By Barry WallaceWhen the wind blew around the beach cottages, the old shacks whistled and moaned and complained about the change in the weather. Empty of their summer visitors, they stood like haunted houses guarding the family ghosts up in the attic where the tintype albums were stored in a steamer chest. The winds became raw and blustery there in the fall and winter. The pebbly shores, empty shells and skeletons of various marine life told stories older than time. The breezes had the same elemental power as the ocean. They not only breathed across land and sea, they also breathed into your soul.
I liked the feel of the wind. Sometimes it was so strong it could suddenly flip your hat and send it sailing over the wooden bulkhead into the waves. On the windiest days, it could pick you up, too, and move you like a figure on a chessboard. The wind had its own song and its own meaning. As a boy, I didn't have much of a clue as to what the meaning was then. It had something to do with beauty and time and timelessness. The voice of the wind fills the ears of a child. I knew it was speaking to me, whispering in my ear, then shouting from the rooftops. The wind at the beach was so dense you could almost see it. We watched the way it scudded across the water pressing against the waves and pushing the whitecaps in wild squalls. It raised sheets of sand twisting and turning like dust devils and carved the gnarled beach plum trees that stood defiantly against it. It rattled the windows of the cottages, hurled screen doors open and slammed them shut, and drove every loose thing racing in every direction. Some of the winds were warm and some cold enough to sting your face and hands. It herded clouds like horses across the sky over the water, and it blew rain and snow down on us as we were working outside.
We put the cottages to bed for the winter in October. This was the season to board up the windows against shattering in storms and to keep intruders from breaking into the houses. Each window had a wooden "blind" specifically sized to fit it. The blinds were marked with pencil indicating the position where each belonged. Grandma Mal couldn't always recall what she had written before, so there was usually a considerable amount of spirited discussion with some cussing added as to what her directions really meant. After a bit of trial and error, we managed to cover every window. It was all of a day's work to batten down the hatches for winter protection.
A fall day at Pine Creek was like a three-ring circus, and the winds were the ringmaster. The day could change from absolute calm to wild windy gusts in a matter of minutes. It came right off the sound and slammed into the cottages full force. You could hear it lifting and cracking the wooden shingles and sometimes tossing them over its shoulder. A spray of sand lifted with it and blew into your face and hair, down your shirt and right into your shoes. This was the fun part. The hard part was trying to carry a ten-pound wooden blind across the yard and up a ladder as the wind was blowing. My father waited at the top for us to reach him.
Lifting the blinds to my father required some effort and I like to test my strength. I felt the strain in my arms and shoulders as I pushed the heavy wooden cover up to him, but I wasn't going to let go and look weak in front of him. When you were up two stories, the gusts got under the blind and you became airborne. It was like trying to hold on to a giant kite. I remember clinging on during one short flight, gliding through the air and landing about 10 yards away. Picking myself up out of the sand, I thought I had done something daring but my father said, "Why didn't you just let go, Bare? You could hurt yourself that way."
I measured myself against those breezes in the simple joy of childhood. I had no formal nautical knowledge of the wind, but I knew each one of them by their force and feel and smell. They could calm you like a mother's touch, throw sand in your face like a bully and frolic like the kids on the beach. There were belligerent blasts that could put the fear in you that you might be swept over the jetty and lost in the chilly water. The beach could delight you or obliterate you that way -- make you feel like a child of God or devour you whole with its darker powers. But what better lessons were there about the earth's power, its rhythms and its essential goodness?
Life was perfect to me then. Everything that happened under the blue skies and the four winds was part of a greater purpose. The world was a series of hints and innuendoes about immortality. I sensed we were part of a fathomless scheme as I tried to peer through the blue skies and look beneath the water. Nothing I learned in philosophy ever spoke more eloquently about creation than those beach mornings on Long Island Sound. The scripture of nature was written in the wind.
The constant swirl and dance of the breezes was enchanting. I see now that I was schooled in wonder at an early age, fortunate beyond reckoning to have lived and worked at Pine Creek. Those winds became a part of my heart and soul. We spent hours at the beach doing family work, but it was really another education, both in life and nature that I received from the beach.
Three generations came together to work near the water and the winds blew over all of us and through us and around us. My robust Uncle Phil, eyes blue as marbles, standing straight and tall in his winter jacket and hat against the gusts; my Uncle Tom, all bluster and bravado himself, with his shock of white hair blown about in all directions; Grandma Mal and Aunt Jo wearing overcoats and kerchiefs as they went from house to house with their heads down; my father wearing a woolen Navy cap pulled down over his wavy red hair; old Bill Nitsche, chewing his plug of Tuck's tobacco with his railroad pocket watch secured in his vest; my hatless brothers and I with the open faces of innocent school children. These were our days under the sun.
I hadn't read Ecclesiastes yet, verses that tell us all life is vanity and a striving after wind. It wouldn't have occurred to me then that the wind was a symbol of futility and nothingness. For me it was the freshness of life and the grand passions that were as yet beyond the knowledge of a boy. As I am a grandfather turning 60 this October, I now know that the winds blow all things away. The beauty of life is like those Saturday mornings. The sky changes in shadow and light. Each day and each hour is a piece of eternity, and each of us under heaven is blowing in the ceaseless wind.
FROM FAIRFIELD CITIZEN 9/30/09 READ MORE:
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