Taffy and the Beach: Delectable Duo Is Forever Stuck Together

OCEAN CITY -- There's something about taffy and the beach.

We like our caramel popcorn, we like our snow cones and we like our french fries, but they aren't purely about the beach. They are multitaskers in a harried modern life. Caramel popcorn evokes the beach but also the stress of bobbing for apples at country fairs. Snow cones, yes, they say beach, but also Little League and missed glories. French fries, well, they're everywhere -- menacingly attractive and always inflicting guilt.

But taffy, salt water taffy, is the beach and only the beach. She's our boardwalk siren. She seduces us with carefree innocence.

Taffy goes with flip-flops and pop-tops, not wingtips and wine. Taffy goes with beach chairs, preferably the '50s models, the webbed-plastic-and-aluminum kind you've fallen through at least once in your life, laughing. There's a bad snapshot of it in the family album. Turn the page and see the snap of that infernal windmill hole on the putt-putt course.

Each bite-size taffy kiss is so sweet -- sticky, gooey, but so sweet. Chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. Molasses, cinnamon and peanut butter. Banana. Close your eyes and you smell creamy peppermint.

Keep them closed and you feel Mom rubbing Coppertone on your cheeks. You wipe the sea salt from your eyes. Your hair blows in the sunset breezes off the ocean. You feel free in your eternal youth.

When we arrive at Ocean City's boardwalk this summer, we make a beeline toward Dolle's Candyland. Dolle's will sell 6 million pieces of taffy before Labor Day.

"It developed as a souvenir treat," says Rudolph "Bunky" Dolle, 58, the ponytailed patriarch of his family's taffy empire. "I think everybody who goes home from Ocean City takes a box of salt water taffy with them."

We find our favorite flavor and chew away, savoring the pleasure. We savor moments at the beach, in a way we cannot -- or do not -- savor them on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Why is that?

Perhaps the paramount question is: Why do we chew taffy? Is it the beach's deceiving way of making us feel the invincibility of youth, regardless of the risk?

"I love salt water taffy, but my fillings don't," says 69-year-old Lois Smith of Fenwick Island, Del. "There's no such thing as sucking salt water taffy."

Her friend Ethel Hurley says she is addicted to orange and vanilla. And it's a costly addiction.