Bathtub Beach — William Williamson

For the native children growing up in the sixties on Matecumbe, a small island in the Florida Keys, there was no Disney World or Sea World their parents could take them to for the day. There was Bathtub Beach. A tiny lagoon that was the gathering spot for the local Conch families on the island. Everybody knew everybody back then in Matecumbe. Parents knew the parents and the kids knew all the kids. All the local families came down to Bathtub Beach to spend the day swimming and relaxing, having picnics on the cement tables scattered about, cooking out on the charcoal grills while their children swam, frolicked on the sliver of sand at the edge of the water or played on the metal swing set and slide near the picnic tables.
The playground, the beach and the other amenities made Bathtub Beach an adventurous place where all children wanted to spend the day even though it was also a place where they were vulnerable to their weaknesses and their innocence braving the water while learning to swim and later as adolescents, vulnerable to their own awakening sexuality from the bared skin exposed around them by the opposite sex.
For the teenage girls, Bathtub Beach was all about their bodies filling out as they matured, swelling their breasts and hips and the self-conscious revelation that all girls face growing up. Becoming a young, desirable woman in a boisterous, testosterone man's world where they were becoming the center of attention of all the males, young and old, at Bathtub Beach.
Bathtub Beach was more than just a beach for the adults on the island, it was also a social gathering place and what they looked like in a pair of shorts or in a bikini mattered more to them than where they worked, how much money they made or whether they owned a business or a boat. Unlike socializing anywhere else on the island while wearing clothes, the men and women who came to Bathtub Beach exposing their selves in their swimwear, especially the women, knew all eyes would see their bodies stripped down half-naked and their physical appearance became a significant badge of honor or shame to them.
As the population of Matecumbe swelled with more people moving to the Keys, strangers, transients and bums began materializing at Bathtub Beach outnumbering the families, turning Bathtub Beach into something else to the locals, a distant memory where they once shared the most revealing times of their lives.