The Summer of 48: Operation Sandcastle

Some of my greatest childhood memories are about the terrific times I had under my grandmother's house on Sullivan's Island. My mother and I lived with my grandmother, and we would spend half the summer at her beach house every year. The house was raised about eight feet off the ground on pilings, as most old island homes are, and, to give a sense of privacy, the underhouse area was surrounded by a sort of fence, but the individual boards were spaced about 3" apart.

The underhouse was nothing but sand, except for a small pile of bricks at the west end and some intruding weeds at the edges. Of course, the sand was its most valuable attribute. Without it, I could not have built my forts, castles, bridges, and moats. There was a seemingly fathomless supply of it. I could dig to about four feet and it would still be there, but it would be damp; another foot and there would be mud. I often wondered: If I continued to dig, would the water suddenly gush up with the pressure of the Atlantic behind it and blast through the house, taking with it my grandmother and her card table full of canasta-playing cronies, not to mention a great quantity of my lead soldiers? Within a few hours the entire island, the soldiers and myself would disappear into the ocean, creating the Lowcountry's version of Atlantis and a tourist bonanza for years to come. Not willing to tempt fate, I never dug beyond the mud; there was no practical reason to, anyway, since I only had to dig about 8-10" to reach the layer that was compact enough to build with.

For purely malevolent reasons, my cousins once dug down about three feet in order to make a trap. The hole was wide enough for someone's leg and foot to go down in it. They then placed the thin, green slats from some old, discarded porch blinds over the top and covered this with sand, so it looked just like the rest of the underhouse. My three male cousins all knew where the trap was, as I did. Our parents never knew, but, then, they never ventured into this territory from the boring confines of their adult world anyway. I don't remember exactly who it was we planned to have topple in this perfidious puncture—thank God, we knew nothing of Punji stick then—but we all agreed not to tell their sister, Nancy, and I do recall their having lured her under the house, so perhaps she was the intended victim. Being the only girl in a family of four, eventually five, boys tends to predispose one to an uneven share of harassment.

The plan worked to perfection; unfortunately, Nancy broke her leg. I was not there when the reign of parental terror began, but I'm sure a severe punishment was meted out. However, I was innocent of any participation in this cowardly deed, though my being aware of it probably made me an accessory. Nevertheless, no one incriminated me, possibly fearing my infamous pyrotechnical talents (see "Burning Desire," Omnibus, June 1990).

Oh, there were happier experiences under the house, although this one was certainly not a complete fiasco. I mean, the trap worked just as we'd all hoped; there was just an unforeseen, disastrous complication. Did we learn a lesson from this? Of course. We learned that the traps should be dug on the beach where the chances were less that someone we were related to would fall into them. I also improved on the old model by suggesting that we build a castle on top of the hole (hidden now with sand-covered marsh sticks). This ensured that someone would fall into it, but not just some anonymous, child-hating, 60-year-old fat lady and her snapping Chihuahua. This would be one of those demented sand-geeks who came to the beach for no other apparent reason than to stomp on kids' castles. We cackled among ourselves—perhaps a bit too ghoulishly—as we envisioned the event.

But wait, this was insufficient; this fiend, this destroyer of children's art, this Nazi Beach Psycho deserved more than to just fall into a hole. We'd put a dead jellyfish and some dog dung into the hole. We even considered dropping in some broken bottles. My cousin David's supposition that someone could bleed to death and that we'd all be sent to some Dickensian prison convinced us that we should leave out the glass. My contention that all evil acts committed on Sullivan's Island would automatically be blamed on the Gerbilhead kids (see "Burning Desire," Omnibus, June 1990) was overruled.

This being August, it did not take us very long to find a dead jellyfish, since the beach was strewn with them this time of the summer. David's excited yell that he had found one occupied by maggots brought a simultaneous, "Yeah!" from all of us. We hacked it up a little bit with sticks so the victim would experience the essence of jellyfish, or as one of my older cousins, Frederick, put it, "So he'll have jellyfish guts oozin' between his toes." Once again, fortune smiled on us that day, as Frederick spotted a huge Mastiff with obvious gastrointestinal problems, who made a sizeable, though involuntary contribution to our project.

Although near slavering with anxious anticipation, we took our time in building the castle. We figured the better it looked, the greater the chance that it would attract our unwary malefactor. In fact, the castle looked so good, there was some mild protestation about seeing it destroyed, until Sandy, the oldest at 12, reminded us that it would be a noble sacrifice for a greater purpose: "Hey, it might be one of the Gerbilheads!" That thought excited all of us, even though I did wonder aloud who it would be blamed on then. "Psychotic, itinerant, Gypsy beachcombers," Sandy said.

"Who?" asked David.

"Never mind. Let's do it!" Frederick said.

We checked out the trap one last time. It was perfectly camouflaged, a three-foot deep by one-foot wide hole right in the middle of the castle. We repaired to our observation post, a well hidden spot in the dunes about thirty yards away. It was a perfect spot, an indentation well hidden by sea oats. It was actually an old WWII gun emplacement which had the added protection of sandbags, in case our victim happened to be armed. We had brought firecrackers to throw at him in the event this occurred.

We had waited about thirty minutes, visually sweeping the beach for any sign of suspicious persons, and we were getting discouraged. The only people who came by were a couple of old ladies looking for shells and a little boy and his mother, who walked around our castle admiring it for what seemed like ten minutes. He tried to get into it several times but she managed to pull him back. Frederick tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "Hey, what if the kid falls in face first?" This thought caused an epidemic of gigglitis to the point that the mother looked up towards our dune. Perhaps sensing that something was not quite right here, she dragged her complaining child away from the castle and continued down the beach.

"Look," David said. "It's Al Weissman." Sure enough, it was Al Weissman, our neighbor, who lived across the street from my grandmother's beach house. He was about 14 years old. He was a very mean guy. He once shot me in the chest with his BB gun. It had only left a little red mark, but it had stung like Hell. He also shot birds and cats and dogs with the gun. My mother had always told me to stay away from him—that he was a "very bad boy." We had forgotten about him because he had been out of town, but if anybody deserved to fall into that hole, it was Al Weissman. Al had probably committed some sort of sinister act against every kid and helpless animal on the island. In fact, he was apparently up to no good right now, since he was carrying his well-known weapon of woe, his well-oiled Daisy Pump Action.

He began walking along the gully, firing his BB gun into it repeatedly, then stopping to see if his kills—minnows and crabs—would float to the top. Would he be too preoccupied with his slaughter-waging to notice the castle? It seemed as though he might, as he continued to concentrate on the gully. Then, suddenly, the unexpected—which gradually becomes the expected, as one ventures into adulthood—happened. "It's that dog again!" David had screamed. It was the huge mastiff, who had re-arrived on the scene, as we were scrutinizing Awful Al's behavior. He was sniffing around the castle, obviously attracted by the scent emanating from the trap. Oh God, he was going to all into the trap and ruin everything. "He's not only gonna fall in the hole, he's gonna eat the contents," Frederick said, reminding us unnecessarily of our canine friends' indiscriminate eating habits. Nearly gagging on this thought, we all realized that our great scheme was to soon be an unforgettable debacle.

Suddenly, perhaps tiring of the exacting sport challenge of minnow-shooting, Al turned his attention landward in search of bigger and less mobile targets. Immediately sighting the mastiff, who was still sniffing around the castle's outer wall, he fired from the hip, stinging the dog in the left buttock and sending him yelping down the beach. Then, Al began walking toward the castle, firing as he approached. Pieces of the castellated wall were nicked off. The marsh stick-based bridge blew up. The marsh stick flagpole snapped in half.

"Wow," muttered David. Although we hated Al, we had to admit it looked pretty cool. We also figured Al would grow tired of destroying our castle bit by bit, and would eventually stomp it to smithereens. We smiled knowingly, as he carefully placed his gun down. He was prepared to deliver the big crusher, the two-footed castle smasher. The coup de stomp. We tensed, drooling concomitantly with anticipation. Al, all at once, bent down and picked up a brick. Sandy beat his head into the sand in painful frustration. How could we have been so negligent? We should have policed the area for throwable objects. Being occasional, but not chronic, castle-crushers ourselves, how could we have overlooked this possibility? Now, Al would simply stand there and pelt it with bricks and flotsam until it became an amorphous clump of sand.

"Wait!" I spoke hopefully. "Look!" Al had stopped picking up bricks and seemed to be just standing there, starting at the castle. Suddenly, he was running toward it and then jumping high over it with bare feet together, emitting an inhuman, blood-curdling yell, which sounded amazingly similar to those I had read in my volumes of war comics: "Earrg!"

It was a perfect jump. He came down squarely in the center of the main castle building, which was squarely on top of the trap. Immediately, there was another scream, but this one more spontaneous, original and wordy: "Goddamn!" What the SH--!" Al had disappeared up to his thighs in the hole. He quickly pulled himself out and looked frantically at his feet. From our vantage point, we could see that his feet were covered with our special concoction. He began to brush at them wildly with his hands, then brought one of them up close to his face. "Jesus!" he screamed, as he started rubbing his hands and feet wildly in the sand. Next, he got to his feet briefly, before falling down on all fours and barfing his venomous insides into the sand.

By this time, we, of course, had lost all control, rolling over and over in the sand and laughing to the point of severe stomach cramps. David showed his usual secondary manifestation of hearty laughter, a large wet circle around the crotch of his pants. We screamed, laughing and rejoicing at the same time. If only the mastiff could have been there to get his laugh.