dispatch from myrtle beach

I'm still in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I've been here for a few weeks, celebrating the holidays and then refusing to return to the cold that's coming to Maryland. Myrtle Beach is an odd place. Drive down any given highway and you'll find endless malls and shopping centers and seafood buffets and sometimes, a giant plaster King Kong with funny dimensions. There are huge ferris wheels lit up (even in December) and an empty boardwalk adorned with a mile of Christmas lights. It is unlike the beach towns of my youth at the Outer Banks because everything is either kitschy or glaringly regular, like the four Walmarts and twenty McDonald's.

There are sprawling suburban neighborhoods everywhere here and we are staying in one that is newly developed. Every block of homes surrounds a pond and the ponds are home to many birds. There are geese, swans, and ducks, traveling from one body of water to another. There are herons that seem to take shifts at the pond behind the house, there's the long boy and the big boy and the skinny boy. There are blue birds fluttering around together, landing on the gutters of the houses and in the palm trees that don't quite fit their surroundings. There's a belted kingfisher who sits for hours on the roof of the house across the way. These birds have entertained me for days.

We've gone to a few state parks here, too. The parks protect the beaches and the woods surrounding them. At Huntington Beach State Park, we saw more birds at the outposts in the marsh and on the path to the beach and at the beach itself. I bought a little booklet of birds of the area and I have the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone. With both, we run around looking up to catch the birds like Pokemon.

The birds that inhabit this place feel so antithetical to the ways humans have developed it. You can see a bald eagle at a giant ropes course off of Highway 17 or a great blue heron standing beside one of the many mini golf courses. The state parks are glimmers of hope in the landscape, where every intersection looks like that meme of quintessential Americana (a McDonalds, a gas station, a car dealership, etc).

Myrtle is manufactured for tourists and beachgoers. It's a summer town. Almost everything caters to this crowd. There are entire false boardwalks with man-made bodies of water with everything from year-round Christmas shops to upside down haunted mansions. Arcades litter the landscape; it's the mini golf capital of the world.

Spending Christmas and New Years here, in a place with such hard contradictions, is forcing me to encounter the same contradictions within myself. Oh, how I love outlet mall shopping and year-long Christmas stores. Oh, how the gigantic sharks and King Kong make me giggle as we drive by them for the hundredth time. Oh, how I love looking to the sky and the trees for whatever birds I may see. Oh, how the ocean fades when it's surrounded by thousands of Christmas lights in the form of gingerbread girls and elves on motorcycles.

You have to read between the lines here, painstakingly so. Even at the height of summer, umbrellas and beach chairs and giant tents make the sand almost invisible to a helicopter flying above or a bird watching over us. I want to be in touch with that bird, as long as it isn't a seagull trying to eat my vinegar soaked french fries.