Napatree Point

I love the West Coast, and everything about it. I love the Pacific, the redwoods, the Sierras and the desert of Los Angeles. I love the Mexican influence and the freedom of the west. But still. when I think of my archtypal beach, it is not here. It is back east, in Watch Hill. It is a sandy spit that curves out to the Atlantic, unprotected and wild--with a lighthouse at one end, and an old overgrown fort at the other. I have sailed and motored there since I was a child, and now I have taken my children there. I have watched my father spearfish there, gathered mussels there, and jogged and swum up and down the beach endlessly. I don't know why, but to me it is the most beautiful beach in the world.

As I grew up we always heard stories of the '38 Hurricane. We heard there had once been houses on Napatree--unbelievable now--there is not a foundation or a chimney or a staircase today. And on the beach at the Wadawanuck Yacht Club where we played in Stonington, the beach was littered with tiny plastic beads into the '70s. We would dig for them endlessly, the beach never ran out. Parents told us they were from a bead factory that blew down in the '38 Hurricane, scattering the beads to the wind.

Every time we went to Watch Hill I would go to the tiny bookstore there and look at pictures of the devastation of the hurricane. This year, my lovely sister-in-law Jessica gave me the book, Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938, by R.A. Scotti, a former journalist from the Providence Journal and a novelist. It was as if the book were written for me. I devoured it, but especially the sections about Napatree Point, and the 40 houses that had once stood on my favorite beach.

On that fateful day gigantic waves rose out of the sea and devastated Long Island, Rhode Island (most of all), Connecticut and Massachusetts. The hurricane, with no warning, ripped 40 houses from the ground and blew them away. Families surfed roofs and doors and mattresses across Little Narragansett Bay and ashore in Connecticut, on many of the islands and beaches and nature preserves I have walked many times. The Hurricane split Sandy Point from Napatree and opened up the bay (that we knew and heard often.) But as I read the book, saw the pictures of the houses that had once stood on the sandy spit of Napatree I was appalled again at the power of that storm, that could wipe 40 huge summer mansions away in three hours and leave no trace. Waves that could rise above first floors, second floors and into attics. Waves that could kill--on a stretch of beach where usually the waves lap gently at the shore.

It is a story that I have always partially known, but never completely. And now I cannot get it out of my mind.

I guess those people thought Napatree was the most beautiful beach in the world, as well. The story haunts me.