DECADE LATE, SAND DOLLAR SHORT

Donna Dufresne

It’s been years since I’ve been to the beaches in Southern Maine. Perhaps even decades, and more than half a century since I peddled sand in a bucket as a child. We rarely went to the beach when I was growing up in the fifties & sixties. My mother didn’t drive, and my father worked all the time trying to piece together a living to make ends meet.  My parents weren’t really beach people to begin with. Didn’t like the crowds. Certainly didn’t like the amusements and the riffraff that spilled out of the boardwalks in Salisbury or Revere. So, it was a rare occasion that I got to go to the beach until I was old enough to tag along with the neighbors or ride my bike to Plum Island. But on those rare occasions that percolate from my early memory, we would visit a long stretch of fine-grained sand and I would find sand dollars bigger than silver dollars, and moon snails by the bucketful. They would inevitably stew in a corner of my room until the stench drove my mother to toss it all in the garbage heap down by the brook.

It seems there was a yearly pilgrimage to Old Orchard Beach with Great Aunt Rose, and an excursion with the Whittiers, who owned the farm where we lived. On those occasions, there would be crabmeat sandwiches, potato salad, and tart plums picked up at one of the many farm stands along the way. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep the grit of sand out of my mouth or my crotch. In those early days of little tin beach pails and their matching shovels, I could understand why my parents didn’t particularly like the beach. But oh – the sand dollars were worth the trouble.

Excursions to the beach were for picnics, not for sunbathing. My mother, who must have been very lonely, stuck out on the farm with a toddler and without a car, seemed to have an endless gift for gab.  She plied Aunt Rose and the Whittiers for tidbits of family lore and legacy that might explain the moods of her dark horse husband. Had she been born into a more educated class, she would have become a psychologist. Or a detective, trying to unravel the mystery of why my father was the way he was, even though he wasn’t much different from any other man of his time. At any rate, the bits and pieces I’ve retained about family history on my father’s side, have a peculiar musical backdrop. The cadence of waves crashing on the beach, the clicking of tongues and shaking of heads to the tempo of the fading Yankee vernacular of my childhood. Pretending to be asleep on the scratchy wool beach blanket, or sprawled on the back seat of the car, I learned a lot about my family. Things my mother certainly would not have wanted spread around town as she steadily climbed that pretentious ladder, grasping for dreams. Some of those one-way conversations are still quite vivid in my memory:

“Cousin Peggy’s grandmother ran a cat house in Portland, Maine, and her mother killed herself by sticking her head in a gas oven,” I heard her whisper when she thought I was asleep. I had images of a fading Victorian house with cats in every window, and thought it must have been wonderful to live with all those cats.

Aunt Rose boasted that her mother was an “Indian Princess” from the Micmac Tribe, but my mother would later whisper to my future sister-in-law, as we sat on Crane’s Beach, that “she was really black”. And didn’t I tuck that little tidbit of information away as fuel for my righteous indignation for all things unjust?

“I don’t know why they sent him to work on the farm when he was only eight-years old,” my mother prattled on to the backdrop of swishing waves, “Dr. Lee said Henry had a nervous breakdown when he lost his job. Then Bob was born with something wrong with his legs and had what they used to call fits. They must have been seizures, because Dick remembers him writhing on the floor and having to put a stick in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue. It must have been hard during the depression. I wouldn’t know, because my father always had a job. It used to irk me that my mother took in so much of the family when they couldn’t find work. There was Uncle Barney, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Roy, Archie, Junior, and Georgie, my half-brother, and not one of them offered to pay room and board. Then, of course, when Aunt Hazel, my mother’s sister up in Maine, died of TB, we took in cousin Hazel who spent the first two years of her life in a sanatorium. All my mother did was cook and clean up after them all. I used to get so mad at them boys. Not one of them ever offered to do the dishes. But other than that, I didn’t know anything about the Depression. My father would go on business trips and always brought me back a present, or a pretty dress. One time he brought me the most beautiful plaid coat with big black buttons.”

My mother would prattle on about my father’s family to puff herself up. When you’re at the bottom of the pile, it’s always helpful to point out someone who is beneath you. She would often tell stories about the Depression and be the first to point out that “Dick’s family had a hard time, though. Henry used to go to the breadlines in Lawrence. I guess they couldn’t take care of Dick and Bob at the same time. First, they sent him to live with Grammy and Grampy Dunham. But then Fred Whittier said he needed a boy to help around the farm, and offered to take him in. They used to show up every Sunday and collect the money he’d earned. Fred treated him like a son. At one point there was talk of adoption. We’d all be better off if our last name was Whittier…”

The harsh sunburns and suffering the long car rides were worth every penny for the information I tucked away about my family. Of course, the sand dollars were also part of the deal.

It baffles me that there aren’t any sand dollars left. I have spent days combing Wells and Ogunquit Beach, trying to find one. The broken remnants are mere shadows of the ones I found as a kid. The size of a dime, rather than a silver dollar. I know there are a gazillion people on the same mission as I, and they might know the secret to finding a whole sand dollar.  But I’ve stopped and chatted with many treasure hunters, and not one of them had found one.  I don’t think my memory is deluded. I distinctly recall digging in the sand, or waddling along the water’s edge and finding sand dollars bigger than the palm of my hand.  On Hampton Beach, they were as white as snow. At Rye, they were almost black, matching the shiny boulders, beached like whales.

Sand dollars aren’t the only scarcity in the natural world.  My liberal sensibility wants to blame climate change, which means you can blame Trump and Prewitt for waging war on the environment. After all, when your adaptation is so delicately fine-tuned to a specific habitat, you succumb to the slightest change in temperature, acidity, and pollution. Deregulating and eroding environmental protection laws is a slippery slope toward environmental disaster. I guess the people who voted with their pocketbooks don’t remember the rivers running blue or red depending on the dye in the mills, or raw sewage floating past you while your dad fly fished for the elusive trout. In fact, the beach seems eerily devoid of life, other than seagulls, sandpipers and an occasional plover. The crabs have been pushed out by a gentrified Japanese species which has taken over all the crabby neighborhoods in New England. Periwinkles dominate the gastropod world, and rarely do you see a whelk or moon snail. Slipper shells, which are hermaphrodites, have easily surpassed other populations with that quirky little habit of changing sex for convenience. But the most heartbreaking victim brought to near extinction is the green sea urchin.

I used to keep baskets full of them around the house to remind me of kayak excursions off the coast of Port Clyde, where I would find piles of them tucked in the rocks and nestled in the blueberries on the islands. Unfortunately, my Mini Schnauzers thought I had put those tantalizing snacks out for them, because they managed to get to every one of them, no matter how I tried to hide them or how high up on a table or mantel. There was a lot of ingenuity, standing on hind legs, and climbing on furniture to reach those odorous morsels. They even managed to crush the spiny ones.  Gone are the beautiful sage green shells. Gone the little Native American grass basket, a family treasure, which held them close. So you can imagine my disappointment when I returned to Maine a few years ago and couldn’t find any sea urchins. Not one!  I crawled into spruce tangles on my hands and knees hoping to find one cushioned by reindeer lichen. I scoured the deep crevices of the rocky shore. It was downright eerie. Not even a broken shell could be found. It was as if they had suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth. Or worse, that they had never really existed.  I was determined to discover why the sea urchins had disappeared, and heart-broken to learn it was yet another symptom of the economic turn. When other fisheries dried up, Maine fishermen turned to the Japanese and sushi market. Sea urchins became the next gold rush. In fact, the demand was so great and the price so good, they were totally fished out within ten years.

According to Marina Schauffler in her article Absence of life on Maine shoreline brings grief and hope for action, sand dollars are not the only species rapidly disappearing. Periwinkles, those hardy and somewhat invasive inhabitants of the tidal zone, are now washing up on the shore – their empty shells bleaching in the sun.  Mussel beds are abandoned, and one would be hard pressed to find a sea star close to shore.  Although it seems as though it happened over night, the mass die-off of marine life has been an accumulative effect of climate change for 30 – even 50 years. But the acceleration in the last ten years is alarming. It’s not just the marine life, but the very threshold on which everything depends. Extreme weather, fierce winter storms and beach erosion have put further stress on coastal habitats.

Sand dollars and sea urchins are not the only victims of climate change and erosion. When I was a child, a trip to the beach was both rare and sacred. The water was ferociously cold, and there wasn’t a jellyfish in sight. I was warned about the undertow, constantly (which I thought was an “undertoad” monster living in the water). But the habitat was rich and fecund, not like the barren wasteland we find today. And another climatic change has taken place.  There is a wall of silence when you walk down a beach on a hot day in July. Although there may be throngs of people, the chatter and the gossip that so delighted me as a child, seems to have gone the way of the sand dollar. Rather than prattling on about some juicy tidbits from the family past, mothers are glued to their cellphones, chatting via text. I suppose they think they are protecting their children from inappropriate information. But I can guarantee there won’t be one imaginative, creative mind raised in such a brood, and probably no future writers either. ),Object(r.crea