I adjusted the contours of the wadded up paper towel one more time and finally got it right.  I was trying to stop a steady flow of rain water from entering the trailer where the bed rail track meets the door frame.  There has always been a small gap there, but it has never caused a leak before.  This time with a strong wind blowing a light but steady rain straight onto the front door, the water was dripping from the upper lip of the track, down onto the bench seat support inside the trailer.

The flow was just slow enough to separate into individual drops as it fell. Just a tiny bit faster and the water's cohesion qualities would transform the flow into a continuous column of water.

My paper towel “Dutch Boy” was acting more as a conduit than as a thumb in the dike.  Paper towels are not noted for being water repellent.  There was water flowing through and over the surface of the paper towel.  But the adhesion qualities of water made it flow along the towel back out the gap so that very little water was still getting into the trailer.

We arrived yesterday afternoon at Campsite B-11 of Assateague State Park and set up the trailer in the same strong wind.  So I knew which way it was blowing, but I wanted to have the view out the front picture window to be facing the gap in the dunes that allowed us to see the ocean waves crashing onto the shoreline.  From our dinning room table, we can see and hear the white caps curl over.

The thunderous crashing is slightly muted by the intervening hundred yards and the constant flapping of the trailer’s canvas and the clanking of its solid parts in northeast wind.

At 7:30 this morning, my little thermometer indicated 61 degrees.  I bundled up in my water resistant trail pants and my Gore-Tex jacket and walked over to the well built rest rooms.  I met a young man who said he had been camping here since Monday and has only seen the sun for a half hour.  But he seemed cheerful as he said it.

Later in the day, the rain stopped. The sky stayed cloudy, but Ann and I still grabbed the lawn chairs and walked over to the beach and sat in the breeze filled with microscopic beads of salt water.  We took turns watching the water birds and cleaning off our eyeglasses.  The sandpipers gave a particularly entertaining show.  With their long beaks probing the wet sand beneath the retreating backwash after a wave had come in, then using their skinny long legs to scamper out of the way of the next incoming wave. 

The breeze grabs bits of sea foam where the wave quits its assault on land, and sends the clump of lightweight sea nothing skittering across the smooth sand. The foam ball gets smaller and smaller as the bottom gets sanded away,  Then, suddenly, it is no more.

I walked north a hundred feet to see why an orange colored Nerf Ball was not blowing away.  Oh!  It’s a Nerf colored orange.

We were on the beach for an hour and only six people had walked past us.  As a lone jogger ran past us to the north, Ann gave up sitting in the cold damp breeze and headed back to the trailer.  I cleaned my glasses one more time and looked to the south along the beach and saw three people three hundred yards away walking toward me.  As they reached the area in front of me, the jogger came back and joined them.  They were the same group of four people I had seen earlier, and looking to the north I see the other two walking back.  So I still have only seen six other people on the beach all day.

But today was a gray cloudy, cool day.  Tomorrow's weather forecast is for upper seventies and partly cloudy, which means more like what normal beach bums enjoy.  The campground hostess told us that Friday night there are only seven campsites in the entire campground that are not reserved.  There are 350 camp sites in the State Park  Tomorrow's beach will be less private.  

8:30 am, Friday 06/18/1999

It is still cloudy and breezy, but more sunlight is penetrating the gray sky, although no sunbeams can be seen in any direction.  Maybe the hoards of beach goers will look out their homes and say, “Not a good day for the beach!” and cancel their reservations.

I got up before Ann and took a walk on the beach looking for shells.  I collected a few along with some interesting stones and a piece of coral on the hour stroll.  One oyster shell that I grabbed was not particularly pretty, but it had five radial fingers sticking out of its two inch wide fan.  It looked very much like a small mammal’s foot.  I used it to make impressions in the wet sand up from the surf, flipping it over on alternate pressings to look like some five toed creature walked on two legs out of the sea up to the dunes.

The deception lacked reality because my foot prints in the sand paralleled the “creature” prints, my left foot on one side, my right foot on the other.  So I walked back over my foot steps with both feet to look like I was just investigating the creature’s foot prints.

I returned to the trailer to join Ann who was just waking up.  She asked me. “What makes a sound like Skraack, Skraack?”  I listened and heard it, too.  It turned out to be the camp ground hostess using a shovel to remove the drifted sand from the pavement on the adjacent campsite, which had been vacant since we arrived.  There was so much sand deposited on the site that there was not enough room to park a car.  After a while she realized that there was just too much sand for her to move with a simple hand shovel.

Ann and I decided that a day on the beach was in order.  The breeze was still blowing, but it did not have the droplets of dampness that chilled the air yesterday. We gathered up the lawn chairs, the drywall bucket of sand castle building tools, and suntan goo, and headed across the gap in the dunes. 

By that time there were definite signs of the sun reappearing, such as the fact that we had shadows.  There were also more people on the beach, but not enough to make us have to search for a space.

After slathering sun protection on exposed skin, I started building a sand castle.  First step, create a pile of sand that will take two hours to sculpt. I thought I would be clever and get a drywall bucket full of damp sand from down at the water’s edge.  Using a Frisbee as a shovel, I quickly filled the five gallon container. 

I discovered even quicker that I could not lift it.  So I could not transport it up to the chairs where I wanted to build the castle and building a sand castle in the surging surf is a dumb futile effort.  So I dumped the wet sand and filled the bucket with salt water.  That I could carry up to the chairs and use to moisten the sand as needed to help it hold a shape.

Every sand castle is different and each one needs inspiration in the mind of the builder.  This time, the inspiration came from a four foot long 2x4 piece of drift wood laying nearby.  I placed one end of the board on the top of my pile of sand, and the other end into the level sand in front of the pile.  This created a bridge-ramp entrance to the top of what in my mind was now mountain top fortress.

The bare finished wood of the 2x4 seemed to ruin the illusion, so I used dribble art to conceal the entire top and sides of the plank.  Then I used the squared off handle end of a plastic spoon to dig a meandering half inch wide path up the entire length of the ramp.  Suddenly the scale of the castle was clear.  Imaginary stone masons began to build walls, platforms, windows, doorways, stairways and turrets all around the top of the mountain fortress.  Engineers began to blast and cut away the sloped sides of the mountain, turning them into huge vertical cliffs all around the mountain, leaving the ramp as the only way in and out of the fortress.  At last a market square was built at the bottom of the ramp allowing free commerce with visiting friendly caravans and the local population.

Ann had picked up on the scale and developed a nearby village with homes and barns and plowed fields.  Citizen families would know that if the pillaging nomads approached, they could quickly move up the ramp to the fortress and wait out the marauders who would not dare risk the losses of a prolonged attack through that long narrow twisting passage up the bridge ramp.

Ann went back to the trailer and fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us and we ate in our chairs listening to the bird calls and surf, which was louder than any noise being created by the few neighbors on the beach. 

Somewhere in that rejuvenating beach time another sound did penetrate our attention, the sound of a large diesel engine just over the dune in the camp ground area.  A front end loader had been called in to dig out the sand in the campsite next to ours that the lady with the shovel had found too challenging.  It took many of those giant scoops full of sand to make the site usable, and the operator was having fun finding creative ways to disperse the sand where it would be useful.  Some was dumped on top of the protective dunes.  Some was spread out over low spots in the campground. 

Thoughts came to my mind of a toy that I once coveted, a remote controlled model of this very piece of heavy equipment.  What a wondrous toy it would have been in a sandbox.  I don’t know if I coveted it when I was a little boy, or if I coveted it while I was a daddy of young children.  I does not matter when.

Some time after lunch, Ann said that this has been a wonderful trip, her first camping trip at the beach.  She indicated that it can’t get any better than this and she wanted her memory of this trip to have an ending with the same wonderful privacy and solitude that we were still enjoying.  The beach was still not crowded.  She did not want to have the last event be the raucous din of Friday night’s yahoos with their loud radios and generators or Saturday morning’s yelling and screaming kids.  So we packed up camp and departed for home at about 2::30 in the afternoon, missing the onrush of weekend campers arriving after work for the predicted sunny Saturday. 

We stopped at the campground registration building and asked how soon we could reserve a site for next year.  The good news is that you can reserve up to a year ahead of time.  As soon as we look at Ann’s school calendar for next year, we will know when her summer vacation begins and will probably reserve a Sunday through Thursday night early next June.

It was a good trip.

                        Bob Kuhns