The tide arrives in two forms in Ocean City, Maryland. The first of course belongs to the moon. The second comes in around seven each evening, when the beach has emptied and the showers have run cold, and several thousand people in various stages of sunburn surrender to the boardwalk — a slow, salted, contented tide moving north and south at the speed of no particular hurry. We joined it this week for the first time in our lives, and I can report that you can be brand new to a place and still know exactly what to do. You walk. You eat things your cardiologist will hear about later. You look at the ocean going dark as though you'd been assigned to it.

The boardwalk is a genre, and Ocean City knows it fluently. In the candy shop window a machine folds saltwater taffy with the patience of a monk. Taffy is a candy purchased by the pound and eaten by the piece; its actual flavor is the town you bought it in, and its purpose is to ride home in a glove compartment and become a fossil of the week. A few blocks down, Thrasher's has been frying potatoes since 1929, when a religious man from Georgia named J.T. Thrasher opened a stand selling one item, the french fry, with one condiment, vinegar, and was assured by everyone that he would starve. The stand does not stock ketchup. It has never stocked ketchup. You take your bucket with cider vinegar and salt like the generations before you, and somewhere around the third fry the conversion takes, quietly, the way most conversions do. There are t-shirts being airbrushed with wolves, lightning, and the name KAYLEE in letters that appear to be traveling at great speed. There are a great many other t-shirts whose content I decline to share with you. There is an arcade where the claw machine carries on its century of instruction in the management of hope. And over the pier a Ferris wheel turns with the serenity of a thing that knows it is being remembered even while it is being ridden.

In short, it’s a fascinating place. We have never been here — and all week I have had the sensation of arriving mid-sentence, of walking into a room where the conversation is decades old and finding a chair already pulled out. The place is thick with other people's returns. You can hear them making corrections as they walk: that used to be the mini-golf; the fudge place was on this corner, I'd swear it; wasn't the arcade bigger? An older man stopped his grandson in front of a perfectly innocent storefront and explained, with real feeling, what it replaced. A woman about my mother's age found her bench — her bench — and sat down as if she had been doing so for forty summers. All evening the town is narrated in discrepancies of memory, and the strange accounting is that they never add up. A hundred things are different than last time, but nobody concludes that the place has changed. The ledger refuses to balance, and everyone appears to prefer it that way.

The Impressionists seemed to prefer this ledger too. In 1874, Claude Monet hung a small canvas in Paris called Impression, Sunrise: the harbor at Le Havre in morning haze, an orange sun, its light laid on the water in a few unapologetic strokes. A critic named Louis Leroy went after it in print — a sketch putting on airs, he said; wallpaper was more finished — and he titled his mockery "The Exhibition of the Impressionists," borrowing the sneer from the painting itself. He meant it as the charge: these men paint the impression instead of the thing. The accused agreed, and kept the name. Within twenty years the world had come around so completely that it is now hard to find a calendar, a tote bag, or a dentist's waiting room without him.

Monet spent the rest of his life compounding the supposed insult. He painted the stacks of wheat in the field near his house twenty-five times — which is either the discipline of genius or the behavior of a man who has lost something in that field — hauling out several canvases at once and swapping between them as the light moved, because the haystack was never the subject. Eleven o'clock was the subject. The air between the easel and the wheat was the subject. Stand close to one of those canvases and you get chaos, commas of paint, nothing you could testify to. Step back and it assembles into an hour with a temperature. It’s the quiet mystery of the style: no two people standing in front of it attend to the same strokes, and the same morning arrives for everyone anyway. He painted at the resolution feeling operates at — loose on purpose, exact about warmth — because certain subjects, light on water chief among them, are falsified by precision. A photograph of the harbor would have told you less about the morning.

I’m realizing that a beach town is a painting made in this style, though nobody planned it. This one in Ocean City has been worked on for over a century by thousands of families, each laying strokes without consulting the others: this taffy window, that bench, one sunburned Thursday, a walk after dinner in a specific July. No two families keep the same strokes. The picture strikes everyone alike. And that, I think, is why the corrections never total to change — nobody was ever loyal to the strokes. The town can replace every board under the picture and the picture holds. It has been doing that from the beginning: the first boardwalk here, laid in 1902, was rolled up and stored on hotel porches — a promenade with the permanence of a picnic blanket, which turned out to be all it required. A storm leveled it in 1962; in 2012 they re-planked it end to end. The boardwalk may be the youngest thing about it.

And the picture holds, I suspect, because this is the resolution memory paints at. Mine does not archive; it renders. It cannot produce the boardwalk plank by plank, and it will not try. Ask it for this week in thirty years and it will hand back heat, vinegar, a small hand in mine, lights going long on wet sand — loose strokes, wrong in every detail a camera would care about and right about the whole. A memory of a summer is not a photograph that has degraded. It was never a photograph. It is a canvas worked loosely because the subject — light on water, a week, being young — cannot be rendered any other way.

So we are new here, and we are not. Other families painted this town before we ever arrived — blocked in the composition, set the palette, left the edges loose — and to walk into it is to be handed a canvas still warm from someone else's sun. This week we are doing the same for a boy too young to remember any of it. He will keep no taffy window, no Ferris wheel, not one board. This is how the painters prime their canvases. Under every picture is a ground — a first coat no one ever sees, deciding how everything laid over it glows. Monet primed his pale; it is partly why his mornings shine. Nobody remembers their own priming. That is not the sad part of being small. It is the technique. Someday, God willing, he will stand some child in front of a perfectly innocent storefront and explain, with real feeling, what used to be there — and the feeling, whatever its facts, will have been mixed here, in a coat he never saw us lay.

Tonight we joined the seven o'clock tide once more, and it looked different to me. The man narrating a vanished storefront, the woman keeping her bench, the families filing past the taffy window at the speed of no particular hurry — I had taken all this for a crowd. In a more whimsical sense, is a studio. Everyone on these boards is at work on the same loose canvas, laying strokes nobody else will keep, arriving at a warmth everybody shares, and the town, which has replaced every plank of itself, holds the pose. We walked it with a boy who will keep none of this week and will somehow glow with all of it. Tomorrow the sun comes up out of the Atlantic, orange over gray, the subject that named the movement, painted from this beach every clear morning for a century — never once accurately, and never once wrong.

John

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