Digging It
Three South Padre Island artists work on the beach, but don't call them bums.
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After growing up in western Massachusetts, Fred crisscrossed the globe with the Navy for six years. He spent spare hours in the sun on islands in the Indian Ocean and on fishing boat docks in Greece. With the technical skills he picked up from his Navy training, Fred launched his own computer education service when he returned, a successful business that still occupies him today. Without an office to tie him down, he decided to make a new home for himself. "It dawned on me it didn't matter where I lived any more," Fred recalls, "So I got in a car and drove south."
Fred became interested in sand sculpting about a year and a half ago, when his girlfriend, Sandy Feet (her real name is Lucinda Wierenga), invited him over to help with a project in her backyard sandbox. The co-owner of Sons of the Beach, a sand sculpting business based in South Padre Island, Sandy often had new boyfriends assist her.
Sandy had been a high school English teacher in Weslaco before quickly becoming fed up with her job, tired of the criticism from administrators. She moved sixty miles east to South Padre Island and used her retirement money to buy an early model Macintosh, hiring herself out for desktop publishing jobs. She also freelanced for local papers under a pseudonym, Sandy Feet, a name that has had a way of sticking over the years.
Walking between the trailers of the artists and surfers who became her neighbors, Sandy Feet could watch dolphins playing in the surf and fishermen out along the jetties. She met Walter, who lived in a nearby trailer and was a mainstay on the beach with his guitar, or his harmonica, or his sketchbook. "Amazin'" Walter McDonald grew up in Orange, near Beaumont, and first formed sand at Boy Scout camp. He started out with a little trick he picked up, creating trees by cupping soupy wet sand in his hands and letting it dribble out between his fingers.
After studying photography in college for a couple of years, Walter got restless and took off, landing a job shooting underwater photos for offshore oil rigs in the Gulf and then another taking photographs for a newspaper in Albuquerque. He was working for a paper in Dallas when the itchy feet set in one more time. "I just said phooey on it all, grabbed my guitar and got in my Volkswagen," Walter tells me. "It's been kind of a gypsy existence since then." It was sometime in 1982 or 1983 when Walter rode down to South Padre with a friend: "I told 'em, 'Ah, I'll catch a ride back later.' And that was twenty years ago."
He continued to take photos and carried sketchbooks around, filling the pages with song lyrics and grocery lists. He showed off the sand-dribbling trick to some friends on the beach one day, and then he began experimenting with castles, testing out the sand to see how well it would hold together. Turns out, with its fine grain and a high silt content to make it stick, South Padre Island sand is some of the best in the world.
"He was using it as a way to pick up chicks," Sandy Feet tells me as we sit in the masters' tent on the Port Aransas beach at the end of the second day of the contest. "And it worked." A few sculptors dig into the beer cooler and pizza boxes behind me. Outside, the overcast skies have cleared in time to light the nearly finished sculptures in the oranges and purples of sunset. Walter unfastens a broad, snaggletoothed grin. Sitting in a nearby folding chair, he sports a close-cropped white beard and the trademark tan of a beach artist. At 62 years old, his easygoing charm has clearly benefited from his time in the sand. "It's worked for me," he says.
He'd been honing his sand castle skills when he asked Sandy Feet to help him out on the beach one day. She couldn't refuse. "Walter is such a catalyst for people," she says. "He makes it look like so much fun that you have to just jump in and be a part of it." In 1985 Walter built his first commercial sand sculpture for a convention in Corpus Christi, which got him thinking there might be a future in sand. He learned there were sand sculpting contests around the world, even ones that would pay artists to come and build on a distant beach.
He and Sandy Feet entered a contest sponsored by a local radio station, which they didn't win, but they went to the North American Championship in Virginia Beach later that year and won second place. They won the radio station's contest the following year, then started winning all the contests around Texas they could find. "Once the dam broke, it started flooding," Sandy explains. They continued to enter competitions, and Sandy Feet wrote a book of sand sculpting tips. With their growing stock around the sand circuit, they were featured alongside other sand sculptors in a book by Chicago sculptor Ted Siebert. In 1987 Sandy Feet, Amazin' Walter, and the South Padre Island Merchants Association hosted the first Sand Castle Days competition on South Padre, which brings master sculptors to the island every year on the third weekend in October. With their new exposure, on top of the prize money from contests, came job offers from theme parks, festivals, and casinos, and suddenly they were professional artists. Walter, Sandy Feet, and others decided to name their business the Sons of the Beach, after the title of one of Walter's songs. Sandy, who had been keeping busy with her computer business, began designing corporate Web sites as well, and the Sons of the Beach first appeared on the Internet in 1995.
But when such relationships run out of steam, as happened with Sandy Feet and Walter, the love for sand sculpting remains. "Every one of my boyfriends since I divorced Walter," Sandy tells me, "I got them into sand sculpting and they've stuck with it." According to Sandy, some people are predisposed for it. "You'll see a certain kind of person who sits down and before you know it, that person is poking his finger around in the sand. It's an instinctive thing."
Sand sculpting is a strange way to make a living, and there aren't many people in the world who devote much time to it. But it has worked out well for Sandy, who says she sees the world differently now as an artist. The sculpting lessons she gives allow her to teach, and she's gotten to love the travel. In contests she breaks from the usual subjects—a man and a woman embracing, Greek mythology, fish—and uses the sculpture to tell new stories of her own.
Today, Sandy's sandcastlecentral.com is one of the most popular sand sculpting Web sites in the world, with sculpting tips as well as information on how to book lessons, commission sculptures, or buy Sons of the Beach tools, books, and painted pith helmets. "I wish there were more hours in the day," Sandy Feet says. "I've got so many projects I want to tackle." She is working on a third sand sculpting book right now, with all the details of the Sons of the Beach "scoop-plop-flatten-jiggle" hand-stacking method, while still running her own Web publishing business. "People come to me and say, 'Someday, when I can afford it, I'm gonna do what you do, live on the beach and do what I want,'" Sandy tells me. But the transition wasn't so easy for her. She just knew it was time to do something a little more fun with her time. "You're never going to be comfortable giving up that regular paycheck," she says. "It takes determination, a refusal to do anything boring."
Fred, who can see South Padre Island from his dock behind his home in Laguna Vista, agrees. Until recently, he wouldn't have guessed he would be traveling the world again, building sand castles, of all things. But when he got the hunch a year and a half ago that he'd found something he liked, he sat himself down in the sand and dug in. "It takes lots of self discipline and hard work," he tells me, "to be able to play as hard as I do."
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