December 22 was the day winter should have begun – but it didn’t. During the day temperatures climbed near 60° and didn’t drop below 50 that night. Heavy dew formed, leaving all the roads wet and even puddled in places, giving the illusion that it had rained, but the wheelbarrow of firewood I left out overnight was dry.
When I woke the next morning the sun had climbed into a haze of misty brightness that was irresistible, so I got in the car and drove out to Newcomb Hollow. There was a gusty southwest breeze, but the cliffs largely protected me from it. The sea surged in in strong but measured swells. Each foamy swell formed a thin, delicate, but distinct ridge of sand on the smooth upper beach. In such small, measured, modest increments nature is content to work her most dramatic effects. So the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains were formed, drop by drop, grit by grit – so Europe, America and Africa were split asunder, millimeter by millimeter, over the eons.
The beach immediately below the parking lot was still densely packed with the footprints of weekend visitors, but it didn’t take long for me to outwalk them to a section of the beach where hundreds of gull prints outnumbered human ones. I walked south into the low, winter, eye-hurting sun, to the extensive clay cliffs a few hundred yards south. These cliffs are one the most dramatic and dramatically changing stretches on the entire outer beach, smaller but more colorful than the Clay Pounds of Truro. If I do not visit them for a few weeks, their entire face may change completely.
That day, for instance, a new, wide parabolic pile of reddish-orange iron conglomerate had spilled out onto the beach, like an opened fishnet spilling out its catch. In other places thick rivers of yellow sand flowed out and around rugged clay outcrops. New slumps of pure blue clay created shallow caves and thin fluted channels, and in one place a sheer wall of yellowish-brown clay some twelve feet high looked as if it’d been clawed vertically by a giant bear. Overall, the massive clay outcrops looked like a recent excavation site, which, in fact, it was – a quarry mined by the sea, one older and more continuous than the Carrera marble quarries of Italy, ten thousand years in the making.
As I turned around to go back to the parking lot, the variously colored clay outcrops – yellow, white, blue, gray, orange, yellow – were all suddenly lit directly by the low sun - a brilliant “Western” light, slightly hazy and dispersed, at once softening and luminous and intense. It lent scale and antiquity to the formations, so that once again, I literally saw them in a new light. The nearest and largest outcrop, with its stark yellow-white color and sharp convex ridges, seemed particularly ancient, as a dried cod head can look like a paleontological artifact millions of years old. Not only shape and scale, but time itself, is highly mutable here on this shifting beach.
