Sometime in a Cape November there will come the first real Nor’easter,
punching an effective period to the end of Fall. Then the winds come
roaring out of the northeast to whip the waters of the Cape into a
white frenzy and howl around the corners of old houses. These are the
winds that rattle the store signs along Main Street while torrential
rains beat against the plate glass windows and the shoppers are not
there. It is a time to spend indoors, huddled up to the warmth of stove
or open hearth, while the sturdy Cape houses settle down into the wind
to weather it out. Above stairs the old houses yield gently to the
wind in a motion that is reminiscent of the roll of a ship at sea.
Like the ship, they will ride out this storm as they have many another
throughout a long two centuries.
When a Nor’easter has passed, or settled down to a dull roar, it is a
time for the Outer Beach, that magnificent stretch of shoreline that
skirts the Cape from Provincetown to Chatham. One early Saturday in
November I reached the Nauset Coast Guard Beach just as the peak of the
high tide reached the shore and the unleashed fury of an angry Atlantic
beat against the land to create one of the Cape’s most terrifying and
awesome sights. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sun was
trying to break through the overcast but the seas piled higher and
higher, as if through their own momentum. The whole surface of the sea
was a menacing mass of tortured white breakers which threw their spume
in smokey clouds a hundred feet into the air. The breakers themselves
reached heights of over fifty feet and followed one upon another with
such savage intensity that there was hardly any distinguishing between
them. They tossed a mass of miscellaneous lumber about with incredible
ease. At the near shore a huge, battered scow rolled over and over and
was finally spewed out upon the beach, while out in the troughs of the
waves several telephone poles and a tremendous, up-rooted tree were
tossed about as lightly as if they had been matchsticks. The shore was
rapidly becoming littered with the toll of the storm, an extraordinary
collection of objects of every size, color and shape, each with a story
of its own, each with a beginning of its own, united by their common
destination--the outer beach of the Cape. Each of them was smothered
in a cottony mass of foam that writhed in the wind and was iridescent
in the wavering sunlight and piled upon the beach like banks of snow
before a plow.
The air was full of salt, new-washed, crisp and exhilarating, and the
call of the beach itself was irresistible. Making cautious and slow
headway, I headed south along it with the sea nipping at my heels
and the salt spray in my face. This was the beach that Thoreau had
known so well and that Henry Beston so lovingly described in his “The
Outermost House”; but even Beston, who knew the beach in all seasons
and in all weathers, might not have recognized it that day. It was
hardly there at all, for nearly all of its white wideness was covered
with the gaping jaws of the waves that threatened it. Westward of the
beach the salt marshes were completely awash and all the way to Route
28 you looked across a whole sea that was leaden and riled and made
the whole landscape unfamiliar and strange. All along the beach the
breakers tore and crashed against the high sand dunes. Walking became a
tricky, perilous business with the sea acting as if it were possessed
of some malicious wit of its own with which it could set a trap for the
unalert. So great were the breakers that, when they would recede, a
hundred feet of beach would stand bare and revealed only to be covered
up in the very next instant while the water reached for your feet and
sent you scrambling up the sand dunes to safety. The air was filled
with the continuous roar and swish of the sea but after walking a bit
you could anticipate its next attack by the crash of the comber and the
intensity of the swish as it swept over the sand.
The wind had played tricks with the dunes, changing not only their
shapes but their entire position. In one place a ship’s spar, remnant
of an ancient shipwreck, had resisted the wind which then carved a
huge vertical funnel around it. Erosion and the wind had left huge
pillars of sand teetering under their own weight. The whole beaten
strip of beach had the look of a miniature, tortured Grand Canyon.
Even the usually indestructible beach grass had suffered. Its roots
were exposed, its head bowed, and in the tracings on the sand one
could detect the wild gyrations it had been forced to perform at the
will of the wind. In seven distinct places the sea had crashed all
the way through the barrier beach, surging over the marsh toward the
main highway. Three of them were knee-deep and as you waded through
them the water swirled about your legs with tremendous force. Walking
became a real effort. At last the Outermost House was in sight and it
was miraculously unaffected by the storm. Henry Beston would have been
proud of the look of it as it nestled in the dunes unconcerned by the
changing and chaotic world around it.
Fording one more breakthrough I found myself at Nauset Inlet where the
sea crashed toward the Mainland without hindrance and the rip tides
had a special fury of their own. For nearly an hour I perched upon a
steep-sided dune and watched the waves reaching for the land. Behind
me a ton of sand slid into the sea with a long sigh that emphasized
the instability of my position. Suddenly, however, the sun, in its
full brilliance, broke through the overcast with finality. Then the
wind seemed milder, and, as the tide receded, the waves became less
threatening. The whitecaps, now shining in the sunlight, took on
such beauty as to quite belie their destructive powers. Out over the
breakers a flock of seagulls appeared, flying parallel to the shore
and screaming defiance as they flew in and out of the troughs of the
waves. They seemed to have confidence that the storm was over. A few
feet down the beach a red fox emerged from the protection of a clump of
beach grass and walked cautiously toward the water’s edge. He sniffed
inquiringly at the sea air and then, with more assurance, trotted off
in search of breakfast. Gradually the great wide beach emerged from
the ebbing tide. It was flat and wet and covered with the debris of
the storm but the oceanside world was returning to normal. The storm
had left some marks that might never be erased. And it left with me a
memory of a day at the Outer Beach that I could never forget.