Probably the worst sunburn I’ve ever had was etched on my body last summer, as I swam at the beach and the polluted ocean water washed off my now-ineffective sunblock. Three or four hours in the sun and water, and I didn’t even realize the full extent of the damage until much later in the hotel room, my skin now hot to the touch, even under a cold shower, which would have felt soothing if it wasn’t like sandpaper gently rubbing on a fresh wound.

We slept in an old hotel in a modestly sized town along this province’s south shore, made of old wood with adolescent finger paintings on the wall where art would normally be. A clerical error by an inexperienced worker appeared to cut our rate in half, and we knew this but said nothing. The air conditioner seemed to have no noticeable effect on the temperature inside the room, and opening the window accomplished even less. The ceiling fan — Eureka!, I thought — only circulated warm air, blowing a painful 30-degree breeze onto my body, which was now flush red, like a ripe tomato or maybe a radish.

It was my second time ever swimming in the ocean — the Atlantic Ocean, anyway; I don’t count a trip to a beach in Vancouver because a lack of waves and a horizon littered with islands meant the impact — or illusion — of an endless expanse of unforgiving seas was gone, robbed from me by geography. I was warned that the North Atlantic would be colder than I could possibly imagine, which I brushed off as worried hyperbole. But it was far worse. Every time I entered the water it felt colder than before, and my legs and feet felt numb as if they’d been dissolved by the salt and carried out into oblivion. But the waves were real, unlike the manufactured bursts of water at the Village Square Leisure Centre in northeast Calgary, and I’d spent hours walking away from the shore and riding the waves back in, sometimes getting flipped around and swallowing mouthfulls of this awful water. And when I was finished, I was sore and red and pealing. And content.

Sunburns are the painful marking posts of my adolescence. It’s often difficult to sort through memories of numerous camping holidays or trips to the beach or swimming in public pools or climbing over large hills of dirt that were created by the burgeoning growth of my suburban neighborhood, all of which seem to fade together, but a good sunburn is easy to place.

We’d swim at the municipal pool in Golden, or another in Creston, two communities carved into B.C.’s Rocky Mounties where the local IGA or the neighbouring bakery, famous for its butterhorns that no longer compare to their former glory, serve as the closest thing to a social hub. Or maybe the post office, if the bulletin board wasn’t covered in obituaries, constant reminders that if the brewery wasn’t there or if the railyard wasn’t still operating and the tourists didn’t come to the ski resort for a few months every the winter, these towns would quietly die of attrition. But my brother and I, and local children we’d meet along the way, didn’t need social hubs, not that kind anyway. We’d go to the pool and stay there all day, the chlorine burning our eyes and, of course, the sun burning our skin.

One particularly painful sunburn occurred, I believe, in the summer between the seventh and eighth grades. We were staying at a campground in Vernon, B.C., where there was an ice cream shop and minigolf on site, and the Okanagan Lake just a quick walk away. In the camping spot next to us was Kat Logan, who had the same love for Wierd Al and bad comedies like Hot Shots. We’d walk to the beach every day with our bathing suits always under our clothes, our watches and money cleverly tucked into our socks which were cleverly tucked into our shoes when we swam in the cool calm lake. We jumped off the peer, an exhilarating six- or seven-foot fall into the water. We went to the nearby waterslides one day, and we fed each other soft ice cream and we laughed and laughed. She was a year older and therefore more responsible, and more effective at applying her sunblock. And more than once, at the end of the day, I was scorched, but she was sympathetic and kind and gentle. I thought maybe we could fall in love, at 12 or 13 years old, and be best friends even when we were old and more mature, wiser but still clinging to our youth. We wrote each other off and on for a year or so, until we stopped, bored I guess or maybe we just gave up. She wrote a couple years later to see if I would be in Vernon again that summer, because her and her family were returning and they were also bringing along her boyfriend. My heart broke and I moved on.

And there’s always the first sunburn of the year, when you let your guard down after months of darkness. Back home it was always a gradual shift, but here on the coast it seems to happen in an instant. Winter to summer. Just like that. Sometimes it flips back and forth, like the rain that is running down my window as I write this, but once the season switches it’s as if someone simply flipped a switch somewhere, and you think it will be forever until the ground freezes again. But it does. Burnt or tanned skin turns pale. But then, soon enough, someone flips that switch again.