We took a Guild Heighliner to Arrakis last month
to meet my brother and his family for a weekend on the dunes.
Uncle Adrian AKA Uncle Ace
Sand is drifting up and piling over the narrow spit of land our beach rental house sits on. A sign warning of deep and shifting sands demands your attention before you can even navigate your car down the last bit of the road out to the spit.
It is no wonder the voracious dunes of the Oregon coast inspired Frank Herbert to write Dune:
The idea [for Dune] came came from an article (I was going to do an article, which I never did) about the control of sand dunes. What many people don’t realize is that the United States has pioneered in this, how to control the flow of sand dunes, and it started up here at Florence, Oregon.This selection edited by
[...]
[Florence, Oregon is] an area where sand dunes blew across U.S. Highway 1, frequently blocking the highway, and the forest service put in a test station down there to determine how they could control the flow of these sand dunes. And I got fascinated by sand dunes. And I got fascinated by sand dunes, because I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and then can be expanded to the macrocosm or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar. Like a river…
from the original transcription of Willis McNelly's interview with Frank Herbert.
Standing on top of a dune looking south, feeling the stiff wind at my back and the sand it carries stinging my ears, I can almost see the dunes flowing toward the last houses on the spit.
Uncle Ace in the thick of it
The kids love Arrakis of course. Sand is great fun. Sand immediately outside the door? Even better! We spend the afternoon after arrival playing in the sand and otherwise being merry.
As the sun droops lower out above the Pacific ocean, we light the coals in the grill and take a family walk down onto the beach to watch the sunset.
Yes, I said wonder around.
Hopefully you do the same? The ocean is wondrous. is enraptured and wants to go every direction at once.
As the sun finally dips down below the clouds and turns the horizon line a glowing orange
we lie down on the sand and cuddle for a minute between clumps of beach grass. The grass holds the sand in place. The wind tears it away. I hold as if nothing could ever tear him away from me. But I know that is not true. So I hold him tightly in the moment we have, soaking in the distant roar of the waves, an eternity to return to.