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.
Draw your floor plan on a piece of paper and consider the actual life-size dimensions of the structure.
Like a conventional floor plan, denote placement of any windows, doors, and stairways.
If multiple story home, draw the floor with the most communal spaces.
If the sand-drawn floor plan dimensions are maintained in proportion to the original, it allows people to understand the true scale and relate to it more effectively.
Pack a yard stick or tape measure in your beach bag.
Get thee to the beach with a friend or small group.
Use driftwood or a tool to draw lines in the sand.
Find a large area of available sand. Be aware that beach goers may walk through your floor plan.
Low tide is the best time and the best sand.
As best you can, draw lines in the sand that accurately reflects the original structure floor plan in its size and proportions in reality.
Once you are done with the floor plan, invite your friends over for tea. Interacting with the space as if you were inside the real structure.
You must enter through the door!
You must not walk through walls to get into another room!
It is important that this illusion is maintained especially for the tour guide. Once inside the house, they may be in a kind of ‘storytelling spell’ where the beach sand is now also their childhood home with thousands of compounding memories.
Try to get inside this storytelling spell with them and pepper them with simple questions. Some examples:2
Where was the furniture in this room? What conversations do you remember taking place here?
Where was the TV? What do you remember watching on it?
Where was the telephone? Where do you remember talking on it in the house?
Where did you eat breakfast? Where is the cabinet with your favorite snacks?
Where do you remember interacting with pets?
Where did you have holiday meals? What was a common seating arrangement?
Where did you put the menorah or Christmas tree? What was a memorable gift?
What was something that happened in this room while you were alone?
Where did you have a fight with a parent or sibling?
What story from family lore happened in here?
How did this room change over time?
If you have time and space, draw the floorplan of everyone present at the gathering.
Don’t forget to document it! Take photos throughout the process, and record a voice memo of your friend giving you a tour and the stories your prompts evoke.
This is an inexpensive gather if you can get to the beach and find a free stick!
Overall Cost: $0 plus gas money
If you can’t get to the beach with friends, you can draw your floor plans on paper instead.
It might be harder to generate the story memories, but keep asking prompts until you learn stories you’ve never heard before.
DEE DEE
My parents visited us in California in October 2019, just before the pandemic.
We stopped along the coast to walk on the beach and I asked my mom to draw her childhood home.
I was at a beautiful beach in California, and I was asked to draw a floor plan of my childhood home. It was um, comforting to remember where I grew up. It definitely sparked memories. just remembering all the little nooks and crannies.
There were some places in the hallway going from one bedroom to the other into the bathroom where the floor would creak. And I remembered when I walked that way, that there was a creak in the floor.
It was a great reminder that all those memories were still there in my mind and I didn't forget them.
Dee Dee said she wants to do this again with her friends back home - maybe using chalk on the driveway or drawing out on a piece of paper.
But she highly recommends gathering for this exercise at the beach!
The impermanance of the floor plan in the sand - near the waves that will soon wipe it way - did not undermine the permanance of her memories of the space.
“I would highly recommend it, especially at a beach in sand. There's something about the water coming in and the sand. It's like a sandcastle. I knew that the water was going to come and take it away, but remembering each room and drawing it made it permanent for the moment you were explaining it. Knowing that it was going to be washed away didn't make much difference because… it was permanent in my mind.”
TYLER
Here’s Tyler talking about the reading material that was next to the toilet in the bathroom, and how it inspired his study of architecture later in life.
Tyler and I drove to Fort Funston and my goal had been to use my drone from above and film him drawing in the sand. The drone batteries were dead, so I took these photos and video.
Tyler: In the simplest form, it's like getting to know someone and their history. Understanding them and the connection that is created from finding those similarities that you may have had a similar experience and bond over it. You're like, Oh, that's interesting. You grew up differently. , this is how I grew up and just the, the knowledge of knowing someone, like what is our goal in human life? But to me known, especially by people we love and love us.
What is our goal in human life, but to be known - especially by people we love and love us?
JESSE
Here’s Jesse drawing one of his childhood homes at Fort Funston.
He invited me into his living room and when we started talking about past holidays he spent in this home, he told me a story that I’d never heard before: One Christmas morning, he accidentally placed his new Ewok doll, fresh from the box, next to the space heater. And its face melted.
Jesse, a therapist, sees the exercise as a therapuetic tool that can offer useful information about the utility of memory.
What happens to you when you remember?
Like, what do you need… as you set out to draw your childhood home in the sand, what do you need? Do you need to remember something that you've lost because it brings you a particular kind of comfort that you actually just don't have access to as an adult? Do you need to remember having your immediate family all inside of one structure, because that's something that you haven't had in 50 years? Do you need to be soothed? Do you need to feel integrated? Do you need to feel like the different chapters of your life are all kind of like speaking to each other and that they actually belong together, and there's one story?
What do you need from the act of remembering?
What do you need from the act of remembering?
I really love that question and it’s something to consider before you head to the beach for a Beach House gathering.
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN…
MAKE A BEACH HOUSE AND INVITE A FRIEND OVER FOR A TOUR!
SHARE YOUR BEACH HOUSE PHOTOS & VOICE MEMOS WITH ME, PLEASE & THANK YOU :)
ONE LAST PLUG FOR BEACH HOUSE, FROM TYLER:
Previous posts in this series:
Coming soon:
I took a photo of our lines in the sand on my flip phone back then. I wasn’t able to get it off my phone, so I remember taking a photo of my phone screen so I could save the document of that memory. Sadly, I can not find this image anywhere…
Let me know what other kind of successful prompts you use!