Our Dixcart Dam

I am posting my bi-monthly tidbit on Tuesday as I found myself in Sark yesterday, quite disconnected from the world.

We almost didn’t make it back due to – in the ominous wording of Condor Ferries – ‘inclement conditions’, i.e., it’s blowing an effing hoolie out yer.

Seeing the Sark Venture manoeuvre into the tiny Creux Harbour after failing to make port in the swell of the main harbour, hardly a foot to spare either side of the harbour mouth, I was impressed, but disappointed.

Part of me always wants to stay in Sark.

I ‘switch off’ more in Sark than anywhere else. It’s just pure simplicity, and a hint of what life once was not too long ago in Guernsey.

(I can hear a couple of Sarkee friends protesting that life isn’t so simple on Sark – but it is for me. It’s like being an uncle, you can play with and hype up your nieces and nephews, and then leave the complex bit to their custodians.)

Our group of friends spent Sunday sizzling on Dixcart Bay, respite from busy lives and welcome relaxation after a busy Saturday racing around the island on our bikes.

Dixcart makes you ache with its beauty: cliffs plunging into a small cove, facing blue waters and rocky outcrops in the bay. Yet somehow there are few other people on the bay, a family, a couple, and a dog walker.

The girls recline on the hot sand, talking and giggling and reading together.

“We should build a dam,” Adam declares, looking at the rivulet in the sand trickling steadily down the beach, formed by the water running out of the sheer cliff face behind us.

Tom, Adam and I begin mining materials from the base the the cliffs. I manage to heave an awkward boulder over my shoulder and stagger down the beach with it.

“We’re gonna build a wall,” Tom says in a distinctly nasal voice as we heave the materials toward our dam site, “it’s gonna be a biiig wall, the biggest wall you’ve ever seen, and we’re gonna make the Mexicans pay for it.”

Two children, a girl of about 8 and a boy of about 6, come and mooch at the three fully grown men in swim shorts on their hands and knees piling stones on the beach.

“What are you doing?” the little girl asks.

“We’re building our own swimming pool,” I tell her happily.

“I tried to build my own swimming pool before,” the little boy says, “but it didn’t work.”

Well, I thought to myself, now you have a party of adults behind you.

“Do you want to help us build it?” I ask.

Both kiddos chime agreement and get to work beside us, shoulder to shoulder, stacking stones, smushing sand, a dam gradually forming.

“Wow, it’s starting to look like a dam!” Tom says proudly, standing up and admiring our work.

“Shut up and get back to work,” I tell him. “Builders don’t stop work and say, ‘Duhhh, it’s starting to look like a house now!'”

The kids are mixed by way of race, sharp by way of intellect, and clearly free-range by nature; a credit to their parents, whom I notice peering over and smiling at us working. They speak three languages, two the languages of their parents, and the third English, which they speak with me confidently.

“Breach! Breach!” I cry as some water breaks through a gap in the rocks of our dam. The kids skitter over, helping me to hand-shovel pebbly sand into the breach.

As I’m digging down into our pool, I find a perfectly flat stone, the width of my fist.

“Woah,” I stop, raising it for Tom to see. “The perfect skimmer?”

“Go skim that now,” comes the reply.

I strut toward the crystalline water, shimmering welcomingly with the sun, barely a wrinkle in its ancient ever-young skin.

I whip the stone nigh-on horizontal across the water: skip — skip — skip — skip — skip — skip – skip – skip – skip-skip-skip.

Back into the breach: a pool has formed, but it is bursting its banks. It’s all hands on deck.

“We’re running out of resources!” Tom cries.

“Let’s invade and pillage Herm,” I suggest, clawing at sandy pebbles in an attempt to stem the flow.

“Guys,” Ross says, running down the beach toward us, “I think it would be a good idea to make an outlet for the pool otherwise the pressure is going to burst the dam.”

We agree, and task the little boy with digging an outlet with his little red spade.

That seems to do the trick. We stand back to admire our craftsmanship.

We grown-ups are more than knee-deep in the newly formed pool. It’s quite deep for the kids.

“Nice work guys,” we say to the young’uns, and return to the ladies at the top of the beach, happily sunbathing, nattering, laughing at their respective man-oafs playing in the sand.

Tom retrieves his phone: “I gotta get a picture of that.”

“Is that the only picture you’ve taken this whole weekend?” I ask him, finding it funny that after sharing a long weekend of intense socialising and umpteen games with a dozen friends, only now after building something in the sand does he think to try and capture the moment for posterity.

“Yes,” Tom replies, clambering awkwardly up some rocks to try and get a better shot of our feat of engineering.

“Wowee,” says Alana, who cannot stifle a laugh.

“Did you see that big rock I carried?” I ask.

“Yes, it was sooo big,” she replies, pleasing me.

We earn a little rest, reddened by work and sun, contentedly watching our two child labourers and a couple of other kids maintaining and playing in the pool together.

Their father walks past our pitch, commenting favourably on our work.

He tells us his wife asked him why we were doing that, perplexed at our labouring over a dam.

The fellow chuckled to himself, “I told her, ‘Well, because they are men.'”