Coast Guard Beach

Coast Guard Beach is in Eastham, on the ocean side of Cape Cod, and forms part of the Cape Cod National Seashore — the forty-mile stretch of outer beach that the federal government protected in 1961, at the point when the rest of the Cape was being built on. The beach takes its name from the 1936 lifesaving station still standing above it.

Its significance is as much administrative as scenic. Protection came just in time: everything from here north to Provincetown was preserved from development, and the result is a stretch of Atlantic coast in the north-eastern United States with no houses, no boardwalk and no commerce visible from the sand. Henry Beston spent a year in a cottage on this beach and wrote *The Outermost House* about it; the cottage was taken by a storm in 1978, which is the other thing this coast does.

The shore is wide quartz and shell sand with a substantial dune behind, backed by marsh. The Atlantic arrives without shelter and the water is cold — high teens Celsius in August is a good day. The beach moves constantly: barrier sand here migrates measurably each winter, and the parking arrangements have been rebuilt more than once because the ocean took the previous ones.

There is a bathhouse, lifeguards in season, and a shuttle from a car park inland, because parking at the beach itself is limited by design. The Cape Cod Rail Trail passes nearby and many people arrive by bicycle. Great white sharks have followed the recovering seal population here since the 2010s, and shark advisories are a normal part of a summer day.

The Atlantic takes about a metre of this shore a year and the National Seashore has decided not to fight it — the car park moved, the station was lifted and carried inland, and the beach is allowed to migrate. That decision is the most interesting thing here. The water is fifteen degrees and the shuttle from the visitor centre is the only sane way in.