This piece originally appeared in The Narragansett Times.
Sand Hill Cove
There is one place that I hold as the most beautiful place on earth in my mind. I went to visit there today, one last time for what might be months or years. I can’t say which it will be just yet.
Sand Hill Cove—now Roger Wheeler State Beach—showed itself at its best today, a humid day in late May. A huge trail of great nearly black cumulonimbus clouds filled the dome of the sky from west to east. Block Island was enveloped in a shroud of offshore fog, appearing almost dreamlike and surreal, as if suspended from the heavens in an ancient myth of heroes in some lost age. To the north a band of lighter cumulus framed the day of gentle winds and calm seas and warming temperatures. The dunes of the cove were already showing off their cover of ocean grasses and the great breakwater forming the Harbor of Refuge protected the few boats that could be seen.
My earliest memories of childhood and the summer sea were formed here. My family frequented the beach on weekends, and when we were lucky enough, we stayed for the traditional two-week vacation in a cozy cabin owned by friends on Ocean Road a mile away. As I grew older, the memories of slightly sandy egg salad sandwiches eaten beneath skies of perfect azure blue were replaced with more frequent trips with friends as cars became more resilient and the relative affluence of the Sixties allowed for more leisure time.
While others went to the more popular Scarborough Beach and town beach at Narragansett, I was perennially drawn to return with friends to the dunes at the eastern edge of the beach which afforded privacy not readily available on any other beach I had known, and an absolutely perfect bird’s eye of the masses of beachgoers below and the inviting sea beyond (Today, the dunes are a protected area.) On the infrequent early evening in summer at sunset, if the conditions were right, the treat of a full yellow moon rising at the eastern end of the beach is contrasted against the blazing orange-red of the setting sun. I have found such beauty nowhere else on earth.
Standing at the middle of the beach in front of the pavilion, the seasons and the past rush by in a kaleidoscope of images. My father rises from below the water in a rush of spray adorned with a Fu Manchu moustache of thick brown kelp. I chase a friend playfully across the sand on the first real day of spring in a time long since gone. While relaxing on a bench at the old pavilion, I meet a new friend in the magic of a late-summer evening of youth. A friend, returning from a long absence, and I stand on the dunes in August and watch the dazzling red of the sunset over Jerusalem. I carve a giant valentine in the October sand with the woman to whom I’m engaged. Our children learn to love the beach with its near perfect warm sand and gentle sea as much as we do.
Even with the beach abandoned for winter, the long lines of east to west redwood snow fences make an inviting welcome to beachcombers and cast long shadows in the late afternoon, while the beach grass, now brown, bends in supplication to the cold north and west winds.
Wherever I go, part of me will remain happily behind here, and a part of this timeless place will come along with me.
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