Provincetown is located toward the very "inside" of the spiral, off-center, toward the swirl's center, and it faces southeast. And the Cape keeps whirling inward beyond Provincetown. And of course the Cape spins quite a few miles (80 or so in all), out from Provincetown. The town itself forms a star, a left-of-center nucleus, and this is perfectly apt because the town is bursting with energy, light, and color, all of which radiates outward from the Cape's center, the vortex, called Long Point, which directs a barren finger to the northeast.
Cape Cod is a loose spiral
Right now, the Cape is a spiral as the big storm to my east is a spiral (all storms are), and as so many things are spirals. Spirals dot the cosmos in the form of galaxies. Spirals go down drains and up tornadoes. Edgar Allen Poe's famous Maelstrom was a lost soul's downward spiral.
And when we surf, we strive to enter the elongated spiral that is the tube.
I left my home in Boston for the Cape on a Saturday afternoon, after a few days of watching an early-season nor'easter develop. It's mid-October and nor'easters don't normally wind up for another month or so. Along with tropics-borne hurricanes between June and November, nor'easters are the region's best wave producers. Problem is, unlike hurricanes that can scoot up the coast, preferably 200 miles offshore to maximize wave cleanliness and size -- and minimize loss of life, property and land -- nor'easters occur when the water and air are coldest: during winter. Water temperatures off New England during winter drop to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and air can drop to as low as zero degrees and below with a NW wind out of Canada. People surf around here down to 30-degree water and air in the teens. If you're lucky, you can hit it for overhead "leftovers" on a 40-degree sunny day after the storm drifts off toward the Grand Banks.
At the time I left, the storm was spinning just to the south of New England off the south coast of Rhode Island, and a series of heavy rain bands passed over Massachusetts. It was raw and windy, out of the southeast.
My old red hatchback -- a throwback to when cars were more functional than flashy, with my 9' Becker and 6'8" Xanadu strapped to the roof -- never enjoyed a cool deluge, such as this one as I drove down the Cape. A little scruffy around the edges, but deceptively fast like all my cars, she coughed as she does when there's moisture in her carburator, sputtering for breath, like when you've just been held under by consecutive overhead waves, and you finally pop up to the surface, sucking for oxygen and exhausted. Ironic how much I like water -- especially cold water -- and my car hates it so...
But, also as usual, after a few minutes of wheezing, she managed to cough up the water (just like I do after a long hold-down), and an like a champ the remainder of the 120-mile trip to the tip of the Cape. Plus, I knew the rain would be intermittent: I saw the live radar online before I left, and sure enough it was mostly drizzle from Rte. 495 on.
Late in the afternoon, I hit the Orleans rotary (another spiral, although man-made). I knew my drive neared its climax: Coast Gaurd beach was only another five minutes up Rte. 6, situated at the mid-point of the Cape. I had seen the clouds breaking up as I buzzed down Rte. 6, the main artery on the upper "arm" of the Cape. The ceiling lifted somewhat, at times, from ground level to a hundred feet, and the sky in the dropping sun's light was an orange hue behind. Dripping leaden swathes alternated with a lighter background, like dirty bandages over a wound.
But then, after I passed the Cape Cod National Seashore's visitor center and snaked my way throught the scrub oak and pine forest that covers much of the Cape's coarse sandy surface, cresting a high, tree-covered dune, what so I see?
The Atlantic Ocean beyond the rolling sand and dune grass, is a bright grey and angry, all disorderly lumps and peaks, topped by frothing whitewater. It rages under the gunmetal sky. But front and center, a wide diagonal band of spectral light connects the ocean with the low clouds, a colorful life-line, the end of a rainbow. The sea is illuminated silver by the break in the clouds, and the sky where the prism exits glows the same color. I have to catch my breath.
This evening, at least, it didn't matter that it was unsurfable.
I made Saturday an early night after a few pints at the Old Colony Tap in P-town, where I only go in the off-season. I know the bartender, a slightly weathered redhaired woman in her 30s named _________, with perfect bone- and muscle-structure and a friendly personality. At the bar, I spoke at length with an ex-commercial fisherman about the death of the Provincetown fleet and about how nice it would be to see the Yankees lose the American League Championship Series to Cleveland. The latter had beaten the locals -- the Red Sox -- who always spiral downward at the end of the season, in the Divisional Playoff last week.
After a fitfull sleep -- the spirals that are storms and waves often keep me awake at night in anxious anticipation of the adventures ahead -- Sunday morning I burned too much gas looking at Atlantic Ocean chaos. I checked Coast Gaurd beach twice and Lecount's Hollow once. All the beaches out here face east.
The first look at Coast Guard was inconclusive. A thick drizzly fog hung over the eastern rim of the Cape's forearm and I couldn't see out beyond 60 yards. But I heard the waves, and they were big. That sound, like the elevated trains I heard as a kid in Boston over Mass. Ave., like an expressway to Hell. Looking out on what I could see, I detected only crisscrossing tumbling whitwater, without regular pattern, as it hissed toward the sand. Occasionally, a slow-motion four-foot inside reform dumped itself behind several "rows" of whitewater, probably three feet themselves. I knew by looking at all the whitewater and hearing the low boom and rush that occurred beyond the obscurity of the fog, that this was only the extreme inside reform.
It knew that beyond this, was a more extreme (and far more dangerous) chaos. Sometimes it's whitewater for almost a half-mile out, with nothing clear outside that for as far as as the eye can see.
Now that the early-season nor'easter began its spiraling amble away from the curling spit of sand that is the Cape, the wind had swung around to the north and freshened to 30kts. It was still too strong and the vortex was too close. But it was drifting away to the northeast, toward the sea-goers' graveyard that is the Grand Banks.
(Hopefully, the longliners like New Bedford's Kelly Marie, a 60-footer, had time to cut their losses and make it into safe harbor in Provincetown or Gloucester before the 60-foot seas enveloped them far from home and pulled them down the rest forever amongst the other broken vessels and bones of sailors at the bottom of the North Atlantic. The next day, I was relieved to see the Kelly Marie tied to the Provincetown pier along with other 50- to 70-foot longliners from New Bedford and Provincetown. She had made it. This meant ___________, daughter of the Kelly Marie's expert captain, would be working here for a few days. She cooks, and sometimes stings baithooks, on the Kelly-Marie every so soften.)
When I checked Coast Gaurd beach again in the morning, the ceiling had lifted somewhat, and I could see what I already knew was happening. Only this time, one guy sat out there on a longboard, while another, his buddy, struggled with the relentless whitewater not 30 yards from shore. Two more guys in fullsuits (one from Maine I learned later) approached the water, which was probably about 53 degrees F, and the air was not much warmer and very damp. Disorganization, closeouts and fury still reigned.
Based on the ant-size paddlers, I could tell the faces of the crazily random short-period storm sets had about 8-foot faces on the sets. But most crumbled, and they were peaky and lumpy, with no real walls forming. The guy farther out made one drop on a 6-foot face, made a quick righthand turn (his frontside) and got eaten alive by the cascade of whitewater that hit his frontside rail. He skillfully pulled back over the top since the wave had mushed out quite a bit.
I watched for a little longer, glancing behind me on occasion at the schooner weather vain atop the white clapboard Coast Gaurd station. It still showed a north wind, still strong at 30kts. sustained. I saw a two more attempts by the longboarder, but no more drops. His buddy finally made it out, but the two more recent entrants, in the same time span, drifted 100 yards south and had barely made it past the second wall of whitewater. They were like bugs in a giant washing machine, Neptune's rinse cycle. A few gnashing, frothing lips pitched out from the hollower eight foot faces and plummeted down before the waves, exploding in horrific whitewater upon impact. I imagined my board (or my back) under that crusher and knew that I should wait, because the wind would continue to swing around, eventually to the NW, when conditions would begin to clean up as the storm continued its journey toward Iceland. This has always happened.
After I checked Lecount's Hollow to the north, seeing more of the same and not a soul on it, I knew it was time to skate.
To the jazzy pounding rhythmic barrage of noise the is the band Helmet, I headed for the fun skate terrain of Provincetown. I knew that in the near future, within 24 hours, I'd be speeding along a head-high wall of water, my left hand barely touching the surface, alive.
How could I possibly have been wrong?
Monday, early a.m.
I woke up in my tent early because my bladder was bursting. I must have fallen asleep just after nightfall, after drinking a few dark ales and reading a local arts rag, better than any sleeping tablet ever devised. Not because the local art is bad -- it's phenomenal. But because good art is a sedative.
The wind is still roaring through the impenetrable canopy of oak and pine above the snug, protective dome of my tent. It sounds like I imagine it would sound inside a small tornado: loud, with debris plucked from the tree branches above pecking at the nylon tent fly and pinging off my car. I keep waiting for a big branch to loose itself from an oak tree and crash down on me, ending (in a cruel and ironic way) my waiting for the wind to switch or at least die down.
But here in my tent, it's still and calm. It's a sturdy geodesic shape, one which has taken me to San Franscisco and back and across the Sierra Nevada range, and through the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
I sense that the air may be turning cooler, a sign that the wind has shifted more northwest, ushering in the high pressure system that is supposed to drop down from Quebec.
I couldn't for the life of me get back to sleep. I felt like my guts were being fueled by a nuclear power plant as energy tumbled inside me. I tried counting, tried to stop my mind from racing. I tried not to focus my thoughts on my heart, which beat harder in short bursts. I'm anticipating waves when it gets light, if only the wind would back off. If that happens, say dropping from its present 30kts. to 10 kts., and the cloud cover blows off, I'm in for perfection at dawn. I can see the steep, dark faces, marching silently in from open ocean, a mute beautiful foreground to a red-orange sun peeking up over the horizon, lighting the cumulus clouds above an electric shade of salmon, and slowly turning the sky from grey to white to blue. I try counting them.
But for now, I can't sleep, so I start to think again about the spirals.