Saturday, October 13, 2007

Nauset

The light at Nauset is hard by the Town of Eastham. It is more famous than other lighthouses on Cape Cod; the red and white tower is the logo for Cape Cod Potato Chips, sold in every convenience store from Connecticut to Maine.



Pat and I climbed down the wooden steps to the narrow beach where we set up chairs and the all-important umbrella. Pat took off her sandals, dipped a toe in the water, pronounced it freezing, and ensconced herself with cool drinks, and a new mystery novel in the shade of the umbrella to enjoy the beach in her own inimitable fashion. I can’t sit still on a beach and took off back up the stairs to explore the lighthouse and environs.

Cape Cod has always had a problem with its lighthouses. The coastal cliff that (technically a glacial scarp) forms a rampart against the ocean affords a free additional fifty feet or so of elevation at Eastham, but the remorseless Atlantic nibbles away at the cliff base with every wave and every storm, and the edge keeps moving ever westward and closer to the light. Every lighthouse facing the open sea is a replacement--sometimes second or third generation--of a light that went over the lip when its feet were cut out from under it.

The current Nauset lighthouse was built in 1877 as one of the “Chatham Twins”- old postcards show the keeper’s house flanked by identical fifty-foot tall white lighthouses. The right-hand tower was dismantled in 1923 and moved by barge up the coast to the cliffs, where it replaced the last of the “Three Sisters” lights. The Sisters were themselves wooden replacements for the three original brick towers, built in 1838, when the cliff stood about 800 feet further east. The last of the brick sisters slid over in 1892-what's left of the foundations are visible at extreme low tide. The “new” Nauset Lighthouse was operated by the Coast Guard until 1955, when it was sold out of service. The owner donated the light and the grounds to the National Park Service to be a part of Cape Cod National Seashore. That seashore kept moving closer to the base until, by 1996, the cliff edge was only 25 feet from the base of the tower. The light was moved 100 yards inland, waiting for the ocean to catch up with it. Nauset Lighthouse is run by the Nauset Light Preservation Society, who keep up the maintenance and do restoration, operating the light as a “private aid to navigation”. Boaters and fisherfolk use the red and white tower as a day mark and the alternating red and white aerobeacon lights can be seen up to 20 miles at sea.



The day we were there, Nauset Beach had more that its share of surfers, most on long boards, a good number sporting grey in their beards, and all but one in full wetsuits. Long boards handle better than hot dog boards on the small waves sloshing ashore. The waves were smallish but well formed and a surfer usually had the choice of left or right breaks. Long boards give a stable smooth ride and can better take bumps with rocks as well. The beach was littered with rocks from football to chair size; dumped there by the last glacier and eroding out of the cliff face when the glacier retreated (gone back, as the locals say, for more rocks). A pair of surfers were standing up on wide Hawaiian-style paddle boards, looking like gondoliers in wetsuits with their long single oar, and were catching more curls than most.



When I was fifteen or so, I happened upon a book entitled The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I still have it; pages yellowed and corners folded, the 95 cent price tag still in the corner. Beston, a burnt-out magazine editor and bon vivant built a two-room vacation shack on the dunes at Nauset Beach and found himself unable to leave one September. Beston spent a year on Nauset Beach, recording his experiences and thoughts in longhand on a kitchen table. He wrote of storms and shipwrecks, bird migrations and fishermen. His few visitors were mostly Coast Guardsmen from the local station or the lighthouse. Beston always offered them coffee, or something a bit stronger, on winter nights. I can still remember long quotes from the book, some passages, like long-ago memorized poetry stick in my mind. It would have been nice to have visited the house, which was dedicated as a "National Literary Landmark" in 1964 by the then Secretary of the Interior, but the house was demolished by a howling Northeaster (the lady in the local bookstore called it hurricane)in 1978. The foundation and the commemorative plaque are gone as well, the beach and dunes changed, the cliffs pushed back by the constant waves and the patient sea.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Private Viewing

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one around paying attention. I was walking around dusk in Old Town Alexandria a couple of weeks ago, when my attention was drawn by a chittering overhead. The sound came from a flock of chimney swifts wheeling around the unused smoke stack at the old Courthouse Building on Washington Street. Having raised their babies, and prior to migration for the rain forests of the upper Amazon, swifts spend the rest of the summer feeding on the wing and forming communal roosts in (guess where) chimneys. Before the European invasion of the Americas, chimney swifts roosted in standing hollow trees, but chimneys are even better and it is rare to find them in hollow trees anymore. The wheel in the sky grew as more swifts joined and the sound level intensified. I like to think they were swapping stories of where the best spots are for the tastiest bugs and about the one that got away.

Roger Tory Peterson in his Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, describes swifts as "a cigar with wings". Swifts are related to hummingbirds and move their wings almost as fast. Rather than the blur you see with hummers, swifts seem to flap their wings alternately; it's just an optical illusion from the rapidity of movement; your brain interprets it as alternate movements. Swifts have tiny feet; early biologist who should have known better, thought the feet were missing altogether, leading to the group name Apodidae (no feet). Their small feet and weak toes leave swifts unable to perch on a horizontal surface as do other birds. Chimney swifts prefer to find a rough vertical surface and hook their claws into some irregularity and roost like upside down bats.

The wheel reached out to half a block in size, and it seemed as if every swift in Alexandria was circling the chimney and chattering up a storm. At some point, known only to the birds, critical mass was reached and the entire mass spiraled down the chimney like smoke going backwards. It was like some sort of magic trick, which I guess that’s really what it was. From the first circling birds to empty sky, the whole show was over in less than five minutes. The truly amazing thing was that, as I stood there, agog in astonishment at being privileged to see such a spectacle, nobody else along that busy street even bothered to look up. I mumbled a thanks for the show to Whoever might be listening, and rejoined the throng, hurrying towards my destination of the evening.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Chatham; Hammerheads and Horseheads

Pat and I spent a long weekend on Cape Cod. Rather than go through a blow by blow, I am doing a series of vignettes interspersed with the usual stuff. Intro done, we commence.

Chatham Lighthouse sits about a mile down Main Street, just outside of Chatham, Massachusetts. It perches on a cliff overlooking the approaches to Chatham harbor. The light was built in 1881; one of a set of twin lighthouses, and part of the third set of twin lighthouses in Chatham. The original lights, as well as their replacements, slid into the ocean as the cliff slowly eroded away. In 1923, one light was moved up-cape to Nauset to replace a set of aging triple lights. Chatham light was taken over by the Coast Guard in 1939 and is still an active Coast Guard station.


Coasties were known on the Cape as Hammerheads. They got the name from an elite military unit set up during the days of Prohibition. Hammerheads went after rumrunners smuggling liquor from Canada, smashing contraband whiskey barrels with sledge hammers and spilling the contents overboard, much to the delight of the local lobster population.

Pat and I drove to the lighthouse after a leisurely stroll through the town. We were taking in the view from the cliff top and contemplating a trudge down the wooden stairs to the beach when a couple came past and asked if we had seen the seals. Really? Where? They had lunched up the road and had seen seals sporting in the channel. I scanned the area with my binoculars and came up with nothing. Then I checked out the tiny island off the point. No bigger than a sandbar, it looked covered with logs. Which moved. Eureka. I dug out the 20x spotting scope that Pat had me bring along (thanks, Pat) and focused in. The sandbar was wall-to-wall seals. Gray seals the size of sofa beds along with smaller, lighter harbor seals lay cheek by jowl on the beach looking for all the world like a crowd of summer sunbathers. I half expected them to be passing the Coppertone. I decided to hike out to the point to see if I could get some pictures. Pat elected to stay on the cliff top with the scope. She asked anyone who passed by if they wanted to see the seals; most people were blase about it until they got their eye to the lens. When I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked back up, Pat was doing a land-office business - she could have sold tickets. Pat says she didn't offer a look to the bikers who roared up soon after I left. Too bad, she could have swapped a view of the seals for some free legal or accounting advice.


Local fishermen call Gray seals “horseheads” from their long rounded heads that poke out of the water to stare at you with huge soulful puppy eyes.


Grays and the smaller harbor seals have ballooned in population in the past 30 years until their numbers are approaching 6000 along the Cape. With the increase in the seal populations, have come (cue up scary music here…Da Dum…Da Dum..) their major predator, the Great White Shark. There have been reports of shark attacks on seals off Chatham for several years and the occasional seal carcass washes up showing half-moon bite marks the diameter of garbage can lids. A Great White, estimated to be 14 feet long, was observed killing and eating a seal just off the beach not 2 months ago. Chatham Town has issued an “advisory” telling people not to swim with seals. It seems to me that swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match, is only slightly less foolhardy than swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match AND knowing that something with the firepower to eat it may be nearby. The good news is that Great Whites rarely attack humans; when they do, it is usually a case of mistaken identity - a swimmer or surfer on a board looks an awful lot like a seal on the surface. Seals have a thick layer of blubber (read: calories) that the shark can detect when it hits. Humans are too skinny and not worth the effort to digest; a shark will spit you (or whatever part of you it took off) back out. The bad news is that the first bite is enough to ruin your day.

Pat and I drove back to the lighthouse in the evening after a good seafood dinner in a local restaurant. Chatham Light sent its double beams out into a clear black night, broken only by the lights of passing cars on the main road. The Milky Way was visible, with the Pleiades hovering, and Orion climbing over the horizon like a fat man getting out of the tub. The cries of migrating shorebirds punctuated the darkness over the empty beach with summer past and a north wind rising.