Mullis: Remembering how to play in the sand

Kids love sand.

My fondest memories of our family vacations didn’t involve water as much as sand.

Burying my toys in it. Burying my feet in it. Burying my brother in it. Writing my name, leaving my footprints, building my dream home complete with a moat. Sand was a pile of creativity, the socially acceptable version of playing in the dirt. When I was finished, it covered me like a second skin. My mother would scrub it out of my hair and rub it off my limbs, leaving a sandy puddle in the bottom of the bathtub.

When I got older, I didn’t love sand as much as tolerated it. I didn’t sit on the beach without a towel under my bum. I washed sand politely off my feet and brushed it vigorously out of the car. Sand was something to mitigate. And when I had kids burying each other in the sand, it was my turn to scrub the tub.

Michigan has plenty of sand, but much of it is piled up. Most inland lake beaches, like the one I visited as a kid, are brought in with a backhoe. The Great Lake beaches are slim, running like a pinch of pie crust around the water. Meanwhile, there are more than 300,000 acres of sand dunes squeezed into five spots on the map.

This year my ginormous family rented a few cabins by Silver Lake, which has 2,000 acres of sand dunes between it and Lake Michigan. Our cabins were across the water from the dunes. They interrupted the lush tree line with stark mounds of brown, inviting exploration.

After unpacking, we took a boat across the water. We climbed out of the boat gingerly. You couldn’t go forward. You could only go up.

We started climbing. Since it was midday, the sand was blistering on the surface, but cool beneath. My sister swore it was easier to use the last person’s stepping place, but within seconds that place was gone, filled in, erased.

Even the most athletic of us struggled to finish. We started upright, then hunched over, then on all fours, then stopping every four steps to catch our breath. Vertigo met every backward glance.

Finally, I flopped onto the ridge and laid on my belly. My nimble nieces and nephews danced around me, urging me to watch them jump.

And they did, right off the edge — leaving nothing but a lump in my throat and a cloud of grit in the sun. When I righted myself, I saw they had landed safely in a ploof of sand, before unburying themselves and trying again.

While on my belly, I appreciated how clean the sand was — no sticks, no stones, no spiky pine plants. When I ran my hand over it, it felt like salt. I stood up and saw Lake Michigan beyond the rise and dip of dunes. I walked for a while on the shifting spine of a dune as if in an alien land.

I found a small plain of wet sand, a cool blessing for my feet. I knelt down and wrote my name. I erased the letters with the flat of my hand and tried again.

Before I knew it, I was sitting in the sand, burying my hands, burying my feet, burying my legs, carving trenches, digging deeper and deeper. I was playing in the sand like a child, looking up to see my siblings around me, doing the same.

Eventually, we turned around, took a running leap off the dune’s edge, and landed beside our little ones in a ploof. We stomped like giants down the dunes and dove into the lake.

That night, I scrubbed sand out of my hair and rubbed it off my limbs. When I stepped out of the shower, I saw a puddle of sand and smiled.

Nicole L.V. Mullis is the author of “A Teacher Named Faith.” You can reach her at nlvm.columns@gmail.com or www.NicoleLVMullis.com.