September, as always, is the beginning of the year and the end of the year. September on the Cape is the month of young families with pre-school kids, college students with late-starting semesters, retired couples, or simply vagabonds with no particular place to be, nothing particular to do. As those of us who live here know, September is when our beaches are at their most brilliant, when the high autumnal skies and the searing slanted light give a sense of transcendence to those familiar sands, as if they almost speak and reveal the essence of their mystery. It is also the time when the beaches regain their capacity for solitude.
A little before 7:00 in the evening, I drive down to White Crest Beach in South Wellfleet. White Crest, as its name implies, lies at the base of a pure crest of nearly-white sand. It lacks the sublime height of Long Nook Hollow in Truro, with its majestic flanking dunes, but it shares that same sense of bare space and sand, of the body of the Cape spilling itself out onto the apron of the sea.
It is remarkable how quickly the character of the beach accesses change here on the Outer Beach. At White Crest it is all uniform, unvegetated sand that flows along with your footsteps as you slide down the makeshift path to the beach. Just a half-mile or so north, the access is a thick, clayey, eroded gully.
The previous tide breached the inner bar and rolled all the way up into the depressions at the base of the cliffs. Now it’s receding – it has been for several hours – yet hardly any footprints mark the sands below the high-tide wrack line. The surf is moderately high – five to six foot swells – but formal and orderly. A large seal about 75 feet offshore rides the swells, almost body-surfing. No longer, I realize, will we be able to look at seals and not think of sharks.
A young woman in her late teens, her blond hair tied back in a pony tail, her small bag neatly set above the wrack line, her jeans rolled up above her knees, toys barefoot and solemnly with the surf. To the north a young couple with an infant riding in her father’s backpack, also strolls in and out of the surf. Suddenly I’m aware of my clumsy and unnecessary shoes. Kicking them off, I join the few others in walking in the swash. So we play in the soft teeth of the ocean.
Behind me, at the crest of the bluff, the lights of a string of beach cottages come on. In another month most of these will go dark for another year. Several seem to perch precariously near the edge. It was only two years ago that one of their number here tumbled into the sea. It seems strange to me that the people in these structures crave such a full view of the instrument of their destruction, that they would consciously place themselves in harm’s way. But, as if to keep me from maintaining any such superior perspective, a rush of swash comes in, swirling up around my naked feet. The damp, saturated sand gives under me momentarily, forcing me to regain our balance. So the sea accelerates the sense of our own transience here, of one’s own presence disappearing, even as we watch the land and its houses disappear, grain by grain, wave by wave, day by day, season by season, year by year.
