Legal Schnauzer: "Atticus v. The Architect," documentary about the political prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman, premieres Wednesday night at the Alabama Theatre

Legal Schnauzer: "Atticus v. The Architect," documentary about the political prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman, premieres Wednesday night at the Alabama Theatre

Clark-Works: Western Mind Eastern Heart

Clark-Works: Western Mind Eastern Heart

Left-Over Turkey - Sunday 1 December 1991 Press Register

Here goes another nuthin - Thanks, Rich! (Go here for the Southern Journal 1984 original)

"Sand Castle" Gulf Shores 1933-1979

Southern Living, June 1984 "Best of Southern Journal"

Here’s something some of you who remember Gulf Shores, or your own treasured place from childhood, might appreciate.

SAND CASTLE

(from SOUTHERN LIVING: The Best of Southern Journal

June 1984)

Sand Castle wasn't much, really — a green box roofed by a green pyramid and propped on creosote poles set in white sand forty yards from the Gulf of Mexico.  But to our family Sand Castle seemed almost a, well, sacred place. My grandparents Pet and Pop built it in 1933. It was sanctuary to three generations of summer, where the only time was good time and the 9-to-5 of history rolled elsewhere.

We'd get downright poeuic about it: Aunt Barbara wrote in bardlike longhand a poem called "The True Meaning of Sand Castle" and framed it on a wall.  Sand Castle had the same expansive effect on friends, too. The scrapbook Pet and Pop started in 1938 contained the most outrageous paeans. For example: "June 22, 1940 — The day Germany declared war upon Russia. But here we don't bother about such small things." I liked the one Miss Emily wrote in June of '58: "The breeze is blowing, the bourbon is flowing and life is easy and it is the Sand Castle."

We would pull out the Sand Castle scrapbook and look at photographs of our parents when they were kids like us, and a few pages later there we were, babies in their arms, squinting at the same bright white beach.

When we were small, my cousins and brothers and I would lie in our bunks in the dark of the sleeping porch and listen to the grownups talk. Pop would tell, and endlessly tell, how he had Sand Castle built from cheap pine mill ends and cheaper Depression labor, and how our house was the third one built on the marshy sand spit destined to become Gulf Shores, Alabama.

We could see the orange flicker of his cigar at the other end of the porch, where the grownups would be rocking in cherished willow rockers.  Even then we knew the stories by heart, and sooner or later one of us would call out Tell us about Zeke and they would call back, Y’all are supposed to be asleep.

But one of them would pick up the story, how my great-uncle Zeke got "the last homestead ever granted east of the Mississippi” in 1927 and claimed 1,000 beachfront acres of biting flies and a lagoon of alligators.  How he and his bride Jesse had to jolt down a three-trail road (wheels on the outside, mule in the midde) and take a skiff to their cabin, and how he grew fig trees so the Homestead Inspector would verify that he was "cultivating the land," and then Zeke would let the martins eat all the figs.

And Sand Castle was built on the second lot sold from Zeke's homestead, Pop would repeat, but we would time his pauses and yell out Tell about the war.

And as we knew she would, my mother would say, Lord, that was a time. Remember how they made us put black paper on the windows and doors? The war was black paper to the women left behind.  And they’d go on to tell of the night they saw car lights flashing out on the beach, and other lights out in the Gulf flashing back, and how they heedlessly ran down to the beach and the lights went out, and the FBI came by the next day and said that U-boats were landing supplies there.  We weren't scared till then, they'd say.

But we were kids, all we knew was the present, and for us Sand Castle was the place where everybody, even grownups, lived only to play. We were much too busy having fun to realize we were ourselves creating recollections. Our own, from the fifties and sixties, were less dramatic than those of our parents and grandparents.

I remember diving in Zeke's Hole he’d dredged to fish in the lagoon, going down ear-ringing deep in the black cold to bring a prize scoop of mud back from the bottom. The terror of stingarees when we went floundering at the Old Mouth and the hissing of the mantles in the lanterns.

Simple things. Endless drip castles rising gothically beneath fingertips dripping watery sand, long walks just to walk, sometimes looking for sand dollars and ashtray-size shells.  Pressing down the little air mounds of sand where the waves lapped and feeling their hollowness in your sole.

In a way, I count my boyhood by the summers at Sand Castle. One was the summer of the shark. Each year Dad and I would bait a huge J-hook with a smelly bonito.  He'd wade out to toss it past the breakers, and I would sit beside him on the beach, pestering him to let me hold the rod. For all my seven years, I never saw him catch a shark, though he told me he used to catch three or four a day when he was a boy. Too many people now, he'd say. Sometimes we'd swim while Dad relentlessly fished; he'd holler, Y'all scaring the sharks away. Finally, one afternoon I heard him holler I got him, boy!  And I looked up to see the fat rod finally bend double.

Dad backed in the dunes halfway to the road to land the shark, and the family tried to tug on the monofilament to help.  It was a big shark.  I watched in delicious horror as the line snapped with the dream monster right at the beach, and the Gulf from that moment was changed by the shark it took back. It was no longer trustworthy.

When I was very small the only building at the crossroad down the beach was a general store called Romeo's. But each summer brought a new attraction, a Goofy Golf or a water-bike ride at Posey’s or trampoline place or baseball batting range. The centerpiece of this adolescent mecca was called The Hang Out, an archetypally American beach-teen-surfer-dance place. We would go there and look wistfully at girls. They did the Monkey with big farm boys who did the Dirty Dog.

By 1979, Gulf Shores had changed.  Gone were the wild dunes of Zeke's homestead. The city limit crept yearly out and enclosed Sand Castle in a commercial zone. Hurricane Frederic seemed a biblical and logical response.

The first cousins in had to hike the last two miles — the beach road no longer existed. And Sand Castle, true at last to its name, was erased from the beach. A tornado must have whipped through, they said.  Not a piling, not even a dune remained.

A few days later I came out and dug a rusted lamp from the smooth beach. The Gulf lolled gray and innocent, yet somewhere strewn in its currents with debris from a thousand other families, I could imagine our own willow rockers, each rolling away in the pull of the Gulf Stream.

I remembered the last week I spent at Sand Castle three months earlier. In Mobile my father was eight days from dying a long and bad death, and I was having a tough time holding on. So I started fixing things. I rehung the broken door of the boys' room down below and tied a cowbell in the wind. I glued a pentagon of small starfish on the lintel of the central doorway. When I came back to Mobile, I was patched and fixed, like Sand Castle, and able to close calmly my father's eyes when he died at home the next day.

But when I stood on the beach where Sand Castle was not, I saw in the Gulf's purity of destruction the expression I'd wanted to give to my father, and for the first time since his death, I cried hard tears. I was being healed in the sure and good place kept where Sand Castle stayed.