Our rusted maroon 1999 Chevy Impala kicked up dust as we pulled out of the driveway, leaving tree-lined blocks behind. My baby brother and I squabble over premium real estate — a window seat — while my parents’ swearing broiled upfront about the merits of taking Highways 8 or 9. An annual pilgrimage. Urban scenery quickly gives way to endless fields of canola and wheat, vibrant yellow seas undulating in the prairie winds. God bless our shared flat Canadiana. Billboards advertised seemingly ironic beach getaways amidst the landlocked landscape. I pressed my face against the glass, smearing child-grease as I watched telephone poles whizz by in steady rhythm. My imagination pictures a running-man dressed in black following us perfectly balanced on the lines, transporting me from the stuffy car.

An hour north, the lakeshore began peeking into view. My giddiness builds as we cross over the community cemetery and approach. Winnipeg Beach materialized. A seaside port after the endless, monotonous expanse of flatlands.

The car slowed to a crawl as we hit the main drag — a years-long traffic ritual. I gazed out at storefronts — a colourful arcade, forgotten bars. Grandma Bubbles’ dilapidated pier home waits on Kenneth Gordon Lane, named after my dead grandfather. Dead since I was a baby. An artist I stole my name from. Peeling baby blue paint visible through the tangle of edible plants and bushes. Creaky wooden floorboards and the musty scent of damp laundry perpetually hanging to dry.

We pulled up to the cottage, and the doors flew open. The heavy lake breeze instantly refreshed us with bracing flavors of algae and bonfire smoke. My feet hit the sandy driveway as I tore off towards the shoreline, leaving a trail of discarded shoes and plastic sandcastle buckets in my wake.

Those first few moments on the beach always hit with the force of rebirth. I inhaled ionic transfusions, greedily devouring the gifts of negative ions so lacking back in the city. The omnipresent, hypnotic roar of waves erased the external world as I surrendered to Lake Winnipeg’s primordial embrace. Shed the fatigue and estrangement of city-life like soiled layers. The burdens of the urban grind fell away with each plunge into the kettledrum waters. In the company of wide open waters and windswept sand hills.

There was an unspoken beach etiquette, rituals my family seemed to instinctively tap into the moment our feet hit the sandy shores, as if we contained eons of accumulated seaside wisdom triggered by those familiar surroundings. The first order of business was always shedding layers — shirts, shoes, inhibitions all sloughed off with practiced nonchalance. We became feral beachcombers once more, our motions unfurling with that relaxed, primal familiarity of returning home. Stripping back down to our natural state in this Edenic paradise.

I dug my bare toes into the heated sand, reveling in that gritty warmth between them as we erected pantherlike sun shelters from our store-bought towels and whatever driftwood lay nearby. I foraged along the strandline, that alluring free buffet of shells, rocks, and other oceanic treasures left behind by the rhythmic lapping of the shallows that provided our ambient soundtrack.

The heat descended in soporific waves from on high as we sprawled in spent repose, allowing the sun to slowly brown us to a bucolic crisp. We lay there, waves podcasting the latest zephyrs and gossiping about any happenings caught on those breeze-borne whispers from the great cetacean messenger herself.

During those interluding periods of blissful, transcendent lull, we plunged headlong into the primal soup, our bodily forms reuniting with Mother Beach. Immersing into those fresh, glass-smooth waters felt akin to dissolving back into that primordial origin state whence we all first spawned. Floating face-up, I gazed skyward allowing gravity’s steady caress to literally take the weight off my body. In those delirious moments, all boundaries blurred until the line separating Self from the universe grew tenuous and porous. No atheist could have survived such an experience.

Eventually, as that molten sun waltzed westward and shadows deepened around us, we reversed the morning ritual — crisping into the hues of campfires ourselves as terrestrial beings once more. Sandy and spent, we failed to fully shake off all the clinging grains as we detangled ourselves from those dehydrated appendages of the civilized world. Making our way back through the dingy warrens of town, we may have stopped for plain vanilla ice cream or some other no-name refreshment as a final salute to the day’s restorative powers before returning to our cottage. God would have loved getting sunburned on a day like that.