{"id":17892,"date":"2022-03-25T15:08:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-25T19:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17892"},"modified":"2024-08-27T16:57:57","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T20:57:57","slug":"bright-sand-beach-my-memory-of-the-photograph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/bright-sand-beach-my-memory-of-the-photograph\/","title":{"rendered":"Bright Sand Beach (my memory of the photograph)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Bright Sand Beach (my memory of the photograph)\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

The boy crouches on the sand halfway between the water and the white pine trees behind him. He has been digging, and sand sticks to his hands, his arms, his thighs. The boys had been dumping sand on each other. There is sand in his hair, and a trace of sand near his mouth where he had rubbed his arm across his face. He is laughing.
\nHis young brother kneels behind him, digging. His long hair falls forward, half hiding his face. Not actively playing together, they are almost touching, intensely aware of each others\u2019 presence. They are always together, the five-year old tightly wired, constantly vigilant, his voice pitched high with tension, intensely protective of his younger brother. I wondered how often they felt this safe at home.
\nNeither one has swimming trunks. Like many of the youngsters in the preschool field trip, they stripped to their underpants when they got to the beach, keeping their clothes dry to change back into them in the bushes before they would board the little yellow school bus at home time.
\nIn the middle of June, the lake in northern Saskatchewan is free of ice, but the water is still cold. Some of the six-year-olds splash and paddle in the shallow water, but no one swims. Most don\u2019t know how. They don\u2019t come often to the beach, and haven\u2019t had opportunities to learn. The day is overcast, but that doesn\u2019t dim the feeling of joy and freedom in the outdoors, beyond walls, the only roof the ancient sky.
\nI left the reserve school at the end of that year, moving to Asia to teach abroad. I heard later through the message from my colleague who stayed in the community that the boys\u2019 house had burned down the following winter. Their parents had locked the five kids in the house and gone to town at night. Fire had broken out. The reserve houses are firetraps, poorly insulated, without running water, heated by wood burning stoves through the sub-arctic prairie winters. In less than an hour, the house was ashes.
\nI don\u2019t really know what happened. I picture the young ones panicking as flames and smoke grew, the doors would not open, no adults came to help them, they could not get out, screams finally choked by smoke, then suffocated, then silence.
\nTo this day I am haunted by those young boys in sandy white undershorts laughing in freedom on the beach at Bright Sand Lake. They never made it into Grade One.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The boy crouches on the sand halfway between the water and the white pine trees behind him. He has been digging, and sand sticks to his hands, his arms, his thighs. The boys had been dumping sand on each other. There is sand in his hair, and a trace of sand near his mouth where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17909,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17892\/revisions\/17909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}