Dan's Papers - June 27, 2008

The shifting sands of the East End cause a lot of anxiety for seaside homeowners and local governments. There's controversy over the groin fields built by the Army Corps of Engineers, starting from Georgica and moving west, with plenty of debates about the erosion they've caused and who is responsible. But local surfers, who see more of the beach than any of us because they're in the water all year long, feel that the annual erosion problems along other areas of our shoreline are a part of the natural rhythm of the sand and surf, and they have the support of many scientists and local fishermen. According to Tom Muse, the head of the local chapter of the Surfriders Association, when we build structures by the sea and expect them to stay there permanently, we run into problems. The fact is, the fluctuation of the sands is an old story. And over the decades, there have been many attempts to stop the sand, from the ridiculous to the sublime.

First, a little geology lesson. In general, our sand travels east to west. The headland at Montauk has been feeding the beaches to the west ever since Long Island was formed. The finest particles travel all the way to Jones Beach and the Rockaways, where the sand is whiter and finer than it is here in the Hamptons. (When you walk across Atlantic or Lido Beach, if you skip your feet just right, the sand makes a singing sound.) Every winter the big waves and strong winds brought by Nor'easters carve away at the dunes in different areas. The smaller, more tranquil waves of late spring and summer slowly bring the beaches back to the great breadth that we have to trudge over in July to find a spot for the beach towels. The wind comes predominantly from the southwest in the summer, and as the more sanguine sea piles sand back up along the shore, sometimes it forms those wonderful pools we all love to puddle around in. According to some longtime surfers, the erosion and sand shifting is in part related to the formation of sandbars, which is where the good waves are. Every year the sandbars form off different beaches, some of them as the sand is coming back in to shore. But it is impossible to predict just where the sand will travel before it settles into a new bar.

And that's the point. Sand goes where the water takes it. And despite the fear of eroding beaches as a new phenomenon, sand movement is a natural process that has been going on for millennia - the shape of the shoreline today is not what it was 200 years ago. But even more phenomenal are the attempts people have made to keep sand in place or to combat beach erosion.

When the beach is pulled out into the ocean in the winter, East End history emerges. To the west of Cooper's Beach lies a Rambler graveyard, maybe 15 feet below the present dunes. Only once in 20 years have I seen the cars uncovered, chrome still intact. They were dragged there to keep the sand in place and to mitigate the wave action, should the sand all leave again. Local artist Aage Bjeering went down to the beach and painted the half-buried cars and a bank of other vehicles and farm machinery that surfaced in 1980 west of the cut at Mecox Bay. This was a common method of shoreline stabilization at one time throughout the East End. Similar measures were taken on the North Fork, where old truck engines are easily spotted along the shoreline. In North Sea, a V8 flathead Ford motor and a straight six flathead stick out in all their rusty glory, tossed over the cliff along with an old sink and concrete rip rap to help keep the tides that rush through from taking the land away with them.

To the west of the Shinnecock Inlet in Hampton Bays some very telling local history emerged one day. A line of what looked like the tops of fence posts was uncovered when the littoral drift scoured out the western side of the western jetty and took away the beach almost up to the primary dune and the parking lot. The posts are parallel to the beach, approximately where the surfline is today. According to former town historian Bob Keene, these posts were the outermost fencing for cow pasturage, which is what Shinnecock Bay was prior to being flooded by the inlet that was opened up by a hurricane. So the dunes were out farther, and the land was lower, at the time these fences were built.

In Quogue, school kids used to take field trips to the beach with magnets to see if they could replicate some of Thomas Edison's experiments. He was trying to extract the iron, or black sand, from the beach, and when the winter storms hit Quogue some years, the remnants of his laboratory are uncovered. Also lying beneath the sands of Quogue is an old schooner, the Nahun Chapin, which was beached in 1897 by the old surf club. Timbers are revealed from time to time, but its present location, like the fence posts in Hampton Bays, indicate a far different shoreline than what we have today.

If the Montauk headlands continue to erode at their current pace we may eventually find out if the secret tunnels under Camp Hero, which is directly west of the lighthouse, actually exist and where they go, or if that story is merely part of a conspiracy theory. The bones of the beached whales that were buried in the sand in Southampton last year may emerge one day as spectacular beach souvenirs for the first one to discover and fully uncover them.

In more recent times, the towns encouraged the practice of dumping Christmas trees on the beach after the holiday season. They were great sand catchers if held in place by snow fencing, and smelled great. Many oceanside homeowners apply for permits to place snow fencing and beach grass in front of their homes to catch the passing sands blown about in the winter winds. If entire stretches of the beach are treated in this way, some defense in the way of large primary dunes can be built up with time. Some of the fences get washed out, it is true, and the dunes get bitten into by the winter storms, but the alternative of having a bulkhead is no longer viable. Many ideas have been tried, more are needed, but there will be no stopping the tide. Oh, and hurricane season began June 1.