2049: The Beach
It was a sunny afternoon, so my daughter and I went down to the beach.
The weather was getting warm and in a couple of weeks it would be too hot. We live inland and it’s not a short drive. But on that day, it just felt like now or never.
We got out of the car and stepped into the sand, flip-flops dangling from our hands. After racing each other, then catching our breaths, we cooled down walking along the surf picking up seashells and skipping rocks. We had arrived late in the afternoon and the sun was beginning to set. To our delight, we noticed the silica was starting to sparkle like dark-purple glitter in the sand.
Walking along, my eye suddenly caught something washing up onshore.
“Daddy, what are you looking at?”
“There’s a plastic bottle up there,” I said. “Let’s go pick it up.”
We picked up the bottle and a few more bits of trash we found as we walked.
After filling up a plastic bag we found with all the trash we could fit, we sat down to rest on a rock and watch the sunset. I looked down at the trash I held in my hand, all the carelessness it represented, and I thought about my father who would have had something to say about all the people who littered on this beach. All his heated rants about the world ending. All his fatalist diatribes about why everything was going to shit. Pollution this, climate change that, corporations are evil, people are monsters.
He was never happy with the slow pace of change. And to his credit, his anger was objectively justified. Remarkably, most of the world is currently on its way to meeting C02 emission reduction goals by 2050. Despite the effort, though, about half the world’s coastal cities at this point are flooded and increasingly uninhabitable. Millions of people are migrating. The Middle East is breaking heatwave records every year. Parts of Europe are having a not-so-subtle dance with fascism again. And the US, like many other countries, is primarily occupied with reactionary measures like protecting its remaining coastal cities from uncontrollable sea-level rise.
It is generally accepted that we were finished before we even got started. In the mid-30s, the attitude kind of went from “saving the world” to just salvaging what was left. And, that’s kinda the way it was for me growing up.
My father would often tell me he was sorry for bringing me into this world. Sometimes, especially when he drank, he just started apologizing about everything.
It’s your world now, he would say, “I’m sorry we couldn’t save it. Your mother and I thought… we all thought we could save it.”
I always told him it was okay, stop feeling sorry. Because, honestly, it annoyed me most of the time even though I knew it was all true. I knew things were getting worse, but I, along with most of my generation who slowly began to realize the window of opportunity had closed years ago, was basically at peace with it. It’s just the world we were raised in — a beautiful, tragic, ephemeral world.
My father never forgave himself for bringing a child into this world. I always wondered how happy my childhood would have been had I just been born a century earlier, to a happier-go-lucky father, one who didn’t regret having a child, smiling all day while happily driving around in his gas-guzzling Buick without a care in the world. Instead, my father was born into a fast-moving world that was full of hopes and dreams but didn’t see it was heading straight towards a cliff. I, it turns out, was born going over that cliff. Free-falling with everyone else, just trying to enjoy the view.
I sighed and took a deep breath, kicking some sand at the base of the rock we were sitting on. I felt a lifetime go by as I thought about my father, and my daughter must have read that in my face.
“What’s the matter, daddy?”
“Oh, nothing,” I responded, kinda glad she had brought me back. “Just, you know… thinking about Grampy.” She knew what I meant.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s never been happy, has he.” I chuckled and nodded my head in agreement.
“Not as long as I’ve known him,” I said, smiling at her wit.
We put on our sunglasses and just sat there for a while watching the last few moments of what turned out to be one of those rare, beautifully red-hued sunsets where you can see the sun drop into the ocean at what seems like an alarming speed for a heavenly body. I looked at the wonder on my daughter’s face. She was so young, she had probably never seen one like this before.
I turned back to the horizon again, letting out a deeply proud sigh as I watched all the light in the world fall slowly into that bright, vanishing dot at the end of the ocean, at the end of the world.
“What do you think it’s like, daddy,” she asked, “deciding to have a baby?”
“Selfish,” I said, without skipping a beat. Then I leaned over, put my arm around her, and kissed her head. “But, having you was the best decision I have ever made.”
