Sarah Clifford, BYU class of 2018, received a judge’s choice award at LawStories 2018 for this story.
We built walls. We built walls. We built walls for our walls. We dug our fingers into the earth to scoop up damp sand, protecting the sand castle with sand walls. We built a safety system: eight small walls surrounding a big wall surrounding a misshapen, half-built castle. We spent more time building the walls and fortifying the walls and rebuilding the walls than we did on the castle.
My brother had started the castle alone and had moved on to build walls when he noticed the tide. I joined later, after he had built the big wall but before he had started constructing the elaborate system of safety walls.
And we knew we were going to lose the battle. The tide was creeping in. The ocean water was breaching the ninth wall—the outer wall—almost every time a wave thundered up the beach. I’m honestly not sure why that misshapen castle was worth protecting, but it was. Maybe the need to build walls hit some primitive nerve within my brother and me. After all, as long as humans have been building communities, we have been building walls around them.
We know this because we have stories of ancient walls, stories baked into the bricks of our collective psyche, stories that were passed down from generation to generation until someone took the time to chisel them into stone tablets or scratch them onto parchment because they were worth immortalizing. Stories like that of Joshua, who led his people in a march around the walls of Jericho and brought the walls down by shouting. Stories of Odysseus, who breached the mighty walls of Troy with a wooden horse. And stories of Gilgamesh, who built walls around Uruk and found his immorality in them.
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Click here to read Sarah's full story published in The BYU Advocate.
about the author
Sarah Clifford is a shareholder at Gallagher & Kennedy, advising individuals, families, and business owners with their estate plans to help manage and preserve wealth and assets. Her experience includes probate and trust administration, including representation of high-net-worth clients with trusts and estates valued in excess of $20 million.