Snail Beach and the Neighborhood Pirates

Virginia Beach 2007-2013

It was the summer when I was six years old that I learned to ride my bike. I had so

many places that I wanted to explore that my parents soon gave up trying to keep tabs on

me and my Barney the Dinosaur-colored bicycle. They confined me to the area between the

highway and the bridge, giving me about a ten block radius in my neighborhood to roam

free until sunset, when I was expected home for dinner.

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon Snail Beach, located a block from my house.

All I remember is pushing back the bushes that hid it, and stepping onto the cushion of

sand. I looked out into the Bay, and took in the fresh air that smelled of the perfect

combination of seaweed and sand as to not make it disgusting. I noticed an old decrepit dock

that was clearly no longer in use, and, surrounding the lightly colored sand of the beach,

large greyish-brown rocks. As I approached them, I became bewildered. Covering every inch

of the jagged mounds of stone were little snails--giving an estimation on the number of them

would be like trying to count the number of little gravel pieces in my driveway. I felt an

immediate sense of prideful ownership towards this small beach. I couldn’t wait to tell all of

my friends from the neighborhood what I had just found. And it was ​my​ own piece of

paradise (finders keepers).

I first brought my friends Richard, Julia, and Jack from down the street to Snail

Beach. Naturally, when I showed them the city of snails, we concluded that they ​all​ had to

become pets. Retrieving a cardboard storage box from my attic, we shoved wet sand at the

bottom, and began stuffing the container with hundreds of snails to bring home. My friends

and I tiptoed ninja-style up the stairs to my bedroom with our homemade terrarium, wet
sand spilling from the edges. We eluded the attention of my parents, placed the carton of

snails in between the wall and my bed to keep it hidden from sight, and plopped a couple

spoonfuls of peanut butter in the corner of the box so my snails would stay nourished. When

I awoke the next morning, I got out of bed to check on my babies. The box was empty.

Looking around my room in horror, I saw all of my snails in various crevices around room.

They had all climbed out of the box, and some had traveled far enough to exit my room and

take residence in the hallway. Frantically grabbing at as many snails as possible and shoving

them back into the dilapidated box oozing with rotting sand, I sprinted back to the beach

and poured the hundreds of snail shells into a pile next to one of the rocks farther away

from shore. Few snails handled the sleepover at my house well. The stack of snails stayed

dormant in the back of the beach for years to come… I referred to it as the Snail Massacre of

2007, the first tragedy in the history of Snail Beach.

All of the neighborhood kids flocked to Snail Beach on hot summer days. We quickly

learned that swimming was not a pleasant activity; the floor of the Bay was a manure-like

mud, and litter washed up frequently onto the sand and the Bay itself was the color of water

after rinsing off a sponge used for cleaning dusty furniture in the sink. On an especially hot

and long and boring summer day, a friend got the clever idea to “borrow” Mrs. Randall’s (an

older mean neighbor lady) canoes from the rack in her backyard while she was at work

during the day. She had died her hair black about two years earlier, and always screamed at

the neighbors’ dogs for barking too loudly. The neighborhood kids told stories of how she

kept dead bodies in her old tool shed; I was afraid of her, but I wouldn’t let that get in the

way of a good time. We sneaked the three canoes away like bandits and decided we were

going to be pirates for the day. We filled the empty glass bottles on the beach labeled

“SMIRNOFF” with Gatorade and played our best drunken pirates, practicing our swearing
and pirate language, and feeding Ritz Bitz crackers to Richard’s parrot (he always brought

one of his many interesting pets along on adventures) and tried to teach Stefan the Parrot

how to curse too. After pushing our canoes off the shore of Snail Beach, we sailed our

mighty ships to the bridge in the Bay, and after an hour of canoeing, our arms were sore, our

faces were so sunburned it hurt to smile, and we had gone through our last glass bottle of

orange Gatorade. Once we approached the beach, we saw a woman in her fancy work

clothes: a navy blue pleated pantsuit, standing on the shore. It was Mrs. Randall. Pulling our

canoes onto the sand with our eyes at our feet, bracing for phone calls to all of our parents,

Mrs. Randall said in a monotone voice, “put them back.” And she turned and walked away.

Completely dumbfounded by the sudden mercy we had been gifted, we quickly returned the

canoes and headed home (tragedy averted).

While Snail Beach remained dormant and untrodden during the winter months, it

instantly became a place of sanctuary to me once the season turned from spring to summer

and the Bay water became warm to the touch. It was a place of shenanigans with friends, but

also a quiet place to escape to. Sometimes I would sit on the sand and just smell the cool

wind that always seemed to carry my thoughts away with it. I would dig my toes into the

warm sand or see how far I could throw stones into the water. As I aged, I became strong

enough to carry my paddleboard down the street to Snail Beach. I would paddle down to the

bridge and burn away the sunscreen my mother slathered on my skin every day before I left

the house in the morning on my purple bike.

One hot afternoon in July while eating a turkey sandwich in the kitchen, my mother

informed my brother and me that we were moving to Denver. My mom asked me how I was,

and I said “okay.” But I didn’t know if I was. I walked down to Snail Beach with my paddle

board and sat down and wiggled my bare toes in the warm sand and looked out onto dirty
water of the Bay and chucked rocks out into the water as far as I could and pushed my

paddleboard into the water and rowed past the bridge this time. I thought about why I

wasn’t crying about the news. I thought about how much I loved where I lived. But I also

thought about the excitement of the adventures (and shenanigans) that a new place would

offer me. I had outgrown where I was. Realizing the sun was setting and how far away I was

from Snail Beach, I turned around and paddled home. It was well past dark when I walked

through my front door. My mom asked me if I was okay. I said I was, and this time I meant

it.

It took my parents a year to sell the house after moving to Colorado. We went home

after six months to do Christmas at my house in Virginia Beach. Feeling nostalgic, I went

back to Snail Beach in my full winter gear. When I stepped onto the cushion of sand, I

smelled the same breeze I had forgotten about. Even in the cold, humid winter, it was as

calming as I had remembered it. But it was littered with trash and rowdy teenagers had

clearly been using this as a hangout spot as evidence by the empty glass alcohol bottles and

Burger King wrappers strewn across the sand. It was significantly smaller than I

remembered, and there wasn’t a single snail to be found, and the dilapidated boat dock was

almost completely gone, and I wondered how this place had been built up so high in my

mind. The physical place had been so distorted because of the memories attached to it and in

the end, I came to the conclusion that Snail Beach was a sort of eyesore, a meaningless pit of

dirty sand, beer cans, and decaying washed-up seaweed. But even after going back, when I

think of Snail Beach, I can’t seem to remember it as anything else besides paradise.