Getting Crabby

My final point of interest on this personal tour of the oceanfront is the Virginia Beach Boardwalk Fishing Pier located at 1413 Atlantic Avenue. This 400 foot pier was built in 1950 and has since been only by three families: the Murdens, the Lachmans, and the Bonneys. It is essentially a site for people to come and fish at the oceanfront while also taking in its sights, particularly during the night when the stars are out and most visible over the ocean. During this time, it comes alive with children running up and down the walkway, playing with glow in the dark toys and renting bikes to ride up and down the boardwalk.

While this pier isn't quite a go-to of mine while at the beach, or even a place that I particularly enjoy, it has sentimental value for me because my first time coming was with my father and his long time girlfriend (basically his wife and my stepmom) to watch people fish one night. It was my father's first time seeing the beach, and he was primarily there to pick my sister and I up and bring us to Michigan in order to spend the summer with him for the first time, as arranged by an agreement made between him and my mom. Thus, I associate the pier with the beginning of this dynamic and, related, the beginning of a more robust relationship with my biological father. During this visit, I distinctly recall that we came across a man who had managed to catch around 30 or so crabs and was storing them in a large white bucket. This inspired my stepmom to buy two small hermit crabs from the local gift shop, both of whom died rather shortly later - sometime in the middle of the summer. As time passed, it became a tradition for my father to rent a hotel on or near the oceanfront whenver he visited to either pick us up or drop us off during the summers and for us to spend a couple days exploring the boardwalk.

While I was unaware of this at the time, it actually costs money to fish here ($12 for an adult) and it costs $2 to simply walk along the pier and take in the sights. This urges me to reflect on the extent to which each aspect of nature, even down to existing within and witnessing nature, has been commercialized; this includes land, but extends past it into the water and even the cosmos. Though I know little about the Chesepians, I can rather confidently infer that fishing for sustenance purposes would not have been a commercialized activity, and neither would the activity of taking in the natural beauty of the oceanfront.

Image(s): Fishing Pier Entrance; view of pier from a distance