Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
I grew up on a beach in California. I’ve lolled on the pebbles below the cliffs of Dover and watched the Italian Punch and Judy shows on the crowded sands of Salerno. I’ve swum in the Atlantic in Maine and Miami Beach and lived for two years on the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve known some beaches. But none of these places have a special ingredient that Nome’s beaches have. It’s not the gold. It’s not the seawall or the whales or the surf fishing or the salmon. It’s the driftwood.
On our excursions along Bering shorelines, my husband the engineer sets us up a first-class instant beach camp. He drags out the cookstove, the dufflebag of raingear, the Action Packers, the fishing poles and tackle boxes, the food coolers, pepper spray, and the endless piles of stuff we throw into the back of our truck when we’re going on a three-hour adventure.
Meanwhile, I’m out of the truck and I’m running for those piles of driftwood. I can’t help it. The sight of those pieces of wood brings out the nine-year-old in me. I come by this naturally. Several of my Grossman ancestors were carpenters. There’s a snapshot of a gap-toothed me in my Sunday clothes holding my cat Smokey in front of a plywood fort built by my brothers and me behind our garage (so my mother wouldn’t have to look at it). Great-grandfather Grossman may not have approved of our technique but he’d understand the drive.
My kids are aware of my addiction and shrug their shoulders as I start dragging the big logs over to start something. There are plywood pieces and planks from fish camps blown away by storms. There are burled spruce logs, branches of willow, and pieces so weathered they look like they were whittled and sanded by some ancient mariner. I don’t know if anybody ever tags this stuff, but I’m sure there’s wood washed up from the Yukon, from the Kuskokwim, the Fish, and bleached out planks blown in from the mighty Kamchatka and Anadyr Rivers of Siberia.
“Are you building a fire circle?” the Engineer asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just have to build.” It’s true. I have to arrange the wood somehow. I don’t take pictures of it. I don’t even whittle though I brought my knife for that purpose once. It was too slow and too small. I need to make large things! We need buildings, compounds, fortifications!
One Sunday afternoon it was a teepee. Someone had left three poles lashed together with a yellow nylon rope. Perfect! I worked on that teepee for hours with my sons. We chinked it with kelp and decorated with gull feathers. It gave us a shelter out of the wind that whipped our coats. But it gave me more than that. I was a young girl again. I was Robinson Crusoe. Our family was the Swiss Family Robinson. I had just crossed the land bridge. I was “The Lost Woman of St. Nicholas Island,” living alone off the California coast just like in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I was alone with the sea, the sand, the wood, and a couple of Snickers bars from The Country Store. Nome’s beaches and that wonderful washed-up wood give me back some energy and delight that sometimes gets lost through the years. And that’s worth a lot of gold nuggets to me.
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