Last weekend’s storm hit hard along the stretch of Gardiner’s Bay where I live. By Sunday, when the wind and tide backed off a bit, two houses near Promised Land were in immediate danger and two more looked about one more strong nor’easter away from collapsing onto the beach.
The house my Aunt Mary and Uncle Howard had built in the 1970s was not among these, but only because of a tall concrete wall that had been installed some time ago between the deck and the water. Around 50 feet of dune once separated the house from the crest of the dune when it was built.
My father had supposedly asked old-timers how far flooding reached along Cranberry Hole Road during the 1938 Hurricane before deciding where to site our foundation. We still have more than 100 feet to the dune, but only a few feet above sea level.
For most of my life, I thought that moving the house back would be a problem for my children’s generation to deal with. But, in 2011, as Sandy, by then a tropical storm, approached, I had to rethink. My friend Jameson Ellis and I had gone to the house to strap an automatic trail camera somewhere, but by then everything was already in motion from the wind, and high, yellow-tinged water was scouring the dune the way a swollen river eats at its banks. Then and there, I realized that the future of the house was now my problem.
There are long, deceptive periods of stasis along the bay beach. There can be relative stability for a decade, then we can lose 12 feet in a single night. This time, the trap stakes I tied a shade sail to washed away. My now-impassable stairs hang on by just a nail or two. I’ll give things time to settle then see about putting them back in place.