THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 5, 1995 TAG: 9507040010
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: BY LARRY MADDRY, STAFF COLUMNIST
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
SUMMER HAS hit Chick's Beach.
I mark it by the first couple seen spending the night under the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel.
Mabel the cocker Spaniel and I walk the beach early each morning. We found the pair asleep on the sand beneath the bridge pilings.
The sleepers were cocooned in a ragged bedspread. Mabel sniffed nearby but didn't wake them.
Other signs and portents of summer have appeared in the neighborhood. Bridal bouquets of Queen Anne's lace ornament the shore of Bay Lake. And we have a new clutch of ducklings on Bay Lake and some baby fish.
Chick's Beach has an easygoing pace during the week but jumps on weekends. On Saturdays and Sundays, the bachelors tune their stereos to hard rock and blast it over the beach as a public service. Such kindness is so rare these days.
Everybody knows Chick's Beach as the home of the Low Rent Regatta. I guess one of the reasons our neighborhood is considered ``low rent'' is the absence of a beach club. We don't have one. Bob Guess' garage is the closest thing I've seen to a club.. On weekends, folks go over to watch Bob build his boats in and around the garage, drink beer and, sometimes, nibble on fish he nets from the Bay. The bar is one of Bob's work benches.
But summers at Chick's Beach are a lot more upscale than when I arrived. People have begun to go to the beach with towels that don't have hotel names on them. And I see beach umbrellas sprouting above the sand on my walks by the Bay. And expensive beach chairs with wooden arm rests, too.
I can remember when you never saw a beach umbrella on our beach. Just folks sunbathing on their bedsheets with no covering to keep out the noon sun. Sometimes the women would do their wash in the morning and the entire family would carry the post and the frame webbed with line of a backyard clothes dryer to the beach with the wet clothes hanging from it.
The family would stick the apparatus in the sand and sit under it.
It was said to be better than an umbrella because of the breeze blowing over the wet laundry. I never tried it myself. by CNB