Sketch Artist 
Digging It
Three South Padre Island artists work on the beach, but don't call them bums.
2003 Texas Sandfest in Port Aransas
Click below to view photos!
IT IS JUST A HAIRLINE crack for now, but Fred Mallett knows it means trouble. What looks like a flaw along the surface is actually a fissure—who knows how deep—running down into his statue's left arm. The only thing to do is to go work on some other piece of the sculpture.
For the past two days, Fred has been working on the beach, cordoned off inside a twenty-foot square with his tools, some buckets of water, and about four tons of sand. It is a hazy, humid afternoon in Port Aransas, with freighters barely visible as they chug out into the Gulf through distant fog. Spectators in swimsuits and T-shirts, myself included, stroll the crowded shore, walking the beach for a look at the Texas Sandfest sculpting competition. Fred is one of the event's sixteen master sand sculptors, each with identical plots lined up about one hundred feet from the water. Next to Fred, an artist from suburban Seattle has fashioned a grinning Buddha with a surfboard and an umbrella drink. The sculptors share a distinctive tan, more like a sunburn left out to brown over time, and even though Fred is still a "newbie"—he started sculpting just a year and a half ago—he's no exception. He is 44 years old, his long wave of brown hair splashed with a little gray in the back. He works the sand with a cool focus, answers questions from onlookers with a MacGuyver-like friendly expertise.
The novelty of the sculptures I saw in photos is what drew me to Port Aransas, and I am clearly not alone in my fascination. As I wait in parking lot traffic and food lines, I join a dog-walking, sandal-clad gaggle that lends this wide-open beach all the tranquility of a North African bazaar. The Port A event is one of three large annual sand contests along Texas' Gulf Coast.
We, the crowd of around 80,000, came to treat ourselves to a day at the beach, to have a look at the amazing things other people can do with sand. We mill around, careful not to spill our beers, wondering how these artists discovered they could do that with sand, when of course, the simple answer is: They tried.
At best, we make up only half of the picture as we circle the sand plots. We snap photos and marvel that sand, which we had known for so long only as something soft to walk on, something flat, could rise fifteen feet in a free-standing tower.
Fred, across the orange ribbon that keeps back the crowd, is sweating into his hat and building that tower.
Fred's sculpture has by now taken its shape as a hefty, stern-faced woman. With a surrealist flair, Fred has given her a huge left hand, four feet tall as it rests on the ground in front of her. She points a scolding finger down at what will, in time, become a sullen-looking puppy. He's called the sculpture Bad Dog. The crowd grows as more notice the portentous dark line that cuts across the sand woman's arm. The onlookers wait patiently for the inevitable disaster, their eyes fixed on the fault line where it will start. There is whispering and pointing, but Fred remains calm inside his plot of sand. He is carving out details in the low-slung neck of his dog when, behind him, the sand gives way, and with a quick puff, a chunk of the arm is gone. A chorus of groans fill the air. Fred stops his carving and nods a few times. He looks up at the spectators, reading their faces. "Well, there it went," he says. "Anybody got a beer?"
Held together with nothing but water, sand sculptures are created not for posterity, but for the sake of creation. Sand lets an artist act quickly on inspiration without plotting out each cut beforehand, as in stone or woodwork. And the ever-present threat of total collapse keeps a sand artist focused on the process and not the product. With the logistical problems you'd find in maintaining a two-ton upright litter box in the drawing room, nobody tries to keep these sculptures for too long. They are spared the long and dusty shelf life that awaits most works of art.
The heart of sand sculpture is the sculpting process, the way bridges, tunnels, and faces slowly materialize out of a big brown lump. Sculptors need to read the sand, make concessions to gravity when the sand starts cracking, and diligently begin the whole thing over again when it falls apart. Even a finished sculpture is no lasting victory, for as soon as he's finished, the artist surrenders his creation to nature, which dismantles the piece at its leisure.
Fred is back to work, mixing sand and water in a small bucket, pressing it into place against the broken wrist. Within half an hour, the arm is back, and the empty beer can in the sand is the only reminder of the collapse. The arm will crack again and a finger will fall off the next morning, and again Fred will replace it, fast enough to finish his piece and pack up his gear an hour before the contest ends. Of course, the arm will come apart a third time. Over the next week, once the judges have doled out their prizes elsewhere down the line, once the crowds have left the island in their pickups and RVs, the entire sand woman will fall. There will be no attempts to preserve her or the other artwork, least of all from the artists, who will be miles away and engrossed in their latest projects.
A sand sculptor enjoys a kind of freedom from his past, saddled only with snapshots of his work and memories of the time he spent carving. He can't leave behind a gallery of old work, so he must always be creating something new. Sand sculpting is a good fit, then, for South Padre, where the days aren't about making a dent in the world, but testing the waters for a life worth living.
They call themselves the Sons of the Beach. On the island, they've taken nicknames like Amazin', Dunehead, Sandy Feet, and Cannon Boy. In another life they were schoolteachers, press photographers, and sailors in the Navy. Today, they are beach entrepreneurs. They take all-expenses-paid trips to contests and sculpture gardens in places like South Africa, Italy, and Japan. They write books and sell tools over the Internet. They give private lessons. They work long hours, but here is the payoff: They get to do it on their own schedule, in the sun, with their shoes off.
The details vary, but the story of how they arrived always goes something like this: An old friend—or their grandparents, or a girlfriend—lived on South Padre and invited them to visit. The time felt right for a little vacation, to clear the cobwebs from their souls. From all sides of the country, they traversed South Texas, hung a left with Mexico on the horizon, and crossed the causeway over from Port Isabel. The first morning on South Padre, they woke up to the calming sound of the tumbling surf, the sun bright and the fine sand soft between their toes. They felt an easy connection with the people around who had chosen the island as their home. When it was time to head back—and distant thoughts of Monday mornings and a boss breathing down their neck crept in—they realized that what they really wanted was to stay. Why go back when this feels so much like home?
My Library
