Nauset Light Beach

Author's Comments

The lighthouse is the photograph everyone makes, and you should make it too. Red and white iron against blue sky, the keeper's house off to the side, the whole composition sitting just far enough from the cliff edge that you can feel the slow geological argument the Atlantic is having with the bluff. That picture is real and it is worth the trip. But it is not the photograph I drive out to Eastham for. The one I want is from the beach below, looking back up. You take the staircase down and walk a little south, and at a certain point the lighthouse appears at the top of the cliff with eighty feet of striated clay between you and it. In late September, an hour before sunset, the bluff goes copper and rose and the lighthouse reads as a small bright object against an enormous wall of color. The scale finally makes sense from down there. You understand what they were saving the building from, and how briefly any of this is going to last. The clay erodes a little more each winter. The staircase moves. The lighthouse itself was hauled back from the edge in 1996 and the edge has been catching up ever since. There is a particular feeling to photographing a place that is actively disappearing, and Nauset has it in a way few coastal locations do. Come in shoulder season when the parking lot is not full. Stay until the light is almost gone. The last ten minutes are when the cliff does its real work.

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