Chappaquiddick’s East Beach is a plain, uneventful kind of beach – not on a list of the world’s ten best beaches – but the unremarkable features of sand, water, and beach grass combine into a simple melody of peacefulness, even on a busy day in summer. It has become my favorite beach over the years: perfect in any season and any weather – with the right clothes. (As an Icelandic friend said, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.”)

So why is East Beach number one on my list? For one thing, it never fails to give a good swim: no crashing waves, strong undertow, or riptides, just crystal clear swimming water. In the summer, my husband and I like to go there early, before the crowds come. We always hope no one will be parked in the lot before the bridge, because then we know we’ll have the beach to ourselves. Besides, I like to park in front of the lot’s tiny sign that says “Park Here”: It makes me feel as if the world is in order, with everything in its place. Often no one is there, and we have this number one beach all to ourselves.

To reach the beach from the parking lot, we cross the Dyke Bridge, pausing to look down into the eddies of water swirling below us. The bridge’s notoriety, worn thin by our frequent passage, is far from our minds. We gaze at the absolute, serene beauty. Sometimes an egret or heron feeds in the marsh along the water’s edge, or a disturbance on the surface produces a cormorant that pops up a short distance away. Often in summer the fog drifts in across Poucha Pond from Wasque Point or rolls over the sound from Nantucket. In September, the sun can be so strong that it sets the ripples in the pond on fire, and the whole scene vibrates like a visual migraine. Our bare feet discover the different surfaces on the walk to the beach: dirt, bridge boards, gravel, the deep sand where the SUVs drive, the hard composite boards of the walkway, and then the coarse sand of the beach itself.

In the 1980s, East Beach became almost inaccessible when the town declared the bridge to the beach unsafe. To keep people from using it, a chain link fence was erected – but the fence just made getting to the beach more of an adventure. When town officials realized the fence wasn’t keeping people off the bridge, they extended the sides of the fence out over the water and removed some of the bridge planks. So we had to climb around the outside of the fence, hanging above the water, while negotiating towels, coolers, and babies across to the other side. With the planks removed, it became a daredevil balancing act to walk the support beams that were left. The difficulty of reaching the beach was always worth the effort, because when we finally arrived, there was usually not a soul in sight, even on a perfect beach day. Everyone was at Wasque, where people just walked across the sand to get to the beach.

Finally, a whole section the width of the bridge was taken out, leaving a four-foot gap that proved impossible to navigate. After that, we would sometimes bring inner tubes and rafts to paddle across.

In one memorable crossing, I swam with my toddler son in a life jacket hanging onto my back. About halfway across, we entered a sea of jellyfish – not the stinging kind, but the round, globby kind that cluster into an area, making it thick like caviar. Somehow I managed to keep from shrieking out loud until we reached the other side.

I don’t remember how we returned from the beach that day, but I know it wasn’t in the water. Now the bridge has long since been rebuilt, but I still look for jellyfish every time I cross it.

The ocean at East Beach is almost always clear, but if there is seaweed, you can easily swim out beyond it, as long as you have never seen Jaws. After the movie was filmed on the Vineyard, it forever changed many people’s experience of being in the ocean. One hot summer day the year after Jaws came out, my family arrived at East Beach for a swim. Many people were on the beach and in the water, and we went in for a swim too. After a while my mother noticed that one of my sisters was nowhere to be seen. The word “shark” was not uttered, but we were all thinking of Jaws.

We searched the beach and the water for any sign of her, and we were starting to feel panicky when she strolled up, having swum with the current way down the beach. I still think of sharks every time I go in the water, especially at East Beach, where my sister “nearly” got eaten by one.

On my favorite Island mini-expedition, I depart from my house on foot with a minimum of supplies in a beach bag. I love to leave my gas-guzzling exoskeleton behind – it makes me feel virtuous and adventuresome. I head southeast along the inside of Cape Pogue Pond toward the bridge, where I swim the gut with my belongings held above the water in one hand, trying not to think about sharks and jellyfish. When I reach the other side, I mosey – or dash, if the sand is hot – across the dunes to East Beach, which is usually empty this far from the bridge. I flop down on the hot sand to warm up before taking a swim in the clear, cold ocean.

I know why people like Wasque better – it’s a more interesting beach, the way it curves, with dunes that dip up and down, and it has bigger waves to bodysurf. East Beach is flat and unchanging, although to the north the beach curves gently, beckoning me to wander into its emptiness. The lighthouse at Cape Pogue is not in sight, but it’s there in my mind’s eye. The nearer curve to the south, at Parking Lot Beach, is usually obscured in the summer by a wall of hulking, gleaming metal – the SUVs. I don’t go in that direction.

I love to come to the beach after it rains or after a high tide has cleaned the strip of footprints off the sand at the edge of the water. In the beginning of summer, it takes me a while to get used to the hordes of footprints I see when I come to the beach – those of humans and nighttime creatures. Once when I was walking in winter, there were no footprints anywhere, just untouched wilderness. I was reveling in the feeling of walking where no person had walked before me, until I chanced to look back to where I’d come from.

I felt a jolt of dismay at seeing my own footprints – the beach was no longer pristine! Without thinking, I had changed it for everyone.

East Beach is a place I like to go to observe the relationship between the natural world and human beings – that interface of mystery. Early one day I was on the beach reclining in a hole in the sand dug by a previous beachgoer. From my perspective, I could see one Trustees of Reservations ranger on a four-wheeler, annoyingly coming my way; one gull hunkered down in the wind; a line of metal posts and wire separating the walkers from the drivers; a red surfboard with a white cross painted on it, standing tall in case of emergencies; green beach grass tinged with yellow and brown; sand made up of many bits of colored rock; pieces of brown seaweed blowing around the flat surface before the slope to the sea; the ocean – dark gray-green and silvery light, reflecting clouds and sun; and a buoy in the water out close to the horizon. I thought I could make the buoy sit on the skyline if I sunk low enough in the hole, but instead, the buoy simply merged into the sea with the haze.

From down in my dugout, the line where sand met water was like a horizon, but when I stood up it was gone, and I could see where the waves were crashing onto the beach, erasing the distinction between sand and water. Horizons look so permanent and definite, so delineated (except in the fog), but they don’t exist as a place.

The clear-cut lines of the beach make life appear simple; all that is disordered or in need of fixing is not visible. The earth looks fine, and its apparent permanence gives me a sense of security in the face of life’s uncertainties. Here, things stay the same and I am held by the enduring presence of sand and ocean.