A  HORSE'S  WHAT?

Some of you may have visited Massachusetts' Horseneck Beach. It is contained within a 600 acre combination of wetland, bird sanctuary and long sandy beach areas, open to the public, and free if you cycle in. Part of the lure of the beaches is their opening to Buzzard's Bay and through that body of water, to the surf of the Atlantic Ocean.  Another feature of the beach is the large number of inviting sand dunes.

When I was a child, I would ask to be driven along the Ocean Road which paralleled miles of the pristine sandy beach.  On the side of the road across from the beach, were hundreds of little summer cottages,  interspersed, at short periods with vendors selling stuffed quahogs, fish and chips, and ice cold Dawson's beer.  The smells were overpowering.  My nose remembers them even though a whole lot of time has gone by.

Eight-year-old Joe Vaughan and his buddy, Casey, would often cycle out to the beach and cool our feet in the cold ocean water.  On the way, we would always pick a free lunch of Concord grapes that grew all along the roadside.

This idyllic life was shattered in September of 1938, when a rogue hurricane (no names for storms back then) blew in at high tide, unexpectedly, and destroyed every bit of the man-made buildings. No more summer cottages!  No more delicious stuffed quahogs! Mother Nature had reasserted herself.

 Several years later, I was taking the summer break from Boston University.  I had recently married and realized this might be a good time to make some money, which we needed.  I searched around, but no jobs were to be had.  I finally asked my State Representative (Al) to see if there might be some temporary job I could do for the summer.  I had been friends with Al when he was a "regular" at the YMCA where I worked. I didn't expect anything, but I felt "it was worth a shot."

A couple of days later, I got a letter from a Massachusetts office, ordering me to go to a location at 6 am.. "tomorrow," and begin work on a summer job, for which I would be paid $54 each week. (This was a decent salary at that time.)  I was happy. 

I joined fellow workers at the pick-up site and was transported on the back of a truck to the work site.  My fellow workers were mainly men of Portuguese descent, who had trouble with English, and a couple of college students like me.

The work site was the former Horseneck Beach.  Our task was to dig through the largest sand dunes and extract anything of value from the houses that may be underneath.  Our foreman was a 50-year-old guy with a (kind of) British accent.  Some of his instructions to us remained a mystery.

His main instruction was "Dig out all the dee bris!"

We eventually discovered that he wasn't asking us to look for remnants of a ritual circumcision, but rather the debris that might be under the sand, and there was plenty.  We dug out appliances, beds, tables, framed pictures, and lots of family memorabilia.

The Portuguese-speaking members of our crew were delighted when we found toilet bowls.  They would dig them up and carry them out to the road, to be retrieved after work.

I was continually surprised and amazed at the house remnants that we dug up.  After their 20-year burial they looked "brand new."

When our temporary job was finished, we could see that about twenty of the formerly high dunes were now flat.  And, I think that was all the digging that would be done, and the other dunes would remain as is, part of a renewed fun area for Massachusetts residents.

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