Hide outs and pirates

As a child, every year our family went to Jekyll Island for two weeks vacation. This was back in the 1960s when Jekyll Island still had natural sand dunes. Not the small variety, but the enormous, hill-sized sand dunes thick with the cool, lush green vegetation of the Atlantic Coast. The trees were twisted leeward from the relentless ocean winds and annual Nor'easters that rolled up the coast wreaking havoc to its ultimate destination off the coast of Maine and into the North Atlantic.

The sand was white and powdery and wanted for children's footsteps which my brother and I happily obliged. We would run and play in the cool shade of the trees. The sand was cool to our barefeet—a relief from the blistering sands of the beach. We ran up inclines and slid down the other sides. We explored every accessible inch of our dunes, discovering new things each time. We even had a wind blown cave beneath the roots of the old oaks that held the dunes in place.

This was where our imaginations ran wild. We used to pretend that there was a pirate ship anchored offshore and the pirates were coming to bury their ill-gotten treasures. We had to stay hidden and quiet or they would surely find us and take us prisoner aboard their ship! Suddenly, a twig breaks and they look our way! Run for your life! Whew, that was a close one. Or maybe we were marooned on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific like the Swiss Family Robinson (a popular Disney movie at that time), then again perhaps it was the jungle like in the Tarzan comic books that we liked to read.

That was a wonderful, carefree time for two kids who it seems like spent more time arguing and fighting than playing in harmony. My brother and I are grown now, victims of the pitiless passing of time. The dunes are nearly gone, victims of progress and erosion. He has his family and new memories. In my quiet, lonely moments, I look back on those days of blissful innocence, to the days of sand dunes and pirates. Tears come to my eyes.