Castles in the Sand

I developed my construction skills as a child because we lived quite near the sea. (In Britain one says "sea" not "ocean".)

During summer, a couple of times a month, my mother would drive the family to spend a day at Lavernock, just outside Cardiff, and I'd spend much of the day excavating in the sand, building castles, digging moats, canals and pools and  frantically reinforcing my sandy barricades as the tide inexorably eroded them. I knew they wouldn't last, but I built anyway.

Andy Goldsworthy would understand the concept:  he builds breath-takingly beautiful ephemeral environmental sculptures. My favorite appears in his 2001 movie "Rivers and Tides" where he struggles to complete an ice sculpture for the rising sun to pierce, in the sure and certain knowledge that that same rising sun will melt his creation into oblivion. He built pyramids of stone below the high water mark and left them to be dis-assembled by the rising tide, filming their collapse.

And now the younger generation has changed all that. It was with total oblivion that my grandsons Dodger, 10, and Rascal, 9, spent hours last Friday constructing an intricate landscape of castles, bridges, moats and pools at Sandbar State Park on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. Lake Champlain. No hint of a tide. Their construction was never in any danger of being inundated by a tides; there are no tides. They builtwith no sense of urgency or impending doom; they built to last. Their work may yet survive.

I remembered when first I swam in fresh water. I was 13 when I dived into that river in Switzerland. The clarity and lightness of fresh water was a revelation. Each splash was a fountain of pure crystaline droplets, unhampered by the thick suspended solids of the sea. It felt clear and pure and light, unlike the sticky cling of salt water.

Dodger and Rascal know nothing else: our childhood realities were different. Theirs was the unhurried leisure, and mine the consciousness of impending disaster. So are characters formed. 



Sandbar State Park, Vermont, July 27, 2012