A Town Called Driftwood

A Story for All Ages by Aaron McEmrys

There once was a beautiful city called the City of Sand. It rested along the still waters of the wide Wet River, and the water reflected the amazing buildings the Sanders built.

The Sanders, as you might expect, sculpted everything out of sand. They dyed the sand all the colors of the rainbow: red, blue, green, violet, yellow and then used their top-secret glue to make the sand stick together so it could be shaped and molded.

The City of Sand was beautiful like an almost forgotten dream. Towers, walls and minarettes glided to the sky in colorful sand-scapes. Sand-sculptures of ducks flew; water buffalo grunted and sand-harps seemed to play themselves as the centuries rolled by.

The Sanders were artists, great artists, but they were not kind. Not to each other, and certainly not to the Dusters, who lived among the ruins on the high dusty hill outside of town.

The Dusters rarely tried to make anything beautiful because they were too busy surviving, and they were very good at that. They could build a house out of just about anything and it was said they could even squeeze water from a stone if they had to.

For as long as anyone could remember the Sanders lived by the river, building their great sand buildings while the Dusters…well, they lived in the dust. The Sanders looked down on the Dusters, of course, for being so dusty and simple – they weren’t even allowed to set foot in the City of Sand for fear they might dirty it.

But one year, just as the Harvest Festival arrived, the still, Wet River began to rise. The waters rose and rose for no reason anyone could see. At first the Sanders found it amusing, but then, as the waters lapped at the sand walls at the edge of town, their amusement turned to fear.

And sure enough, in almost no time at all the water began to spill over the edges of the sand walls like water from an overfull bathtub. That’s when the Sanders discovered something they really wished they’d known earlier.

The secret glue they used to hold the sand together? It dissolved in water!

Suddenly the whole City, that glorious sparkling rainbow of a city, began to collapse just as surely as a sandcastle does when the tide comes in.

They slept in the open for the first time ever that night and when the Sanders woke in the morning they saw that the water had receded, but their City was gone. Where the river’s edge used to be rimmed with beautiful gardens and delicate walls of sand, now there was nothing but a huge, and most unsightly tangle of driftwood.

“What will become of us!?” they cried.

The Dusters looked on from above with unreadable faces. Some of them pointed down at the Sanders and held whispered conferences. Then they came down the hill.

The Sanders didn’t know what to expect. After so many years of cruelty, were the Dusters coming down to gloat?

Suprisingly, the Dusters did none of these things. Instead they divided into work parties by the riverside, pulling apart the tangled driftwood and sorting it by shape and size. And then they started building.

The Sanders looked on in amazement as the clever Dusters began to shape that seemingly useless driftwood into simple, sturdy dwellings. Sanders may be snobs, but they have always admired cleverness, so pretty soon they started helping out too, watching, learning, even following the lowly Dusters instructions.

When the red sun sank they worked straight on through the night in starlight. They worked the next day too, Dusters and Sanders alike caught up in the thrill of building something as a new city began to rise.

The Dusters were great at raw building, but they had never paid much attention to beauty. As the buildings rose sturdily, the Sanders came into their own, teaching the Dusters how to carve and decorate the wood so that it was not only sturdy, but beautiful.

They had so much fun that they kept right on building, even after there were enough houses for all the Sanders.

When they were done, just as the Harvest Moon began to rise in the east, the Dusters brought down all the food they had and threw a great harvest feast. Their foods were not spicy, delicate or syrup-sweet like the fancy foods the Sanders loved, but all their spices and syrups had been lost in the flood, and an empty stomach can make even the simplest food taste divine.

All together they feasted on seeds, roots, berries, and pancakes made of groundnuts as stories and songs passed like lazy birds through the night air.

And you know what? The Dusters never left. It felt right to be together. And so they became one People and they named their new City, Driftwood, so they would always remember where they came from.