In the Moon Page 8

  After the participants had spent two hours in intense artistic endeavor, a warning whistle blew, announcing that there were now fifteen minutes left for applying the finishing touches. When the quarter-hour was up, a second whistle sounded, the signal for contestants and spectators to withdraw so that the judges would have no way of knowing who had done any given work. The judges then ruminated before each piece of art, made notes on clipboards, and argued excitedly among themselves before making their final decision.

  In one of these contests, my panneau decoratif won—not just for the best panneau in my age group—but for the best overall, covering all age groups including adults. (I’m sure that allowances were made for age in this award.) A press photographer took my picture, using a flashgun even though I was in broad daylight. In my eyes, the flashgun in itself added immeasurable prestige and importance to the event. I stood beside my panel which depicted two squirrels sitting on their haunches. They were facing each other on a branch, each was holding a teacup in its forepaws, and the two were apparently having a conversation.

  The panel was entitled “Le Gouté Chez Les Ecureuils” (“Teatime at the Squirrels’ House”). My bas-relief sand sculpture had been inspired by an illustration in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. I used brown seaweed to create the effect of rough tree bark and bright green seaweed to suggest the surrounding foliage. I had recruited Raimond to help me carry several buckets of seaweed in preparation for adding these details. The saucers the squirrels held were portrayed with flat cuttlefish bones and the cups with desiccated crab shells. A bent crab claw formed the handle on each cup. The squirrels’ eyes were represented by small, black sea-snails, their whiskers by fine dune grass, and they both sported bushy tails made of coarser dune grass.

  My proportions, someone pointed out, were a bit off, which probably explains why some spectators asked me, “Well, well, well! What sort of animals have we here?” They obviously had not taken the trouble to read the title, which a member of the beach club staff had neatly written out for me in the sand. The title said it all and caused most viewers to laugh heartily when they read it.

  Mother commented that my real inspiration had been the creation of the only entry to depart from the heavily repeated beach, marine or nautical themes from which the judges probably suffered an indigestion, as she put it. Of course, she added diplomatically, my work also had artistic merit in its own right.

  The next day, on the back page of the newspaper there was a picture of me in my bathing suit, wearing a jaunty sailor hat, standing proudly behind my masterpiece and holding my prize, which was a large box of colored pencils. Below the photograph, the caption read, Jeune artiste fuit l’ambiance de la plage (Young artist shuns the beach ambiance). The caption surprised me as I had not been aware of having had such a goal or frame of mind. If anything, I embraced and adored the beach ambiance. This journalistic falsehood didn’t stop me from basking briefly in my celebrity status, to the despair of Father who, predictably, thought it was giving me a swelled head. Indeed, all this publicity imbued me with the notion that I was now world famous, at least in the realm of sand sculpture. I was soon disappointed to discover that no one read newspapers at seaside resorts and that I was doomed to continue my visits to public places totally unnoticed.

  The beach was unusual compared to most beaches I have seen in other parts of the world. It was extremely wide with very little slope to it, so that at low tide the water receded over half a mile, leaving a vast expanse of hard, fine-grained wet sand. This expanse was interspersed with numerous flaques (tide pools). The pools varied greatly in size, depth, and position on the beach from one low tide to the next. Most pools were only a few inches deep, but a few were as much as several feet deep. Some were just small ponds, thirty feet across and a few inches deep, while others were occasionally half a mile in length and two hundred feet wide. The pools were formed during high tide by the strong currents of the English Channel, which churned and shifted the sandbars and carved low spots that became tide pools.

  The idiosyncrasies of the flaques could make the beach dangerous to people unfamiliar with them. A cautionary tale doing the rounds and repeated to all newcomers was about a tragic incident that had occurred about ten years before I played there.

  Young boys at a summer camp for the underprivileged had been brought to Hardelot for a beach outing. A convent in Lille, a large city some hundred miles inland, had organized the trip. The group had taken an early morning train to Boulogne, where they had transferred to the pale yellow trolley that pulled into Hardelot around twelve thirty. It was a hot, windless day, and the twenty children were anxious to get to the water’s edge.

  Led by three nuns in full black habit, complete with white wimples, the boys headed out across that wide, flat beach at a time when all of Hardelot’s residents, including the lifeguards, had gone home for lunch. No one ever swam or stayed on the beach during the two-hour lunch hiatus that was, after all, one of the most important events of the day.

  The nuns and their charges dodged their way through a maze of flaques, and finally, after numerous course zigzags executed to keep their street shoes dry, reached the edge of the sea. The kids removed their shoes, waded into the calm sea and splashed about happily while the nuns watched anxiously from shore, occasionally calling out to those who waded out too far. The children had worn their Sunday best (young boys always wore short pants in those days) and none of them was wearing, or even owned, a bathing suit.

  The nuns stayed on the shore and were probably unaware that to keep their own shoes dry, they were occasionally, but steadily being forced to step backwards. After about an hour, one of the nuns noticed that the group was stranded on a long, narrow sandbar that had been turned into an island by the rising tide. They immediately called the children together and decided to march them across the two hundred feet of shallow water that was now separating them from the rest of the beach. They attempted this crossing but turned back when the water became knee-deep. The nuns hoped that if they walked farther along the island they might find a shallower crossing place.

  They made several tries at crossing, but balked on each attempt, returning to the sand bar island whenever the water’s depth threatened to wet their clothes. None of the children nor any of the nuns could swim, so they feared advancing into deeper water. If they had persevered in their early attempts, they might well have achieved a safe crossing by wading through water up to the waists of the smaller boys.

  In the meantime, the tide was rising fast, and the span of water they had to cross kept growing wider and deeper. The group was now in considerable disarray and in a state of panic. In the end, some of the older children and one of the nuns worked up the courage to brave a water depth that came to their armpits and crossed safely, but sixteen children and two of the nuns drowned. The wailing and hysterical survivors stumbled back to the dry sand zone near the digue just as the more energetic residents of Hardelot were returning from a six-course lunch.

  Father confirmed this horrific story, which had been in all the Paris papers. He remembered it well because he was familiar with Hardelot, though he and Suzy had not been summering there at the time. A newspaper article had said that none of the children nor any of the nuns had ever been to a beach before. When asked if she knew about the tide, the nun who had survived said that she had heard of the term but had no idea what a tide was. At that time in France, going to the seaside for recreation was practiced mostly by the wealthy and was still a relatively new phenomenon.

  The fact that this incident occurred does not mean that the beach at Hardelot was seriously dangerous. The accident happened where most people didn’t usually swim. People were deterred from swimming at low tide by the long walk required to reach the water’s edge. And once they reached the water’s edge, they had to wade another quarter mile before the water was deep enough for swimming. Rather than walk so far, swimmers waited until it
was about high tide, when the sea was a mere hundred feet from the row of cabins, and the tide pools were completely obliterated. If, through inattention, someone found himself out on a sandbar island formed by the rising tide, and were willing to wade or, in rare cases, swim a short distance, he would easily reach a safer part of the beach.

  Unusual conditions had played a key role in causing this extraordinary tragedy. It was one of the hottest days of the year, so the children were impatient to reach the water’s edge. An exceptionally low tide coincided with a time when the lifeguards were off duty and the beach was completely deserted. These factors and the ignorance and helplessness of the nuns all combined to bring on the disaster.

  But low tides and tide pools also provided all kinds of fun. The flaques that remained at low tide were home to a huge population of small shrimp and crabs. The local bazar (general store) sold special nets with which to catch the little creatures. These semicircular shrimp nets had a straight edge formed by a beveled board. This sharp-edged board “chiseled” a thin layer of sand from the bottom of the tide pool as the shrimper pushed the board along by means of a pole fixed at its center. The shrimp and some of the fine sand beneath which they hid were lifted by the chisel board and passed into the netting that trailed behind the board. The collected sand passed through the netting, leaving the shrimp caught in the net. A semicircular hoop attached to the ends of the chisel board (and to the push handle at its center) held the net open. At the bazar, they sold nets in a wide assortment of sizes, so that everyone could savor the primal thrill of the hunt, from the tiniest toddler to the largest of adults.

  The shrimp were abundant and were caught on a much larger scale by professional shrimpers, who usually filled their baskets by nine in the morning. Then, with their bushel-sized baskets heavily loaded with thousands of shrimp, they boarded the pale yellow trolley back to Boulogne. There, the shrimp were packed in crushed ice and shipped by rail to fish markets in all the major cities of France. These little gray shrimp were delicate and clean tasting, with shells so thin that people usually ate the whole tail without removing the shell. Shell removal was a tedious process performed only on the biggest shrimp whose shells had grown thick enough to be unpalatable. At the time, I was convinced that my tummy converted the tiny shrimp shells directly into fingernails and wondered how people who didn’t eat shrimp managed to have any fingernails at all.

  The professional shrimpers were middle-aged women; they wore rough, ankle-length denim skirts that dragged in the shallow tide pools. The women worked barefoot and used shrimp nets four feet wide. They pushed the big nets from one end of a long tide pool to the other, then lifted a net so full of shrimp that it often took the women ten minutes to round up their catch and toss the shrimp into a basket left on the beach nearby. To keep the shrimp from escaping when the basket was nearly full, the fisher-women covered them with wet seaweed which also kept them alive and fresh. Uncovered, the shrimp could jump out by flicking their tails.

  On days when the professional shrimpers hadn’t already fished the flaques in the early morning, I pushed my own tiny ten-inch-wide shrimp net across the tide pools in a state of high-pitched excitement at the prospect of a catch. Standing in a six-inch-deep tide pool, I could barely make out the shrimp six to ten feet from me as they darted around the flaque in search of food. When I moved closer to them, the shrimp quickly vanished, propelling themselves backwards into the sand by a flick of their tails. All I had to do was to push my net across the place where I had seen them disappear and lift the net to find them skipping frantically on the netting, sometimes as many as half a dozen of them when I was lucky.

  Net in hand, I then ran back to my sand pail at the water’s edge. A small skirmish would ensue between me and the three or four shrimp I had caught. They were jumping and skipping all around my net, attempting to escape. Many of them succeeded and disappeared quickly into the damp sand before I could recapture them. Because the bigger shrimp were usually the successful escapees, my catch consisted mostly of the tiniest ones. Instead of seaweed to keep them fresh, I kept my pail full of seawater and added some sand, which settled to the bottom and was intended to make them feel more at home.

  After a satisfying hour of shrimping, I scampered home with water from the full pail slopping down the side of my leg. Françoise, always happy to cook anything, greeted me with enthusiasm. Some thirty to fifty of these minuscule morsels were served on a small side dish beside my main course at lunch. I would then ceremoniously bestow the larger ones to various guests, who accepted them graciously.

  The miraculous aspect of this sport was that each high tide replenished the supply of shrimp, and their abundance never seemed to diminish as the season wore on, or from one year to the next.

  The sand in Hardelot was ideal for building sand castles because it was extremely fine and stuck together nicely when wet and compacted. The damp sand lent itself well to carving with a toy spade or trowel, and older, more sophisticated kids (and quite a few adults) built elaborate sand sculptures and finely detailed edifices.

  The best place for building a sand castle was beside a tide pool. There, I could dig canals or moats around the castle, complete with bridges made from driftwood. I usually carried a small toy car along with my trusty spade and sand pail as I set out for the beach, so I could “drive” my car over the bridges, then through tunnels into the courtyards of my castle. Sometimes, a friend’s toy boat would come steaming up my canal to pay me a visit.

  The best fun of all was the building of dams. I, or one of my friends, ran around the beach at low tide looking for other boys interested in building one. It took a large team of enthusiastic workers for the dam to be successful. Since the beach at low tide was well populated by kids building castles, shrimping, or playing with toy sailboats in the tide pools, it wasn’t too hard to assemble a good group of workers.

  The first stage of dam building was to create a fast-flowing stream by digging a canal linking a decent-sized pool higher up the beach to a pool at a lower level. This canal sometimes stretched as much as a hundred yards in length; a canal of this length was possible because dam building volunteers were usually numerous, and the canal was initially just a few inches wide. The upper pool had to be large enough so that a sustained flow of fast-moving water soon traveled down the canal, widening it by erosion.

  Once started, the flow in the canal grew surprisingly fast and could create havoc. Tide pools the size of a football field could be drained in less than half an hour, leaving a desolate landscape of castles with dry moats, bridges over rivers and canals that were no longer there, and Lord knows how many little shrimp homeless and destitute. Sand castles along the edges of the lower pool were threatened by a danger of the opposite sort: rising water levels caused flooded castle courtyards, put drawbridges under water or caused them to float away. An unexpected rise in water level could also cause mothers and governesses, deep in conversation or engrossed in a novel as they sat in “sand-chairs” nearby, to find themselves, mysteriously, sitting in two inches of water.

  When this crisis was imminent, the real challenge was upon us. Immediate action was essential to avert the impending catastrophe just described, and the cry went out for more help. Other kids on the beach gladly joined in the heroic endeavor and were instantly converted into dedicated dam builders.

  We dug furiously, building two high mounds of sand on opposite sides of the rapidly flowing canal that had grown to a width of about three feet. When the dam builder in charge deemed the piles of sand high enough, he gave the signal for both teams simultaneously to push their mounds into the raging torrent. This action stopped the flow and gave us time to do some fast digging to build levees (dam extensions) on each side of the temporary plug.

  The thrill of the game was to see if we could extend and raise the levees outward on each side of the original plug and stay abreast of the rising water level behind what was now officially le
barrage (the dam). When the team was large and experienced, the water depth behind our dam sometimes reached two feet and the outward extensions could be twenty feet long on each side of the plug. The whole enterprise usually took on the shape of a horseshoe.

  We never won this valiant battle against the forces of nature. Eventually, the water behind the dam rippled over the crest of our levee construction work and triggered a spectacular dam rupture. The water raced through the ever-widening gap in far more copious flow than before the plug had been pushed into the canal. Anyone in the vicinity of the lower tide pool now really had to scramble to avoid the arriving tidal wave. By this stage, however, the morning was usually spent; the noon dinner bell was sounding. We knew there was more important business at hand; we had to leave the little shrimp of the upper pool to fend for themselves and find new homes in the lower pool.

  Because the wet sand of the beach at low tide presented such a hard, smooth, flat surface, beachgoers had fun out there with various wheeled vehicles. Many people carried their bicycles over the strip of dry sand near the seawall and, once on the hard, damp surface, rode them great distances, sometimes in organized races.

  Tweet occasionally took me out to the farthest reaches of the beach at low tide where we had a grandstand view of sand yacht races. The events were conducted on this remote stretch of the beach so that the speeding craft would not endanger the mob of children playing on the rest of the beach.

  A sand yacht is simplicity itself, consisting of a light wood frame, three wheels, two seats, a steering wheel, a stayed mast, and a triangular sail with a boom. The frame consists of two main beams which cross, giving it roughly the shape and proportions of a crucifix. The two steerable front wheels are placed at the ends of the shorter crossbeam, and a single wheel trails at the tail end of the longer beam. The mast stands where the two beams cross. The two rudimentary canvas “bucket seats” and footrests are mounted, one on each side, at the aft end of the longer beam, near the back wheel. And because a sand yacht has no brakes, a rubber-bulbed klaxon (horn) is essential to warn beach strollers of the sand yacht’s silent, fast, and unstoppable approach.