EASTHAM — It was gray and blustery on First Encounter Beach, but nine teams of artists refused to let the summer end last weekend. The peal of a cowbell signaled the start of Eastham’s sand art contest, part of the town’s annual Windmill Weekend celebration. This year’s theme, “Back to the Farm,” spoke to Eastham’s history of producing oysters, turnips, and other crops. During the two-hour Saturday-morning competition, more than 100 spectators came to watch a different kind of digging take place.
The number of competitors was up from last year, when only five teams entered, one on a whim after seeing the others start. Event organizer Katie Nelson attributed the low 2023 turnout to aftereffects of the pandemic, which canceled Windmill Weekend in 2020 and 2021. It’s taken the sand art competition some time to rise again.
As Eastham residents and travelers from afar converged on the beach, Andrea Henderson and Kevin Dunn from Fayston, Vt. built a huge relief sculpture of a sunflower, the symbol of their hometown, with the help of Andrea’s son, Alex, who spent the summer in Eastham while working at the Orleans Waterfront Inn.
A few meters away, the Klaubert family, who won last year’s contest, constructed two colorful pigs in honor of 19th-century meat magnate Gustavus Swift’s butcher shop in Eastham (see “The Butcher of Eastham,” Dec. 28, 2023). On the opposite side of a patch of seagrass, two young teams carved rival farmsteads in the sand.
“I think theirs is too simple,” said Eastham resident Asa Sheptyck-Kuppens, 7, in a moment of good-natured trash talk directed at Brady and Lily O’Connor, 10 and 13 respectively. Asa worked tirelessly to build a border of sticks and string around his barn, “so the animals don’t escape.”
This year’s winners, the McNeany family, came from Rochester and Los Angeles to celebrate the 83rd birthday of Pete McNeany, the clan’s paterfamilias. They wore matching shirts with the family name and a coiling dragon on the back.
Pete, a Plymouth resident who used to live in Eastham, says he built dragons in the sand art contest every year until about 2004. He found that the tools he used while working for a mason in his college years were perfect for shaping the sand. The triangular blade of a trowel was ideal for cutting the texture of scales into a dragon’s flank.
This was the first time McNeany had enlisted the help of his family. Naturally, they made a dragon. Pete’s daughter-in-law, Heidi, the mastermind behind the team shirts, worked with her husband, Brian, to build a small barn out of sand by the monster’s head. “Dragons can be farmers, too,” she assured a reporter.
The contest was judged by Eastham’s new fire chief, Lisa Albino, and after the awards ceremony Pete gave the trophy to his grandchildren, Cora and Owen. The two had worked with their uncle Chris to dig a moat around their grandfather’s creation. Because it was technically still summer, the kids celebrated their victory with ice cream. Pete went to watch the tide come in.
A plaque on one of the benches at First Encounter Beach bears the names of Pete and Kathy McNeany. Kathy never helped make the dragons, but she was always there to watch her husband as he worked. This year, Pete looked out from the bench as the water, driven by the wind, crept toward his team’s creation.
“This was my wife’s happy place,” he said, his voice cracking as he faced the sea. Kathleen McNeany died in 2021. She was in sixth grade when they met. They had been married 54 years.
The sand art contest was just one part of this year’s Windmill Weekend festivities, which included live music, a parade, and an antique car show. For two days the Windmill Green was full of food and art vendors and included a beer and wine garden stocked by Truro Vineyards and Devil’s Purse Brewing Company. A team of volunteers, mainly friends and neighbors of the members of Eastham’s select board, ran the bar. Along with a raffle of prizes from local businesses, the beer and wine garden was one of the primary sources of funding for the celebration.
This year’s raffle was slightly different from those in previous years. Traditionally, residents could purchase raffle tickets through the mail, which is not actually legal. The relevant law dates back to 1909, when the U.S. was experiencing a wave of gambling after the invention of the craps table and the slot machine earlier that decade. Windmill Weekend Committee vice president Rhonda Garran says she learned about the law from an employee at the Sir Speedy print shop in Orleans when she sent a draft of this year’s fliers. In past years the raffle sold a substantial portion of its tickets through the mail, so Garran was surprised to learn that the practice was prohibited. She hoped to make up for lost sales this year by making raffle tickets available online, but worried it would be too big a change.
Luckily, town meeting voted this year to allocate $10,000 for shuttles and other amenities as well as to fund three $1,500 scholarships given by the Windmill Weekend Committee to local students at Nauset Regional High School and Cape Cod Tech.
“So, we don’t really need the raffle,” joked committee president Joanna Stevens.
