On my family’s yearly vacation down to Delaware, one of our many traditions is for me, my dad, and my brother to go down to the boardwalk on the shores of the small city of Rehoboth Beach. Originally constructed in 1873, the boardwalk is about a mile long; it takes me about 20 minutes’ walk from one end all the way to the other. That makes it sound like a big place, and it definitely is, but I can't say it feels like one. There’s only a few different types of attractions you’ll find there, and they all start to run together after a while.
The main attraction for us is the t-shirt shops, mostly for my dad to look through to find a generic Rehoboth Beach shirt for himself, or for my mom. In past years, I’ve often gotten one for myself too, but now I have enough piled up in my closet that I seldom bother with it. Instead I find myself idly browsing through the other items they have for sale. You have your typical tourist stuff, like postcards, or keychains, or those racks of license plates that you can probably find your name on if your name is common enough for them to carry it, but not common enough to be sold out. What catches my eye, however, is the T-shirts themselves. And I’ll be blunt: I don’t think there’s any other part of the country where you can find gay pride T-shirts and second-amendment T-shirts in the same shop. I guess you could contort that fact into some sort of metaphor for Delaware being in an awkward position between the American North and South? I don’t know. Either way, as a kid I probably just laughed and moved on, but these days it makes me a bit uncomfortable to know that places like this just cater to the nearby masses without any regard to the message their selection sends to the vulnerable. But, in all fairness, it’s hard to be picky when you have to pay to keep the lights on; given that they have to appeal to the widest audience possible for that reason, I guess I can’t complain too much.
Skipping past the various places to acquire food (mostly fries, burgers, and slushies), which I admittedly don’t have much experience with myself, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the people. The boardwalk is generally fairly crowded with people of various ages. (Even now, I'm still not used to seeing that many in one space, let alone without face coverings, given the still-ongoing pandemic.) I don't know whether they're mostly locals, or tourists like me, but I suppose it doesn't really matter. They all have their own stories, just as I do. Everyone I see has their own people to come back to, their own life to live, their own places to be. And yet I only see them for a split second at most. I've always wondered if they have that same thought about me.
That's just a benign contemplation towards everyone I see, but in addition to that, what really makes me uncomfortable is seeing the other pedestrians around my age or a little less; that whole crowd just feels suffocatingly straight. Seeing the guys, whose simple attire reminds me of the constricting box of maleness that I try so hard to escape, and seeing the girls, whose existence on their side of the chromosomal coinflip I'll never know firsthand, and whose very revealing clothing I could never wear well myself, makes me feel time-warped back to the scared little queer kid I was two or three years ago, when I'd only just come out to myself as nonbinary and was still getting my head around the fact that I would never fit authentically into the gendered societal mold that most people just accept without question. I'm still navigating that now, and I'm still trying to figure out how to be what I want to be without sticking out too much. I hope I find my way through that so I can feel more at ease in situations like this, but for now it'll just be another mental burden. But I digress.
Speaking of mental burdens: the arcades. There's a few you'll find throughout the boardwalk, and it's not the kind where you just play games to have fun, chill out with friends, and that's it. Like many across the country, this is the kind of arcade where you play to win prizes, either by winning tickets that you later redeem, or by getting them to drop from a claw machine or similar game. And as a very young kid when my family first started coming on these vacations, I marveled at it, and I was genuinely there to have fun. I always hoped I would get something out of it, especially from the claw machines that promise really expensive things like game consoles or headphones. And when I didn't get it after a few tries, my dad and brother would pull me out of the arcade crying and screaming that "It was rigged! It was rigged!"
Looking back on it, I'm tempted to feel ashamed of how I acted… but there's nothing to be ashamed of. Even though my family tried to tell me, my being little made me too innocent and naive to realize the truth: Yeah. It is rigged. Like any business, their primary motivation is to make money, and they use really deceptive ways to do it. The prizes you redeem tickets for always cost considerably less than the money you'd have to spend on games to earn that many tickets. And the claw machines literally have a setting to only give out the prize after the machine collects enough money to profit. I can rarely bear to go into a boardwalk arcade these days, partly because the loud music and bright lights are a sensory nightmare, and partly because it's precisely those deceptive practices that really deter me.
Such is my whole experience with the boardwalk. I've come to see it as so disgustingly capitalist, with how easily and amorally it exploits those who partake in it… And yet I keep going. On our most recent vacation, my dad and I made the drive down there twice. We bought a few t-shirts for ourselves and my mom and grandma. I failed to resist the urge to people-watch, and was silently terrified of who they were, who I was, and whether they'd notice I was looking at them. I even tried a couple times to win a Pokémon plushie at a claw machine. (I didn't, of course.)
And it all speaks to the power of ritual, doesn't it? I'm sure that next year, my family will come back to this area, and I'll walk the boardwalk all over again, buy some T-shirts, feel ambivalent about people, lose some arcade games, and spend the drive back home wondering why I keep coming back given how little I like it while I'm there. I suppose that, for all its faults, it never really gets old.
I give the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk two stars.
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