For the record, I did not bring the shovel. Finn brought the shovel. I just carried it from the car to the beach because he said his hands were full, and when I asked what was in his hands, he held them up and they were empty.
This was at eight-fifteen in the morning in Cannon Beach, Oregon, in weather that can only be described as the sky being passive-aggressive. Not raining. Not not raining. Just gray and damp and slightly accusatory, the kind of cold that doesn't read on a thermometer but lives in your neck. I had a coffee. Finn had a plan.
The plan was that we were going to "scope out" the sandcastle competition. He had been talking about this since February, when he had apparently gone down a very long Wikipedia hole about Cannon Beach civic tradition and emerged with the energy of a man who had been personally invited to compete.
I said: Finn, we are not competing. We are tourists. We are here for the weekend. We do not have a design.
He said: I have a design.
He showed me his phone. It was a screenshot of a Haystack Rock he had drawn in the Notes app using only his finger. It looked like a lumpy tooth. He had labeled it "HAYSTACK (ACCURATE)."
The shovel, he explained, was for structural integrity.
I want to be clear that Finn is a 28-year-old project manager with a reasonable job and a functioning car and opinions about pasta shapes. He is not, in any documented sense, a sandcastle person. He has never, to my knowledge, built a sandcastle. He watched approximately forty-five minutes of a sandcastle documentary on a streaming service whose name he could not remember, and this is the entire foundation of his current confidence.
We got to the beach. It was beautiful in the way Cannon Beach is always beautiful, which is: enormous and cold and a little humbling, with Haystack Rock just sitting there being massive and not caring about you at all. A few other people were already on the sand. Finn assessed them like a general.
He said: Okay, the competition isn't set up yet. We should start now to get ahead.
I said: Finn, I don't think we're registered.
He said: It said open to the public.
I said: I think that means open to the public to watch.
He said: That's a limiting interpretation.
He dug for twenty-two minutes. I know it was twenty-two minutes because I sat on a piece of driftwood and watched and a woman walking a large, unbothered dog passed me twice and gave me the same sympathetic look both times. The shovel, which was a real gardening shovel from his trunk and not in any way a sand tool, was too narrow and kept filling back in. Finn kept saying things like "the key is the base" and "this is actually going really well."
The structure he produced was a mound. A sincere mound. He had given it a small flat top, which I think was meant to be decorative, and he had pressed some shells into the side in what he described as "a motif." It looked like something that had happened accidentally.
He stood back and looked at it with his hands on his hips.
He said: I think the judges will appreciate the minimalism.
I said: Finn.
He said: Conceptually.
I said: Finn, there are no judges yet and also I don't think you're in the competition.
He took a photo of the mound. He took several photos of the mound, from multiple angles, including a low one where he got down on his knees in the wet sand for what he called "scale." He texted someone — I assume his brother — a photo with a caption I couldn't see but which I have to assume was something like "placed well."
We left before any official event infrastructure arrived. I carried the shovel back to the car because he said his hands were full, and this time, genuinely, they were — he was holding the shells he'd taken back from the mound because, he said, he might want them later.
The mound was gone by noon. The tide is not minimalist. The tide does not appreciate the conceptual.
He has already looked up whether there's a registration form for next year.