Myrtle Beach

I went to the colossus of beach/golf/condo resorts on the mid-Atlantic last week to visit some old friends and their kids who were vacationing there. It is the same Myrtle Beach my brother, father and I used to go to for a few days during summer vacations in the lat 50s, but it’s also not the same place. Highway 17 Bypass is now a 35-mile long, six-lane strip with innumerable shopping centers, malls, golf courses, seafood restaurants, beach resort wear emporiums where you buy conch shells, mugs, T-shirts, and inflatable rafts, and every other kind of beach business imaginable. The Myrtle Beach I knew as a child was concentrated around the center of town and the famed Pavillion where we spent many glorious hours among the arcade games and hotdog and fried clam stands.

Today, you stay in 10-story condos, go to enormous seafood buffet restaurants that feed thousands every day, and get caught in traffic consisting of people from North Carolina and states northward up the coast going to the NASCAR and Hard Rock cafes, the water parks, the clubs, and restaurants, etc. Miles of traffic and happy vacationers. It’s an experience.

It was wonderful to see my friends, and there are quiet moments at that beach, but the whole experience really made me appreciate the lazy charms and slow pace of Folly Beach. Myrtle Beach today is the mid-Atlantic’s equivalent of Daytona Beach or Ft. Lauderdale. But when I was a kid, we stayed in small inns on Ocean Blvd, with old-fashioned rooms and beds, with windows open to the seabreezes, and the most wonderfully comfortable cotton chenile bed spreads. Real homey and nice. Didn’t seem anythng like a motel, but more like a bed and breakfast or rooming house.

My brother and I were out on Folly Beach the other night reminiscing about those times at Myrtle when we were kids. Of course, it’s amazing how different a version of history one’s siblings seem to have. He insists that I used to throw countless quarters in those glass-encased, treasure-filled contraptions with the crane that you could maneuver awkwardly over a pile of silver dollars and watches and magically see them lifted into the chute and into your waiting hands. Trouble is, the cranes always seemed to run out of money or stop just when you had snared a prize (such as a cigarette lighter wrapped in a dollar bill; they were tacky things, no doubt about it). Of course it was a joke and a fraud. No one every won anything out of those machines, least of all me. And I’m SURE I exerted admirable self-control and only lost a few quarters at a time and then gave up the pursuit. My brother, two years younger than me, insists I was a 9-year-old prize hunting addict, who couldn’t resist dropping one more quarter in the machine and trying one last time to get a small stuffed animal. I was so caught up in the grip of controlling those maddeningly little crane claws or whatever they were called, that I had to be pried loose. Funny how his version is so different from mine.

But we had a lot of fun, and the Pavillion and boardwalk were crowded, noisy, lighted up, and fantasically exciting places for a boy on his vacation. I’ll never forget it, even when I visit the changed Myrtle Beach of today.