A pre-EPA beach

"Surf, Cohasset {Mass.}, by Maurice Prendergast, ca. 1900.

I remember sharply the look and smell of the beach that was down the hill and through the woods near our house on Massachusetts Bay. Low rocky headlines on each side. Big white-elephant gray-shingled  and faux Spanish Mission style mansions -- some summer places and some year-round— loomedamong the bayberry and poison ivy and over the gray sand and pebbles beach, which was occasionally covered by oil from ships a few miles offshore. There was often a rank smell from the oil and from anarrow stream of sewage water that frequently flowed down one side of the beach. (This was way before the Environmental Protection Agency.)  Soon after an hour in the sun, my back hurt from sunburn. 

The water, unlike Florida’s or even Buzzards Bay, was usually cold and murky. But we all went swimming in it anyway. Then we rushed home to our  gray-shingled house  a quarter mile from the fragrant beach and took hot showers.

-- Robert Whitcomb