Wasque is gone.

A great human conceit is to measure time in lifetimes. Regardless of what has existed long before us, and what will exist long after — our time is our time. So Wasque, as we know her, is gone. She may come back, may reform or even expand, but not in our lifetime. So we mourn her passing from our lives.

Some may find it silly to love a beach so much as to find heartbreak in its absence. But Wasque was the loving grandmother, the fun uncle, the slightly wild, irrepressible and unpredictable friend. Wasque was the house everyone wanted to visit. And now it is gone.

I fell in love 10 times over at Wasque. With the girl in the animal print bikini. With my babysitters. With the girls of my sun-squinted daydreams, imagining myself far braver and more handsome than I was on the salted beach towel. Wasque made me feel grand, powerful and alive.

Wasque was not gentle. Her surf was violent and rife with not pebbles but stones. Body surfing her waves was like being a gem polished in cylinder of rocks. The wind and the sun at Wasque could further burnish your hide into a tenderized, salted and dried hunk of meat. And it felt good.

I saw my first (but not my last) naked lady at Wasque. She was changing in the dunes. I was face down on my towel, yards away, alone in my discovery, and once again thankful to Wasque.

Once I cut the bottom of my foot badly on a shell at Wasque. Anywhere else but Wasque, I would have been taken home and tended to. There, I was told to soak it in the ocean and was given a Viva paper towel to wrap it in and an extra ration of Munchos to keep my complaint to a minimum. No one was leaving Wasque. Not for something as small as a bloody foot.

At day’s end, we’d walk back to the station wagon parked in the dirt lot, over a path worn in the dunes, through the bayberry and rosa rugosa. Pale green crunchy lichen lined the path. I loved everything about Wasque — getting there, being there, leaving there. It was a place of anticipation, enthrallment and deep contentment.

There has never been anything else like Wasque in my life. Not another place. Or person. Or feeling. And now it’s gone. Forever.

Thank you, Wasque. Godspeed.

Gazette contributor Brad Woodger lives on Chappaquiddick.