The Stake They Left Behind

In Chatham in the 1870s, the keeper kept a running count.

Josiah Hardy II measured the distance from the south tower to the edge of the bank, and he wrote the number down. One hundred ninety feet in December of 1874. One hundred twenty-six by September of 1876. Ninety-five that February. Twenty-six by the fall of 1878.

A year after that: twenty-seven inches.

Twenty-seven inches. Think about a man walking out with a measuring tape, year after year, writing down the shrinking distance between a building and the end of the world, and then getting to a number he could span with his hands.

By then people in town were betting on the exact hour. Not whether. The hour.

It went on December 15, 1879, at about one o'clock in the afternoon. The keeper's house and the north tower followed fifteen months later, and pieces of that wreckage were still visible at the bluff edge forty years on, which is its own kind of haunting — a town watching the debris of a thing it had wagered on, right there, for four decades.

That is the ending Truro and Eastham were racing in 1996.

A hundred and twenty-eight feet

Highland Light was established in 1797, the original tower more than five hundred feet from the cliff. Five hundred feet is a comfortable number. Five hundred feet is a distance you don't think about.

The tower standing there now went up in 1857 — sixty-six feet of brick, seventeen thousand dollars, a first-order Fresnel lens.

By 1990 it was a hundred and twenty-eight feet from the edge. And in that single year, forty feet of bluff went just north of the tower.

Forty feet. In one year. When you only have a hundred and twenty-eight left.

Out at Nauset, the arithmetic was worse and moving faster. That tower isn't originally an Eastham light at all — it's the 1877 north tower of the Chatham Twin Lights, taken apart in 1923, hauled up the Cape, and rebuilt two hundred feet from the edge for the grand total of $3,680. Between 1991 and 1994, thirty feet of bluff vanished just east of it. The Perfect Storm took the beach stairs in October of '91.

By 1994, the woman who owned the keeper's house could see the ocean from her kitchen window. For the first time.

The Coast Guard's proposal in 1993 was to decommission the whole thing and let it go.

Ivory soap and flattened quarters

They moved Highland first. Eighteen days in July of 1996. Four hundred fifty feet west. Something north of four hundred tons of brick, riding on steel.

Dave Spang was a Seashore interpreter posted at the site, fielding the same question all day long from people who had driven a long way to see something happen.

"Visitors would ask, 'When is it going to move?' and I'd tell them, 'It's moving now.'"

Then: "It was like watching grass grow."

The mechanics were far less romantic than the crowd wanted. "Each time they pushed it would only go five or six feet," Spang said. "The workers would get down and rub the I-beams with Ivory soap." They went through cases of it. Cases. A two-hundred-year-old lighthouse inching across Truro on a film of bar soap.

Joseph Jakubik of International Chimney, the outfit that braced the tower, described wrapping it in steel as "putting it in a girdle." As for aiming a lighthouse: "Right off the bat, we had to aim it where it was going. There was no steering involved."

No steering. You point it once, and then you commit.

Thousands came to watch. Somebody had the idea of laying quarters on the beams and letting the lighthouse flatten them as it came through, and afterward those coins auctioned for as much as fifty-seven dollars apiece, with the money going to the Truro Historical Society. Which had already sent out thirty thousand brochures and gathered a hundred and forty thousand signatures just to get to the point where a lighthouse could roll over your quarter.

The move ran about $1.55 million, split four ways — the state, the Coast Guard, the Park Service, and the historical society's own fundraising.

They relit it on a Sunday afternoon that November. More than two hundred people toured the tower first, and the Highland Light Bagpipe Band played in full regalia. Congressman Gerry Studds got the line of the day: "While this light may not save lives, it will inspire lives for a long time to come."

The greenskeeper at Highland Links, now looking at a lighthouse parked near his seventh fairway, had a more practical reaction: "We'll get a windmill from Eastham and put it on number one."

Two days in November, in the snow

Nauset went four months later, on the 15th and 16th of November.

It was close. Genuinely close. The new site had been chosen in April with the tower forty-three feet from the edge. Then Hurricane Edouard came through in early September and took it down to something like thirty-six. International Chimney needed thirty feet just to have somewhere to stand.

"Time was of the essence," said Valerie Dumont, who supervised the site. "Winter storms had done a terrible number on the cliffs that year."

Vibration was the enemy. "Not good in any circumstances," she said, "but it was very important here because of the proximity to the cliff." Which ruled out heavy equipment entirely. So crews cut a hole in the floor, pulled out a plug of concrete, and dug beneath the foundation by hand. With shovels. In November. On the Atlantic side of the Outer Cape.

Dumont remembers it being cold enough that "even the hydraulic fuel was a little sluggish."

Ninety tons. Three hundred thirty-six feet. Two days.

Hawkins Conrad, later president of the Nauset Light Preservation Society, was standing there when it started to move. "When they first began to move the structure, the initial tug made the whole lighthouse rock back and forth a little bit, and we all went 'Oooh!'"

His other line is the one that stays with you: "We got out by the skin of our teeth."

The light went dark for the winter and was relit the following May, in front of a crowd of about two thousand people.

The stake

Here is where this stops being a nice story about engineering and turns into arithmetic you can do yourself.

When they moved the Nauset tower, somebody drove a red-and-white stake into the ground to mark where it had stood. A small, sensible gesture. This is where it was.

By January 2003, the marker was only three or four feet from the bluff edge. A few years later it was closer still; by 2010 the preservation society described it as a foot or less from the edge, and expected it to disappear soon.

Roughly thirty feet of ground, gone, in six and a half years. The time it takes a kid to get through elementary school.

The preservation society's own figures put the long-run Atlantic-side average at 3.8 feet a year, and the stretch right at Nauset between 1987 and 1994 at 5.8. But averages are a lie out here, and everybody who lives on this coast knows it. Some years take almost nothing at all. Some years take more than fifteen feet.

Thirty years

The Park Service and the preservation society estimated at the time that the move should keep Nauset safe for about thirty years.

The move was November of 1996.

Do that subtraction and then decide how you feel about it.

Other sources project seventy-five to a hundred years, and the honest answer is that nobody knows, because erosion out here doesn't average — it waits, and then it takes a winter's worth all at once. Highland needed a major rehabilitation, finished in 2022, after the Park Service found that changes made during the 1996 move, combined with later non-breathable coatings, had reduced ventilation and trapped damaging moisture in the tower.

Even the fix needed a fix. That's the Cape for you.

Go look at both of them this month. They're twenty-five minutes apart, and they are two of the very few things out here that somebody managed to save on purpose, with money and shovels and thirty thousand brochures and a great deal of Ivory soap.

Then stand roughly where that stake was, look down, and decide what you think happens next.