Yesterday morning I drove out to Newcomb Hollow and walked south a few hundred yards to the large outcrop of eroding clay bluffs there. They had clearly changed since I was last here, and had become, if possible, even more dramatic. Large chunks of light and dark blue clay lay strewn across the lower beach. On the face of the bluffs it was as if the ocean had fashioned a gallery of mini-sculptures, small animal-like sculptures that protruded out of the clay.
There were Miro-like installations of small stones set in carved round holes, and large moons of yellow brown clay set in the blue. At one point the blue wall was interrupted by a rounded alcove of reddish-yellow sandy clay. On its surface some inspired beachcomber had scratched recognizable imitations of the pre-historic Lascaux wall paintings: an antelope, a bull, and, to give it a local touch, a fish.
South of the main mass a new wall of solid clay has been exposed, perhaps 6 feet tall and 25 feet long, divided by shallow, vertical, grooves. This new wall was decorated with reddish-brown exfoliations made of iron oxide, remarkably similar in appearance to lichen encrustations I have seen on the walls of limestone cliffs. The clay walls themselves were perfectly flat and smooth. They had the look of tablets on which religious scripture might have been carved, though the only human inscription I saw there was a game of tic-tac-toe that had been scratched into its surface.
But my attention soon turned to what was happening above these walls of clay. Out of the upper unconsolidated layers dozens of miniature rivers of sand were cascading down the face of the clay walls, running through its vertical grooves, catching and building up in the iron-oxide encrustations. These sand falls are a beach phenomenon on the outer beach that is peculiarly common at this time of year. The beach is at its narrowest now, and so the bluffs are most vulnerable to erosion. Combined with the warm, dry weather we have had over the past week or two, drying out the cliffs, you have perfect conditions for the proliferation of the phenomenon known as sand falls – these little cascades of sand rivers that flow down the face of the cliffs.
At the base of the wall a triangular mound of sand had already built up some two feet wide and over a foot tall. On an impulse I placed my palm on the flat surface of the clay wall, fingers spread out. Immediately I felt the minute sand grains falling in a steady light drizzle on my skin. It was strangely pleasant and soothing to the touch. Within a half a minute the sand falling on the back of my hand had filled and obscured the valleys between my fingers, the folds of my knuckles, the mole-tunnels of my veins. It occurred to me that, if I chose, I could lie down at the base of this cliff and, within half an hour, I would have been gently and completely buried by this gentle, persistent, dry precipitation.
