Every summer, as the sun starts to beat harder, tourists roll in. Bright red and with peeling skin, wearing bucket hats on the beach, and sporting northeastern license plates. The beaches and restaurants, and roads fill up quickly, making my home feel like the overcrowded town of Jaws.

Like many people who live in my town, I am not from here. When I was seven, my parents decided to move from Maryland to South Carolina, where we had always vacationed. I remember the crowded shores and tourist trap shops of Myrtle Beach, but also the quieter towns not too far away. My grandma had moved here some years before, so that further helped my parents decide to do the same.

I remember not wanting to move. I had friends in my first-grade class, and I liked our house with its basement and fluffy snow, and the pines that grew along the creek in our backyard. But, after some time, I realized that living by the beach really isn't so bad. Sure, we don't see much snow, but that also means that we don't have to shovel any either.

As a kid growing up in a small southern coastal town, I saw the juxtaposition of immense generational wealth and crippling generational poverty. My town has multiple golf courses, a staple of the South Carolina Lowcountry, attracting wealthy retirees from around the country and beyond. However, until recently, it also had streets that most people wouldn't even want to ride their bikes through.

Having grown up here, I do consider myself a local, yet there is an obvious divide between the people who are locals because of time lived here and the people who have their family roots here. I didn't realize this until recently.

This past summer, I worked as a bartender at one of the most popular restaurants here. Opened for almost thirty years, it not only offers some of the cheapest decent drinks and food around, but it also offers a family-like welcoming, especially for local regulars.

As the bartender at this restaurant, I've learned more about the depth of local roots here than I have from any of my other multiple restaurant jobs over the past eight years. The regulars know to come to the restaurant early if they want good service, because once the tourists, whom they despise, come in around dinner time, it's too busy for them to receive the decent service they'd like.

Now, as a fellow local, I do find the tourists annoying. The summer traffic drives me insane, and the fact that I can barely get to the beach because of the lack of parking makes it even worse. People assume that I go to the beach all the time since I live so close to it, yet I can rarely go. I am always working, serving the influx of tourist customers, when it's the heart of beach season, and even on my days off, as I mentioned, I can barely find a parking spot at one of the public beach accesses.

However, the tourists aren't wholly bad. I get it. They are on vacation and they came here for the beach, so they deserve to go to the beach. I don't hold that against them. Additionally, our town bases its economy on tourism. It's not like we could just not let any more tourists in. That would lead to restaurants and businesses, many of them family-owned for decades, having to close down. It'd become a ghost town. What really bothers me is the lack of infrastructure to support all the tourists.

When I was a kid, tourism did not reach the level that it does today. The past few summers have seen a large increase in out-of-towners. The highway, which my town runs upon, has become too congested. A route that would take me ten minutes in spring can take me twenty minutes in summer. It's not rare to have to wait for gas pumps or to scour multiple parking aisles at the grocery store before finding a spot.

And, of course, the money-hungry homebuilders and businessmen are seizing every opportunity. They cut down more and more trees each year to build multi-million-dollar homes and build more and more commercialized stores. More homes will lead to more residents, which leads to less room for the inevitable tourists. More businesses mean more people from neighboring towns will come to ours, choking the area even further.

Businesses will appear whether we like it or not. New residents will come whether we like it or not. However, could we not encourage small family-owned businesses, rather than creating a hub for corporate America to milk? Could we not refuse to allow the destruction of wooded and marshy areas to please wealthy northeasterners looking for homes near their precious golf courses?

The commercialization of this place proves a harsher problem than the tourists. Tourists come here because of the serene shores and the small-town feel. By giving tourists all these corporate amenities, we are bringing in a different crowd of tourists, the tourists who want the cheap hats and cheesy beach souvenirs. The old tourists, the ones who come each year for the peaceful beaches rather than the commercialized idea of the beach, however, will still come because they expect it never to change. But it will, and it is.

Ten years from now, I worry, my town will be largely unrecognizable compared to how I remember it as a kid. It's almost there now.

The tourists are inevitable; they will come. I know this, and I, as someone who has worked in the restaurant business for so long, live off the money I receive from them. I accept this. I just wish the local government would help put the brakes on this and place more restrictions on home-building and commercialization. And, at the end of the day, I just wish I could find a decent parking spot at my beach.