Photographs & Text by Jackie Russo

I like the sticky salt mist that coats Main Beach Park after 5pm, when you can feel all your skin because the air is so thick, and everything glitters in the haze.

I like coming into it fresh from my air-conditioned car, so when my hair thickens with the humidity and sweat beads on my brow and I can consciously slip into a day-ending languidness.

On any given day, I park in the parking lot I’ve always known about and I walk through an alleyway called Peppertree Lane, in which lives the gelato shop with the longest line and the most ascendant scent of waffle cones. It feels sublime to walk through the dark tunnel smelling sugar and then emerge blinded onto the sundrenched sidewalk, nearly stumbling headlong onto Pacific Coast Highway. The sound of traffic echoes the crashing waves across the street, but it’s not appealing to say so. I don’t have time to tell anyone anyway, because where the tourists go I go, and the tourists go throng-wise to the boardwalk and the sand. So I join the crowd at the crosswalk and stroll into the glow of the beach.

This sliver of the California coast is the secret Saint-Tropez I never saw growing up, because we avoided the tourist trap in favor of more innocuous enclaves like Crescent Bay and Aliso Creek. There must be more foreign languages here from May to September than anywhere else in Orange County (except Disneyland, of course), and certainly more speedos, the telltale sign of an alien beachgoer. Bodies clad in a weird array of bikinis to business casual lounge on towels and benches, snacks get handed out, photos get snapped, sand castles are built and destroyed with great consistency, volleyballs fly, small heads pop out of the churning surf; all the normal beachside goings-on, but with a wistful quality that only outsiders can bring to an otherwise normal stretch of sand.

Main Beach is a tourist destination, and the wonderful thing about a tourist destination is that its population treks onward towards a good time no matter what. Even when high tide sucks away umbrellas or smoke from the secular Holy Fire blocks out the sun or unusual heat melts ice cream too fast to eat, tourists persist.

These visitors are relentless in their pursuit of vacation, but they bring a certain gleaming, sentimental style to the endeavor. They have hats that aren’t always baseball caps and wax angular in their stances. They carry the general demeanor of somewhere else. Being on Main Beach in the summer makes me feel like I could sit on the striped beach chair of my European dreams with the kind of Coca-Cola suntan that would concern any cognizant citizen of today.

Here, not at the other beaches, pigeons outnumber sea gulls and the lifeguard stand still boasts a hand painted “Pick up your trash!” sign, and there always seems to be at least one Dr. Seuss exhibit among the faded art galleries.

Here, nothing is safe from wayward sand and The Greeter’s Corner boasts an $18 burger on rye and near the patio patrons who eat it, lesser-clad people wash their feet in outdoor showers.

Here, sunbathers luxuriate in near-nakedness without a modicum of self-doubt and climb barefoot on sharp rocks and are pulled out of rip currents by bleach-blonde teenagers in red.

Here, families take photos that will either be too dark or too bright and tan lines settle in and Aperol Spritzes are blithely discussed as the cultures of a dozen places melt together under the sun. Here at Main Beach, Main Beach could be anywhere.