Putting Life Into The Right Perspective On Tybee Island

It looks like I got back just in the nick of time, before you guys started fighting over whether Christine O’Donnell is dumber than Sarah Palin, or even whether Michael Vick should be starting next week instead of Kevin Kolb. I’ll have to admit, though, that it was hard to leave our little Georgia beach earlier today. It seems that at the end of every trip, Sunday is the day when the sun shines the brightest, the water is just right for catching a few waves, and the people seem the friendliest on Tybee Island.

The thing about a little beach like this, which doesn’t have the golf courses or entertainment venues or amusement parks of a Myrtle Beach, or the raw intensity of Destin, or the cachet of a Seaside or even Hilton Head, is the way it becomes a community beach, even though the people who come here are usually staying for a week or less. As I stood in the ocean yesterday, letting the water lap against my back, I could see quite a few familiar faces from the week, people who I talked to on the beach or stood in line with for breakfast or listened to music with at night in one of the nearby bars.

The building ordinance Tybee Island has that limits the heights of all buildings is probably the thing that has contributed the most to its character. There are no major hotel chains and no high rise condo towers, which means a large part of their tourists rent houses instead of rooms. So you see a lot of families, a lot of intergenerational groupings who come back year after year.

I thought about an exchange I’d had one morning at The Breakfast Club, another Tybee Island institution where you can get to listen to Muddy Waters while you eat your omelet. I was sitting next to a gregarious local builder, although in this place gregariousness seems to be a prerequisite to getting a highly sought after seat at the bar, where you sit a few feet from the backs of the finest short order cooks in town. The builder had leaned over to me to express his condolences since I’d had to confess that I was from Atlanta.

“I got a brother up there,” he said in a booming drawl, as if his brother was doing a bid in a state penitentiary. Then he lowered his voice. “You know what they call this place?”

I gave him the universal “I don’t know” look, spreading the upturned palms of my hands apart slowly to cue him to go ahead with his punchline.

“They call it the ‘Redneck Rivera’.”

I leaned over towards him, my eyebrows raised high. “Redneck it is. The Rivera it ain’t.”

I thought about that exchange yesterday as I stood there in the water, watching people do the the things that they normally do at the beach, and sorted through why I liked this place so much. Maybe, I mused, it allowed me to get in touch with my Inner Redneck. Maybe it was the prices, which were reasonable enough to allow men who painted houses and fixed cars and machined parts and assembled cars to treat their families to a nice time at the beach once a year. Maybe it was the way the public was as welcome to the beach as the people who owned the million dollar houses that overlooked the ocean. Or maybe it was the way most of the people seemed to fully and freely enjoy themselves without worrying about the time or the label on their swimsuits or the way their hair was cut.

I thought about all these things and more as I kept hearing about Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle and Rand Paul and their roles as figureheads for the Tea Party movement. I thought about the men I’d sat next to all week, and drank beer with, and told stories with, men who planned their own itineraries, served as their own bodyguards, loaded their own bags into their own cars, found their way down the highway without the aid of GPS, men who looked into their wallets as if the money in it could run out if they weren’t careful, and wondered why we allowed our media to repeat the kinds of meaningless platitudes they have been spouting recently about the latest political fad to sweep the country.