Christel Roever was a whiz in high school, graduating fifth in a class of 250. Her college years at the Florida Institute of Technology were an instant replay: honors classes, straight A`s.
She had such a gift for translating obscure mathematical theorems into everyday language that other students begged her to join their study groups. Her mother told friends: ”Christel can talk calculus the way you and I talk about Neil Diamond or Billy Joel.”
When Christel graduated from FIT last year with high honors, she was recruited to teach computer programming at Flagler High School. It seemed she had found the perfect job for her talents.
But last summer, before she had the chance to teach her first class, Christel got another job offer. This one suited her even better. She called the people at Flagler High to tell them she was going to take it: Instead of teaching computer classes, Christel Roever, honor student, was going to build sand castles for a living.
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Four days a week, Roever goes to her locker at Sea World and collects the tools of her trade: a large plastic bucket, a rake, a broom, a trowel, a fork, a butter knife, a spoon and a can opener, the last perfect for creating the thin finishing touches that help separate the pro from the weekend sculptor.
At about 1 p.m. each day, she sets out for her sand pile studio, an elevated expanse of pure white sand about the size of a carport. On any given day, there are usually at least three sculptures in the Roever sandbox, a shaded spot across from Sea World`s water ski lagoon: one work in progress, another freshly completed and perhaps one or two venerable, week-old creations, pitted and creased by the wind like some ancient monoliths.
Roever makes a different sand sculpture each day she works, generally spending about six hours at the task. Sometimes she builds castles: crisply angled, elaborate affairs with sweeping stairs, intricate passageways and ornate turrets. More often, she creates something from her repertoire of sea creatures: dolphins, sea lions, lobsters, turtles, goldfish, manatees and killer whales. Today she is making an octopus.
She douses a pile of sand with water from a garden hose and works the sludgy brown mixture of water and sand with her fingers like a baker kneading dough. Soon she has a mound about as tall as a fireplug. Then she begins shaping it, sometimes using one finger, sometimes smoothing the sand with the edge of her hand.
In an hour or so she has created a smooth oval shape, with two semicircular lumps at the top, embryonic eyes that look across the lagoon toward Baby Shamu`s stadium.
With the body roughed out, Roever begins on the legs. She takes handfuls of dry sand, dumps them in the water-filled bucket, scoops them out and slaps them down along the routes she wants the legs to take.
Gradually she moves into finer details. By late afternoon, she smooths away the final few unwanted lumps, carves in the smaller lines and sprays the finished product with a water pump filled with green and brown food coloring. By 6 p.m. the aging sea lion in the sandpile has a companion, rising on dry land, incongruous but unmistakable: a land-bound cephalopod, a mollusk made of sand.
Roever coolly deflects a smart aleck`s suggestion that she has miscalculated, giving her creation only seven legs instead of eight.
”Forget it,” she says. ”I used to be a math major, remember?”
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At 25, Roever is the only full-time professional sand sculptor in Florida. (There are others who do it part time.) She has worked at Sea World for the last year, building castles and carving animals in the sand for about $25,000. That`s $9,000 more a year than she would have made talking to high school students about megabytes and floppy disks.
She is unapologetic about her career choice. ”When they wave that money in front of you, it`s hard to say no,” she says. ”You have to put a value on your own talent. The only thing I`m sorry for is that our school system can`t pay people decently.”
But the pay-for-play quality of her job seems to nag at the adults who watch her create at Sea World. They usually stand about two paces behind their children, with faintly wistful expressions. Sometimes they offer polite compliments about Roever`s work. More often they ask her, with varying degrees of good humor and envy in their voices:
”How do you feel about getting paid for acting like a kid?”
To which Roever replies:
”I feel lucky. I feel blessed. I feel like I stumbled onto a miracle.”
Children are less abstract. The tactical problems of sand castle construction are still fresh in their minds. They tend to treat Roever with the deference due a learned colleague, asking her questions that are practical, to-the-point: How do you get the sand to stick together like that? (She just keeps it wet and adds a little salt as a natural binding agent.)
How long will it last? (About a week, in good weather.) Did you go to school to learn how to do this? (Sort of. Her mother, a professional wildlife artist, tutored her about composition and animal anatomy.)
Roever lives on the beach in New Smyrna and commutes to Orlando. She is an inveterate surfer who talks about the sport with the faraway, mystical mien of the true believers. Friends have come to know this phrase by heart: ”I`ll be there . . . unless there are waves.”
She has an almost mystical attitude about her work, too, unaffected that her medium is a metaphor for transience, that her creations can be destroyed by a strong wind, a light rain, or-it happens-by unruly children.
”That doesn`t bother me,” she says. ”I just keep learning so much every week that the next sculpture I do is always more important than the one I just finished.”
She is, in her own words, a ”terminal perfectionist,” a trait she inherited from her father, Wilfried, a retired, German-born engineer who worked for Rockwell International for 30 years.
”Basically,” she says, ”I guess I am a blend of the German work ethic with the laid-back surfer mentality.” That perfectionist streak is evident in the animals she creates. A manatee seems to have the bulbous shape and nearsighted look of a real manatee, complete with the tiny spokelike lines that emanate from the creature`s eyes. The lime-colored sand of a sea turtle`s back is packed so tightly that it looks as hard as a real-life carapace.
It wasn`t always so. Roever winces when she looks at pictures of some of her earlier creations, made before she started studying the animals to make her sculptures more realistic.
Two years ago Roever`s mother talked her into joining her in a sand sculpture competition in Cocoa Beach. Their sculpture, of a sea turtle laying eggs, won the competition, and they were recruited by Disney World to create sand sculptures there during the summer of 1986.
Roever`s mother helped get Christel a summer job sculpting at Sea World last year, and Christel so impressed Sea World officials that they asked her to stay year round. Says her mother, Joan Roever: ”Christel has never fit into anybody`s mold. In high school, she enjoyed sitting in the back of class with her long, blond hair and surfing T-shirt, knowing that the teachers would look at her and think: dumb beach bunny. Then they`d discover she was the smartest in the class. The same thing would happen at the beach. Guys would point to her and say: `See that chick surfing out there? She`s smart!` ”
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Sand sculpting is a physical art. Roever has pale circles on her knees from kneeling in the sand all day. When she goes home after a day`s work, she is often asleep by 9. Six hours of bending, packing, digging and sweating in 90-degree weather wears her out.
”With my back problems,” Roever says, ”I could send a chiropractor to Hawaii. With his wife. With his kids. I use about a vat of hand cream every week. I used to work hauling packages around for United Parcel Service. I think I`m going to go visit them and tell them I found a kind of work that`s even tougher.”
One afternoon not too long ago, with the sandbox octopus nearly finished, Roever had an audience of about 20 people, kids on the front row, as usual, adults behind.
A mother was getting restless. She tried to get the attention of her daughter, a little girl with sunburned cheeks and an orange crescent from a soft drink covering her upper lip.
”Let`s go,” said the mother. ”You can make one of your own when we get to the beach.”
The little girl didn`t look too sure about that. She eyed Roever`s creation with the respect of a fellow artist.
”Mommy,” she said, ”it`s harder than it looks.”
