The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn An Inlander at the Ocean Where I grew up, Lake Erie was the nearest great body of water. It was nine miles from our village, which meant that it took a...
...There was, though, a good deal of complaint about how the aid was distributed...
...Nature's destruction, in addition to being erratic and terrifying, is unjust...
...Relief would be on a more permanent basis, distributed in a more rational and equitable manner...
...But there are many other places in the U.S...
...that are also worth saving...
...Now it strikes me that if some of our finest beaches were turned into national or state parks, we could provide protection in advance of disaster...
...And for years it is...
...If the Federal government acts quickly, Rehoboth Beach could be a permanent beauty spot for the nation...
...It was nine miles from our village, which meant that it took a couple of hours to reach when we went there on Sunday School picnics or other holidays...
...In its own special way it is a lovely spot...
...What it takes to reduce one to sadness is to observe first-hand a house battered to splinters, household furniture strewn helter-skelter about the landscape, a child's lost toys rocking gently in the waves...
...Very little was done to provide safety before the great storm hit Rehoboth Beach and Ocean City...
...Boardwalks, jetties, piers, blocks and blocks of dwellings and hotels —all are jumbled together in a confused mass of rains...
...But suddenly one comes upon an area left unscarred by the storm...
...After it hit, state and Federal aid were supplied as rapidly as could be expected...
...As an inlander, the treasures which are found along its beaches have always suggested to me strange, beautiful, even terrible forms of life...
...Though the newspapers reported extensively on the damage that had been done, accounts of the storm's horrors produced practically no effect on the mind...
...But it was with horrified fascination that I viewed the storm's destruction at Ocean City and Rehoboth...
...Rehoboth Beach, for example, has never received the attention it deserves...
...I still think of its green shores and softly rippling waves with pleasure...
...For a great distance all signs of human habitation are leveled, or gutted or blown away...
...I still recall how deep and dangerously mysterious the Atlantic Ocean appeared when I first saw it...
...I approached both places, of course, with a lively consciousness of the great storm of early March...
...That which may lie five or six miles beneath the ocean's calm blue surface has constantly appealed to my imagination...
...Within the past month I have returned to the ocean to spend two long weekends—one in Ocean City, New Jersey, the other in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware...
...And to this day the ocean seems to me the most impressive exhibition of nature's various powers...
...I have often written innocently of the beauty of the sea...
...In these areas, the wind and water ruthlessly played with the flimsy achievements of human beings...
...There has been a lot of excitement in recent years over saving the sand dunes in Indiana and in Oregon, and God knows they deserve it...
...Here homes and buildings stand complete and untouched...
...All along the beaches, it was as if a great battle had been waged between land and sea, in which the latter had been both aggressor and victor...
...Its waters were sweet in the mouth of the swimmer...
...This last storm carried some of the sand over a long stretch of earth and shrubbery, with the result that in Delaware we now have a bit of desert that might well have been transported from Arizona...
...But though Lake Erie seemed as wide and wild as any sea, it somehow lacked the mystic quality that draws the inlander to the ocean's shores...
...We take for granted that the land, the rock and soil, is stable...
...Here, incidentally, was a notable instance of interference on the part of big government that was neither rejected nor denounced...
...it was a prime place to wallow in...
...Then, when no one is thinking much about it, the winds whip up the waves and together the two great destructive powers roll up the beaches and over vast stretches of human structures...
Vol. 45 • July 1962 • No. 14
