"An owner may also lose land through natural forces. For example, the opposite of accretion can take place through erosion, the gradual wearing away of the land through the action of water and wind....."
--- Real Estate Fundamentals by Wade E. Gaddy jr & Robert E. Hart (Real Estate Education Co., subs of Dearborn Financial Publishing Co. Chicago 1993, page 54)
Certain places in the world are more "places" than others. The corner of North Avenue and Huguenot Street in New Rochelle, New York is a real, solid place. Hardened by concrete and asphalt, it is there and will be there if ever I should choose to return to it. I once worked at a bank, or rather, a savings & loan association which was located at that place. That savings & loan was somewhat less of a place than the street references which formed its metes and bounds. It was bought by a commercial bank -- lock, stock and liabilities -- a number of years ago and therewith ceased to exist. By the same token, North Avenue and Huguenot Streets are themselves temporary concepts imposed by human beings on the landscape. They may persist for many years, even centuries, but they will go, too. Only the land that underlies the streets and buildings constitutes a place permanent.
But not all places are so easily defined. Jutting into Cape Cod Bay is a section of the township of Wellfleet called Great Island. It is a part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, separated from Wellfleet proper by a small inlet. You can reach Great Island without getting your feet wet by means of a small bridge on Chequessett Neck Road which spans the inlet. The island is a broad mound of built-up sand and glacial detritus topped with a pine forest and bounded on its southeastern section with a sunken meadow and salt water estuary and on its western side by a barrier beach facing Cape Cod Bay. There are only a few residences, most of which are well hidden from view. Extending southerly from this island is a long stretch of sand bar reaching out into the bay for some three miles. The tip of this sandy finger is known as Jeremy Point.
Now, Jeremy Point is a geographic locality much harder to define than the intersection of North Avenue and Huguenot Street in New Rochelle. For one thing, Jeremy Point is not always there at all. Should you determine to hike the three and a half miles to it from the Park headquarters area on the island, it is best to first check the tidal chart in The Cape Codder to see if Jeremy Point is going to be there when you arrive. It is submerged at high tide. This fact alone makes its status as a point of land debatable. After all, for a significant portion of each day Jeremy Point is just a spot on the bottom of Cape Cod Bay. At low tide, the exact location of Jeremy Point varies with such factors as exactly how low is the tide this particular day, what is the weather, the phase of the moon, and how has the sand shifted under those forces since last low tide. From day to day, week to week, year to year, Jeremy Point changes its location, shape and character.
Sometimes it comes to a point so sharp a man could straddle it at its end -- one foot awash in open Cape Cod Bay, one dunked in enclosed Wellfleet Harbor. Other times Jeremy Point broadens to a rounded pancake of sand. Just off the Point, small islands periodically appear, persist a few years and then are swept away.
When I first came to the Cape in the late 1950's, souvenir maps of the type that show exaggerated drawings of tourist attractions (such as the Pilgrim Monument in P'town), often showed Billingsgate Island just south of Jeremy Point complete with picturesque lighthouse. The last of that island, which had been populated, was washed away some years before, lighthouse and all.
Billingsgate Island will not be the last Island in this region to disappear. Stretching from the southwestern corner of Cape Cod is the Elizabeth Island chain. Uncatena, Nonamesset and Naushon are privately owned and essentially uninhabited. The smallest isles of the chain are a few rocky islets grouped together under the apt name of "the Weepackets". Others of the Elizabeths are Nashawena, with its 90 foot cliffs, and the barren Penikese and Pasque. Last in the chain is Cuttyhunk, with its small town and harbor. The largest island is Naushon. It, along with the rest, was isolated from the mainland by rising seas a few thousand years ago and will persist, uninhabited as it is, with its virgin beech and oak forest, for only a few thousand more before those same rising seas claim it.
The Billingsgate Light will not be the last to be claimed by the Atlantic. Not very far from Great Island, on the ocean side of the Cape are two other lighthouses. In Truro, the town immediately to the north of Wellfleet, is the Highland Light. In the next town to the south, Eastham, one finds the much-photographed Nauset Light.
Both, in 1996, were falling into the Atlantic. In June of that year, I went to our house on Nauset Heights some one hundred yards from the Nauset Light and clunked down the rebuilt wood steps to the beach. It had been a hard winter. Great sections of the sandy sea cliffs had recently sloughed off in Nor'easter gales. I had watched, safely ensconced in Tucson, Arizona, some few months before as an unhappy newsman employed by the Weather Channel made a live television report from Chatham, just down the beach from Nauset Light about a dozen miles. The newscaster stood outside in a roaring blizzard, his eyes wincing and his heavy raincoat plastered by sideways snow. This day, as I reached the bottom of the flight of stairs, the weather more resembled Tucson than Thule.
In the bright sun I walked along inspecting the sea cliff just under Nauset Light. The scarp was in spots unnaturally smooth with new sand. Embedded here and there were gnarled and rough barked pine trees at crazy angles. Just last fall, they had been growing peacefully atop the bluff, affording a beautiful ocean view for any birds who chanced to alight in their branches. Now here they were, their roots exposed to the air, so recently undermined that their needles were still green and fresh. These trees were short. If re-errected, they would stand hardly the height of a man. The pine trees which grow exposed to salt air do not prosper and are dwarfed somewhat. Those surrounding our house, one hundred yards from the lip of the bluffs are thirty-five footers or even taller. Each year, however, the ocean moves closer to my house. This year, I find five dead trees on the property. I do believe the trees there are thinning out and the forest is transforming itself to sea-bluffs. The house has long been protected by the inland forest from the full blast of ocean weather, but by the time I am an old man, the forest will be almost gone, dune grass will grow all around. Soon the house will sit bang on the bluff, exposed and vulnerable.
Looking upward from the beach, Nauset Light loomed. 
Its red and white tower, topped with its black cupola which housed its light was ominously close to the edge. One more nor'easter, one more storm surge tide, and the loose glacial debris of the marine escarpment before me would wash out and the weight of the metal-clad brick tower would cause a landslide. Nauset Light would tip forward, and slip toward the beach and surging ocean. Rivets popping and bricks crumbling, it would fall black head foremost down in a crashing heap, its pulsing light -- its heartbeat -- ceasing at last. There were plans to move it, and Highland Light on the bluff in Truro as well, before winter set in that year.
A glacial pebble tumbled down the cliff as I stood there in the morning light. It rolled to a stop right at my feet. A small cascade of sand formed itself three quarters of the way up to the crest. The sand seethed over the lip of a tiny outcropping and poured itself down in a widening stream which only slowly lost momentum and stopped in a fan of fine reddish brown grains. Then came another loosed stone. It fell from very near the top and caused a new sand slide as it rolled downward. It dislodged several more pebbles as it went and they all rolled down the cliff together and bounced onto the beach. The sea cliff under Nauset Light was eroding actively as I watched. If it kept up at this pace, if the sea cliff wall were not to refirm itself each summer after the winter wind and rain, the Atlantic Ocean would meet Cape Cod Bay in only a few decades, instead of a few centuries. Nonetheless, Cape Cod is destined to become a series of islands in the not too distant future. Tourists will one day vacation on Eastham, rather than in Eastham.
The thinnest section of Cape Cod lies a couple of miles north of Nauset Light at the Marconi site. As you stand on the heights overlooking the Atlantic barrier beach where Guglielmo Marconi erected his transoceanic wireless transmitter in 1901, you are only one half mile from the Blackfish Creek, the innermost arm of Cape Cod Bay. Most of the land on which Marconi and his men and his buildings stood at the turn of the nineteenth century has long since washed out into the open Atlantic. The Cape will split in two there in some nine hundred years -- perhaps less, perhaps more -- but not much more. To the north, the very tip of Cape Cod will split off, stranding Provincetown with it curio shops and art galleries. This town, already plagued by inky water, will face importing all its fresh water at that time. Goodbye, P'town. To the south, Nauset Harbor on the oceanside will meet Rock Harbor on the Bay in Orleans. Eastham Island will then be a few miles long and perhaps a mile wide at its broadest. The thousand year old windmill near the south end of the island will be a 'must see' for the tourists of that era. Parts of Wellfleet will yet survive on this island and on what will probably be called Pamet or Truro Island to the north -- but not Jeremy Point. When the ocean breaks through at the Blackfish Creek, that long spit of sand which terminates in Jeremy Point will be subjected to a rapid, fatal erosion. The Point will disappear permanently under the waves of the new channel.
I looked up again at Nauset Light. How quickly it has arrived at the lip of the cliff! (More accurately, how quickly the cliff has arrived at its doorstep). I thought of the Nauset Light Beach area I had first come to know just some thirty years before. 
Nauset Light stood far from the sea bluff then. In front of it, there was a parking lot and Bob's Doghouse -- a seasonal snack-bar complete with its own phone booth and picnic tables. Now, the very land upon which the snack-bar stood is eroded away into the vasty deep, the airspace it occupied is suspended over the pounding breakers.
We live in enchanted times, blessed by the Cape and Islands. Almost all of the human beings who have existed or will exist on this planet have lived or will live in a world in which there is no Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket Island at all. Nantucket -- that most beautiful and historic island of the Cape -- will founder in the open Atlantic in some say less than 800 years. Its two small companion islands, Tuckernuck and Muskeget, will go down with it. So temporary is the Cape and its family of islands that sometimes you can watch them eroding away as you stand in the morning sun at the base of an escarpment along the barrier beach, entertaining such thoughts.
Another stone works it way loose from the cliff and tumbles to a stop at my left foot. A small part of Cape Cod falling into the sea, it has been working its way seaward for seven thousand years. But it will have to work at its journey a bit longer. I pick up the stone and toss it high against the cliff. It thuds into the loose sand. It stays put -- for now.
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24 July 1996