Living on the coast means being sentenced to a lifetime of bringing visitors to the beach. It also means shrugging off your guests’ looks of disappointment when you reach the shore and they discover that your local beach is not, in fact, a tropical oasis fitted with big blue sun umbrellas and pretty lifeguards that gaze out into rolling waves.

Instead, your beach is a muddy little marsh that reeks of life. The water is brackish and green-brown and not a crystalline haven for sunscreen-laden tourists. It welcomes your visitors with mucky low tides and a small selection of beached jellyfish carcasses.

“The tentacles still sting,” you are sure to mention. You’d learned that fact on your own during your youth as a right of passage, but your friends are foreign to these sands and deserving of a diplomatic warning. They give the jellyfish a wide berth.

Eventually, they are able to settle into their little plastic lawn chairs. They’d initially been excited to swim, but the sight of oysters and the texture of the thick pluff mud was enough to discourage them completely. To them, that’s what this beach is: slick, black sludge and drinks hidden in paper bags.

To you, it is something quite different.

It is combing the sand for sharks teeth with your two little brothers. It is holding periwinkle snails to your throat and humming—mimicking the vibrations of marsh reeds in the hot summer wind. It’s chasing minnows in tide pools, where moms dip their babies’ fat little legs into the water. It’s pluff mud slathered against shins and painted across knees and sinking between toes. It’s wearing Walmart tankinis or Dad’s giant shirts or bare skin. Scavenging for pickleweed—slimy, salty, and technically edible—before giving in and eating the boiled peanuts you’d begged your aunt to pack. Luring seagulls in with peanut shells. It’s calloused feet wary of oysters lurking in the murky water. Getting stung by sun and wayward jellyfish and shrimp with sharp little snouts. It’s drying off with crunchy seawater hair and salty seawater skin while eying the old man wielding a clunky metal detector.

You can’t fault your guests for not seeing these shores the way you do. Long ago, you came to the conclusion that this beach is something learned.

By the time the tide crawls back up the shore, displacing beach bags and lapping at feet, it is dark and your guests are ready to retreat to your car. They start their march past the dunes. Tomorrow, you will bring them to The Good Beach, the one with hotels looming on its edges—the beach that requires an hour drive instead of a five minute walk.

One visitor lingers, the water reaching up to her knees. She stares out to the horizon at the spot where the sea meets the sky and swallows the dusk. “I think there are sharks in the water,” she tells you. She isn’t afraid, only questioning.

And there are: hammerheads, tiger sharks, and several other species. As the moon rises out of the water, they tend to grow braver and venture closer to the shore. Following her gaze, though, you know this isn’t what actually prompted her statement. “Those are dolphins,” you correct her. “Their fins are curved.”

She watches in awe as their backs break the surface. The two of you are able to count three or four of them swimming together in a pod. The shore is quiet for a moment before she says, “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”

You realize then that you’ll never remember seeing the ocean for the first time—you were far too young when the salty air first welcomed you. The revelation brings a bittersweet feeling—a feeling of pluff mud sinking in your stomach, miry and telling of life unseen.

You pluck a snail shell from a nearby thicket of marsh grass. If this beach really is something learned, then it must be something that you can teach. “Here,” you say, pressing the shell to her throat. “Hum.”