News

By Mary Jane Fine

                  Flags are flying at the beach on this Tuesday morning, the yellow caution flag and the purple one that warns of dangerous marine life: Portuguese man-o-war, littering the sand like so many blue-tinted, oval balloons, crimped across the top. But the man-o-war attract little attention today. The focus is on the leopard.

                  Two young women approach.“It’s sooooo amazing,” coos one. “Can we take your picture?”

                  She’s about the umpteenth person to ask, and, of course, Lee Stoops says yes. The leopard’s not even done yet, but it won’t last long, so photos are its sole hope for preservation. Touch the ear, and it can crumble. Or kids might smash it. He doesn’t mind. Sand sculpture is his medium, so he knows how short-lived his creatures will be.

                  “The bigger the grains of sand, the more granular it is,” he says, “the faster the water evaporates, the faster it dries.” Down here, just east of the pavilion on Delray Beach, the sand isn’t too bad, not as grainy as on South Beach, where he sculpts on occasion.

                  Either location, any location, he builds his creatures facing away from the ocean; the prevailing winds tend to come from the sea, and wind has a drying effect. There’s this, too: The ocean makes a better backdrop for photos than do all those sunbathers.

                  He likes Delray Beach, moved there from Alaska four years ago to be closer to his parents; his dad had dementia and died the next year, so Stoops stayed on to help his mother, who’s now 87.

                   His sand sculpture is an accidental hobby, begun when he arrived at the beach one day, realized he’d forgotten to bring a book, saw some kids making a sand castle and decided to give it a try. Now he’s at the beach a couple times a week, usually on a Saturday, building leopards and lions, seals and mermaids, polar bears and walruses. The Alaska effect, those latter ones.

                  “I made a big investment,” he says, and smiles from under his wide-brim straw hat. “Five bucks for two buckets.”

                  He’s kneeling in the sand now, lengthening the leopard’s tail with handfuls of sand, smoothing it with the edge of a plastic card, one of those electronic room keys from a hotel where he once stayed. Credit cards also work, but the magnetic effect wears off them, too, so he doesn’t recommend using a current one.

                  He began, an hour or so ago, by mounding bucketsful of sand here, then trekking down to the water and filling both buckets with ocean, 40 pounds each when full. He poked holes in the sand so it’d take in more water, then repeated the process, then began fashioning the leopard. Re-did the head three times before it pleased him.

                  “Are you an artist?” asks a woman who has just wandered up and aimed her cell phone-camera at him.

                  “No,” he says. “Just right now.”

                  He has no artistic training, he says, insisting that, with effort and energy, anyone can do this. In Alaska, he was economic development director for the Northwest Arctic Borough, about 150 miles north of Nome.

                  He smoothes the leopard’s tail again, uses the edge of a shell to make indentations — spots — on the creature’s body. He then scoops out a shallow moat around it to create a sort-of platform for his work.

                   “Can I help?” asks Mitchell Morris, who is 14 and on vacation from Dallas. Mitchell has been watching for a half-hour, clearly itching to be a part of this. “Sure,” says Stoops, who’d love to see every school-kid in the area brought here and exposed to beach art, “to show them what’s possible.” He demonstrates how he fashions a platform ledge, with decorative edging to give it a granite-like look. Mitchell digs in.

                  A few minutes more, and it’s time for the finishing touch. Stoops strolls up the beach, plucks a few strands of beach grass, returns to insert them, one by one, in the leopard’s muzzle:  whiskers.

                  He’s done now. Ditto the leopard. If only for a while.