Summer Getaway #1: The Beach (with Sarah Stodola)

Quick Note: For our special Summer Getaway miniseries, I’m handing over hosting duties to Caleb Bissinger, producer of the Next Big Idea podcast. In the next few episodes, Caleb will speak with authors whose books are a little further afield than what we usually cover on the show.

This is summertime after all, the season of vacation, so we thought it’d be fun to share a few recent books about travel and adventure, books that take you on a journey. You’ll travel down thousands of miles of American rivers. You’ll take a life-changing walk in your own backyard. And today you’re going to the beach …?

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or right here—and join the discussion in the comments below.

Caleb: I live in Los Angeles. My house is only about 12 miles from the beach — so, of course, I never go.?

But a few days back, my girlfriend and I got up the courage to brave traffic on the 10, and we drove until we saw the ocean. And then we drove some more, looking for parking. And after all that driving, we were too tired to take a walk on the beach, so we ducked into the bar of a waterfront hotel.

This hotel was right on the razor’s edge between charming and tourist trap. Our waiter, when he took our order, gave me the “hang loose” sign, the Shaka. It’s a Hawaiian export that is now the international hand gesture of vacation—or, in this case, the international hand gesture that says, “You must be a tourist because you just paid way too much for a weak Aperol Spritz and a lukewarm Heineken.” He clearly mistook us for out-of-towners, which was understandable since everyone else in the bar seemed to be.

As we sat there drinking our drinks, we looked out over the walkway that runs along the ocean. It was lined with palm trees that provided absolutely no shade. A bald busker with a beat-up guitar was playing — I kid you not — a cover of “Margaritaville.” (I’m afraid to even wonder how many times a day he plays that song.) There were women in bikinis riding bicycles. Buff men in board shorts on skateboards. A middle-aged guy with zinc on his nose stomped past, a boogie board in one arm and a crying toddler in the other.

As we sat there people-watching, it occurred to me that we could have been anywhere, that this vista was nearly identical to those I’d seen in Hawaii and South Beach.?

That’s one of the odd things about beach resorts — the sameness of them. The big resorts resemble each other. The tourists resemble each other. Even the soundtrack is the same. Jimmy Buffett, Jack Johnson, maybe a little Bob Marley.?

I know I sound like I’m being super critical, maybe even a little bit snobby, so I should tell you that I love the beach. I even love the kitsch that often comes with it. I only had to hear two chords before I recognized what song that bald busker was playing because I know “Margaritaville” by heart. But as much as I love the beach, I can’t help seeing it in a more critical light these days. And for that, I have to thank Sarah Stodola.?

Sarah is the author of a new book, The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril at the Beach , in which she tries to figure out what keeps us coming back to these fraudulent paradises. Why are our fantasies of Shangri-La all the same? she asks. And will that fantasy be able to hold on as sea levels inch higher and higher??

Sarah’s particularly well-suited to answer these questions because she’s not just a talented researcher and writer — she’s also a prolific traveler. To write this book, she drew on trips she’s taken to Thailand, Monte Carlo, Cap d’Antibes, Hawaii, Fiji, Nicaragua, Senegal, Ibiza, Tulum, Vietnam, Portugal, Barbados, St. Kitts, Miami, and Malaysia.?

It’s hard not to read that list and not turn green with envy. But here’s the thing about Sarah: she’s not really much of a beach lover. She approaches the idyllic resorts she’s visited with a healthy dose of journalistic skepticism; she does not drink the Kool-Aid–flavored Mai Tais. “I don’t have an infatuation with beach vacations,” she told me, “but I did develop an infatuation with understanding this culture.”

Her new book is a way of getting to the bottom of that infatuation, which, for Sarah, meant analyzing the beach from all sorts of different angles. Sometimes she’s an economic historian, exploring all the ways beach resorts around the world have exploited local labor and come to dominate regional economics. Sometimes she’s a climate journalist, warning us that with global sea levels expected to rise as much as three feet by the end of the century, some of our favorite beaches may not be able to hold on. And sometimes she’s a philosopher, meditating on why, after avoiding the beach for centuries, people all over the world now flock to it.

The beach, it turns out, is a far more fraught landscape than our paradisal fantasies would make it seem.

Interview Highlights

No one went to the beach on purpose before the 1700s.

Sarah: Up until the 1700s, people were generally afraid of the ocean and, by extension, the beach. But then, in the 1700s, in England, some enterprising doctors started touting the supposed health benefits of both sea water and sea air, and that was for the first time people [started] to come specifically to the seaside to spend time — not that it was necessarily intended to be a fun thing. It was to either improve your health or to convalesce from a sickness.

Caleb: This is a place where you went to kick your tuberculosis, not to work on your tan.

Sarah: Right.

Caleb: I love the point that you make that if you look at, say, the Bible, the ocean is a menace. We think of Noah’s Ark and the great flood. You know, the Garden of Eden is not a beachside resort. It’s a garden.

How Monaco changed the world.

Fun fact: the doctors who ran these proto–beach resorts had their patients drink seawater and wash their eyes with it. I think it’s safe to say that this was nobody’s idea of a vacation. Actually, the word “vacation,” as we use it today to mean a time of rest and relaxation, didn’t even exist back then. That sense of the word wouldn’t show up until the 1800s. So what happened? When did people realize that going to the beach didn’t have to be a form of torture? Well, I’ll tell you what happened. Monaco.

Sarah: Up until the 1860s, when the casino at Monte Carlo opened, the seaside resort was a regimented place. You were serious when you went there. And then they opened the casino and these fabulous hotels at Monte Carlo, and that flipped the switch. All of a sudden, the seaside was a place where you could go for decadence and indulgence and to leave all your cares behind. There was a “What happens in Monte Carlo stays in Monte Carlo” ethos. And that model very quickly spread throughout Europe and then over to America.

Caleb: What’s fascinating about Monaco is that it not only creates a new template for what a vacation resort can be, but it also creates a new script for what you do on vacation. It’s no longer about this didactic experience of traveling, seeing the world, and learning things, the way you would on a Grand Tour. Now, suddenly, it’s about leisure. It’s about decadence. It’s about hedonism. It’s about relaxing.

Sarah: Right. So before this time, it was only the super, super rich who would’ve had the resources to be able to go on something like The Grand Tour. And then — it kind of aligns with the Industrial Revolution — there is a nascent middle class in the late 1800s, and that’s the first time that a growing portion of the population actually does have the wealth and lifestyle that would enable this kind of travel.

Caleb: After Monaco, you start seeing, as you mentioned, copycat resorts around Europe, and then they start showing up in the US, particularly along the Eastern seaboard. Paint a picture for us. What is the Atlantic coast of the United States like in the late 19th century and into the early 20th?

Sarah: A vast number of resorts cropped up. The difference in the US was that it became a means of escaping the stifling summer heat of the cities in the Northeast, whereas in Europe, up until the 20th century, the high season was in the wintertime..

Caleb: And the scale and numbers of these vacationlands that show up in New York and on the Jersey Shore and in Massachusetts — it’s pretty staggering, right? And these aren’t little beach huts. We’re talking about grand, gorgeous hotels all up and down the coast.

Sarah: Hundreds of them all the way from New Jersey up to Maine.

Beach resorts have always been exclusive—leaving some excluded.

Sarah: Almost all of the spots in the Northeast did not allow people of color. I talk about the example of Atlantic City in the book. They actually created a separate part of Atlantic City for African Americans, who made up a large portion of the staff of these places but whose access to the beach was severely curtailed. I think they gave them an hour a day where they were allowed to get in the water. So yes, it was very segregated.

Caleb: And I think we still see the legacy of some of that at beach resorts around the world, don’t we? You point out in the book that there are a lot of places around the world where a big resort comes in, takes over a public beach, and makes it very difficult for locals to have access to that beach. Resorts rely on local labor, but they aren’t spaces that welcome local community members as guests.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. The tendency of the resort is to create this bubble for the guests to come into where the surrounding culture and surrounding population. Doesn’t really infiltrate. It’s a really strange phenomenon. I would also point out that in the 20th century, when beach resorts went global, often a resort would open in a former colony of a European country, and it would cater to that country.

Paradise: a definition.

Caleb: The resorts that you write about are not just beach destinations, right? These are places that are trying to pass themselves off as paradise. I think if you stopped someone on the street and asked, “What’s your definition of paradise?,” they would describe to you a very particular kind of beach scene. What are the ingredients?

Sarah: First of all, I think it has to be very far away from home to give it this sense of the exotic. It has to be a place that is not as developed as where we live. Even though you will go there and you’ll not technically be ensconced in nature, because you’ll be in a resort, you’ll have this sense of being in the middle of nature. And then there are the actual physical attributes of the beach. It has to have that fine white sand. It has to have those beautiful turquoise waters. It has to have the palm trees leaning out over the beach.?

Caleb:You make the point that that aesthetic is totally contrived and artificial. It relies on palm trees, but palm trees are not native to any of the places where we associate them with being. White sand is incredibly hard to keep in the same place. There are all these grassy lawns in places where that grass is non-native. So there’s something manicured and artificial about it.?

Sarah: I talk about it in the book that it’s not nature that we’re looking for when we look for paradise. We’re looking for nature tamed. We’re looking for this sense of being in nature, but in a very safe, controlled way.

If we want to keep going to the beach, we have to reimagine it.

Caleb: You end the book with a series of suggestions that resort communities and travelers and developers can take to correct a lot of the problems that beach culture has created, both economically and in terms of climate. Walk us through some of those — what do you think we need to do if we’re going to maintain this love affair that we have with the beach?

Sarah: I think we have to start building a lot more sensibly. Building a tall concrete building right on the beach is a recipe for disaster for that beach. Some countries already have setback laws in place that require that any new constructions be set, for example, 50 meters back from the shoreline. I think that’s a really important move.

You know, I think palm trees—they really aren’t helpful to shorelines. Most of the time they don’t provide shade. They require a ton of water. They have shallow root systems that don’t prevent erosion very well. And they’ve also replaced natural vegetation that contributed to a healthy ecosystem in these places. So I think trying to get back away from thinking that “paradise” has to have coconut palm trees is an important move for making a lot of these shorelines more resilient.

Caleb: I live in Los Angeles where I am surrounded by palm trees, and having read your book, I will no longer look at them with the same reverence that I once did.

Sarah: This book really changed my view of them also.

Caleb: I’m really interested in this idea that we have to build resorts in a different way. One of the examples in your book is that a lot of resorts are built with a long-term mentality. “This is gonna stand forever.” But there are folks out there now who are saying, “No, we should be building resorts with a short-term mentality. What if we built a resort that was constructed out of tents and temporary materials, and then when the rainy season comes, we could pack it up and move it inland?” I think that’s really fascinating—and encouraging.

We talked about this disconnect between the clientele and the labor forces at a lot of these resorts. How do we create resorts that don’t just serve wealthy outsiders?

Sarah: It’s hard. I think one of the things that has to happen is that the local populations have to be entrusted with more control of the industry. One thing that does is prevents the kind of economic inequality that you see in a lot of these places. The Naviti Resort in Fiji was a really great example in the sense that Fiji has really strong laws in place enshrining land ownership to native Fijians. The village next to that resort owns the land that the resort sits on and the resort leases it from them, so they have an automatic, steady income, and, along with that, they are guaranteed good employment at the resort. That’s a really good example of when the law makes sure that the land can’t just be taken away from the locals. They end up with control and with economic benefit that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. And that helps lessen the sense that the resort needs to be in a bubble because there’s this poor population outside of it.

Caleb: It would be great to see that mentality exists elsewhere, even in the US. I was disturbed to learn that Larry Ellison, who’s the billionaire creator of Oracle, now owns 98% of Lanai, which is Hawaii’s sixth largest island . He owns 98% of it! He owns the hotels. He owns the rental car agency. He owns the grocery store. He owns a lot of people’s homes. There’s more work to be done.?

Is it time to redefine paradise?

Caleb: You say near the end of the book that the beach resort is a social construct kept in place by cultural forces. I wonder if, like any social construct, it’s impermanent. Maybe it’s time for us to edit those cultural forces. Maybe it’s time for us to come up with a new definition of paradise. Do you think we’ve reached that point?

Sarah: It’s certainly possible that our view of the beach as the place we want to visit is starting to change, and I also think that it’s kind of a guarantee that a lot of the beach resorts that we might know and love today aren’t going to make it through the next couple decades. That will be another thing that will open a lot of eyes and maybe have us thinking differently.

Episode Notes

?? Get a copy of The Last Resort

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