Walking Along the Edge of Where the Ocean Meets the Land

Apr 21, 2007 16:13

Alright, let's see if we can get this updated regularly again.

As anyone living in Rhode Island (or anyone on the East coast, for that matter) knows, this past week we've been hit with a bizarre spring Nor'easter.  Since my apartment is in the middle of the woods and my job is upstate, I hadn't seen much of the damage to the coast.  So Thursday night after work I drove down to Narragansett to see what had become of the Town Beach, one of my favorite places to go beach walking at night when I'm too busy being a general basket case to get to sleep at a decent hour.

I had heard bad things, but it's one thing to hear about a beach being wiped off the face of the earth and another thing to see what's left.

The first thing I noticed was that the main parking lot by the wall was closed, presumably due to damage sustained during the storm.  I couldn't see the damage from the road, so I drove a little farther down and parked on the side of Ocean Road.  The first thing I saw as I came to the corner of the beach was that there was, in fact, no beach there at all.  The still-choppy water was surging all the way up to the wall and even when the waves withdrew there was no trace of the sand and rocks that should have been there, just more water.

As I headed farther down the sea wall it became clear why the parking lot had been closed.  During the storm the waves had risen so high that they had actually broken over the wall, and this was apparent from large clumps of seaweed strewn almost all the way to the road.  The parking lot itself was downright post-apocalyptic.  Huge sections of concrete had been ripped up and the fence was completely gone, even the poles.  The beach at the parking lot was a mere ghost of its former self.  Where there had been twenty yards of sand leading into the bay was a mere sliver of exposed rocks and detritus.  The pilings from the old Narragansett boardwalk jutted up out of the sand, exposed for the first time in almost a century.  Dozens of smashed lobster pots littered the rocks, and the centerpiece of it all was an entire tree covered in algae and garbage.

Farther down the dunes had spared the main pavilion from the worst damage, and had done a lot to preserve some of the sand.  However, the picnic area behind the pavilion was nearly unrecognizable from all the trash, kelp, and twisted sections of fence.  That said, the sections of beach where the dunes had been allowed to stay fared far better than those butting up against the wall.  In all of this, there is an ecological lesson to be learned.

As of this writing the ocean has started bringing some of the sand back, but unless the town of Narragansett has millions of dollars set aside to truck in sand the beach will be a ghost of its former self this summer.  It was a strange sight seeing this place that had been more or less the same for my entire life essentially stripped to the bone.  I have no doubt that Narragansett beach will be back, but when is anyone's guess.

Sometimes it's good to know that as much as I love the ocean, it still has the capacity to kill me.

nor'easter, narragansett beach, ocean stuff

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