1966 - 2,264
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It takes us to church. Pacing the swells until it works itself into a fury and then the hand of god strikes the coast, pounding the shore demanding that this time we listen to the sermon. There's Armageddon in the breakers, fire and brimstone in the wind. The coastline prostrates itself before the billowing rain and spray.
The structures dot the coast. Some stilted. Some hanging off a cliff. Others behind massive seawalls. Heroic signs that this is where a man has chosen to dig in and take a stand. That this is the edge.
Snake got a job house-sitting. Or as he called himself - a caretaker. It was a house out on a small promontory of land surrounded by water. A modest house, feigning humility standing alone on the point. A bit of lawn between the house and sea for disquise as if the structure could pass as one of its inland brethren.
I first noticed the house when I was a kid who made castles in the sand, when I knew the power of the waxing tide. I liked the idea of a mote and would carve out the sand to fill the depression with water but I had no expectations concerning any of my architectural efforts. If I returned later in the day, it was only out of curiosity to see the eroded walls rounded by the moving tide. An intact structure would not have occupied my imagination. A spire here, a lump of a wall there, was the sum of my expectations.
Snake's troubles began almost immediately. A late summer squall scoured the protective sand from the beach. The two-foot rock abutment facing the ocean was destroyed. Another swell began to eat away at the adorable little green mask of suburbia. The grass held its own but its brown tips indicated that it had been badly shaken.
Snake got on the phone to Damon's old man who was a contractor of some kind and knew people in the building trades. Snake was put in touch with an expert on civil engineering. He was visibly anxious waiting for the jobber and when the man appeared on the lawn he burst out the door. We followed at a respectable distance.
The man stood surveying the tract. "You can save this property, Mac, but we've got to act quickly."
The sea was relatively calm but it only underscored the necessity for action. We've all known days when you go out in the morning and see the sun burst off the hood of your car, you spend half a day at work and when you head out for lunch you have to run to your parking place dodging the rain beating on your head. With that same speed, storm surf can come in over the horizon.
"It'll take a morning's work of piling sand. I can bring the dozer in here next week some time. You just say the word, Mac." The man placed the decision squarely in Snake's direction by attaching his gaze to him.
Snake tied his fate to the suggestion, "I've got to get confirmation from the owners but let's go ahead and schedule it."
Damon got a sniff of the action from his old man and he was quickly giving Snake his regards. "Do you know anything about these guys? I know you don't know what you're doing, so don't you think maybe somebody should?"
"Just because you're holding nails so someone else doesn't risk pounding their own fingers makes you an expert I suppose," Snake responded.
Both were verbally cutting at each other and it was doing nothing but threatening to leave scars. "I've heard some of these contractors are incompetent and as slippery as moss covered rocks."
"They're all I've got so I'm using them. Besides I don't have time to waste second guessing."
“Mac” showed up with the bulldozer early in the morning and herded the sand into a ten foot berm.
The surf hit from a northerly angle and outflanked the big berm. Once behind the lines it caught the pile in a cross-fire and wore it away. Snake was back on the phone to Damon's father looking for consolation and reassurance.
"Call in the steam shovels and blasting caps," Damon was calling through his father's ears to Snake hanging on the line. His comments were not appreciated.
"At least he's doing something constructive. Doing something to try and save someone's home." Damon's old man was in a huff as usual.
"They don't live there," Damon countered. The home had been built by an absentee Frenchman and his wife who had sold it to the General who was intent on keeping it in their family even if they were also often absent from the premises.
"So what, it's still a home. Don't they have a right to protect it?"
"Sure, bring in the graders, the earth movers, the dump trunks. Let's drain the ocean."
"If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. At least he's doing something."
And he was about to do something more. The next proffer was to build a breakwater using huge boulders. It was a costly proposition and once in place, those big rocks would be a presence on the beach for some time.
"Snake, shouldn't you get another opinion? Maybe someone can come up with another idea." We could tell Rallio didn't like the idea of the beach being so dramatically altered.
"They've entrusted their property to me, I'm not going to see it destroyed on my watch."
Damon was helping to remodel old but potentially expensive properties. It wasn't exactly the same kind of construction work as what was needed to shore up Snake's property; it was mostly interior work. The company he worked for did high-end cabinetry, window and door replacements, and restoration of period houses. Their appraisal skills in evaluating the integrity of old structures were by necessity highly developed. Damon cleaned up after the journeymen but he was sometimes allowed to do incidental work. Ordinarily he'd have let Snake drown before he reeled him in but perhaps because he was in the trades or he was feeling benevolent or he was trying to prove to Snake his value or for some other unknown reason, he had decided to become involved. "What if I bring my boss over to take a look? Maybe he's seen something like it before."
Damon's employer, Matt Ridgeway, passed by on his way to his day's work. He spent over an hour patrolling the grounds around the house, using a pocketknife to dig at the eaves and windowsills, shining a big flashlight in the crawl space under the house, and probing at the walls.
"I don't think the house is worth the trouble. It's rotten from the floorboards up. You wanna paste some storm windows up and see how long they hold, that may be a good low cost gamble. Any more, and you're flushing money into the cesspool."
Snake asked a few questions to ascertain Ridgeway’s certainty and then thanked him.
An expeditionary force hit the beach. They came in on massive trucks marked with their company logo, an oversized hat on a small cowboy. The deep rumble of the engines punctuated their arrival. It was not a time for jellyfish nerves and Snake and his advisors were as serious as great whites on the attack. When Snake had brought up the findings of Damon's employer the advisors had stomped all over his conclusions. "Draw the line in the sand," they said. "You can go ahead and call the owners and tell them their house is about to sit in three feet of water or you can tell them you've been earning your money by coming up with ways of saving their periled estate."
"So what's it going to be, Mac? We cave in and I turn the trucks around or we stop the destruction here and now?"
It was too easy.
I heard Damon tell Rallio, "Ridgeway says these guys have a sweet deal going. They can count to the grain how much sand it takes to fill their trucks and they know damn well they don't have enough trucks to fill up the ocean but that’s not going to stop them from selling you sand by the truckload."
Rallio wasn't as critical as Damon. Snake was his friend and he didn't want to challenge him or maybe he plain didn't care, at any rate, he remained noncommittal, neither approving nor disapproving.
Damon raised the point again with Snake. "How do you know the cement guy and the truckers and the contractors aren't holding back on you, getting their stories straight over breakfast."
"You're telling me they've got two stories, one for me and one for themselves? Bull shit. This is my deal. You don't like it, don't be here."
The boulders were configured into a breakwater.
The subsequent threat didn't come from the sea. It didn't come pounding over the boulders. It came pounding on the door.
"None of us like what's going on here. We live on the beach so that we can look out our windows and view the sea, not so that we can look out our windows and view rock." The neighbors were angry and it wasn't as if they didn't have a right to be upset. The breakwater was unsightly to say the least. The big boulders were the size of Volkswagens and the giant misshapen bodies were sunbathing within sight of the neighbors' bay windows.
Then the adjoining property owners to the south showed up. "You're stopping the flow of sand. The swells are going to come in and we'll have no protection." They argued that the sand acted as their gatekeeper against the waves that wrapped around the point and the sand was all being trapped behind the pile of rocks thus endangering their homes.
Snake had gotten it into his head, either from observation or from speculation, that the neighbors were too old to appreciate the beach. The beach scene contains a hierarchy of players. At the top are surfers; nothing below is significant. I suppose you could rank kneeboarders slightly above bellyboarders and bellyboarders slightly above bodysurfers and bodysurfers far above sunbathers, but to me it doesn't matter. There's surfers and then there's everyone else. Bellyboarders, kneeboarders, and bodysurfers are lower life forms. This is not opinion, it is fact, ask any surfer. As a rule, bellyboarders, kneeboarders, and body surfers don't belong anywhere near a real break and certainly not out in front of a surfer when he's on a wave. Their down low at board level with their face sticking out so that a well-timed cutback or a quick bottom turn feeds them their lunch in the form of a foam and glass sandwich. These cretins are like non-entities. Worse than non- entities because they take parking that rightfully belongs to surfers. However, it is somewhat of a stretch to say that just because a person doesn't surf their houses should be swamped.
Damon and I were standing at the water's edge while Snake mulled around the sand above the tide mark when the solution hit me. It didn't come all at once, more like a creeping tide inch by inch until it arrived all wet and sticky on my brain. "Snake, come on over here it's been staring us in the face and we didn't see it." He slowly walked over to where I was bent down over the tidepool with my hand below the surface. I could sense the skepticism on his face so I knew I had to make it good.
"Notice how the water rises and falls as I move my hand." I looked up for effect. Both he and Damon were silent. "I move to the left and the water runs over the rocks, back again and it overflows again."
"Yeh, yeh, I get the picture. So what?"
"I'm getting to it. It's this constant undercurrent that is the problem. The implementation is up to you but I think I've found the solution. You've got to keep the fish from moving around so much, they're making waves."
He didn't say anything. He just turned and walked back to where he was before. His response took some of the edge off my delivery but I couldn't help but continue, "You try to help out, make a few suggestions, and what do you get? Well, others have gone before me with ideas that were scoffed at and then accepted." I pursued it no further.
Snake was back on the phone with the owners of the property. I'm sure at first they considered Snake a young whelp with the smell of milk still on his breath. Advice from him must have seemed awfully presumptuous until they realized that they had a young aggressive bull doing what was necessary to protect his territory from any incursion. Snake was proposing a massive reinforced sea wall. "We can beat this," I overheard Snake tell the landlords. He was in it for the count. If there was any doubt in his mind, it didn't show in his voice.
Snake was a surprise to me. And as the concrete was poured and the wall erected my awe rose along with it. It was the first occasion I saw one of us acting on the same level as an adult. Sure we confronted adults but mostly as adversaries or flea bites. Snake was acting differently. He was directing, procuring, organizing, and determining. And he was doing it very well. He was all business as he went about drawing out the plans for the defense. It was true he had the authority of resources behind him but he used it to its best advantage. He was firm with the contractors but not impertinent. When it all fell apart no one could have blamed Snake.
The strategy that was conceived had proved itself in other arenas. Nevermind that those places bore no resemblance to the area where the house rested. You go with what you know. You play to your strengths. The planners had decided to bring as much concrete to bear on the tract as possible. An enormous seawall was erected. And it held for some time. But the tenuousness of the position was always present and the wall began to erode at the foundation. Nothing could shore it up since the very base of the wall was never on solid footing. Then, during an astronomical high tide, a big swell began to float the large boulders against the seawall. When the storm continued into the next day, it was all over for the pulverized wall. And once flooded, the rotten house quickly abdicated.
Word had it that the contractors were haunted by the specter of the doomed house. But no one ever saw their ragged and tattered selves drunk in the city streets. They never had to skip a meal or find a place to sleep. Ridgeway had met Mac in a bar once and he relayed the experience to Damon. Mac had said "Perhaps I overstated the case." Damon said, "You mean they lied." Ridgeway wouldn't say they weren't honest. Maybe he didn't want to admit the elemental truth to an underling because it might call into question the integrity of the profession from which he took his livelihood.
Evil was not let loose by the rise of the sea. It is always among us waiting to take shape. Be it blackguard or fascist or profiteer or men of government it will find the form that most ingratiates and masters. The sea was not the villain. It was a process and as a process it had to be played out. Not that the results were inevitable, but resistance that was formulated and encouraged by those who had calculated that it was bound to fail and who bore none of the cost, was criminal.
The house was lost from the get-go. Its foundation was weak and corrupt and built on sand. The war took place on the sea's turf. No amount of mortar could match the amount of water waiting to invade the coast. The wall got higher and the ocean seemed to recede so there was an illusion of a crossover point, a point where the wall would be too much for the endurance of the sea. It was an illusion fostered by the contractors and when the storms came marching through if there was an admission at all, it was that the contractors too had been deluded.
The summer sun was turning red in the western sky and I was strolling along the beach with a girlfriend. I was intent on her and she was intent on me and we both liked it that way so I didn't notice much besides her and her attributes. We stepped around kids playing in the sand making molds with their buckets and shovels. We walked up and around a point where the houses were big and new and the seawalls rose over our heads so we couldn't stare inside at their first floors. I did not venture from the resolves I had for her and didn't sense the familiar traces of sand and the sea on the rise.