NOR’EASTER
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.