Life On A Sandbar

The thing is, it is a sandbar, and anyone who has been around a shore knows that sandbars move. That is certainly true for Cape Cod.

My cottage on Cape Cod is about one mile from the ocean, and it is getting closer by the minute. A twenty-five-foot chunk of coastline just washed away, and another cottage is poised to fall into the ocean. The never-ending storms just chip away at the coast of sand and clay. All that sand ends up down by Chatham or up by Provincetown. It is kind of like water torture… chip, chip, chip, a chunk at a time.

There is a restaurant on the ocean side that has been moved once, twice, and now a third time. There was (past tense) a cottage on the edge of a bayside bluff. I mean, you walk out the back door and the first step is a doozy: 25 feet straight down! A buyer purchased it for over a million dollars. Six months later, he had to tear it down as it started to fall into the bay.

To save it, they tried putting in fiber rolls to stop the erosion. The town and the National Park Service tried to stop them, but the courts ruled he could do it. You see, when you stop the sand from moving, the beaches down-current erode. But the fiber rolls didn’t stop the cliff erosion, so he had to tear it all down anyway. Now get this: he is suing the bank, saying that he must have been crazy to have bought it, and that the bank should have never given him the loan if they had seen the house.

So each year, my cottage get a little closer to the ocean.