Sunday sand: Old Lighthouse Beach, Cape Hatteras

 

There’s a good reason for the beach’s name – not because it has an old lighthouse on it, but because it used to and now doesn’t.

When I was writing the book, I derived great enjoyment from the travails of lighthouses around the world as symbolic of shape-shifting shorelines and dynamic sands; lighthouses overwhelmed by sand, lighthouses deprived of sand and therefore their foundations. Cape Hatteras is a great example. The sand shoals of the cape extend far offshore and have claimed many ships over the years, including, famously, the ironclad Monitor during the Civil War; this is one of the candidates for the “graveyard of the Atlantic.” The “old lighthouse,” with its distinctive black and white spiral, and its pride as the tallest in the US, was originally built, from brick, in 1868-70. But time and tide – and storms - wait for no man nor manmade structure, and, by the early twentieth-century, the lighthouse was under threat. I’ll let what I wrote for the book continue:

If you had happened to be enjoying a fine day in late June 1999 by taking a walk along the beaches of Cape Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, you would have thought that your mind was playing tricks. You might have dismissed it as an illusion of some sort and sat on the beach, keeping an eye on your dog and sifting sand grains through your fingers—any one of which might have been our sand grain resting on its journey southward after its escape from the Chesapeake. But the sensation of uneasiness would have remained, and you would have inevitably turned back to look again at the huge, candy-striped lighthouse—and yes, it had moved.

This would not have been a trick or an illusion, a sign of your deteriorating faculties. The Cape Hatteras lighthouse, the highest in the country at over 60 meters tall and a historic icon, was on a slow, 900-meter journey from where it had stood for 129 years to a new, safer location. When it was built in 1870, it stood 500 meters from the shore. But the same treachery of the ocean that required the lighthouse to warn ships of offshore shoals had threatened the structure itself. By 1935, the waves were crashing only 30 meters from its base. The beach had gone, carried away not just by the regular storms of the Atlantic, but also by daily wear and tear, washed away by the same processes that move the sand between your toes. The cumulative effect of those processes is that Hatteras Island in its entirety is continuously migrating westward.

To move a lighthouse is no trivial task, and many different alternative engineering solutions had been tried over the decades. Since the 1930s, huge lengths of massive steel sheets had been driven into the shoreline to form groins, walls against the sea. The groins were extended and repaired, but time after time storms found their way around them to slam into the defenceless sands and move them on again. In 1966, fourteen thousand dump truck loads of sand were pumped from neighbouring Pamlico onto the beach in front of the lighthouse, but the sand was fine, puny stuff, easily dismissed by the waves, and dismiss it they did. In 1973, in a further attempt at what, in the trade, is referred to as beach nourishment, another fifty-nine thousand loads of sand were moved from the cape to the lighthouse defenses, only to be swept away within a few years. By 1980, the sea was once again threatening the lighthouse, and sandbags, rubble, and rubber mats were dropped offshore. None had any lasting effect in the face of the stubborn aggression of the ocean. In 1988, the decision was made to retreat, to move the lighthouse, lock, stock, and lantern, inland. The structure, weighing close to 4,000 tons, was jacked up off its foundation in June 1999 and moved on tracks at around two meters per hour over a period of twenty-three days. The lighthouse now stands roughly the same distance from the sea as it did when it was first built. The waves continue their action—as they have, of course, been doing for millennia.

 

Before and during the move

I have long had a yearning to explore the Outer Banks, and, one day, most certainly will – and collect my own sand. But I was lucky enough to find that Betsy Kimak, who runs the award-winning Sandrific site, could provide me with some in the meantime to keep my imagination going. And so there it is, this Sunday’s sand, plucked rudely from its epic journey down the Atlantic coast and incarcerated in London – a frustrated sand. It’s mainly quartz grains, some quite angular, some wind-rounded, all with a history of being left behind as the debris from melting glaciers, or uprooted from the mountains of the Appalachians and flushed to the coast, down the Susquehanna, down the Hudson; for many of these grains this will simply have been the latest uprooting in a series of cycles over hundred of millions of years – who knows what stories this grain has to tell?

 

The “dalmatian” grain in the image on the right at the head of the post is a youthful character, its rough edges hardly affected at all by its journey to the Cape. This is probably a fragment of a metamorphic rock, cooked in the turmoil of the building of the Appalachians, or even from some older, distant, and glacier-scoured bedrock. Each grain unique, each grain simply a frame in an epic movie.

 

[Fore further details on the lighthouse and its extraordinary move, the Wikipedia page is a good start, plus the National Park Service site – Cape Hatteras was the first National Seashore – and the good old US Army Corps of Engineers has a nice “historical vignette.” Photos from the North Carolina Division of Highways] 

Comments

[F]

That is some very quartzy sand. (I don't think quartzy is a word, but I am using it nonetheless.)

I remember when the lighthouse was finally moved. Not all of them are lucky enough to have such a fate, even where eroding foundations are not a problem, especially since most no longer serve a purpose, at least in the States.

[Sandglass]

Quartzy is a fine word, and definitely a good desciption of this sand! And yes, lighthouses are expert witnesses of coastal change around the world - change in both directions.

[Betsy Kimak]

A pleasure, Michael! Thank you, and huge congratulations on winning the 2010 John Burroughs Medal!