The Cape Itself

An excerpt from the book The Cape Itself, by Robert Finch

"I went down to the shore on New Year's Day, just before high tide on the morning following a furious northeaster. The storm itself had blown rapidly out to sea during the night, and the wind had careened around to the west, giving rise to a strange sight: a clear and sunlit beach on which the mighty surf, still in the throes of the storm and now approaching its flood, dashed itself in magnificent chaos.

Such a surf, swept back by the wind and etched in light, had passed through all stages of watery fury. No longer a series of breakers, it had become a shattering wall of green and white, crest breaking upon crest, wave receding crashing into wave oncoming.  The sound it made was not a roar; it was more like a wind, a low, hollow, insidious whine that shlowly grew in pitch and intensity, like the sound of a jet turbine accelerating, before it broke and dissolved into the next oncoming whine.

The air itself was full of the mist of its destruction, intersecting rainbows and flashes of light, and it smelled sweet, new-made, and wonderfully exhilarating. In no other place I know can you get so close to ultimate, unbridled force with so little risk as on the ocean floor."

Robert Finch, from The Cape Itself, W.W. Norton & Co.