OCEAN
II
daddy's toes, and throw it into your brother's eyes and pick it out
of your belly-button; but also, down by the water's edge, when the
tide was low, you could dig pits and pools and caves and caverns
in the sand, you could build bridges, moats, canals, towers, temples,
castles, kingdoms in the sand.
As
a matter of fact, Stephen Wolfe had quite a reputation for
his sand creations on the Seaside public beach. Grown-ups and
children alike admired his patience and imagination, and stood
enthralled while Stephen patty-caked pies and cones and domes in
the sand, let the sand drip from his fingers like ' paraffin, creating
pagodas and minarets, mounded an moulded the sand into Pueblo
huts and Moroccan hovels, amassed great piles of sand and made
them into ziggurats, sliced through others with a stave from an
orange-crate and produced Assyrian palaces, Egyptian pyramids
and Rockefeller Center, transformed the stave into London Bridge,
scooped out giant reservoirs and filled them with water piped from
the sea, engineered a system of canals and water-ways through a
city the size of Bruges, and spent entire days reconstructing Babylon,
Jerusalem and Carcassonne.
And yet, no matter how arduously he labored, how deep he dug
his moats, how high he flung his bulwarks, how much he reinforced
his walls, at some point in the night the sea came in and stole
his
castles from him. At first Stephen had thought Daddy was the
culprit, and then he decided that it was Roggie who sneaked down
to the beach and trampled his creations, until one day Clarry made
it clear to him. "There's a war goin' on between them two-between
the ocean and the land. Has been since the beginnin' of creation.
That old ocean's on the warpath 'cause it come first and the land
come after. It jealous now 'cause the land is so much larger. Jealous
'cause the land has got itself collected-sittin' cool and pretty–
while's the ocean, it always on the go, restless and rampagin'. Sort
of like the difference between a man and woman. Yes sir," Clarry
chuckled, "that what it remind
me
of: the natural, born-in difference
between a man and woman. Why that old ocean's like a starvin'
animal, lappin' at the land. Ain't nothin' gonna satisfy it 'til it's
licked us all way." Stephen agreed. The trouble with the ocean–
its only drawback-was that it wanted to gobble up everything in
sight. But on the other hand, it gave things back.
It
gave back all
