Same Beach, Different Movie

My wife had never been to Grand Bend, and I'm not sure I'd ever mentioned it. It had filed itself away in the part of my memory reserved for things I did once, loved, and never brought up again. She found it on her own, during one of her deep-dives into Ontario beach towns worth a day trip, and floated it out of the blue. The second she said the name, twenty-five years came flooding back. I said yes almost too fast. So on a warm Saturday this August, I drove us out to watch the sun go down over Lake Huron, quietly pleased with myself for knowing a place she thought she'd discovered.

In 2001, Grand Bend was a little beach town that punched well above its weight for a place with one main strip. Kids partied on the sand. Everyone was twenty and nobody had anywhere else to be. My friends and I spent that summer driving around town playing Snoop Dogg, doing absolutely nothing productive with our afternoons. I didn't know I'd remember it this clearly decades later. You never do.

So I pulled in expecting, on some dumb nostalgic level, to step right back into that scene. Instead I got Hot Tub Time Machine. Not the part where the guys travel back to the glory days, but the part at the very beginning, where they show up at their old stomping ground and stand there blinking, trying to work out what happened to the place while they weren't looking.

The beach hadn't moved an inch. Same sand, same lake, though a bank of cloud rolled in right on schedule to cancel the sunset. But the crowd told a different story from the one in my head. Down the beach, a family was eating biriyani off paper plates, steam rising in the evening air like it was the most normal beach snack in the world. I love biriyani, but in all my years of thinking about beach food, it had never occurred to me that it belonged on the list. Beach food was hot dogs, soft-serve and questionable poutine from a truck. And yet there it was, smelling achingly familiar.

That exact smell used to fill my mom's kitchen every weekend, back when I was the kid trying to escape it, sneaking out the door toward whatever was happening at Grand Bend. A quarter century later, I drove three hours to stand on that beach and get hit in the face with the smell I used to leave home to get away from.

Nearby, aunties in salwar kameez sat in beach chairs the way my mom's generation sits at every South Asian gathering I've ever been to: chatting, watching the kids, entirely unbothered by the sand. Blankets ran edge to edge, and four or five phone speakers competed for airspace. Twenty-five years ago, the loudest one would have been mine.

With the sunset lost, we cut our losses and went to the Mexican place on the strip, margaritas as a consolation prize. Our waitress mentioned, almost as an aside, that she'd lived in Grand Bend for twenty years, and the town had changed enough that she wasn't sure anymore she'd retire there. I smiled and nodded, the way you do when someone hands you a feeling you already had. Neither of us could point to the day the old town left.

I'm not complaining about change. I'd be a hypocrite. I came to Canada as an immigrant at fifteen, and I know exactly what it looks like when a place gets a new version of itself because new people showed up and decided to stay. That's not a tragedy. That's what places do. Back then, I was the new energy on that sand too, coolers and questionable decisions and all.

What got me was the speed. Twenty-five years feels like a long time until you're standing where you used to be a completely different person, and then it feels like no time at all. The version of a place you carry around in your head is really just a photograph of one particular Saturday. The place itself kept living without you. It isn't my beach anymore. It belongs to whoever is making their memories on it this decade, the way it belonged to my friends and me for one summer in 2001.

The version of a place you carry around in your head is really just a photograph of one particular Saturday.

I don't know if Grand Bend is better or worse now. Probably neither, just different, the same way I'm neither better nor worse than the kid who snuck out of his mom's kitchen to go there. I can be at peace with that and still miss the old one. Those two things aren't in conflict.

No hot tub is taking me back to 2001, and I'm not sure I'd want it to. Grand Bend's fine. It's just wearing a different outfit now. So am I.