East Coast Views : The East As Change

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August-September 2005

by Adam Bolonsky

A dry northwesterly is on its way to a collision with a humid heatwave. The heavens are about to open with thunderstorms and all hell will break loose.

The harbormaster’s chalked warning on the plywood sign affixed to the gate was as descriptive as it was forthright and blunt. The gate spans a sand road that follows the curve of the barrier beach’s long twisting spine, and during spring tides and nor’easters both the road and beach are flooded by a heavy surge that runs over the dunes in fast-moving waves. “Beach damaged,” he’d scrawled. “Oversand access prohibited.”

The beach looked damaged: awash in some places, falling away in others, and with many of the dunes behind the snow fences collapsed or collapsing.

Ordinarily, this and other east coast beaches rebuild themselves each year. The calmer seas of the summer months load back up on the shoreline what the winter storms wash away. Summer seas coax the steeper winter berm back down closer to the shoreline, to take up residence until November, when the cycle of tearing apart repeats. Today, however, was a day in mid-May (perhaps that most confusing of New England’s rainy and wind-riven spring months) and the beach appeared less eroded than broken.

This shifting of sand along our coastlines is usually littoral. The changes that both the weather and the current brush into the shoreline are often obvious from week to week (Monomoy and all of Cape Cod, for example). Five years ago I paddled a section of the mid-Atlantic coastline and explored coastal batteries and submarine watchtowers that had been installed on sea bluffs in a panic in the 1940s. They lay half-buried beneath what the bluffs had yielded in the subsequent decades: a wide, flat beach. Paddle along any east coast barrier beach between Massachusetts and Florida, or to any of the interconnected sea islands off the Carolinas, and inevitably you end up ashore taking a little hike. A half mile in stands a lighthouse that had to be moved or a station that had to be deactivated after changes either moved the shoreline further offshore or almost toppled the light. The chart doesn’t read quite right. You look again. The light is marked “ab’d” for abandoned. In the fifteen or twenty years since the last survey, that lighthouse became a structure only near a shoreline now so changed that it overlooks a sea of dunes. “There’s a new breach at Chatham Break,” someone will write on an online message board. And a day or two later someone will add: “And South Beach too. The channel’s now blocked by a tombolo.”

Paddler pauses to fish in the shallows.

Aside from my emotional ties to the east, that’s what I enjoy most about east coast paddling. Other regions have destinations more remote, more varied wildlife, faster tidal races or deeper whirlpools in which to test your nerves and bravery, yet what we have in the east is constant change. Sometimes half a dozen climates, two or more types of waters, are separated by just a beach or a bay. This applies even to Maine, our so-called timeless coastal state. Sure, its granite coastline won’t change, short of the arrival of another ice age. But just wait twenty minutes and in comes an enormous fogbank, which two miles downcoast a rival northwestern dry front pierces like a sheet of ice, but not before both play a game of chemistry that sets off forty-minute squalls over Ipswich Bay, lights up eight thunderstorm cells in Mt. Hope Bay, and then drops hail the size of tin cans over portions of Essex county.

Or to further make the point, take the massive parabolic dunes of the Provincelands east of Race Point, Cape Cod’s northeasternmost point. Each year the lands shift and yield and shake. Any 1920s artists’ and writers’ shacks the national park service hasn’t yet knocked down and hauled away, the dunes simply bury—if a nor’easter hasn’t plowed them downcoast to the Truro Highlands nine miles away. And take Nantucket’s Great Point, Martha’s Vineyard’s Wasque Point, or New York’s Montauk and Wellfleet’s Billingsgate. These are fractal places in extreme.

Dunk your head in the water at any of these places and you can hear the sounds of change: sand moving with a tinkling sound as if someone is taking a rake to a chandelier. So too, Boston Harbor’s Nix’s Mate, the mid-Atlantic’s Cape Henlopen, the Carolinas’ Cape Lookout and Kill Devil Hills, and the outrageous shoals off Hatteras, Cumberland, Ocracoke and Chincoteague. All these shift in size, width and shape each time a storm arrives or the tides recede. There was a massive winter blizzard here in 1978. When it left the region, a two hundred year old shipwreck, a carcass of oaken beams and ribs and chines, re-appeared on the glossy sands of Cape Ann’s Good Harbor Beach. By summer the wreck had not washed away, but had simply been re-consumed by the sand flats’ insistent drift and creep.

Change is our coastline’s constant state, from the change of four distinct seasons (winter’s a good one, even if water and air temps typically remain below 40 degrees); to the change from shoals to scarps and capes; to the dramatic difference of one bay from another a half-mile away.

When I first began paddling, the sport in the East was little like it is today. Almost no-one outside a handful of oddball transatlantic types took the sport seriously, and those guys’ physiques and faces suggested not only that they had been ‘there and back’, but had likely been twice. For an east-coaster, the only real way to get your hands on a kayak was the inconvenient one-day rental take-away, and the only true distinction between boat types was how many pints of Guinness its Welsh layup crew had drunk on their beery lunch break. Kayaking was mostly a sport of strange, not- from-the-east types—Europeans, Canadians meanwhile, suffered from a sea-dump sewage problem (blorp... bla-bloop... bladooo…BLOOP! went the Bubbler, Gloucester Harbor’s mid-channel dolphin- pipe). If you wanted to venture out in your rented boat anywhere past Eastern Point, first you had to contend with Zeus, an offshore oil-drilling platform that had been towed here from the Texas Gulf so that we could lay in a federally-mandated offshore pipe.

Some friends and I paddled past Zeus one warm spring day. As is always the case in the east after the winter die-off of water-borne sea life, and before any plant life re-blooms, there was nothing but water in the ocean that day. The sea had that characteristic north Atlantic crystalline clarity, so sharp that it’s only the water’s depth which occludes your view of the bottom. A steep groundswell was building from a few hundred miles east. Our kayaks soared over, then climbed aboard, the roofs of the rollers coming in from the open sea before sliding down through troughs that blocked our view of the surrounding coastline. First you could see the tip of the radio beacon on top of Zeus, then not just Zeus but whoa, its sea legs and barnacles and, now, waaay! UP! Boston nineteen miles south across open sea.

Half a year later Zeus was toast, its crumbs carried around in the pockets of teams of lawyers who had filed lawsuits and counterlawsuits after the rig’s paint locker exploded and Zeus burned down to its girders in three short days.

Luckily, the changes we encounter out here in the east on even short paddles don’t necessarily have to do with storms, fog, erosion or the sudden disappearance of big towers. Sometimes change here is as simple as watching a migratory flyover fade away, or riding swells that mount a rocky shoal and which, as they mount, lift the swell into long, breaking waves. This is my kind of place. Here, along this stretch of coastline between Nova Scotia and Florida, even practicing my roll in a calm bay near a sandbar can alter my days. There are always waters just around the corner that are new enough that a blown roll no longer seems so engrossing. All I have to do is raise my eyes... and look.

© Adam Bolonsky is our regular East Coast columnist. He’s a native New England sea kayaking instructor and sea kayak fishing guide based in Gloucester, Massachusetts: Adam@WaveLengthMagazine.com.