Familial Intimacies and Oceanic Infinities:

I was amazed.  Before my six-year-old gaze--under a roof of clouds--stretching into the misty, gray distance, lay an expanse of deserted sand that had materialized out of nowhere since my visit the day before.

"Where's the sea?" I asked my mother.

"Just ahead sweetie"

"OK," But I was doubtful.  Tramping along behind her, I let my "flip-flop" sandals kick sand up the back of my calves with each flip and flop. 

The day before, the sky at York Beach Maine had been clear, bright blue and the sand filled with bustling noisy people, many who lay so close they became, themselves, a sort of landscape composed of glistening backs and tummies, of shoulders and thighs, of faces with nose guards turned to the sun and feet exposed bottom side up yet covered with sparkling particles of sand.  This topography of flesh, from which blue, yellow and red umbrellas sprouted like strange trees or mushrooms, was itself squeezed into a thin band up against a rocky coast by a sea, vast, dark and bluish green except for the white foam that boiled and exploded where the waves crashed down upon the shore.  On that Sunday, the ocean lay just a sand's throw from the blankets.  I know it was a sand’s throw because I threw some into the consuming sea from the blankets and towels my family had set up when claiming their spot in the fleshy landscape.

But in just the span of one night's sleep everything had changed.  Trudging beside my parents, I dragged along my orange bucket straining to see the ocean I heard booming just ahead.   The crowd had vanished, and the few figures who remained, wrapped in sweatshirts and terrycloth robes, were indistinct in the morning haze. But the riotous sea was nowhere in sight, just sand, sand and more sand, stretching desolately out around me.   So I followed my mother on what seemed an eternal expanse of sand towards the bank of mist and the hissing sound beyond.

  In a moment the sand beneath my feet turned from the fine white powder, slightly traitorous in its ever shifting state, to an uneven if solid, gray surface covered with crannies and small pools which reflected back  my image in front of a pale sun that peeked through the clouds.  And then, quite suddenly, the mist parted, the air cleared, I seemed on the edge of the world.  Facing me was the sprawling vast Atlantic, and I was--just a little bit--afraid.

Long before my birth, my mother's family, the Cubies, had been gathering regularly at the first beach one comes to in Maine when traveling from Massachusetts via New Hampshire's tiny coast, which is itself sandwiched between borders so close they are practically in sight of one another.

Back then, York Beach Bible Conference offered Grandpa Cubie a perfect vacation spot for a thrifty Scotsman.   Clichés aside, he needed to be economically careful as a Nazarene minister in the denomination’s poor youth, with seven children, a wife, and a mother-in-law. At York he was able to rent two tents already set up on wooden platforms, and in one, Great-grandma Rankin and the three girls stayed, while Grandpa, Grandma and the three boys slept in the other.  After the tragic death of my grandmother at the age of forty-seven, my grandfather subsequently brought his new wife and then a year later his new son, James.

Although from different theological traditions, the Baptists allowed my thoroughly Wesleyan grandfather to occasionally preach, and that, I’ve heard, led to some interesting theological discussions.  But what my mother recalls is the family swimming all week both for joy and to keep clean, since there were no showers, and of her fishing with her father, my grandfather, off the surf pounded rocks which surround York Beach’s one major land mark: Cape Neddick or Nubble Light.  

          Nubble light sits on top of a crag that over-looks all of Long Sands and the sea.  It has been there for years, and my family tells me that there was once a family of a light keeper living in the quaint home which stands beside the lighthouse tower.  Visitors could see the children playing on a swing and slide set outside the house near the barnyard red shed, and for school the had to take either a boat to shore or use a pulley system.  At least that’s what I remember hearing as a child and thinking “how cool!”   Now, as a father, I suspect the pulley system was used only for groceries and not precious children! 

          Of course, I in fact remember none of this.  These are just the fragmented images I have gathered from conversations told in various family circles springing from those original six children who to this day gather in various rented cottages along York Beach’s coast.  I fill in the details with the help of old photos and my own memories of the things, like Nubble Light, that remain.

In my actual memory, York Beach is not just the stretch of sand beside the sea; it is an entire community clustered along the shoreline.  Back then as today, the community of York Maine thrives on tourists.  The sea, of course, is indifferent to visitors.  But the people who live there welcome and survive on the happiness of guests, so, at least on one level, my York memories are vivid because of the community.  Turning off Maine’s Rout 1 onto Route 1A, my sisters and I--Jimmy, the youngest of our family, came much later—biyearly found ourselves trapped in the un-air-conditioned, family station wagon’s back-seat, straining to see the first hint of Long Sands.   Locals still call the beach “Long Sands” although today’s maps label that coastal stretch “Long Beach.”  

Occasionally Dad messed up, and we’d find ourselves somehow in York Village proper surrounded by droves of people who, much to my father’s chagrin, walked mindlessly about in the street almost as much as they milled along either side of the sidewalks.  Later, inside those shops, I remember thinking these people gawking in through various glass windows looked like the exotic fish within tanks featured in several stores.  To this day, I find crowds like this fascinating: Dad did not and does not.

When Dad got the directions correct and the family car avoided a side trip into the village, the view was different.  The underbrush and timber on the right side of 1A would suddenly fall away, revealing the blue horizon of the sea. In the midst of this was the lime green, “multi-light bulbed,” flashing, illuminated sign for “Libby’s Trailer Park” which told my mother that she would soon be seeing her sisters and brothers.  And on the left, more cottages and motels appeared.  In fact, by the time of my family vacations, where the York Beach Bible Conference once stood there were only cottages and motels. But in those years the Cubies had found a new gathering point. 

Sure enough, in a moment there would appear a cluster of white painted, wooden framed houses across from which, on the other side of the road, and set up upon the beach was Uncle David’s faded green sun awning under and around which sat a host of people many of whom waved at us in mutual recognition—we’d once again found the Cubie family.

“Smell that salt air!” was my mother’s regular declaration as we swung the car doors open and tumbled out to take possession of the cottage assigned to our immediate family. Although I suspected that Mom sometimes confused the smell of the sea with the smell of dead fish, if in later years she neglected her “declarative duty,” things just did not feel right; we had not yet arrived, and one of us (me probably) would cue her:

          “Mom!  Don’t you just love. . .”

          “The smell of that salt air!”

          “Thank you.”

The vacation just could not start until she finished this ritual, at least not for me.  I’m a big one for consistency.

York actually has two beaches: Long and Short Sands. The Short Sands is part of a small cove by which today there is an open playground.  Looking over it, just beyond a gazebo surrounded by green grass where bands occasionally perform, is York’s mini-boardwalk from which come sounds of bowling and the arcade.   From there the streets go back to the center, and if one follows them far enough there is York’s Wild Kingdom, a small amusement park and zoo built sometime in the seventies.  There, amidst flashing lights, the whack of mini gulf clips, the clap of baseballs hitting pins, the cry of the Carney’s call, and the smell of electric ozone by the bumper cars, my younger brother Jim, by thirteen years, scared my poor mom while at the top of the main Ferris Wheel.  There, where they could see all of York, he thought it hilarious to swing the carriage bench back and forth, back and forth.  I don’t think she’s ridden with him since.

However, I must confess that these various amusements are not part of my own earlier memories.  I do recall going to the center where among the shops is The Goldenrod.  For years they have displayed the process of making saltwater taffy, showing off clever machines that twist and turn candy of various colors and flavors and then wrap them in tiny bite size bits.  My mother and aunts often brought home boxes of mixed flavors of Goldenrod Kisses to share among the cousins.  But my immediate family never went in, too expensive.  Only in the last few years have I with my wife passed through the shining glass doors, which lead past a brass rail--what I thought in my childhood was the actual “golden rod”--to wait, be seated, and have something from the soda fountain.

I can also recall the smell of deep fried clams coming from some open air York restaurant that had on its side a billboard featuring a healthy, plump, blond girl eating buttered bread.  But again such excesses like fried clams were not within the general family’s reach in those days.

Most of my early years were spent on the other beach, Long Sands.  Long Sands faces out to the infinite sea and has far less distracting man-made entertainment.  Although there are a few ice cream shops along the way, most of the structures on Long Beach Road are residential—nowadays they are year round, but in the time I am describing most were suitable only for summer months.  The one entrepreneur back then with whom we did business was “Billy's Rafts” He has, ever since my childhood, rented umbrellas and canvas rafts to visitors. We Cubies occasionally rented one, which became communal property for the entire family, but the rafts rubbed my chest raw.  I learned instead to love “belly surfing.”  Billy, bye the bye, is still alive, but his family, who come up from Massachusetts, now carry on the business. 

In my memory there is something strange and unearthly to see Billy and his family in the early mornings driving their trucks along the deserted beach in what seems like silence. They set up for business, as they have for years, in the same spot by the bathhouse.  Watching a process follow the same steps one saw years ago as a child is surreal enough, but make it with only the background of the sea—no engines, no conversations, no snap of folding chairs unfolded--and the interlude becomes downright eerie. 

The tide at Long Sands is vast and can reach right up to the rocky edges alongside of 1A.  But then it retreats for five hundred yards, leaving smooth, solid sand on which to play and build.  Kite flying, castle building, hardball and volley ball games are common.  For the brave or the numb (the water is often near freezing) swimming is possible.  Shooting forward within the white water of waves, I can recall the rushing hiss of the surf in both ears. 

The sand, meanwhile, lends itself to sand drip castles, a favorite activity of mine for years.  Sitting for hours at a time cross-legged near the surf, I dribbled stalagmite-like structures onto my lap.  And being an artist, I suffered for my work since those long sessions led to the cutting off of the circulation to my legs.  How clearly I remember being barely able to move, let alone stand, all because of hours of creative dribbling.

Meanwhile, on misty days, like that one described earlier, the sea almost vanished but its voice was always there.  And at night I can remember its continuous roar rising into my consciousness.  Even today if I am on a busy street, I try to imagine the traffic sounds as the sea rather than otherwise.  This is the backdrop of my family memories. 

Years after the York Bible Conference folded, the eldest son, my Uncle Alex, organized the entire family to return to York Beach and rent a group of cottages at a place called Groves.  These white painted buildings on the outside looked to me like average, if old, homes, but on the inside they were only barely finished.  Where there were there should have been walls they was usually little more than wood paneling.  There were no rugs just worn down wooden floors.  There was no insulation (who needed it during the hot summer?) and the exposed beams, which were everywhere, often became bookshelves among the Cubies.  I loved those cottages.

What I loved about them was that for a time we, a family who were scattered from the Midwest back to and up and down the East Coast, were all neighbors.  I could call to a cousin from my upstairs' window that would answer from her front porch.  If my family wasn’t ready for breakfast, I'd find another that was.  I became so notorious for this as a teen and college student that I can recall Frank, my cousin-in-law, just sticking out a coffee pot through the kitchen door as I approached his back porch. 

During the second week of Loretta's and my honeymoon, the family at Groves gathered under our window and sang "I'm in the Mood for Love."  Frank recorded it on his video camera.  Frank recorded everything.

Any of us could pop in to nearly any cabin.  Sometimes we played board games; sometimes we sang church choruses, and sometimes we showed movies the recollections of which blur in my memory with the actual events at York.  One especially favorite film belonging to my Uncle Alex was a shot of all the, then little, cousins doing the twist.  And to the hilarious entertainment of my chronically skinny relatives, there I was, in my pudgy childhood glory, twisting so vigorously that my tummy at times was going in a direction opposite from the rest of me.  Alex especially loved to show that one in slow motion. However, what I loved the most was to hear and to tell family stories. 

Gathering in various family living rooms, huddling around a gas heater against the chilly Maine evenings, cradling cups of coffee and tea, we'd tell one story after another.  It was more entertaining and uproarious than television and more interactive than any of the games.  Many of these game boards stood in the center of a group--set up, allegedly for play--but ignored as the memories rolled, anecdotes were recited, stories recalled and corrected and a whole history was formed and shaped into a shared living vision--only to be stopped when someone realized that the red light outside the window indicated that Frank was once again out prowling with his video camera, catching his in-laws at the height of their remembered absurdity.

A number of vitally important events occurred at York.  As a toddler I almost drowned and was rescued by a stranger whom I thought was my father and followed down the beach until he turned about to show an stranger’s face.  Years later, during a time of spiritual crises, I walked up and down the beach sharing my bleakest self with two of the original seven children, who had followed their father into the ministry.  And later, on my own, I hammered out my ideas of faith while pounding my feet upon the resilient sand, jogging through the sparkling surf.  I have brought my own family to York. 

While our first visit with my son, Andy, was marred by aspirated pneumonia caused by his open, artificial trach, last year Loretta and I and my mother and aunts watched teary eyed as he swam with his baby sister Laura in the surf for the first time with a water tight airway. 

Things have changed: life has moved on.  The eldest brother, Alex, who organized all of this originally, has gone on to be with his Heavenly Father and his own earthly parents.  We miss him.  What started with a family of ten has grown to a family of a hundred.  We are now a noticeable presence in York's center.  But we don't all stay in Groves anymore since the management has found that they can rent for months rather than the week we take.  So now we stay in various cottages along the beach, sometimes concentrating on our own immediate families that sprang from the original seven and whose own children now have children of their own.  We seem to have more money, more toys, and the cottages are often nicer. But we are more dispersed and more varied in our opinions, faiths and lifestyles.   I confess that I am not a fan of change, and it sometimes frightens me as it did years ago when I found so drastic a difference at the shore. 

But there are also constants.  The sea in change stays the same.  And in differences of our families we have also found that much endures.  Last year one aunt spent extra money to rent one place where we could as a single unit still all gather and sing.  We are still a family, and we are bound to one another in ties that supersede politics and lifestyles and passing emotions.  At Long Stands we still gather at or near the faded green sun awning; we still talk; we still laugh, we still sing, and in the background the eternal sea still roars—simultaneously reminding us of our transience while affirming our endurance.