Scott Goodson
Google
We have been returning to Pink Sands for years now—enough years that the particular shade of coral in the walls has become, for us, a kind of Proustian trigger for something elusive: the feeling of arriving somewhere that knew how to leave you alone while still taking care of you.
On our last visit, we found the refurbishment. Fresh paint, new linens, staff trained in that contemporary hospitality school manner—attentive without being intrusive, knowledgeable about wine pairings, capable of answering questions about thread counts. All admirable. All correct.
And yet.
There is a quality that places possess when they have evolved organically from their own soil, their own people, their own particular history. Pink Sands had this—a Bahamian soul, if you will. The kind of warmth that cannot be taught in a training seminar. The kind of charm that comes from generations of knowing how to welcome strangers the Bahamian way.
We sense this slipping away. Not gone, not yet. But fading, like paint in the salt air.
The danger, of course, is homogenization. That creeping Floridian sensibility, that Nassau-style sensation-seeking, threatens every beautiful place that makes the mistake of being discovered. Pink Sands could so easily become another interchangeable luxury resort—pristine, five-star, utterly forgettable beach. The kind of place that exists everywhere and therefore nowhere.
That would be the real loss. Not the old furniture or the slightly shabby bar or the staff who knew your name without checking a computer. The loss would be of something ineffable: the sense that you had arrived somewhere that could only be itself and nowhere else.
Let us hope the management understands what they have. Glory, after all, is not found in marble lobbies and infinity pools. It resides in the specific, the local, the irreplaceable.
We will return. One always does. But we will be watching, as one watches all things one loves, for signs of what is being preserved and what, despite everyone’s best intentions, is being allowed to disappear.
