Extreme Makeover at Hammonasset

Not everyone can go. If you want to make this journey with us you will have to get to your favorite quiet place, away from the TV and shut off the music on your ipod, for it requires that you turn inward, without external distraction. Put aside, for the time being, your regular apprehensions about your job or school, the kids, the diet, or having enough money. Here and now, you are to call upon that place in your soul where visual memories mix with somatic sensations and the feelings associated with being young, immortal, and brimming with untold promise. Within the swirl of that hard to reach place, follow the signs that say "This way to the Beach". Select that favorite beach of your youth, or your annual vacation, whichever coast, left or right, north or south. . Grip it tightly and enter from the wooden boardwalk. You are to experience anew, the grainy hot sand between your toes, the invigorating feeling of the hot sun on your tingling back and shoulders, still wet after emerging with goose bumps from the r oaring surf. The beach blankets and jauntily perched umbrellas, the tanned, scantily clothed beautiful bodies, posed upright or lazily stretched horizontally on multi colored squares for the entire width and depth of the white sanded and sparkling beach.

Hammonasset State Park in Connecticut has such a beach and for many local people as well as tourists, over many generations, it has been a repository for the kinds of feelings and experiences we have been talking about. My wife and I revisited this place, long familiar to us, on this 28th day of October 2006. Come with us, carrying your own past experiences, tucked away in that cooler of your mind.

Earlier in the day the weather had been miserable, a heavy constant rain and whipping winds of between 20 and 60mph. Like almost everyone else we remained stuck at home. But in the late afternoon, well before final light, we were feeling itchy with cabin fever when suddenly, the sun broke out and illuminated with color a back yard thickly blanketed in vivid fall leaves that had a moment before been a chromatic blah. When I stepped out on our front porch, the wind had diminished and the thermometer read 60 degrees. We needed some exercise and to burst forth from our confines. Together, we headed south toward the emancipating waters of Long Island Sound in our high stepping CR-V.

The parking lot at Hammonasset had only a dozen or so cars, not surprising on a day like this had been. When I got out of the car it was obvious the winds off the water here, were much stronger then those when we left home. We hooded up and turned directly into them angling toward the boardwalk, past the men's and women's bath houses. That's when we noticed. For the first time ever, we could see the water and the waves from this, the low side of the slightly elevated boardwalk. The closer we got the stronger grew the winds and the louder the roar from the surf.

We were prevented from entering the boardwalk itself by one long yellow police investigation tape. It lay stretched the entire width of the entrance between the bath houses and supported in the middle by two wooden construction horses. Another couple was on the other side, so we stepped over the taut but violently vibrating tape onto the boardwalk to better view what was going on. And what a sight it was. The entire beach, the full width and depth of it was gone, kaput, vanished, without a trace. Long Island Sound was right up to the shore edge of the boardwalk. The water was rushing towards us in Atlantic Ocean sized waves with nothing separating us from their force but our slightly elevated position. Off to one side nearer the women's bath house the boardwalk had become detached and was all akimbo like a train car after a derailment. In the other direction we could see the powerful waves hitting an outcropping of exposed rocks with explosive force and showering over a section of boardwalk and beyond onto the vegetation covered sand dunes.

It was exciting and we wanted, in our own way, to be part of this rare theatrical production being put on by mother nature and so, we embarked on our walk which inadvertently became like unto walking the deck of a ship at sea. The roaring winds kept picking up and were constant. To make progress forward we had to "get our sea legs" steady in order to offset the bullying shoves of the worst of the wind gusts. Large sections of the walkway were covered in wet mud and were slippery. The churning waters exploded on making contact with anything more substantial than jelly fish. The gusts of wind violently kissed the waters surface and spit bubbles of white foam ashore. The lenses of my glasses grew distorted with sea spray. The angry expanse of sea was framed by a thin crescent of cloudless sky, far across the water just above Long Island. But as for the remainder of the planetarium like sphere above us, it was overhung with ominous, jaggedly edged dark clouds, but this darkness was of a different sort, it was some hybrid color between beige and brown. It reminded me of the wet sand from the beach that had mysteriously disappeared. Meanwhile, totally out of view and behind those heavy clouds, the sun was slipping down toward the horizon. As we leaned half forward into the wind that thin sliver of exposed sky gradually began turning a brilliant orange. We paused in this maelstrom, jackets flapping, to watch the sun set.

Along the way we noticed that the water in some places was eroding the sand surrounding the footings supporting the boards beneath us, but we felt energized by the unbelievably powerful forces surrounding us and in an act of misplaced bravado continued on. Water was everywhere it wasn't supposed to be. Where before there had been vast expanses of unbroken marsh grass as far as the eye could see, now lay wide pools of water resembling Vietnamese rice paddies.

How could this all have happened? Long Island Sound is a basin of water the surface of which ordinarily conforms to the earths smooth curvature but this was no ordinary day. Take four inches of rain, add a high tide and mix the contents with a powerful wind pressing down the waters surface in a sweeping motion south from Long Island and sweeping north to Connecticut, in a Radio City Music Hall-like synchronized dance movement. The result was a sea swell that swallowed the beach. When the winds die down the swelling will go down.

This had been a day of contrasts, a day of surprises and a destructive but beautiful gift from mother nature. Of course our taxes will have to go up to pay for the repairs but Hammonasset is a State treasure well worth the investment. Not you, you have it easy, just unpack your cooler and replace your unspoiled eternal beach to that protected recess of your mind, ever at the ready to be fondly recalled whenever the inevitable storms of life threaten.