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.
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