sand gets in my eyes

“The foolish man built his house upon the sand.”


So goes the old Sunday school song.  And as are many of the lessons we learned on Sunday mornings, it is true.  Some of my neighbors are discovering it to their cost.


For the past two weeks, the Pacific Ocean around Melaque has been restless.  High tides.  Ill-tempered waves.  The sea has been high enough for ocean water to crash into the laguna.  Maybe that is why my crocodiles have been AWOL.


We are entering summer in these parts.  For most people up north, it would have felt like summer for well over a month.  Our temperatures and humidity are rising fast enough to keep our professional status as “tropical” intact.


Summer means rain.  Storms.  Lightening.  Thunder.  Hurricanes.  And the rising surf that moviegoers have come to associate with watery disasters.


But the storms haven’t started yet.  And there is no rain.  Just an ocean that seems to be in need of a good dose of Depakene.


In the summer, the wave activity in Melaque is heavy enough to erode the beach – leaving what looks like a model of half the grand canyon.  They are not the cliffs of Dover, but they are over 6 feet high.

 

Their height is not the problem.  The problem is that as the beach erodes in this bizarre form of double-entry columns, the sand gets very near to the fences the beach home owners have designated as their property lines.


If the waves push the sand back a few more yards, there will be fence posts and fencing mixed in with the migrating sand.


But that has not been the worst of this year.  On Thursday night, I had dinner with Lou and Wynn in Barra de Navidad.  While we were waiting for our dinners to arrive, I wandered down to one of the town’s new tourist sites.

That building once housed the tourist police office.  The “we speak English” sign on the front seems a pathetic plea for help.


The back of the building was built on the sea wall.  But a small leak developed under the wall, washed all of the sand away, and toppled the building onto its side.  Leaving it with the appearance of a tipped cow.


But that building is not the only potential victim of the sea.  A little to the west, another building has lost a good deal of the sand under one side.  Nothing is being done to prevent any further erosion.  Maybe the powers that be have decided the diagnosis does not look good – it is time to set back and let nature take its course.

If we are seeing this type of damage this early in the season, I am curious what the place will look like when we start receiving our tropical storms.


You can bet I am going to watch the level of the laguna as the seasons erodes its way through the calendar – and the beach.