On the night of October 22 a large storm system gyrated up the coast and hit the Outer Cape with the season’s first full-fledged northeaster. All night long the storm thundered its power, pelting and slapping the house with wind and rain as if in punishment for some sin of which we were unaware. I
In the morning I drove out to Cahoon Hollow. The sky had cleared, but the air was full of shattered mist. The dirt parking lot was completely flooded except for one space on the north edge. The surf was at its best: glassy, green-gray marbled waters and brilliant, milky-foamy surf. The seas offshore had that muscular mass of moving mountain ranges. The breakers not only plunged and reared like wild horses, but threw up exploding geysers of spray. Crashing swells created a symphonic chaos for several hundred yards out and up and down the shore as far as one could see, giving it a range and expanse commensurate with its glory.
The storm surge had reached the base of the cliff during the night, wiping the beach clean of footprints. The wind had also done its work, leaving thousands of small rocks and pebbles balanced on miniature buttes and pillars of wet sand, with tiny narrow sand ridges running behind them, recording the wind’s direction.
The beach after a storm provides a curious mixture of obscurity and clarity. A delicate and dazzling mist from the crashing spray hung over the whole shore, diffusing the light so that the whole scene seemed to have an air-brushed inner glow, yet any single object or feature was crystal clear, even at a distance. A flock of mixed herring and black backed gulls stood out vividly on the beach a quarter-mile to the north. As I descended the cliff face, they suddenly flew up and dispersed in a widening, whirling gyre – as if they had all suddenly thought of whirlwind. Then they slowly settled back down in the same place, just as a small wind-devil will sometimes suck up a pile of leaves and, after dervishing with them for a while, will set most of them down again in the same exact spot.
And everywhere, ubiquitous to the ear, was that unmistakable post-storm roar of big surf on a rising tide: first, the powerful, guttering hollow whine and growl of the steepening volutes of swells; then the exhilarating transformation of all that gathered power of sound into a sudden effervescent dissipation of seethe and sucking into the sands of the upper beach; and finally, the grating, infinitely-broken sound of the retreat of the spent surges over the screened and graveled bottom of the lower beach.
As I’ve said before, the surf on the Outer Beach can be monotonously uniform. In general it lacks the complexity and variety, the orchestrated invention and drama of more rocky, northern shores. But on such a morning as this, in all its post-storm splendor, this beach more than holds its own with any other. And finally there is no surpassing first loves, when they are true and complete, as mine was here. Looking up at the smooth light-rust-colored cliffs, fringed with a dark line of beach grass at the top, I see a quarter moon sitting over them, bright in a bright blue sky.
