Who roots for the sea?

Posted at 3:00 PM on March 8, 2013 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Weather

It's funny how the news can take you back to being 8 years old again.

This is the picture-of-the-day for the storm that's hammered the East Coast today. It's on Plum Island, a long spit of sand that runs along the north shore of Massachusetts, on the New Hampshire border.

The house, as you can imagine, is a goner. The people who own it are at their house in Florida and that'll have to do. Their old house, and the land on which it once lay, belongs to the ocean again. (See some amazing pictures in this Facebook album)

That's the way it works on Plum Island. And yet, people keep building as close to the ocean as they can.

Plum Island, which sits in the town of Newburyport, was a working-person's enclave back in the day. Newburyport was a fishing and shoe-making town until the '60s, when textile companies abandoned New England for the south. Now, it's high-priced real estate for the wealthy.

I know that because when I was a kid, we had the oceanfront lot. We were the '50s and '60s pre-wealthy inhabitants.

Our home, though, wasn't the multi-million dollar structure here or the type that, no doubt, are on either side of this home, awaiting their own fate. It was just an old trailer in which somehow, we fit seven people. When you were a kid on Plum Island back then, it wasn't about your fancy house, it was about exploring what was around you. My parents would turn us loose in the morning and we might come back by dinner.

The Simmons family -- he was a milkman -- had the little cottage in front of us until the sea came calling and they moved it back a half mile or so to escape it. The Burkes had a little pink house across the sandy road, until they -- and we -- found it tipped upside down on the beach one spring. It had fallen into the path of an angry ocean and, apparently, nobody had noticed until it came time to open the cottage for the season.

That happened all the time. Like taking attendance at the beginning of class, we'd start each summer by determining what homes were no longer where they once stood.

The town tried everything to stop the ocean. Rocks, bigger jetties, old cars, truckload after truckload of sand, and for a time it seemed to work, but nature can be very patient. Even the sprawling Coast Guard station next door gave up and moved a little farther inland. In the end, you just can't shovel sand against the tide.

We never got much of a chance to find out how our own plot would fare against it, though. A few years after the Simmonses moved their house, something else came calling -- a man with money to make. He had offered my dad money for the land, but my parents wouldn't sell. He loved the place and so did their five kids.

The next winter, someone took an axe to the trailer and, probably not coincidentally, the man called my father asking if he was interested in selling now. He was. And so a prime piece of beachfront property went for $5,000. I was too young to understand what a bitter pill that must've been for the old man.

A few weeks later, the trailer mysteriously burned down -- the guy said he was working on the plumbing with a torch at the time -- and in its place rose a multi-million dollar home, which as far as I know, still stands today.

The same thing happened up and down the beach. The old cottages gave way to the big homes, the working-class was mostly pushed out, leaving a generation of boys -- now old -- feeling only a little bit guilty and not at all proud of occasionally rooting for the sea.

Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston

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Comments (5)

Perhaps it’s time we admit that the sea is stronger than we are, and that a barrier island may be a beautiful place to visit, but a less than ideal place to live on.

Left to its own, how might Plum Island look in 50 years? Would the shrub (Prunus maritima) that gave the place its name start growing en mass again, stabilizing the dunes? Would seabirds again use the island as a nesting site?

Of course, if I lived on Plum Island, I'd feel differently. When was the last time someone suggested THEIR home go "back to nature?"

Posted by Robert Moffitt | March 8, 2013 3:24 PM

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I can tell you how it would look, actually. it would like what we used to refer to as "the other end of the island." The entire southern end is the Parker River Wildlife Refuge of the national government. It's an unbelievably spectacular place.

Here's a few images.

Posted by Bob Collins | March 8, 2013 4:04 PM

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Very well written.....
PI newsflash!!
Mother Nature decides the topology of the beach, regardless of where we build our homes.....

Very bad break if you built or bought too close to the changing PI surf, but that's the risk you signed up for. That being said, I would fight like hell if I lived there. Good luck Islanders!!

Posted by frank mcginnis | March 8, 2013 5:44 PM

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so much packed into this story, Bob: those childhood memories of freedom, the unique place on the edge of the continent with its natural history, and the latest in what must be a long a series of land grabs. It makes me want to read more.

Posted by Joanna | March 9, 2013 9:46 AM

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The "other end" link is pretty cool. Thanks!

Posted by Robert Moffitt | March 11, 2013 7:55 AM

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