Beach House
Gather at the beach for storytelling
This post is the second in a series called:
I’m sharing ideas for experiences that create deeper connections with your friends, family and community.
Each post will feature a Game, Gift or Gathering that is an experience I’ve created, developed or is adapted from a beloved classic.
Please borrow these ideas and use them to create fun experiences with the people in your life.
If you make a Beach House with friends, I’d love to feature it in a future post!
INSPIRATION STORY
When I first moved to San Francisco, I worked as a youth radio instructor with impressario Noah Miller at his non-profit outLoud Radio (now a part of YR Media in Oakland).
In 2005, Noah was house sitting in the Sunset District and I visited him with our mutual friend Peter. We took a walk to Ocean Beach during low tide.
The sand was a smooth blank canvas as the waves pulled back into the ocean.
As I remember it, it was Noah’s idea to draw our childhood homes in the sand.
Noah: I don't remember going to the beach with you and Peter, really. It sounds like a wonderful thing. It sounds like something that I would maybe have come up with in a moment of inspiration? If this was 2005, we were still kind of getting to know each other, and it would make sense for me to try to get to know new friends by finding out what kind of spaces they grew up in.
I think it's a very me thing, because I grew up in the same house since I was born until I graduated from high school. My parents are still living there. I still go back there. And so for me, that house is just inextricable from who I am. I guess since then I've learned that, you know, people move a lot and maybe not everybody has that same kind of connection. It's not central to their identity, but, I still I love the idea.
An excerpt from my personal journal.
April 2005
…Peter and Noah and I drew the blueprints of our childhood homes in the sand at the beach. It was really affecting. You could step into a whole new world and really feel like you were there.
I was taken back to Peter's home in Kentucky, to the holler, the turtle, the ice cream maker in the front yard, the tree with the deadly caterpillar, the heater in the living room.
Noah brought us to a fantasy world, a hidden room behind the library, a look out room to watch the ocean and a spiral staircase.
I really did feel like I was in my parents home…
It was an unforgettable evocative experience to have with new friends.1 Once the floor plans were drawn, they both invited me over.
Talking about the space inspired childhood memories they hadn’t told me before.
Noah: If you're me, you don't remember a lot from your childhood. But you do kind of have a muscle - well, it's a muscle memory of the spaces that you grew up in. It's sort of like unlocking a memory - for me, probably a deeper memory than anything I could just tell you.
Because you remember just on a very physical level, moving through that space, and when you enter different parts of that space, there are emotional triggers that happen. It's a kind of memory that I don't think anything else really compares to.
For years since that day, if I’m ever at the beach and the vibe and the sand is just right, I’ll gather people together and use Beach House as a way to get to know them better.
Noah: The beach is the perfect place for this because it's big. On the beach, you can do it at the right scale you can actually walk into the place that you've drawn invite people in. The fact that your drawing is so impermanent and it's going to get erased by the next waves that come, seems very symbolic about this kind of reviving old memories… things that might flip away.
And the beach also just has sort of emotional resonance to begin with so, it seems like the perfect place to do it.
