them up and drop them down again on the bed of rubber-bands, the softness of which allowed them to frolic in ways that sand would not. From the way they laughed and teased each other, I caught a glimpse backwards in time, past their one-piece suits and tender knees, to the young beach-goers they once were.

And me? I spent most of my time just walking by the water’s edge, feeling the wet rubber bands squish like calamari between my toes. Then later, I spread my towel over a little patch where the rubber-bands were mostly red and lay down on a beach that cradled my shoulders and legs and bounced my movements back at me whenever I shifted.

I wanted to take you there tonight, but mid-way through the afternoon, a group of city workers appeared and walked up and down the beach, dismay on their faces. Shortly afterward came the bulldozers, driven by proficient men in baseball caps. As the beach cleared, people tentatively left the rubber bands to go back to the familiar sand. By the evening, they say, the beach will look the same as all the others.

David Torrey Peters is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa. His essays have been selected as finalists in contests held by Narrative Magazine and Third Coast Magazine, and his work is forthcoming in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and Best Travel Writing 2009.