The Mast-Head: Ill Winds

The wind has been out of character this winter here by the beach. Normally, by now we would have had a couple of classic northeasters; instead, there have been just a few easterly blows followed by hard wind from the west or northwest.

This has saved the Gardiner’s Bay shore from Devon to Promised Land, so far, its usual beatings. There are plenty of weeks left to come, and March often brings the hardest weather, but what seems to me a shift from the usual pattern feels odd.

At Ditch Plain on Sunday with my friend Chris, we noticed that the beach was unusually wide and smooth. Sand had filled the area from Poles to the jetty and around to the Trailer Park, something neither of us recalled seeing for years.

My guess was that it was the persistent westerlies, the same ones that choked Amagansett with field dust, that had brought the sand in. Toward downtown Montauk, the bluff hoodoos had sloughed off large blocks of soil in recent rains; these, I suspected, are quickly broken up by the waves and the sand carried to the nearby hook of the beach. In other places, the ground had become near liquid and come down to rest like so many successive lava flows but in miniature. These, too, meant more sand for the beach.

Nearby, Chris and I came on the last remaining wreckage of the Rheinstein house that stood on the bluff from 1928 to 1976. Two stone-and-cement driveway posts rested on the beach, among a scatter of broken pipe and bits of brick. The landward section of the foundation slipped onto the beach in 2003. Poles, as the surfing spot out front is called, got its name from a set of pilings, now gone, too, that once had been part of an attempt to stabilize the bluff.

Ditch is fat with sand at the moment. If it stays that way through the summer there will be a lot of pleased beachgoers, unaware of the price in many feet of eroded bluff.