When, along with hundreds of others, I arrived at a barricaded Coast Guard Beach the morning after the storm, the air was full of metaphors of war. The beach, people said, looked as though it had been strafed and bombed. The line of wrecked cottages reminded some of the older men of Dresden and other European cities after World War II. From one of the remaining cottages, just beyond where the parking lot had been, the owners were hurriedly loading boxes, blankets and furniture into a waiting Jeep. Someone said they looked like a family of refugees, or a small army unit retreating from a Pacific islet. Over the beach shack a tattered flag still flew bravely. The general consensus was that the scene was one of total destruction.
The images struck me as exaggerated and inexact, though they certainly expressed the sense of awesome power conveyed by the effects of monumental tides and massive surf. But why, I thought, this emphasis on destruction? Great storms, after all, are nothing new on this beach. In 1928 Henry Beston, describing his own stay on this beach in his classic book, The Outermost House, wrote of ‘the great northeast storm of February 19th and 20th’ which, like this one, produced record tides and severe cuts in the dune walls of the barrier beach, islanding the Fo’castle, as Beston called his beach shack.
This storm, it is true, had extraordinary credentials. We were viewing the effects of what was termed ‘The Storm of the Century’ and ‘The Great Blizzard of ’78’ by the media. Two days before, on the sixth of February, an unprecedented winter storm, a hurricane in all but tropical origin, had struck southern New England, dumping thirty inches of snow on eastern Massachusetts, forty inches on Rhode Island, stranding twelve hundred commuters on Route 128 outside Boston, whose abandoned cars remained buried for several days. Car travel was banned in half the state for nearly a week, leaving many visitors marooned in expensive motels. There were several storm-related deaths, and over thirty million dollars in damage to shorefront structures in the South Shore communities of Hull and Scituate.
On the Cape fourteen-and-a-half-foot tides were measured in Provincetown Harbor during the height of the storm on Monday, and ninety-two-mile-per-hour winds were recorded at the weather station in Chatham. But except for the ever-precarious beach cottages and some heavy flooding in Provincetown Harbor, we escaped relatively unscathed, compared to the wholesale inundation, loss of life, paralyzing snowfall and severe damage inflicted on communities elsewhere on the coast.
Only on these outer barrier beaches, open to the full force of the storm surges, had the destruction been so complete. On Monday the storm had broken through the upper end of the beach, smashing apart the large National Seashore parking lot located there. The tide caught a Volkswagen lingering in the lot, swamped its engine and floated it (minus its owner) out into the marsh where it sank. The enormous waves heavily battered and undermined the public bathhouse, but the structure survived the first onslaught. The following day the massive surf rammed it again and again, while a crowd on the hill cheered with each crashing wave. (The building was finally torched by park rangers, afraid it might float off and become a navigational hazard.) The mile and a half of barrier dunes, having been weakened and set up earlier in the year by a series of powerful autumn storms, was virtually flattened. Storm surges cut sheer twenty-foot-high gouges in the dunes, and from Fort Hill across the marsh the long spit looked like a series of small mounded islands. Five of the eight remaining beach cottages were carried off. Some were totally destroyed, some had floated out and were sitting now like houseboats in the marsh, one had been carried all the way across to the town landing on the mainland side a mile to the west. One of those destroyed was the Outermost House.
I first heard about it Tuesday morning when a friend called up and asked, ‘Did you hear the Outermost House perished?’ All at once the storm turned serious, creating a loss that mattered. His choice of words was curiously appropriate. Its passing somehow deserved a term usually reserved for souls, thoughts and principles of human liberty.
Now I stood with the crowd, looking down the changed beach, thinking of that house, the remains of which had been scattered and swept out to sea through Nauset Inlet. Henry Beston would have understood and assented. Twenty years after his stay there ‘the little house, to whom the ocean has been kind,’ had already been moved back once from the beach. He had no expectations for its immortality. The house had been but the shell for the book. He knew where it was he lived.
At the end of The Outermost House, Beston makes his famous statement, ‘Creation is here and now.’ Its converse, of course, is that destruction is also here and now, and this moment it seemed to be the stronger truth. But they are really two sides of the same coin, or rather, a single indistinguishable process that human beings have divided into ‘creative’ and ‘destructive’ forces to express its effects on their own interests.
It seemed to me that the beach, looked at dispassionately, might have suggested either. The major victims of the storm appeared to be the offshore beds of sea clams, tens of thousands of which had been dragged off the ocean bottom and now lay smashed and strewn along most of the spit. As far as the gulls now picking among them were concerned, the storm meant a bounty past reckoning.
Aside from the clams, however, and a half-dozen lobster pots visible down the strand, the beaches were remarkably clean, a thousand times healthier than the lingering air of desolation and degradation that hangs over areas of human despoliation even before final abandonment and decay set in. Wide, clean plains of sand stretched across from ocean to marsh where walls of dune had stood the day before, spilling out in thick fans and pools into the marsh itself. It reminded me of old construction sites cleared away before new building began, a kind of marine urban renewal.
Often, after storms like this, the earth remembers itself. Out on those sandy plains newly-created, on the beach beyond the fragmented remains of the parking lot, I saw the curious forms of a dozen or more galvanized wellpipes sticking up out of the sand. They looked like strange periscopic life forms, some with long black noses of plastic pipe hanging from their tops, such as might be imagined on a Martian desert. Several of these wellpipes belonged to the cottages that had been swept away in the storm, but others represented former abandoned wells of the same buildings, or of others, which had been moved back or removed completely years ago.
There was also considerable evidence that erosion of the beach is not as straightforward or linear as we sometimes like to think. In one place, at the base of an eroded dune wall, a rusty old hand pump had emerged, indicating that the beach had built up some eight to ten feet since the pump was originally set. The storm had thrown up some large logs onto the beach, but it had also exposed others that had been buried in the dune wall and now stuck out from its face like huge cannons, suggesting that here, too, the beach had been much lower in a previous epoch.
An even more curious thing happened. On the way out to the beach, I had stopped at the Fort Hill overlook and scanned the outer beach across the marsh with binoculars. At the far end of the spit I spotted the blackened ribs of a small boat. It must have been exhumed by the storm, for it had not been there a week ago when I had last walked the beach. The following morning I walked the ruined beach again and could find no sign of it. Resurrected for a day, it was apparently broken up and carried off by the next high tide.
By far the most remarkable manifestation of previous lives here was just under our noses as we crowded the barricade on the road above the former parking lot. For years the asphalt bordering this road on the ocean side has been gradually crumbling away during storms. Beneath the asphalt is the surface of an earlier parking lot, and below this several feet of beach sand. Underlying the sand is a ten-to-fifteen-foot bank of clayey glacial till, reddish in color and capped with a black sticky material stepping down in layers to the beach.
Early on the morning after the storm, in the top layer of this clay till, the clawing surf had exposed the remains of two ancient Indian fire pits, about three feet across, containing rocks, charcoal, flint chips, bits of bones and other artifacts. Normally such a find would have precipitated delight and a prolonged, careful archaeological excavation with sieves and toothbrushes. In the face of the rising tide, however, no such approach was possible, and the reaction was one of controlled panic. For an instant, the sea had opened up a deep chapter in the earth’s memory and would close it forever in another. Park rangers and volunteers shoveled the pits out pell-mell, hoisted their contents on boards up to the road surface and threw chunks of pre-history into a government pickup while the diggers jumped out of the way of the crashing surf. When I arrived late in the morning, the round, excavated pits, sheared cleanly into cross-sections, were still visible, but when I returned two days later to show them to a friend even the outlines were gone.
What are we to make of these fossils and artifacts, well-pipes, pumps, logs, buried ships and Indian pits? It is true that in the long run the Cape is losing ground, or at least attenuating, century by century. But along its edges, at least, the processes are not so simple. Average rates of erosion are just that, averages. Some beaches, especially at the extremes of the Outer Cape and along the Bay shores, are actually accreting and extending. But on barrier beaches such as this one, its dunes riddled with present destruction and pieces of man’s forgotten past, there is an oscillation which should make us wary of classifying them too quickly as either retreating or building, for they have done both in the past and are likely to do so again.
Finally, there were impressive examples of the sea’s insistence, not only on revealing human history, but on its own geologic past. In my own town, for instance, at Paine’s Creek Landing, the tide broke from the Bay through a low wall of dunes, cutting a breach twenty feet wide and five feet deep into a small tidal creek that empties out of Freeman’s Pond, a brackish water body further inland. A 1916 Geological Survey map shows the creek emptying into the Bay at this exact point where the cut took place. Sometime after that date the stream had been diverted westward by means of a dug trench, through a culvert that runs beneath the beach road and into the main stream, Paine’s Creek. But for several months after the storm the smaller creek once more flowed in and out through its former natural channel before the cut finally filled up again.
At Race Point in Provincetown, the sea broke through the dike that was built decades ago across the inner side of Hatches Harbor, flooding the valley behind it, on whose floor the municipal airport had since been built, submerging the runways and advancing to within a few feet of the terminal building itself. By doing so it reasserted its claim to the original extent of ‘Race Run,’ a long, narrow, tidal estuary that flowed there in the early part of this century.
These were two dramatic examples, but there were several other instances around the peninsula where severe erosion or a cut through the dunes reminded us that this lake or that river once had different and more natural outlets.
So man makes cosmetic changes on the shoreline, building dikes and sea walls, filling in swamps and marshes, dredging harbors and rechanneling streams. But the older, deeper currents continue to run in the daily tides, like the schools of ale-wives that are said to swarm and beat each spring against entrances to ancestral spawning grounds that have been blocked off by man for generations. These currents carry a deep insistent earth memory that sometimes breaks out during major storms into sudden consciousness. And when the waters finally recede we are left staring across an unfamiliar landscape to redefine our human world as best we might.