I was forewarned that they’d be doing some “dune nourishment” at Gibson Beach, so I haven’t been there in two weeks. I did not jump out of my skin when a friend called to tell me he’d heard they were bulldozing the beach. I was not alarmed—no one in his right mind would bulldoze something as precious and fragile as a sand dune. Sand dunes are not so much an endangered species as each one of them is individually endangered, fated or not, to spill its sand elsewhere, sometimes to fortify another. Excepting the dump trucks and bulldozers, dune nourishment is the enhancement of this natural process.
If you are a guinea hen, a stage in the morning is spent slowing down traffic on Sagg Main Street. I have decided it is mainly a territorial response when I see them scattered near the edge of the road waiting for traffic. The busier the roads gets, the busier the birds get, crossing and faking and stalling in front. Chests puffed, necks coiled, they force a cement mixer truck to downshift.
Guinea hens are not modest or cowardly birds and not easily dissuaded from daily routines and rituals. But by the third day of the dune nourishment program, the birds graciously retreated. There were too many trucks coming and going from Gibson. Not the normal ebb and flow of electricians and landscapers, but a steady rumble of tractor-trailers, all of them delivering a fraction of the total and then rolling past again, this time a little louder, empty.
After about one week, the sand delivery trucks stopped, and Sagg Main was returned to its normal din of construction worker rush hour, followed by lumber delivery hour, then specialist to the job site hour, then it is lunch, and after that the whole thing happens in reverse, until Sagaponack is almost empty again. By Sunday, I could no longer put it off—I went to see the finished results of all that bought sand.
I’ve seen a fair share of coastal erosion projects. My first beach memories are of watching boulders being buried at Peter’s Pond. Whether it is a set of stairs dangling dunelessly or quarry trucks rolling from a dredged inlet, there is almost always something shifting on the beach. Until motorized man came, these shifts were either slow or catastrophic. But now, with our money and machines, we have the ability to conduct or respond to such changes. We cannot do it with subtlety, as years of wind might; we do it with earth-moving equipment.
I can tell by the number of footprints that lead to the base of the fine bulwark, and fewer that climbed it, not too many were recently impressed by the bald reintroduction of a dune that’s been gone 30 years.
on Mar 27, 2012