Wildfires prompt long-distance worry

I've spent some time this morning looking at photos from the Myrtle Beach Sun-News of the wildfires in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area. Friday's news reports alerted me to the extraordinary calamity and prompted me to worry about my first cousin, who lives in the Barefoot Resort development, where 69 houses have been destroyed. A family e-mail went out asking, "Has anyone heard from Paula?" That was followed by an e-mail from another cousin saying Paula and her husband had been evacuated but didn't know whether their home had been damaged.

For the past three years, the Tarleton Family Reunion had been held at Barefoot Resort. Three generations of the descendants of my grandparents, not including my father's generation (now all deceased), gathered for lunch at the resort clubhouse. The resort location attracted some cousins who had skipped the more traditional covered dish meals in church halls and civic clubhouses, and the beach attractions made this a great place to get together.

Our only worry about the location was the possibility of October hurricanes. Who could ever expect wildfires in a locale so dominated by water — the ocean, canals, creeks, inlets, ponds, waterways, etc.? Yet, as the pictures show, wildfires can sweep across the creeks and ponds to torch the golf courses and homes that sprawl across the marshes and wetlands. This kind of disaster is associated with the arid areas of Southern California and the Southwest, not with the water-drenched South Carolina Lowcountry.

Looking at the newspaper's pictures, I recognized a number of landmarks and marveled that an area so inviting could suddenly turn so hazardous. I have no doubt that Myrtle Beach's tourist mecca will recover from this setback, and the devastated homeowners will rebuild. But the trauma will stay with them, and evidence of the disaster will linger through the tourist season. I'll pray that Paula and other relatives in the area have been spared.

As for the Tarleton reunion, it had already been decided to move this year's event back to Anson County, where my grandparents lived, died and are buried.

Beach renourishment never stops

Eleven floors above the sand of North Myrtle Beach, I had an expansive view of the resort town's beach renourishment efforts the past couple of days. A family reunion brought me to what used to be called The Grand Strand, but this weekend, the thing that was grand was the engineering effort. Bulldozers, an other-worldly looking motorized tripod with a cockpit on top, a dredge ship and hundreds of yards of pipes worked almost around the clock to refill the beach with sand.

The bulldozers, which were loud even 100 feet above the work, continued all afternoon Friday and well into the night. Bright lights lit the effort. Dozers pushed sand out toward the waves, creating a porous barricade against the pounding surf, then the dredged sand poured through the pipe to fill the gap between the sea oats-covered dunes and the sand the dozers had just pushed toward the surf. As the dredged sand filled in, the dozers would go back and forth smoothing the new beach into something resembling a natural beach. It continued all day Saturday and late into the night. Workers were back at it Sunday morning.

All up and down the beach once marked by modest little vacation cottages, high-rise condominium complexes have turned the shoreline into a mega-metropolis. In the off-season, the condos can be had for reasonable prices, but during vacation season, millions of northern and midwestern tourists come and ride the elevators and the waves and think how great the beach is. But the beach is disappearing.

The effort my family watched and heard is a desperate attempt to keep sand beneath those soaring high rises and keep some semblance of a beach for the tourists. Farther inland, entertainment complexes feature music and dancing and other spectacles for those for whom the beach is not enough. Without the beach to attract the tourists to fill the high rises and eat at the restaurants and see the shows, all will be lost. So the construction project went on late into the night and all through the weekend. Time is of the essence when the sands of time and the times of sand are ebbing away.