The beach is a strange and mystical place. It has powers over people that most places do not have. These powers can make old men wear black socks with sandals. It can put string bikinis and Speedos on people that usually don't leave the house in anything but loose sweats. Beach powers can make normally sane human beings search for hours at a time for things conchs and scallops regularly discard. People become prospectors, and shells are the gold. Others fly kites and gleefully glide by on skim boards that I believe were designed by someone in orthopedics that thought business was too slow.

The powers get me, too. The beach is the only place I will spend hours building something that I know full well will be destroyed in a matter of seconds with the arrival of one big wave. My kids and I will dig and build, shape and form, and sweat and burn under a relentless sun just to complete a sand castle we are sure will be reduced to a slight lump in the surf when high tide rolls in.

This summer, I could barely stand up straight after creating moats and tunnels with cheap plastic shovels, two of which I broke trying to dig a bit too enthusiastically. Usually, by the time we've got the mote complete, I'm too tired to move and our castle is a pile of sand with a trench around it.

But this year, I constructed an elaborate tunnel that would allow ocean waves in to fill up the pool my kids completed in front of our castle. While I was digging this thing, my entire arm was under about two feet of sand. The thought did cross my mind once or twice as to what would happen if the tunnel collapsed on me. The newspaper headline might have read, "Tourist buried under two feet of sand…family can't rescue him with broken plastic shovels." I did survive, but my tunnel did not. The first wave collapsed it, but the pool filled up. The effort was worth the pain, even if I looked like a sun- burned Egor rolled in sand.

The beach has that effect on everyone and strange behavior brought on by ocean air is as predictable as the tides. Where else would groups of people roll wooden balls into each other for hours at a time and actually think they're having fun? It's kind of like watching curling in the Winter Olympics. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish, but it looks entertaining…at least under the spell of those beach powers.

Even swimming at the beach could be considered a little oddball especially to those of us who remember the movie Jaws. Where else would people willingly jump into something at the risk of being eaten? I mean even if the sharks aren't hungry, there are jellyfish with nothing better to do than sting and crabs with seemingly strong dislikes for big toes.

It's not madness. It's the beach, and we love it. Right now, I wish I could slap on a pair of black socks, toss a wooden ball around, build an ephemeral sand castle, and take a dip with an 11- foot mouth full of teeth, but the ocean air doesn't quite reach Columbia. So I'll just go back to my normal life and put the Speedo way in the back of my top left drawer.