Love letter in the sand: the tide comes in and the tide taketh out

The beach at high tide is an interesting place. The ocean encroaches gradually until all that’s left is a thin sliver of land between the dunes and the water. It is usually there at the farthest reaches of the beach that people, would-be sand artisans, construct both the prosaic and fanciful sand castles that I love to chance upon during a walk, observing up close the little details lovingly applied to these most temporary of structures: little passages beneath the walls, moats, turrets, seashell ornaments, and other bric-a-brac and detritus washed ashore and applied to the sand creations.

These castles of sand have their brief time of glory in the sun before the waves topple the outer walls. They dissolve in the ocean’s relentless onslaught and disappear in the foam and salt water. I always like to think of them as symbols of human finiteness, folly, and stubborn determinatiion to build and create on places where the elements will always have their way — eventually.

But there is another kind of creation in the sand — a monument, also, if you will — and it’s usually much simpler and more capable of directly communciating a message for passers-by to see.

I saw an example of this just the other afternoon as the tide was reaching its highest mark on shore for that particular day. Large letters scrawled in the sand composed the message “Duff + Sarah.” Love letters in the sand, one might say. But young Duff went further. To emphasize his love for the fair lady Sarah, he composed a huge heart in the sand, bordered by a narrow strip of tiny shells. It was a delicate and sensitive touch to what might have been just an ordinary bit of amateur artwork.

Then, more words, “Duff Loves Sarah,” emblazoned on that little strip of sand for all the world to see, all the world meaning myself and perhaps a few other late summer beachcombers who were out walking their dogs or looking out over the ocean.

“What is more real than real?” Duff wrote.

“Sarah,” he proclaimed in big letters just down from the huge, shell-decorated heart.

Oh, my. I think we had a true romantic out on the beach that day. A love-sick lothario who was dreaming only of his girl on that otherwise ordinary day at Folly Beach.

Of course, I imagine this to be the work of a young man, or teenage boy, for that matter. But that’s a mystery also. It could have been anyone of any age.

So in love — or so he believes. Sarah may have even been there, but I think he was alone without her, or maybe she had left him, never to return. Who will ever know who saw the messages in the sand that day?

Waves were gently lapping at the letters of his girlfriend’s name as I moved on up the beach. The sun had set. It was getting darker. Time to go in. There would be no trace of that discovery in the morning. And that, I suppose, was the whole point of putting it there.