Something else you can do when you don’t have a job: leave.

As in: I put some clothes in a backpack, got in my car and left.

Don’t get me wrong. This was no Springsteen song. I came back. And I made sure the family was cool with my going.

But I cannot tell you how many times, sitting in my cube, I had fantasized about just getting in the car and leaving town, with no destination in mind, just go, pay the damn credit card bills later.

Thus I found myself standing waist-deep in the Atlantic Ocean at this time last week, letting the waves hit me and plotting the best time to build a sand castle.

You want to start on a sand castle when the tide is low, and pick a location well below the high-tide line, setting up walls and moats and trenches and the like, with the notion of keeping your little edifice standing against the oncoming tide as long as possible. But in the end, of course, the ocean will win. That’s kinda the point.

A couple years back I was wandering through a Big Lots store and saw a small garden hoe on sale for 99 cents. It was made of steel, thick and sturdy looking, and had a nice rubberized handle and cost less than an economy pack of gum. I knew I had to buy it, even though I didn’t even have a garden at the time.

Last week I realized what it is. It’s not for gardening at all. It’s actually the ultimate sand-castle-building tool.You can pound it deep in the sand like a hammer and then pull, and you get instant trench. Use it more gently and you can sculpt delicate castle spires.

And so I had made sure to bring it along, just in case I ended up at the ocean, which I suspected I would.

When the time was right I went to work, and pretty soon I had a labyrinth of tunnels and towers and walls and moats that kids were pointing out to their parents as they walked by. My footprint was maybe eight feet square, with walls a foot or so high and trenches behind them a foot or so deep, surrounding an island at the original sand level upon which stood the castle proper. I am telling you, they should sell these hoes as Sand Sculpters. Maybe I will if nothing else comes along before next season….

No one seemed to think anything weird of a graying adult slaving away in the sand with no children around to help or impress. At least, no one said anything.

I would guess that start to finish, it took about two hours. Then I just sat down,  and waited. The first gentle, flat tide tendrils touched it about 15 minutes later. The first serious wave smacked the outer defense perimeter maybe 10 minutes after that.

Then two little kids, their arms loaded with way too many seashells they had collected, came stomping up and walked right into my castle, intent on smooshing it to oblivion. I asked them to stop. They smiled at me, the way a cat smiles at a mouse, and kept stomping. I told them I was serious, that it was my castle and they had to leave now.

I honestly think it may have been the first time in their little lives that anyone told them no. They looked at me like a dog staring at a TV set. “I mean it,” I said. Finally they moved on.

I managed to repair the damage they had wrought before things with the tide got serious. What a pair of spoiled little creeps. I bet they watch 8 hours of TV a day, when they’re not stripping the beaches of beautiful natural objects they will never appreciate or need for any purpose other than to slake their greed.

And then I sat back down and waited some more.

It is impossible to perform this ritual without the classic Jimi Hendrix song rolling gently through my head: “And so castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.” It is also a fine metaphor to consider while also thinking about how you spent about 10 percent of your life to date at a job where you never really felt appreciated, and then one day you got kicked to the curb. In the end, all edifices built by silly humans fall back into the dust from which they sprang. Even the ones with four layers of bureaucracy and a couple hundred employees.

I watched the gulls and sandpipers plying their trade on the beach and thought, on mny levels, about all the work I have done in my life, this most recent job and all the rest, and all the work I have done that was not job-related, the volunteer stuff and the parenting and life-partner stuff.

Another wave came and cleaved a big hole in my first wall, sending a few hundred gallons of seawater rolling into the moat I had dug to re-direct water flow away from the central edifice. A parent with an eye for detail pointed this out to a much better behaved child at her side as they walked past.

“Nice work,” the woman said. I thanked her.

We newspaper folk have it especially hard, I think, in this day and age. We’re not really that old, some of us at least, and yet we have seen technology remake our world a couple of times over, and finally rip it to shreds in the past few years.

I actually started at a paper where we typed on manual typewriters, cutting and pasting sheets of yellow paper together with steel rulers and rubber cement — yes, that is where the terms come from — and handing them to typographers who re-keyed everything into the system that spit out long sheets of printed type. Then crusty old guys with razor knives and more steel rulers cut up and waxed all that type into place on big wooden boards — the galleys.

We made corrections with more wax, and whatever final adjustments our standards and sense of pride called for. Generally you knew who did which page by how well the margins had been squared up, how evenly the splits between grafs had been made. Some guys were artists. Some were just doing a job. It always showed.

At midnight we’d burn the plates, fire up the press and I’d catch papers off the end and stack them, and then the press guys and I would share a final cup of coffee at 3 a.m. and stumble home, too buzzed to sleep really but needing to rest nonetheless.

And it would all start again the next day.

I feel 100 years old when I tell that story. The laptop I’m currently typing on could lay out a page 100 times as fast, with no lost keystrokes. And I have access to a bag of digital tricks the crusty old guys never imagined. And we’re still talking print here. Don’t even get me started on the web. When I started, if you had told me a reporter could do research on the machine he or she was typing on, instantly, I would have laughed at you.

Now the tide was really advancing, and the waves were starting to gather some steam. One of them rolled right over all three of my walls and started to eat away the base of the central tower. It wouldn’t be long now.

I saw the writing on the wall for “printing on dead trees,” as I like to call it, a long time ago, and made the jump to 1s and 0s before most of my colleagues knew what a gigabyte was, or why you might want several of them for RAM. I remain convinced I did the right thing. I may have gotten canned recently, but there are still a lot more jobs out there for people who can wield Dreamweaver than there are for people who spent their lives honing the art of the steel ruler and razor knife, and never looked beyond that. I know a few guys who retired from that gig to barstools, or worse. I have no idea what happened to the rest but you know it wasn’t good.

It finally came, the wave that rolled past every defense I had built in the sand and knocked down the tower. Two or three more waves and there was literally no sign that any castle had ever been there. Another half hour and the spot was a foot underwater. And there I was, still sitting there, letting the waves wash over me, with my little hoe in my hand and the memory of all that hard work, now invisible.

I find it comforting to see my castle washed away like that, to see the ocean and the beach just as it was before I started hacking away at the sand. I guess I appreciate the deeper truth, the older magic. And that I am still here even if the castle I made has vanished.

I picked up a single shell on my way back to the place I was staying, as a present for a friend.

I drove home a couple of days later.

So, that’s a week I won’t be claiming unemployment. But it was worth it.