Henry Groper

I tried to think of everything. It’s nice to have a beach house, but a normal beach house is damaged by bad weather. It’s great when the sky is blue and the waves are high, but you don’t want to be there when the hurricane blows. After a hurricane, you have to start all over to make it livable. I thought, why put money into a beach house unless it was built to last more than a season or two?

All the materials and technology that I used had been designed for other uses. I got a lot of it as military surplus. Spare parts that weren’t needed any more, that kind of thing. There’s a whole subculture around military contracting. The warehouses are normally run by civilians who used to be in the service, or they worked for NASA. So they knew about things of value that weren’t needed any more.

So I built the most impervious beach house of all time. What happened during the storm was ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. It shouldn’t have happened.

True, I went overboard. In the end, I wasted a lot of money thinking that I could outwit nature. Well, she’ll be here long after we’re all gone. One definition of nature is all the things that we don’t control.