What do you see when you aim to stop looking?

Kelly and I are standing, ankle-deep, in rising surf, watching. The water slinks past our feet, and as the ocean reclaims it, we stare where the sand is pulled back. “Look for the darkest black, a color that doesn’t shine but absorbs all the light,” she says. “Don’t focus on shape.”

Before me, tens of thousands of little objects glimmer in a glaring noon-sun light, remnants of an entire civilization of bivalve mollusks whose crusty shell-houses have been thrown upon the beach, crushed by relentless waves and the heavy footsteps of beachcombers, and scattered across the sand. There is an astonishing spectrum of color: pink, indigo, purple, rust-red, and on occasion even hints of yellow.

We are looking for shark teeth, perhaps my wife’s favorite and most notorious beachtime hobby. I stare downward at the sand, pacing my breath, tempering my synapses. Thousands of shell fragments. Don’t focus on shape, I repeat, even as my brain impulsively picks out triangles. I see nothing. Kelly reaches down and scoops out a fossilized tooth, black as night. Rather, another one. She has a pocketful.

I have none. In fact, in my entire life, I have never found a shark tooth. It is one of many ignominious traits of mine. This is our seventh year spending a week at the beach. By now, Kelly has found enough teeth to construct dentures for a whale shark. My count remains at zero.

Perhaps this year I could break the haunting streak, I thought. We arrived on Saturday, and Sunday morning the skies were clear and seemed to indicate a perfect day ahead. I ferried out the detritus useful for hours on the sand while Kelly put breakfast together.

There is a curious anthropology of beach vacationers. Just after sunrise on a fair-weather day, two primary groups of people tend to emerge from their houses and condos and motor-lodge rooms to descend upon the shore: the ambulatory and the campers.

The campers haul out wagons or beach carts laden with the same things I am carrying: chairs, umbrellas, towels, coolers, shovels, nets, buckets, sand molds, foam boards, skim boards, pool noodles, portable speakers, beach bags full of sunscreen, hats, novels, games, and occasionally saltwater fishing tackle.

The ambulatory are there, in the low-angled, dewy morning sun, to shuffle, walk, jog, or run along the tide. Among these are the first-shift tooth hunters. Their languid pace betrays their task.

We are all here for the real estate, of course. The hunters are here to enjoy the mostly empty shore. The campers are here to secure a small stretch of this public beach, to stake a claim with a wide arc of chairs before the rest of the shoreline wakens from their salty slumber.

Larger groups often send forth an emissary. I watch from our balcony where two fathers, the Lewis and Clark of a large family sharing an oceanside mansion, dutifully commandeer a half acre of sand for the day. Every morning for a week, they plunge ten matching umbrellas into the ground like garnishes, each staged with a pair of collapsible chairs and a small cooler, before attending to the rest of their encampment. Soon, a competition field is established, marked with little orange cones, where after lunch they will engage in a game of touch football.

Beach games belong to their own classification of hominid activities. As I poke along, looking for the darkest black that absorbs all of the light, doing my best to ignore three-sided seashells, I notice a dozen of these sports, some adapted to this particular geography, others invented for it.

There are groups tossing a football or baseball or softball or frisbee; a mother and daughter passing a soccer ball (another family brings a pair of folding goals); the group down the beach with the half-acre promenade later erects a near-professional beach volleyball net. I halfway expect to see Kerri Walsh.

Elsewhere: cornhole (very popular), ladderball, Whiffle ball, beer pong, Kan Jam, spike ball, bottle bash. And, of course, the consummate beach activity: bocce.

My kiddos love playing bocce, a game simple enough that all of us can enjoy it. Thomas relishes the chance to roll the jack, because he always aims for the little white ball to end up in a sand castle, which we then proceed to pound with the heavy bocce balls as if we were re-enacting the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

This being America, we of course insist upon playing our own version of the game on the beach. There is no court, no formal demarcation of boundaries. Some families seem to play a game that stretches in football-field measures. Others create miniature golf-style obstacle courses to navigate. Occasionally there are disagreements over a ruling, contestants trying to convey one thing or another over the roar of the waves. It is utterly futile to talk at any distance on the beach. I wonder what the old Italians would say about this, and then I continue walking down the beach.

By the middle of the week, I still haven’t found a single tooth.

Kelly has taken to listening to podcasts, and she notes that paying attention to whatever is in her earbuds distracts her from the task of looking for shark teeth—and curiously improves her already refined skills. She produces a bevy of teeth, including a silver dollar-sized incisor that must have belonged to something from the Jurassic period, something that clearly ate well.

Taking this counsel to heart, I decide that the purpose of my walks on the beach is now for exercise, not hunting. I carefully instruct my Apple watch to record an outdoor walk, and then I walk—faster, this time—toward a distant pier. I often walk with my eyes on the sand, glancing about for those darkest of black colors, but I frequently look up, purposefully distracting myself.

Without realizing it, I’ve made it to the pier, and I keep walking until I’m hungry. The pizza place I like is closed for lunch this year (the new summer theme: not enough people lifeguard or bake pizza, apparently), so I end up on a rooftop bar eating fish tacos and drinking a cold beer and peering over at the queue of people waiting to tether themselves to a parachute and sail through the air behind a powerboat.

The sun is fully up, and it’s hot on the beach. I watch the busboys climbing the steps to the rooftop, their arms cradling plastic tubs filled with dirty dishes and flatwear. The woman tending bar seems about fifty, and I am astonished at her pace and efficiency. She sees without seeing; a patron raises a finger and though she has seven things to do first, she remembers the man in the lime green tank top wanted another Bud Light. Like a shark, she doesn’t stop moving behind the bar. I ask how she keeps her endurance on a hot day, and she grins and produces a can of biofreeze from under the counter. “Spray this down your shirt and keep walking,” she says.

I pay my tab and wander in the alley between the bar and the joint next door, a place with lots of motorcycles in the parking lot, and louder music, and a large flag reading “TRUMP 2024: TAKE AMERICA BACK” flying from the side. Down the street, at a gas station, I see a woman standing by the curb whose earthly possessions are packed into grocery bags and cheap plastic bins loaded onto a hotel luggage cart. Behind a weekly-rate motel, I see a maid perched on a concrete parking barrier, wiping her eyes, a stub of cigarette between her fingers. She forces a smile as I walk by.

What do you see when you aim to stop looking?

Vulnerability at my age is a carefully preserved attitude, I think, one that is mostly kept secreted away. Fortressed. The deeper it goes, the higher the walls.

In the middle of everything, a small group of people have congregated fifty yards up the shore. A man with long, grayish hair wearing a white jumpsuit has pulled a suitcase-sized karaoke machine near the surf, and he begins singing, right there in front of God and everyone else in Cherry Grove. Kelly notes he doesn’t have a bad voice. A woman joins him, and he sings to her, and by sing, I mean performs: hand motions, knees bent at climatic moments, head leaned back, belting. Later, with the speaker at a volume that I can only describe as intrusive, they begin to dance just as enthusiastically as they sang. They are expressly affectionate.

In light of the idea of vulnerability, I find all of this fascinating. What on earth has driven this couple to act in such a way? What drugs does one take to conduct karaoke in such an unusual setting? Why is it instinctual for me to judge them?

We see this crew again and again. I begin inventing their story. Maybe he has survived cancer, and he has adamantly determined carpe diem. Or maybe the cancer is back. Or maybe she has cancer, and there won’t be much longer. They hold hands, and he reaches for her face, planting a long kiss while bocce balls roll past.

We wake up to a morning thunderstorm. Julia has finished both of the books she’s brought with her, so we search on our phones to see if there is a bookshop anywhere near us. To our amusement, there is a Books-A-Million still open in the Myrtle Beach Mall. We arrive to find that it is one of only a few operating storefronts in the building.

A person of my generation can feel old walking through an emptied mall, the vestiges of a former shopping complex still about. A few mom and pop stores dot here and there; a church has taken shelter next to Gift Addict, and a community theatre has repurposed what might have once been Victoria’s Secret.

The former American Eagle is now a video game arcade, and I am delighted by the eight-bit sounds that spill out from a rodeo of square-screens. I pull the kids inside, and I change a dollar bill into quarters (they still take quarters!) and we feed them into pinball machines. I let Annie sit on my lap to play Pole Position, spinning the wheel, remembering everything.

Back at the bookstore, the cashier asks the lady in front of me if she has a rewards card. “Well,” she says in a long drawl, “the Books-A-Million where we live closed, and the only ones I ever see are here and in Pigeon Forge.” She delivers this line, oblivious to how it must make the cashier feel. When I step forward to check out, the cashier asks if I have a rewards card.

Later in the week, Thomas and Kelly run into a man who found what he described as a megalodon tooth on the beach near us. Thomas is both anguished and inspired. He’s found several shark teeth this trip, and hearing from the man pushes him to keep looking for more, but something in him is diminished in knowing that the grand prize has been claimed, that nothing else of such a size could come out from this strand.

There is a colonizer streak in us all, I think. The men who race to claim their spot in the sand, the recreation of Roman Empire-era weighted ball games, the hunt to strip the beach of fossils.

Miles of sand, millions (billions?) of shells. I must be walking past thousands of shark teeth, oblivious as I go. Kel says that the first one is the hardest one to find, that afterward they seem to just appear, that your eyes simply begin to see them. My watch obediently counts my steps, urging me to keep moving when I tary.

We walk, all of us, in the golden light of evening. I see a toddler running down the beach with all her might, tugging along as a plastic kite on a string flutters behind her. The girl’s parents shout encouragement as she runs, and suddenly I see Julia in her tiny footsteps and sugar-white hair. We were here when she was that small, and time seems to fold over on itself, like a lazy river infinity loop.

The large family has come back onto the beach, dressed for making a photograph. The patriarch of this clan, a distinguished looking grandfather in a crisp white shirt, is off to the side, grasping a large trash can, sick. The hired photographer doesn’t notice, busy as she is directing the middle generations among the dunes.

Later, we plant a portable tripod in the sand, fix Kelly’s phone to the top, and gather for our annual family portrait. The wizardry of the watch means that we can see what’s in the viewfinder on the tiny wrist screen. As Kelly goes back to review the frames to see if we’ve snagged a good shot, I feel the water splash around my feet, and instinctively I look down, watching as the sand pulls away, looking for that darkest black. I breathe slowly. Nothing there.

Perhaps this will be the running joke for our kids—that every year, we go to the beach, and every year, Dad never finds any shark teeth. This simple thing in life that I am so terrible at could transform into legend.

Kelly walks back over, and Annie leans into my side and glances up, her honest eyes green and hazel in the fading light, her curls blowing in the wind. I keep my eyes up as we walk back inside. I have a reputation to uphold.

Other beach episodes:
Cherry Groove
The Art of Building Sand Castles