Shifting sands of summertime at Grand Beach

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2023 (810 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was a child my family would rent a cabin in Grand Marais, and walk the short distance to Grand Beach. A summertime playground for generations, this beautiful white sand stretch of shoreline beckons Manitobans annually with promises of reprieve and relaxation.

My childhood at the beach in the 1980s and ’90s was in the heyday of first-run Chip and Pepper stardom. Grand Beach Club colour-changing plastic mugs full of Slurpee. Neon sunscreen on our noses, tie-dye and Hypercolor beginning to obscure the last wisps of the beach styles of the previous generation.

The cabin had no running water, and my brothers and I would take a wooden wagon to haul a five-gallon pail to a well. One would operate the pump while the other two ensured no mosquito who landed on us would live. In the summer heat, the tar roads would soften and fill the air filled with an acrid smell. We’d hunt for empties in the lanes and exchange them for nickels that we’d spend at the arcade. At the beach, pushing my little hands into the warm sand on the shore felt as soft as plunging them into a bin of flour.

In my parents’ childhood, the beach was accessed by rail. Scores of families boarded the train at Union Station and rode the short distance to be deposited nearly directly onto that soft white sand. My uncles made a profit riding the train for 50 cents, then offering to carry luggage for passengers at 25 cents a bag.

Even earlier, in the resort days, day-trippers cavorted late into the night in the enormous dance hall along the boardwalk. I imagine them at the end of an evening, bare feet blistered from dancing, shoes swinging from fingers, laughing and stumbling through the moonlit sand back to the station in time for the midnight train back to the city. And before all this, before the railway and the dance hall and the tie-dye, our beautiful beach was enjoyed by untold numbers of Indigenous ancestors.

Summertime at Grand Beach, of course, continues to change and evolve. The dance hall burned down in 1950 and the rail line was pulled up just over a decade later. Traces of my own neon era at the beach are fading now too. The arcade is still there, but shuttered, clad in peeling paint and surrounded by tall grasses and weeds. Chip and Pepper’s Grand Beach Club is no more, replaced by a playground area. Many of those tar roads have been paved and the old well pumps in Grand Marais are merely ornamental, the handles removed some time ago.

My latest sojourn to Grand Beach was with my own young family this summer. We hadn’t visited in a few years, and parking on the site of the old train station, we set off over the dunes with a wagon full of good times for sand, sun and water. My middle child made a dash for the lake, shedding his shirt and sandals while he ran. But he suddenly stopped, a wide black barrier in the sand between himself and the beckoning water.

“Mom, why is the beach covered in toenails?”

A band of invasive zebra mussel shells lay like a barricade along the shoreline, pointed and broken. Too wide to jump over and too sharp to walk on, I scraped a passageway to the water for him with a toy shovel. Later, digging in the sand with our hands, we were met with more remnants of shells scraping our fingertips. This was no longer a task for bare little hands, so we switched to shovels.

A frightening question came to me: Are we entering the final joyous chapters of this little piece of heaven? Was that flour-soft sand gone forever, fouled now by black shards of mollusk shell just below the surface?

The zebra mussels aren’t the first indication of trouble in the water. Extreme algae blooms in the 1990s prompted a slowly rising level of alarm about the health of Lake Winnipeg. I remember this, too: my mother trying to clear a path for us through a green slick of algae just as I did for my own son through the shells. A convergence of climate change, invasive species and agricultural activity has placed our lake in the crosshairs.

Failure to act to protect the fragile beauty and value of our lake may mean this young generation could be among the last few to run gleefully, tiny sandals flying from feet, toward that murky and ancient source of joy and respite.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca