CoolCabanas on the sand and the question of who owns which bit of shade

Who owns shade? I stood on the beach with my toes pugged into the hot sand asking myself the question. If I arrange a shadow to be cast, is it mine? Or might a squatter claim it? In a public place where shade has become valuable, what are the proprietary limits on it?

The sand was tessellated with a thousand CoolCabanas. You’ll have seen these – they’re a beach shelter with four legs holding up a peaked canvas roof, under which a pork-fed family sets up a type of temporary colonialism. CoolCabanas are the latest thing. If you go to the beach without one you remain a pauper with no chance of banking shaded territory on which your progeny might sit and whine about how much they’d rather be at a mall.

Each CoolCabana owner naturally enough lays claim to the square of sand inside its four legs. But the sun was to the north, throwing the square of shade each made out to the south alongside, but not beneath, the shelter itself. Does a CoolCabana owner claim this wayward shade as well as the land beneath his or her accoutrement? I was about to find out.

Most owners were alongside their shelter, having moved out into the southern shade. But at one particularly gaudy model (splattered with a rhododendron motif, I think) the family was absent and their chairs and towels were sitting directly beneath the canvas in full sun. The oblong of shade their shelter was throwing southward was uninhabited, so I threw out my towel in this truant shadow and lay on my stomach trying mightily to ignore the honked dullardry of teenagers while en route to my favourite daydream.

Not quarter of an hour later a family of self-gavaged behemoths, all sugar-sheened about the gills, arrived back at their rhododendron-splattered refuge.

The man stood over me and said, “Hey. You’re in our shade.”

I opened an eye. “Your shade? Can you own shade, though?”

“We brought this thing to shade the kids.”

“But it isn’t. It’s shading me. You should have brought something with sides, your shade has spilled into the public domain.”