Point Rip
Dropping onto the declining shoreline, I pivot to the south and walk the water’s edge, listening to the rocks along the shore clack and smack against each other in the retreating surf. I look further out to where a new sandbar has formed, new to me anyway, and watch the thundering rollers rear up with vengeful sneers, only to be denied true landfall after traveling all the way from the coast of Africa. At least there’s no mythical sea monster lifting its scaly head from the surf.
Hiking further along, I come to the place where the ocean meets the Sound. The French navigator Samuel de Champlain named this outlying bar ‘Cap Mallebarre,’ loosely translated to mean “Cape of the Evil Sandbar,” and many a doomed sailor has proven Champlain right over the years. The bar is now known a
