I went out to Newcomb Hollow two days after the powerful windstorm that raked the Cape on December 18. Since it had been given no official name, I baptized it the Advent Storm.
Though the sea had calmed considerably, there was evidence that the storm had reached more deeply than usual into the depths of the ocean. There was a continuous wrack line about three feet wide stretching up and down the beach, composed primarily of rounded black pieces of charcoal or burnt wood, crab carcasses, and an unusual number of sunstars. (Also called “starfish” though they have nothing to do with fish.) Sunstars are echinoderms, spiny-skinned marine species related to sea urchins and sand dollars. Most local sunstar species have five star-shaped “arms,” thus giving it its common name. I often find them on our ocean beaches after easterly storms. But among the more familiar species, I came upon one specimen of a Purple Sunstar, Solaster endeca, a ten-armed sun star, purplish on top, white on the bottom, the disk about six inches in diameter, the arms short and curled. According to my Peterson guide, this species is near the southern end of its range on Cape Cod. but is rarely found on our beaches since it lives at depths of 120 feet or more. Its presence on the beach that afternoon was powerful, mute testimony to how deeply the Advent Storm had stirred the ocean bottom.
Other visible effects of the storm only served to enhance my opinion of Newcomb Hollow as the showplace of the Outer Beach. Portions of the glacial scarp presented a broken face of fragmented slumps, like the wall of a building caught and frozen at the moment of implosion, its façade cracked but not yet fallen. Higher up on the cliff face, thick layers of blue clay had been undercut and cantilevered out several feet, while at the very top a hairy rim of yellow scrub oak roots dangled in the air.
One flails for metaphors or correspondences for this unparalleled landscape which the glacier gestated, and the sea has brought forth. Curiously, it reminded me most strongly of the wild, surreal terrains of the science fiction comics I read as a boy. Stuck in the face of the cliff were several recently revealed formations of iron conglomerate, rusty crenelated ridges that looked like giant geodes, all held within shells of blue clay, but with a tissue-like complexity that made them seem organic forms momentarily solidified.
Other sections of the cliff were smooth and unbroken, representing what geologists call ‘the angle of response,” a delightfully poetic term defined as “the steepest angle at which a sloping surface formed of a particular loose material is stable.” But “repose” is an illusion here on this Outer Beach. Though there was little visible movement of the cliff while I was there that day, nothing suggested rest or repose, but only momentarily arrested motion.
