With years of a consistent theme going, we’re a local icon of sorts since just about everyone knows who we are and what we do at Lakeside. Lakeside itself is such an amazing place that sometimes we just can’t get enough of it. Several years ago we decided two weeks wasn’t enough, that we needed just a little more vacation time. Since all of us wanted to go back for just one extra weekend before summer’s end, even though we didn’t have any extra money, we decided to try something new.

Over the years, as our popularity spread, many people recommended that we contact Lakeside’s Rhein Center, the place where any Lakesider can go to learn all kinds of new skills through various types of art, music, and dance classes taught by fellow Lakesiders. But the family resisted because we just wanted to have fun. Mom, especially, was against the idea that we “work” on our vacation because Dad works so much back home, even though we knew we could save money by teaching in exchange for gate passes as other Lakesiders did. But eventually our desire to squeeze in a little extra vacation time without it costing too much won out, and we decided to try it. We contacted the Rhein Center, got background checks, ordered 20 extra sets of sculpting tools, and headed back to Lakeside.

Twenty students signed up for our first class, with an age range of 5 to 64. That first go-around we were nervous because taking that step from dancing to music and goofing around while we sculpted to teaching people who were paying to learn a skill was stressful. My dad has been a professor at a private university for over 30 years, so teaching came naturally to him. As for the rest of us, we had welcomed and worked with so many children and adults over the years while sculpting, we found that teaching came easily to us, as well. What a relief!

At the end of the day, we had put up a few smaller sculptures with a large centerpiece sculpture. The class went really well, and all the students finished with a smile. Little did we know this was to become the norm at our beloved sculpting destination and set us on a course of striving for better and better artwork and even greater creativity.

The ball is rolling on this sand sculpting persona my family has taken on. We’ve fully embraced it. This is how things go for a few years. We receive tons of praise from the local community that has fallen in love with our work, and the SandMen sand sculptures have become a staple of the Lakeside experience for those who come to visit. Vacationers are now taking their afternoon stroll down the pier to see the sculpture of the day and watch the sunset.

People start telling us that our sculptures are the highlight of their day at Lakeside, which later becomes the highlights of their vacation. We are told that our sculptures are a source of childlike joy for both children and adults. Some of our professional shuffleboard friends begin telling they’re relatives, “This family comes to Lakeside and transforms the entire place.” We make the paper again for our sculptures. Recognition is what really comes out of these early years, and it is a total surprise. Are we the best? Absolutely not, but we are trying our hardest and aren’t terrible at it in the first place. Each of us has an artistic eye, so things never turn out terribly.

With positive feedback comes negative, as well, but it is surprisingly limited considering how loudly we play our music and how much of the beach we take up creating these sculptures. We’ve only gotten a few complaints, usually because our music is too loud, of course. Ironically, the lifeguards want us to turn it up because they like our taste in music. And that isn’t unintentional.

Before heading to Lakeside each year, my family works on compiling a playlist that relates to everyone on the beach, songs that range from the early 1920s to modern day. And it is always a hit. People dance at different times throughout the day all over the beach and on the pier. The playlist includes a variety of genres, from pop to rock to Christian to electric, from swing to jazz to country. We play only the best, most popular songs (that have no vulgar or sexually explicit lyrics). This is possible through my siblings’ love of music and resultant dedication to creating the playlist, along with the fact that my parents are baby boomers and know the classics, especially my dad.

We are branded, we have a theme, we have a fun concept, it is free, and everyone can be a part of it. We have found a niche in the Lakeside community. We are able to fill and leave our stamp on a timeless place with faith and family-based roots. Sculpting is a hobby, a massive confidence booster, and it is the easiest way to make a friend I’ve ever known.

Another year goes by for my family. The fires of sand sculpting have fully taken hold now, and a new season approaches. The entire year was spent pondering future projects, considering objects, scenes, and wildlife we could turn into works of sand art. We took on some massive projects and pushed our skills to the limit.

That season or summer we created over seven different sculptures. Of those, the most impressive were a lion, an elephant, and a 1983 Porsche Boxster. This was the year we saw the most growth, not only in our ability to create these fun pieces of art but to work together as a team. We were refining our own methods and including more helpers than ever before. As we grew in confidence, so did our audience, with people wanting to know more about us.

If I remember correctly, we appeared in the local newspaper for the first time that year. This obviously contributed to the spread of our popularity. Dad recalls a conversation he had with a fellow “Lakesider” (a term used to refer to a vacationer in this town) who recognized him as “the guy on the beach who does sand sculptures.” The other guy started the conversation with, “Hey, you’re the Sand Man!” This is the moment we claimed the title and ran with it. Now, instead of scrambling for an answer as to who we were and what we were doing, we could simply state, “We’re the Sand Men.”

Once we had a title, it was time to focus on getting the sun off our backs. With the increased difficulty of our sculpture, came an increase in the number of strenuous hours spent in the sun, so we had to come up with a way to lessen the number and severity of sunburns and to prevent skin damage or worse. Sun block is always a good option, but reapplying it is hard to do when your hands are covered in sand. During a stop at a local boat and fishing supply store, my Dad found a solution: Columbia Fishing Apparel.

Columbia makes baggy, unflattering, floppy looking sun-blocking shirts, hats, and pants in pale colors. Everything looks washed out and has an unnecessary number of pockets. However, it’s relatively light, offers 100% UV protection (SPF 50 all day) and has a distinct look that draws some attention as a sort of uniform but doesn’t take away from the beauty of the sculptures themselves. We bought a few shirts, and they quickly became (and probably always will be) a staple of the official Sand Man gear. The shirts work as a great identifier as to who’s in charge, especially when there are 20-plus helpers. But the Colombia Fisherman shirt pales in comparison with arguably the most important and identifiable apparel staple, my dad’s floppy sun hat. More than any shirt could, this hat looks terrible, and my dad has refused to ditch this effective sun-blocking tool. At first, my mom, my siblings, and I detested it. With Mom’s encouragement, my brother Joey even took the hat out of the cart when my dad said he wanted to buy it, trying to get him to forget about it and leave it behind, but that did not stop him. He bought it, and it became the “Sand Man” hat. Whenever he wears it, everyone at Lakeside knows who he is. When he takes it off, most people don’t recognize him, and he likes that because he can enjoy walking around town and playing shuffleboard without too many interruptions. For that reason, now Mom likes it, too.

Dad was the only one who wore a “Sand Man” hat for a long time. However, last summer my brothers, Joey and Max, broke down and started wearing them to avoid getting sunburns on their faces and necks while sculpting. But I just can’t get myself to do it . . . yet.

-Photos by Dawn C. Harris

A few days after finishing the giant snake coiled around my little sister, some of our sculpting buddies were becoming more than that to my siblings and me. Without realizing it, we had been making friends while sand sculpting. This became even more pronounced after Dad came up with the Idea for us kids to make mermaids out of willing participants on the beach. Fortunately, all the little girls Joey, Max and I approached with our proposal responded with glee and proudly said, “Yes!”–a few we had selected at random and others who had helped on the snake sculpture. They were fully on board with this sand sculpting endeavor.

Jumping from girl to girl, we shoveled sand over their legs, poured on a lot of water, packed the wet sand, and then began molding it into mounds that resembled dolphin tales, the typical look of mermaids. The girls were excited, as were their parents, who watched and waited from a distance. We had created an attraction of wholesome fun for many of the kids on the beach, which also served as a pleasant distraction for moms and dads who either were bored themselves or who needed some alone time to read a book or take in some sunlight.

In total, we sculpted seven mermaids of varying styles with various designs on their tales that day. I remember the parents taking many photos, and I remember the gratitude they expressed to my family for giving each of their kids this experience, the chance to be a mermaid, a dream many little girls have as some point or another.

Ultimately, it was the friendships that resulted from the mermaid sculpt that were the highlight that made it significant for my family, not just friendships for us kids but for our parents, as well. Two of the girls who had participated in this sculpt were sisters, and our families kicked off a vacation-based friendship for over eight years to follow. Our new friends even came to visit our actual home once or twice, in addition to hanging out with us on quiet evenings at Lakeside in our beachfront cottage.

To this day I consider these childhood buddies my friends, even though we’ve gone down different paths and typically all hang out with other, newer friends, most of whom were also made while sand sculpting over the years. Every summer when see the mermaid family at Lakeside, we greet one another with a friendly, familiar hug. Friendship-making is a huge and ever-continuing part of what sand sculpting is all about. I intend to write an entire blog post about the joyful friendships that form from working together, especially on something fun. But that’s for another time.

I would never have guessed the day were found our mermaids that these people would become my good friends. For their part, the mermaid family enjoyed Lakeside and my family so much that they doubled their vacation from one week to two. This led to more sand sculpting creations, including the sculpt of an obese sumo wrestler pondering the meaning of life as he sat and viewed the sunset. This concept was hilarious to me, and seeing these new friends so interested and invested in it inspired me truly to invest myself in the whole sand-sculpting process. It was never that I didn’t want to work with my Dad or siblings, but that the concept wasn’t intriguing to me quite yet. But with the addition of friend-making and working on something I knew I would enjoy, I was hooked on the art form from that point forward. As the years have gone by, I’ve become more and more invested in sand sculpting, and my skills have increased concurrently, along with those of my Father and my siblings, bringing us to the point at which we are now. I’ll explain this in more detail next time.

-Photo by Dawn C. Harris

I can’t remember if it was the same summer or the following that we returned to the beach for some new and ambitious sculptures. The generic sand castle is fun, but admiring it is something you can do only for a short time. I have found sand castles have very little personality, they don’t have a narrative unless you add an external aspect. Sand sculpting has a theme, it has a story, it tells you something or moves you to a decision. It’s as wide as it is heavy, and we all know sand is very heavy. Sculpting it like the short story of the bottle and the master, I don’t remember where I heard this but the story goes like this:

A wise master once had a bottle, he showed it to his student and said tell me when the bottle is full. So he took golf-ball-sized stones and dropped them into the bottle until it could fit no more. The student said, “Now, It is full!” The master smiled and took even smaller rocks like gravel and put them in the bottle, filling all the spaces between the large stones. Again, he could fit no more, so the student, confident it was filled completely, said, “There! Now it is full.” The wise old master then scooped up sand and poured it into the bottle, filling in all of the even smaller spaces between the gravel. The student, more than humbled, said, “Surely now it is truly at its fullest.” The master, laughing, poured water into the bottle, finally filling it in its entirety.

This reminds me of sand sculpting because there is so much to the process that from the outside you’d never know how much is happening within. You’d never know what great mysteries would be uncovered if you were to shave away at a sculpture, layer by layer.  I imagine this had somewhat to do with my dad’s thought process when he was deciding what to sculpt next.

With some creative thinking, Dad had this Idea to sculpt a snake coiled around one of us. My younger sister, being the least flinchy, was the Ideal candidate for this project, unlike the second oldest Harris sibling, my brother Max, who is….very much a flinchy guy to this day. Soon enough, there we were back on the beach mounding up an impressive amount of sand. Firstly, a seat was made for Lily to sit on, and then we piled up sand around her. By keeping it wet, we hoped it would hold its form around her.

What a spectacle it was to have a little girl buried in this three-foot tall pile of sand, clear up to her neck. Once she was completely covered, we carved grooves to create the look of a coiled snake wrapped around her clear to her toes. I, however, was not actively present for this sculpt, since around this point in time I was still far more interested in digging the biggest hole I possibly could and in guarding it with my life against other young beach-goers who would try and cave in the sides. This adorable little sculpture was preserved by way of a photograph, as seen below. Sand sculpting wasn’t something I was interested in yet, though I don’t know why that was the case. There was plenty interesting about it, but it hadn’t yet clicked for me in the same way it does now. Maybe I was just too busy being a typical little boy, wanting to dig and dig and dig, or to destroy.

-Photo by Dawn C. Harris

Hi, and welcome to my blog “Dust to Dust.” I’m Ben Harris, and I will be your guide through the world of sand sculpting, as well as other artistic media in which my family members and I are involved.

Since I was age four, my family has been taking an annual vacation to a small town in Northern Ohio called Lakeside. We started going there in the year 2001 and haven’t gone anywhere else since because we love being there so much. Entire blogs could be made on this vacation destination. Which reminds me, there is one! Check out my little sister’s blog page if you are interested in learning more.

The beaches of Lake Erie are not known for having great sand. What little sand there is is filled with stones, tiny shells, and other debris. But my dad, being the workaholic that he is, couldn’t sit still on the ¼ mile long pier and just watch us play in the lake or on its sandy little beach and help Mom count heads over, and over, and over–1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–making sure all of us were alive and well. Dad had to do something, so one day he decided it would be fun to sculpt a little sea turtle in the sand with my oldest brother, Joey. Knowing that they had no actual tools for this project, they decided that instead of moving a bunch of extra sand, they could simply cover a turkey-sized stone bolder with sand and make the sculpt based around that. As they worked on creating this sea turtle, it began gathering attention from the little kids on the beach, and in no time at all they had acquired a few “little buddies,” random sand-sculpting helpers. When the sea turtle was finished, everyone took a step back to admire the little work of art, but after just a few brief seconds of admiration for this 2 ft, x 3 ft. masterpiece, the silence was broken by one of the “little buddies” with a question that would change my family forever: “So, what are we making tomorrow?” That moment set us off on our sand-sculpting journey.

Seventeen years later, here we are, sand sculpting on a professional level for the same vacation destination. You’re probably wondering what happened to the ‘Little Sea Turtle”? Well, when my family returned to the beach the next morning, there was one set of footprints on the top of its shell that created a little crater and left exposed the jagged stone base. The rest of the sculpture was completely intact. Some poor destructive little fellow had hurt himself so badly that he could not continue with the turtle’s demolition. Ouch! And that’s why we never again put anything in or under our sand sculptures, . . . except people, but those stories are for another post.

Lakeside Beach and historic Pavilion. -Photo by Camille C. Harris