In the Dunes 

By Sharon Blair

Grace and her dog Shiloh had lived in the dune shack for three weeks. Life there was more than Grace expected. When asked to be an artist in residence in the dunes for two months, she had no idea of what was in store. No idea whatsoever.

Grace expected privacy, quiet, and great views of the sea, both she and Shiloh surviving on cans of sardines and dog food and dried strips of chicken and beef.  Oyster crackers. Nuts. Milk in a box for her tea.

Grace had survivalist instincts. The dune shack was a little like the wilderness camp where she had lived for several years, miles from pavement and electric power.  In the wilderness, most of her thinking revolved around five things: how to get water, how to get heat, how to get light, how to get and store food, and how to keep essential things within reach.  All these things were much easier in the dunes than they had been at the camp.

Even now at her home below Plymouth, the basement shelves were filled with canned and dried vegetables and fruit, cans of tuna and salmon, and little cans of dog food that Shiloh could finish at one setting. There were boxes of loose tea, jars of honey from an organic farm on the Cape, and boxes and boxes of preserved milk.

The basement also held what she called her “protest supplies,” poster board and markers that made bold black letters. The signs could have served as an archive of the then 72-year-old, extremely vital woman’s interests: immigration reform, the Keystone pipeline, and the Pilgrim Nuclear Facility and its faraway owner, Entergy. When Grace went to the dune shack on the Cape, all that protest gear stayed in the basement. She didn’t plan to protest anything in the dunes.

Grace had earned an adequate living as an artist, sculpting busts, mostly of children, commissioned by their families. She thought she might do some carving from wood picked up on walks in the sand, wood that Shiloh would carry back to the shack like treasure.

All this happened.

What Grace didn’t anticipate was for the solitude to wash over her in waves, the rhythm of life falling in sync with the tides, the desire pooling up behind her heart to live in the dunes forever. In the dunes, she knew what she needed, and she needed nothing more, other than food, than what the dunes had to offer. All this was evident in the first three days and nights, the nights she learned quickly as good a time to be awake as during the day.

Toward the end of the first week, Grace realized she didn’t think anymore about “when” or “time,” neither having any relevance to her life in the dunes. “Forever,” as a sort of journey with a destination, shriveled into “now.” The sun was up; the sun was down. The tides were in or out or on their way.  Sometimes, the moonrise would wake her as she slept on an old hammock mat on the porch of the tiny shack, Shiloh nearby, opening her eyes and looking into Grace’s, neither one moving before falling back asleep.

Two weeks in, Grace and the twelve-year old Shiloh found something that changed everything. Clay. Sheer cliffs of grey, malleable clay — clay created by sand and dead fish and dolphins smashed to smithereens by gravity, glaciers, ocean,  and ages and ages of time.

When Grace stood on the top of the tallest dune, she could see the Atlantic on one side and Cape Cod Bay on the other. She knew that one way was Portugal, the other Massachusetts’s South Shore and the home of her major nemesis, the Pilgrim Nuclear Facility near Plymouth.

————–

When Grace and Shiloh found the clay, they both started digging into the wall. Some of it gave way in tiny pieces, more came off in big chunks. Some of it could be squeezed into balls or its rough edges mashed into smoothness. Grace tried to carry a long, narrow, bone-like piece away, but it crumbled and fell to the sand.

No one but Grace or Shiloh was on the beach that day. It was warm, but it was a day in the early fall after most tourists had gone.  As they headed back to the shack, Grace carried some pieces of clay in the apron of her shirt and Shiloh a piece of wood. As they clambered up the steep path to the dune shack, they were met by a bracing wind from the west. Grace knew this wind was blowing across Plymouth, and she decided she to make a quick trip home.

——–

Early the next morning, Grace and Shiloh left the dune shack and walked into Provincetown.  The long walk in the deep sand took over an hour to reach Route 6; it took another thirty minutes to reach the arts center where Grace had left her car.

Two hours later, Grace and Shiloh were home. Grace didn’t feel the usual happiness to see the cottage she had owned for over thirty years. It was here that Grace had experienced purpose, and passion; where she had been lucky in life and in various “kinds of love.”  But, now, Grace just wanted to hold on to her mental and physical health and peace and purpose for the “end times,” which she wrote later, she felt were near.

It didn’t take long to load up the buckets with the food from the basement. Grace stopped at a convenience store on 3A. She bought twenty gallons of water. She got the clerk to give her a box of plastic bags for garbage and personal hygiene.

——-

Three hours later, Grace and Shiloh were back in Provincetown. Grace drove to the garage where the tour vans were kept overnight. Grace and Shiloh slept in the car. The next morning, Grace got one of the drivers to take her, Shiloh, and all their goods into the dunes and as close to the shack as the tour van could go.  About a thousand feet before the shack rose up ahead, a barely discernible road that once could be driven to the beach, cut to the left and fell off toward the sea.  Grace and the driver unloaded everything by that road, hidden in plain sight under some scrub pines and an old, battered blue tarp that had attached itself to the sand.

———-

Later than afternoon, Grace and Shiloh walked to the clay. Grace carried a shovel and a hoe she had found at the shack the first day. They stood back at the water line and looked hard at the grey cliff, getting a feel for where they could easily climb and start to dig.

It took most of five days and nights to dig the cave into the clay. Each time they went to the cave, Grace carried some of the stuff she had brought from home, sometimes rolling it over the side of the cliff and to the beach below. She packed the stuff into the cave and started to dig out living space around it. She found driftwood boards to use as a floor. She pounded some pieces of metal pipe on the inside of the entrance, a place to hang the heavy lead blanket she’d found at a flea market where she was selling her sculpture.

Although Grace didn’t plan for this, she and Shiloh started sleeping in the cave and just visiting the dune shack to work. Sometimes, a ranger from the National Seashore would drive a 4-wheeler on the beach below. If she was outside the shack and within sight and could be seen by the ranger, Grace and the ranger waved. One day, the director from the artists in residence program came to visit. Grace was glad she was at the shack and that she had a healthy collection of sculpture to display, along with a journal of her time in the dunes and how her work was progressing. Grace asked if she could stay another month and was encouraged to stay on.

One morning in early October, Grace and Shiloh woke in the cave to the sounds of many sirens and blasts from boats. Standing at the door of the cave, Grace realized that while the sirens were coming from behind her, the blasts were coming from the two whale watch boats that had been lolling around about a half mile offshore. Both boats stopped dead in the water, completed a pirouette and sped away, bells on each boat starting to toll.  The air blasts continued. Through binoculars, Grace watched the boats race to the Northwest, not hugging the coast as they did when returning to Provincetown Harbor. No longer a soft, soothing rumble, the boat engines now screamed.

Grace and Shiloh both went outside the cave and relieved themselves in the sand. In the cave where only Shiloh could fully stand, Grace slid to the floor and leaned back against her old study pillow that made the floor and wall into a comfortable resting place. She turned on the radio, and she heard the news. She took her journal out of the metal box she’d found on the beach. She wrote, “This is the day Pilgrim blew.” Then she realized the date: it was her last birthday, the beginning of her seventy-third year.

Author’s note: Grace’s journal, full of thoughts and observations about her life in the dunes, was found on a rocky beach in Ireland forty-three years after a small jet crashed into the holding pool for spent rods at Pilgrim Nuclear Facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Close to 3000 spent but still radioactive fuel rods were stored in the exposed pool. There was a massive fire, and many people died at the plant and nearby. While some people within the ten mile zone around the plant survived by driving west, thousands of people died attempting to flee. There was no escape from Cape Cod; over one hundred and fifty-thousand people were trapped and died as the radioactivity moved across Cape Cod and days later, much dispersed, brushed southwest Nova Scotia. 

Grace’s journal was in the metal box along with her passport and Shiloh’s dog tag. The metal box was sealed with candle wax and placed into a locked, thick plastic box inside a blue float bag. There was considerable water damage, and the float bag and its contents were still slightly radioactive. Almost everything that washed up on Irish and other western facing European shores was tested for radioactivity for many years.

The most detailed account of the incident at Pilgrim Nuclear Facility and its outcome can be found under the name Lilah Dahl in the Belos Museum of Eastern America, which holds the computer generated news reports and collections from 2013 to the current time. Ms. Dahl was a youngster living on Cape Cod in 2013, but she was traveling off Cape with her parents when the incident happened at Pilgrim, and they were never able to return home. Lilah Dahl became an acclaimed writer for Belos News and has written several collections about the incident that shaped her life.

The End

The Power of Prayer

By Sharon Blair

My father can’t pray. At least he can’t pray out loud. He’s been praying out loud all his life, in church, in restaurants, and before meals at home. In the home were I grew up, there’s always been a whole lot of praying going on.

Now at ninety, my Southern Baptist father can’t pray. When he tries, he starts sobbing. He says it’s because of Mother.

A few months ago, we had to put Mother in a nursing home. Her mind is gone, from strokes and perhaps Alzheimer’s. Physically, she’s a mess, with several ailments. My father was her primary caregiver — and his own — for years.

Then he started to drop weight. A blood test sent up an alarm. My father has Hodgkin’s Disease, the most advanced kind.

Months of chemotherapy and transfusions have left him feeble but alive. During his first treatment, Mother went over the edge mentally and had to be removed from their home.

Although my father is hanging on to his life for all it’s worth, refusing nursing care, and visiting Mother when he can, this sick and lonely old man can’t pray.

Christianity has been the focus of his life, but he and I never discuss religion, at least mine. He knows that I live my life under a religiously liberal Unitarian-Universalist umbrella, but it’s like the secret that dares not speak its name. Even so, during my Christmas visit, I was the designated pray-er, delivering mildly eccentric blessings before each meal, like…

We hope that Mother is having a good day

today and that when we see her later, it will be

a comforting time for us all. We hope that all

our family and friends feel our love and that

they are safe. We are thankful for this food

and for being together. Amen.

My father seemed grateful for these directionless hopes I tossed out over biscuits and gravy at breakfast and bowls of beans and platters of fried chops and chicken I prepared for his lunch. And I think he was pleased to hear me imploring something, of someone or something somewhere.

And there is something, somewhere. Its powerful presence showed up on Christmas Eve.

I gathered Mother from the nursing home and drove the few miles to the tiny Arkansas town where she’s lived for sixty-six years. We drove within 500 feet of her home. She had no idea where she was. I could have said we were in SoHo, and she likely would have said, “I’ve always liked it here. What about you?”

At my niece’s home for the family dinner, there was a certain bedlam with kids and gifts and getting the buffet served. When my father arrived, he and my mother kissed passionately on the lips.

Mother asked my niece, whose home we were in, “Vicki, do you eat here often?”

We stood around the table, waiting for the blessing. About the time I remembered my father couldn’t pray out loud, I whispered to my sister, “You do it.” Louder than me, Daddy said to Mother, “Marie, you say the blessing.” We bowed our heads, not knowing what to expect, expecting the worst.

An extraordinary thing happened. Like a savant, Mother wove a prayer that would put Billy Graham to shame. This 82-year-old woman, who most often thinks she’s in her fifties, whose sentences often start in one decade and end in another, delivered the most eloquent prayer I’ve ever heard. She started with a powerful, “Dear Lord.” She prayed for her family, those there and away. She talked about the joy of food and sharing it with loved ones. She expressed gratitude for her life, and then, she blessed the power of prayer, describing it as a gift that she hoped we all could share. At the end, she paused dramatically, then said, “In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

My father’s body shook. He put his arm around Mother. The rest of us looked at each other and said, “Amen.”

I filled Mother’s plate. She ate a bite now and then, but mostly moved food from one side of the plate to the other. She said she was tired from cooking. My father helped her sip some iced tea. He cut her a few pieces of ham. She ate a few bites of pie.

As we drove away, she asked if we were going home. I said, “Not today.”

“Where are we going?” she asked. I told her we were going where she should stay until Daddy is well.

She asked if I had seen my brother who died four years ago. I said, “No, not today.”

At the nursing home, she said, “I’ve never been here before in my life. I don’t know anyone here.”

A nurse said, “You know me. I got you fixed up to see your family.”

The old woman who had spent the day of the home’s Christmas party and Living Nativity Scene jumping up and down proclaiming “I’m going to play the baby Jesus! I’m going to play the baby Jesus!” came running down the hall.

Mother said, “That’s the meanest woman that ever lived.”

In her room, Mother asked the nurse, “Are you the one who takes care of me?”

I kissed Mother good-bye. I said I’d see her in a month. She asked, “Am I supposed to stay here?”

When I said, “Yes,” she asked “What am I supposed to do here?” I could only tell her she could read or watch TV, neither of which she could really do.

I fled the room. As I hurried down the hall, past the emergency evacuation plan on the wall that Mother had pointed to earlier, saying “That’s the way to get to Europe,” I could hear her calling, “Sharon. Sharon, come here for a while,” like a prayer. Yes, like a prayer.

-end-

The Olympics always remind me of times and places in my life. Today, watching the U.S. Women’s volleyball team play, I remember being the program director of KUHT, the public television station in Houston, TX in the mid-1970s. I got to do so many things there that lead to an overall wonderful life. Here’s one that has to do with volleyball.

A tall, striking woman named Mary Jo Peppler was an Olympic star in volleyball. She had gone to college in Texas at a place called Sul Ross. Somehow, after the Olympics, she came to Houston where she put together a women’s volleyball team called E Pluribus Unum. She and I were connected through some other feminists I knew and worked with on various issues around town and on television.

I don’t remember what opponents Mary Jo Peppler’s team played before (DRUM ROLL HERE) the Chinese women — considered to be the best volleyball players in the world — came to town. Somehow, Mary Jo Peppler convinced me, and I convinced my station manager, that KUHT should broadcast the game.

Now, the game was obviously played on location somewhere in Houston, and the station only had two cameras, and I know we didn’t (couldn’t) carry the match live so our coverage was rather limited and tape delayed. I remember that there were some incidental expenses amounting to $200 for which we had no budget, but I told my station manager I’d find the money.

So I picked up the phone and called my father in Leslie, Arkansas, who probably had never seen a volleyball game other than one played in someone’s yard, and asked him to “underwrite” the game. So when the demonstration match between the Chinese women’s team and the local E Pluribus Unum  aired on KUHT in Houston, it carried an underwriting spot at the beginning and end that went something like this: This program is made possible by a grant from Virgil Blair. And, Virgil Blair never saw any of it because whatever copies we had were on 3/4 inch videotape; at that time, no one had these playback machines in their home.

So seeing the U.S. women play today led me to Google and E Pluribus Unum and Mary Jo Peppler and memories of video recorders as big as cars. And, of all the sports I’ve loved and sportspeople I’ve met, and not incidentally, that much of my life has been made possible by a grant from Virgil Blair.