"Where have all the beach-bum-dreams gone.... Long time passing..."

Having a full wall-sized mural of a beach scene on your dorm room wall makes you a little more popular, or more interesting at least. But for me, it was more than just a picture, it was an obsession. It's almost amazing I even made it as far as college, considering I once dreamed of moving to a Caribbean Island and getting a job at a resort as a dishwasher, just to be near the beach.

By the time I was 20, it was full blown. I had spent a month in the Bahamas and had come back with treasures to decorate my room and life, as well as a head full of ideas about getting a small boat to live on, and a fishing pole, cast net, and diving gear. I had a goal. A career choice. A dream.

I researched, went to the library, looked up maps of beaches and what kind of fish are good to eat and easy to catch. I knew which beaches would let someone camp out indefinitely, where to anchor my boat, and where to start diving for treasure. South Florida and the Caribbean was all I could think about. Names and words like Turks and Caicos, Mangrove swamps, Barbados, Spanish galleon, Dry Tortugas...they all swirled in my head like taunting, ungraspable images.

Anyone who ventured into my dorm room would have assumed I was studying marine biology. One look at the salt-water aquarium, the decorative fishnet and starfish on the wall, the pictures and posters of tropical scenes, you would wonder what I was doing there and not at a college closer to the beach. Indeed, I actually went to Armstrong State College in Savannah for one quarter for the sole reason that it was close to the ocean.

Songs swirled through my head like Beach Baby, Sloop John B., and Kokomo. In the early fall, when the bright green leaves of summer began to show the first hint of red, and a the slight crispness and long afternoon shadows gave an atmosphere both cheery and mournful, I didn't think of Halloween or hayrides, I thought of...it was time to go. I could feel a pull in my blood towards warmer climates and sandy beaches, a pull like the urge of a salmon to swim upstream for hundreds of miles. A desire I could hardly put into words, but felt as powerfully as any obsession I'd known.

Now, 20 years later, my dive gear sits in a box in the basement, my wall mural is rolled up and stored in the attic, and my wife is unlikely to agree to live on a boat with our two kids while I try and catch dinner and dive for treasure. Damn this bothersome streak of responsibility...got to go to college, got to get a job, got to make money...blah blah blah...

It's not that I regret having my family, they are my greatest joy. However, I wonder what happened to my youth, and my dreams, and my desire for the sound of the surf to lull me to sleep, and wake me at dawn.....the gentle sea breezes blowing open my unbuttoned shirt as I stroll under palm trees, looking for whatever the tide brought in the night before.... gently strolling, without a care in the world.