Bryson's America: Just one of those ghastly days at the beach

Every year about this time, my wife wakes me up with a playful slap and says: "I've got an idea. Let's drive for three hours to the ocean, take off most of our clothes and sit on some sand for a whole day."

"What for?" I will say warily. "It will be fun," she will insist. "I don't think so," I will reply. "People find it disturbing when I take my shirt off in public. I find it disturbing."

"No, it will be great. We'll get sand in our hair. We'll get sand in our shoes. We'll get sand in our sandwiches and then in our mouths. We'll get sunburned and windburned. And when we get tired of sitting, we can have a paddle in water so cold it actually hurts. At the end of the day, we'll set off at the same time as 37,000 other people and get in such a traffic jam that we won't get home till midnight. I can make trenchant observations about your driving, and the children can pass the time sticking each other with sharp objects. It will be such fun."

The tragic thing is that because my wife is English, and therefore beyond the reach of reason where saltwater is concerned, she really will think it's fun. Frankly, I have never understood the British attachment to the seaside.

Iowa, where I grew up, is a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so to me the word "ocean" suggests alarming things like riptides and undertows. (I expect people in New York suffer similar terrors when you mention words such as "cornfields" and "county fair".) Lake Ahquabi, where I did all my formative swimming and sunburning, may not have the romance of Cape Cod or the grandeur of the rock-ribbed coast of Maine, but then neither did it grab you by the legs and carry you off helplessly to Newfoundland. No, you may keep the sea, as far as I am concerned, and every drop of water in it.

So when, last weekend, my wife suggested that we take a drive to the ocean, I put my foot down and said, "Never - absolutely not," which is of course why we ended up, three hours later, at Kennebunk Beach in Maine. Now you may find this hard to believe, given the whirlwind of adventure that has been my life, but in all my years I had been to American ocean beaches just twice - once in California when I was 12 and managed to scrape all the skin from my nose by mistiming a retreating wave as only someone from Iowa can and diving headlong into bare, gritty sand, and once in Florida when I was a college student and far too intoxicated to notice a landscape feature as subtle as an ocean.

So I can't pretend to speak with authority here. All I can tell you is that if Kennebunk Beach is anything to go by, then American beaches are entirely unlike British ones. To begin with, there was no pier, promenade or arcades; no shops where everything is miraculously priced at pounds 1; no places to buy saucy postcards or jaunty hats; no tearooms and fish and chip shops; no fortune tellers; no disembodied voice from a bingo parlour breathing out those strange, coded calls: "Number 37 - the vicar's in the shrubs again", or whatever it is they say.

Indeed, there was nothing commercial at all - just a street lined with big summer homes, a vast sunny beach and an infinite and hostile sea beyond.

That isn't to say the people on the beach - of whom there were hundreds - were going without, for they had brought everything they would ever need again in the way of food, beverages, beach umbrellas, windbreaks, folding chairs, and sleek inflatables. Amundsen went to the South Pole with fewer provisions than most of these people had.

We were a pretty pathetic sight in contrast. Apart from being whiter than an old man's flanks, we had just three beach towels and a raffia bag filled, in the English style, with a bottle of sunscreen, an inexhaustible supply of Wet Wipes, spare underpants for everyone (in case of vehicular accidents involving visits to an emergency room) and a modest packet of sandwiches.

Our youngest - whom I've taken to calling Jimmy in case he should one day become a libel lawyer - surveyed the scene and said: "OK, Dad, here's the situation. I need an ice-cream, a Lilo, a deluxe bucket and spade set, a hot dog, some candy floss, an inflatable dinghy, scuba equipment, my own water slide, a cheese pizza with extra cheese, and a toilet."

"They don't have those things here, Jimmy," I chuckled.

"I really need the toilet."

I reported this to my wife. "Then you'll have to take him to Kennebunkport," she said serenely from beneath a preposterous sun hat.

Kennebunkport is an old town, at a crossroads, laid out long before anyone thought of the motorcar, and some miles from the beach. It was jammed with traffic. We parked an appallingly vast distance from the centre and searched for toilets. By the time we found a toilet (actually it was the back wall of the Rite-Aid Pharmacy - but please don't tell my wife), little Jimmy didn't need to go any longer.

So we returned to the beach. By the time we got there, some hours later, I found that everyone had gone for a swim and there was only one half- eaten sandwich left. I sat on a towel and nibbled at it.

"Oh, look, Mummy," said number two daughter gaily when they emerged from the surf a few minutes later, "Daddy's eating the sandwich the dog had."

"Tell me this isn't happening," I whimpered.

"Don't worry, dear," my wife said. "It was an Irish setter. They're very clean."

I don't remember much after that. I had a little nap and woke to find that Jimmy was burying me up to my chest in sand, which was fine except that he had started at my head, and I had been so sunburned that a dermatologist invited me to a convention in Cleveland as an exhibit.

We lost the car keys for two hours, the Irish setter came back and stole one of the beach towels then nipped me on the hand for eating his sandwich, and number two daughter got tar in her hair. It was a typical day at the seaside, in other words. We got home about midnight after an inadvertent detour to the Canadian border - though this at least gave us something to talk about on the long drive across Pennsylvania.

"Lovely," said my wife. "We must do that again soon."

And the heartbreaking thing is she really meant it.

`Notes From a Big Country' (Doubleday, pounds 16.99)