When I pulled into Newcomb Hollow, the beach was curiously empty. There were only three cars in the parking lot, and two of those left almost immediately. The waves were low and quiet, silently tossing massive logs and bright flags of sea lettuce about in the surf.
A low fog was sitting on the beach like a cool shroud, though I could feel the hot sun, like a weight, beating down on it.
I walked north along the beach, my eyes smarting from a stiff, moist north wind. As the cliffs began to rise over fifty feet in height, I left the beach, climbing up one of those man-made, improvised diagonal foot trails cut into the face of the scarp, which was comparatively firm after the recent rains. Reaching the top, I continued on the path that runs along the crest just back from the edge. This path is, like the beach, both permanent and ephemeral and constantly forced to relocate as the cliffs recede from year to year.
The dips and rises of the crest, the fantastic topography, the occasional views of the receding beach and the long, rolling vistas landward make this perhaps the most exhilarating stretch of bluffs to walk along the entire Outer Beach. Here is one place, at least, where the Cape's extremes are vertical as well as horizontal. The highest point of land on the Outer Cape is along this section, a summit marked on the U.S. Geological Survey maps as "Pamet", climbing to a dizzying height of 177 feet above the beach (though this figure likely changes from year to year).
Yet everything is on the Cape's characteristically diminutive scale, so that I felt like a giant striding with a few steps from summit to summit along a sandy mountain range, complete with miniature peaks, cirques, bowls and knife-edges. Where the crest trail swung out to the edge, I peered over and startled a flock of gulls that were roosting on the slope, sending them out into the fog where they disappeared, reassembling farther north.
To the west I looked out over a vast and tilted plain of stunted vegetation. The drifting patches of fog both veiled its outlines and intensified a remarkable variety and succession of greens, starting at the cliff edge and moving inland: first patches of poverty grass, succeeded by carpets of bearberry, beach and upland grasses, then thickets of beach rose, bayberry and beach plum, and finally bands of shiny scrub oak and dark pitch pine - surely one of the most distinctive and recognizable landscapes anywhere.
I strode, with my folded umbrella set across my shoulders like a yoke, across an open field of bright, rounded tufts of beach heather surrounded by tall, waving beach grass, among hardy stands of gnarled and weathered chokecherry, through thickets of beach plum with their hard, green fruits already as large as marbles. Their stiff twigs were entwined with numerous vines of wild grapes, all sprouting clusters of lime-green fruit as yet no bigger than grape seeds, glowing beneath the broad, arched grape leaves. How lush and thick and heavy with promise these eroding fragments of beach bluff can be!
The screams of the invisible gulls loomed over me, dwarfing my presence, and I thought, We need to be overwhelmed like this, from time to time, by some unpeopled expanse of the land where we live, even to fear it a little, that it goes on so long without us.
