Sunshine, Saltwater & Sandy Paws — Emma & Noodle's Beach Week
When I adopted Noodle last spring, I promised myself I'd give him a life full of adventures. I said this with great confidence, despite the fact that I was twenty-two, a college student, and had never owned a dog before in my life. Noodle is a corgi. He is one year old. He has the energy of a small sun and the personality of someone who was born knowing exactly how charming they are. The beach trip was my first big promise to him. I almost canceled it three times from nerves. I'm very glad I didn't.
We arrived at the coast on a Sunday afternoon, windows down, Noodle standing up in the back seat with his ears pressed flat by the wind and his face arranged in an expression of pure joy. The moment I opened the car door in the beach parking lot, he smelled the salt air, and something switched on inside him. His entire back half began wagging independently of the rest of his body, which is a thing corgis can apparently do.
I spread out Noodle's Ruffwell sand-proof blanket near the dunes and set up camp — towels, snacks, the little bottle of dog-safe sunscreen I'd packed for his nose and the sparse pink skin of his belly. Noodle stood at the edge of the blanket and stared at the ocean with the focused intensity of a scholar encountering an entirely new text.
"The first wave that reached Noodle's paws produced a sound I can only describe as a tiny surprised scream followed immediately by the most excited barking I have ever heard in my life."
He charged it. It retreated. He chased it. It came back. He ran from it. This went on for twenty minutes. I sat on the sand-proof blanket (which, I am happy to report, lived up to its name — we ate lunch on it later and found exactly zero grains of sand in my sandwich) and watched my one-year-old corgi discover the ocean and decide, resolutely, that it was his enemy and also his best friend.
By Tuesday we had a routine. Morning walk along the tideline while the beach was still quiet. Midday in the shade with the blanket spread out and Noodle napping against my leg while I read. Late afternoon back in the surf. I built sandcastles — real ones, with a moat and towers — and Noodle supervised from a respectful distance before ultimately destroying them, which I think was the point all along.
On Wednesday afternoon, Noodle made a new friend.
A brown pelican had landed near the tideline about twenty feet from us, doing that very pelican thing of standing completely still with great self-importance. Noodle approached it with the careful, low-crouch energy of someone executing a very important plan. The pelican turned one prehistoric eye toward him. Noodle froze. The pelican looked away. Noodle took two more steps. They stared at each other for a long, suspended moment — two creatures from entirely different chapters of the animal kingdom, equally confused by the other — and then the pelican lifted off and sailed away over the water. Noodle watched it go. Then he looked back at me. I applauded. He accepted this.
"I came to the beach thinking I was giving Noodle an adventure. Somewhere around Day Three I realized he was giving me one right back."
The sunsets that week were extraordinary — the kind that turn the whole sky orange and pink and make everyone on the beach stop walking for a minute. Noodle and I walked the shore in that light every evening, his short legs leaving perfect little paw prints in the wet sand, the waves hissing up around our feet. Those walks are the part of the week I keep returning to in my memory. Quiet and warm and unhurried, just the two of us at the edge of the water.
I'm still a new dog owner. I still google things constantly and second-guess myself and occasionally call my mom to ask if something Noodle is doing is normal (it usually is). But that week at the beach, watching a small orange-and-white dog discover the ocean and pelicans and the sheer joy of wet sand under his paws — I understood something I hadn't quite gotten before.
I didn't just get a dog when I got Noodle. I got a partner for every first I'll ever have. Every new place, every strange experience, every sunset I'd otherwise watch alone. He'll be there for all of it, tail going, ears up, ready to run straight at the next wave.
I can't think of a single thing I'd rather have.
