Bayocean Losses Tallied

At one time or another, the resort town of Bayocean included everything listed below, as chronicled in Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon. Absolutely nothing remains. 

59 Residences (not all stood at the same time; the number peaked at 36 in 1939):

30 slid to the sea, undercut by erosion 

  8 were deconstructed 

  6 were moved off the spit before it became an island in 1952

  4 burned down for lack of a fire department

  9 were burned, and buried to enable construction of the breakwater  that reconnected the island to Cape Meares in 1956

  2 had unknown fates 

Rock crusher: used to manufacture 3.5 miles of concrete streets  and sidewalks along High Terrace and Twelfth Avenues                Two schoolhouses

Machine shop 

Warehouses: at least two; many untallied outbuildings 

Kaaran Ann Kottages: a duplex

Cottage Park: 42 rental cottages (the number and style varied) 

Annex: 38 guest rooms and a restaurant

Amusement Pavilion: a three-sided structure including a bowling alley, billiard room, ice cream parlor, game room, and curio shop

Tennis courts

Bayside Inn: 24 guest rooms and a restaurant 

Natatorium

Three dance halls: at different times, the last put up by Reed College students when they ran the resort in 1921

The Mitchell: a mercantile with at least three apartments upstairs

Pier: one quarter mile long, with a harbor for ocean-going ships

Water lines: run from Coleman Creek on Cape Meares

Sewer lines: run along High Terrace and Twelfth Avenues 

6-7 million cubic yards of sand: which would have filled a cube 545’ to  573’ on each side, roughly two Portland city blocks and the street between

To find other articles of interest, see the Index or scroll through them on the Home page. 

1949 Ackroyd Aerial Depicts Bayocean Hotel Ruins and Erosion

For years I wondered about the posts visible during low tide running parallel to Dike Road and wider posts just barely visible above the mudflats crossing the small inlet just northeast of the gate at the south end of the hills. 

I found no evidence of them in aerial photos and maps from individual and archival sources or Army Corps of Engineers records at the National Archives. I thought the posts might have been installed after the breakwater was built in 1956 because they were far out into the bay before then, though not to the end of the original pier. Perry Reeder said they were there when he was a kid. He thought they were what's left of bulkheads used to protect the bay side of the spit during storms. A recently discovered aerial photograph, taken by Hugh Ackroyd in 1949, confirms Perry's recollections. The view is from the southwest, so 12th Avenue, leading down to the pier is out of sight to the right. 

Print and high-resolution digital versions of Ackroyd 01751-05 can be ordered at www.historicphotoarchive.net or by calling
 Thomas Robinson at 503-460-0415. He was kind enough to allow me to display it here when I told him the significance.

Posts running parallel to Dike Rd and crossing the inlet from the gate at the base of the hills.



Comparing Ackroyd's 1949 aerial to a profile view from the north not long after the Bayocean was finished - 100' elevation - in 1912 gives you a sense of the great volume of sand lost to erosion during the intervening 37 years. The concrete walls and basement of the first floor of the Annex were all that remained after the upper stories were deconstructed, by 1938.

Bayocean photo #214 at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. Call (503) 842-4553 for print or digital copies.

The cottages shown at the top were all built by Johan Poulsen, Portland lumber baron, in 1912 for use by himself and his daughters' families. They were rented out to the Coast Guard to house a war dog beach patrol unit during World War II. The most southerly of the houses, known later as the Hicks House, was moved to the mainland in 1952, just before Bayocean became an island. The house closest to the edge was sold to A.T. Dolan.  It burned to the ground shortly after Ackroyd shot his aerial. The house closest to the bay, also last owned by the Hicks, fell to the shore in 1954. The last house to fall (Notdurft's; hidden behind the trees to the right) succumbed in 1960.   

See the Index page to find more stories like this.

Tillamook Coastline Studied

The Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) recently published Coastal Flood Hazard Study, Tillamook County, Oregon to "develop a digital flood insurance rate map (DFIRM) and flood insurance study (FIS) report for Tillamook County, Oregon." Much of Oregon's coastline is discussed within its 274 pages, but specific focus is placed on the four littoral cells (coastline sections between capes) from Neahkahnie Mountain to Cascade Head. Bayocean is located within the Rockaway littoral cell.

The report reviews ancient geological processes that created Oregon's coast, then uses previous research to provide context for the most recent data gathered about earthquakes, tsunamis, tides, erosion, wave runup, overtopping, and floods. Wonderful color graphics - photographs (including aerials), charts, diagrams and maps - help explain the detailed analysis. Much of it is still beyond my understanding, but I didn't see anything that conflicts with Pre-historic Geomorphology of Bayocean Peninsula and Changes in Bayocean Beaches Studied by DOGAMI; most likely because the study's lead author, Jonathan Allan, was kind enough to give me feedback while writing them.

The jetty built on the north side of Tillamook Bay's inlet is blamed for Bayocean's eventual destruction. The report provides specific distances and rates of erosion post starting on page 36. After the south jetty was finished in 1979, the shoreline started to grow. These two maps depict shoreline changes across the last century. Other diagrams depicting these changes in different ways are at Bayocean Shoreline Changes Over Time and Oregon Coastal Atlas.

Shoreline changes at north end of Bayocean Spit (page 37)

Shoreline changes at south end of Bayocean Spit (page 39)

Those who attended Perry Reeder's presentation at the Tillamook County Library on October 24th heard and saw the evidence he has gathered over the last decade showing beach expansion (accretion) and dune growth (aggradation) parallel to the Bayocean town site. He noted that the area close to Cape Meares seemed to have stayed the same. Allan and his colleagues agree with him, using precise measurements taken from several gauging stations along the Bayocean shoreline. This figure and text are from page 66:

Figure 3-1 depicts the changes that have taken place over the past 15 years. In the far south, the beach is backed by an extensive gravel beach that provides considerable protection from erosion to the backshore properties. As a result, this section of the beach is essentially stable, oscillating between minor bouts of erosion and accretion. With progress north along the spit, it is apparent that the dunes have fully recovered from the late 1990s winter storms (Figure 3-12) and are now actively aggrading along the length of the spit. Accretion rates are highest along the north end of the spit (reaching around +1m/yr [3.3 ft/yr]) and lowest in the south.

The report listed 128' as the height of the highest dune measured on Bayocean. This concerned me because I'd reported hiking to 152' back in January. So I contacted Allan. He clarified that they measured the dune closest to each transect, not older ones farther from the beach.  His Lidar map showed the highest point on Bayocean to be approximately 153'. Close enough. 

This older comparison, based on Coast and Geodetic Survey records, shows changes in the shoreline of Tillamook Bay between 1867 and 1971. It's in a 1972 Oregon State University study. Though not as detailed or colorful, it shows how much has changed over the last 150 years. 

Bayocean Spit Breached in 1700

When a winter storm ripped a 3/4 mile wide gap between Cape Meares and Bayocean Spit on November 13, 1952, the sand covered oyster beds in Tillamook Bay. Over the decades that followed, research confirmed the residents' belief that construction of the north jetty at the entrance of Tillamook Bay, without a south jetty to match, caused the destruction of the spit and its resort town. What no one realized then was that this larger breaches had happened long before jetties were ever considered. 

Figure 10, page 467, Journal of Geology, July 2004

In "Sediment Accumulation in Tillamook Bay, Oregon: Natural Processes versus Human Impacts" (Journal of Geology; July 2004), Oregon State University oceanographers Paul D. Komar, James McManus, and Michael Styllas (whose 2001 master's thesis provided the data) conclude that the Bayocean Spit was breached many times - and to a much greater extent than in 1952 - following the last major Cascadia subduction zone earthquake in January 26, 1700. Figure 10 on the right makes the point graphically.

Studying Tillamook Bay core samples, the researchers found several layers of ocean sand (differentiated from layers of river sediment) in the century and a half after the 1700 earthquake, most of which were larger than the layer attributed to the years 1952 to 1956 (when the gap was closed). They knew from the research of others that fault movement accompanying the 1700 earthquake had lowered the elevation of Bayocean by a meter. This then made it possible for severe winter storms to breach the lower-elevation southern end of the Bayocean Spit. The breaches ceased, and the spit reconstituted by natural processes, prior to the arrival of white settlers. 

This surely was an event the Tillamooks would have experienced and passed down as legend. Though I've not found one in books on the subject, Mack Rhoades tells it on Garibaldi Oregon Memories:

I used to love sitting around the campfire and hearing the tale of 'Thunderfish' being told by a Native American local. Seems that tribes from the South came up to drive away the People's of the Tillamook... when they called upon Thunderbird to save them. Thunderbird flew far to sea and spoke to Thunderfish, who raised his mighty tail high above the water as Thunderbird flew back to tell the People's of the Tillamook to flee to the highest mountains. Then the mighty Thunderfish slapped his tail upon the waters, shaking the very land itself and sending a wall of water over the lands, drowning the invaders from the South and cleansing the land of their existence. Then the People's of the Tillamook returned, making sacrificial offerings of the survivors from the South to both Thunderfish and Thunderbird for their great help... the People's of Tillamook lived for many moons in peace until the great fish with white wings brought the White men to their lands....and the rest we all know, is history!

Legends from other tribes are told at Native American Legends of Tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest. In "The Really Big One" (The New Yorker; July 20, 2015) Kathryn Schulz includes similar legends, and then notes: "It does not speak well of European-Americans that such stories counted as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been proved." It is indeed hard to imagine T.B. Potter asking Tillamooks what they thought of his plans for Bayocean Park. 

Cape Meares Landslides

The closure of one mile of the Cape Meares Loop Road in 2013, between the communities of Cape Meares and Oceanside, was caused by a landscape that has been moving for centuries. The historical record begins in 1899, based on information discovered by a Tillamook County engineering consultant and forwarded to me by Cape Meares resident Mike Neal.

In "A Phenomenal Land Slide, Paper No. 984" in Volume 53 (1904) of the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers,  D.D. Clarke describes venturing "partly by rail and boat, but chiefly by stage or mudwagon, crossing the Coast Range, and occupying 36 hours or more," to spend three and half days measuring and sketching the slide. He'd been inspired to do so by a May 21, 1899 Sunday Oregonian article describing a slide that was 1/4 mile wide, four miles long, traveling two inches per hour, that "tears great trees and boulders from their places and hurls them into the bay."

Clarke estimated that 30 acres had slid 400 feet from May 10 to June 13, starting up at the 300 foot level, 1/2 mile in total length, and averaging 500' in width. Not quite as dramatic as the newspaper report, but still impressive. He reported that the ocean had already begun to scour away the end of the slide. Mike Neal says that what still juts out a bit in that location is very hard clay. Zoom in on the Google map and you'll see Neal's best estimate of the 1899 slide boundaries. It's very close to what's still sliding today. Coleman Creek, just north of the slide, was the source of Bayocean's water. 

These landslides are just one way in which Cape Meares has been falling into the ocean for a millenia. Cliffs also crumble. Mike Watkins pointed out a cave out near the edge of Cape Meares that had collapsed since his childhood. Debris from similar collapses in the past formed Bayocean Spit and continues contributing to it today. 

Clarke's sketch also provides early historical information. The wagon road sketched was built to haul materials for the construction of the lighthouse from 1888 to 1890 (Cape Meares And It's Sentinel, 44). It wound down to the beach, between the two streams, at which point travel would proceed on wet sand during low tide - a good example of what's discussed in The Oregon Beach Bill and Bayocean. The break in the road must have been repaired because the children of lighthouse tenders and their teacher road it down to a school that operated even before Bayocean was built (ibid, 68-70). Tenders originally used the road to get to Hauxhurst landing on Tillamook Bay, from which they'd row over to Tillamook to get supplies, but in 1893 Hodgdon Road (now the Netarts Road) had been extended to the lighthouse (Ibid., 44,66). The buildings depicted belonged to Henry M. Sampson, who was granted patent #1339 in 1882. The "small creek" on the north edge of the slide is Sampson Creek. On page 234 of Tillamook: Land of Many Waters, Ada M. Orcutt said one correspondent described the slide "being on the Hauxhurst beach in a valley of Foley Creek." Another called it the "Barnegat Slide."

To find more stories about the geological history of Bayocean, or any other category, see the Index. 

Bayocean Shoreline Changes Over Time

In Oregon Coastal Atlas I mentioned a web viewer set up by Tanya Haddad to view changes in Bayocean's shorelines from 1939 to 1964, using aerial photographs from the Army Corps of Engineers. The four diagrams below show the changes in a different way. Figures 19 and 20 are the last two pages of the Final Impact Statement for the Extension of Tillamook South Jetty, again provided by the Corps.

Oregon Coastal Atlas

1953 USACE  aerial photo of Bayocean from
 a now-defunct Oregon Coastal Atlas web tool. 

Anyone interested in Oregon's coast should know about the Oregon Coastal Atlas. Whether your focus is history, environmental issues, shoreline changes, storm and/or tsunami planning, or photographic timelines, this site offers a plethora of data, and digital tools that bring it all to life. Some of the information is not available elsewhere. For example, their Estuary Data Viewer is the only place I've found that provides a township and range map layer for Bayocean.

When Trees Arrived on Bayocean

The dunes of the southern Oregon Coast are free of any vegetation, while Bayocean has some very large old spruce and pine on its northern, hilly, forested section. The salal, huckleberry, and other undergrowth would have followed the establishment of those trees because they require shade to survive. When might the trees have arrived?

Obviously, sand dunes must stabilize (stop growing and moving) to some degree before vegetation can take hold. So it would have to have been after Bayocean started shrinking, as discussed in Pre-historic Geomorphology of Bayocean Peninsula. 

Photos taken when the town was being built show trees and sales brochures featured them. In Coastal Sand Dunes of Oregon and Washington, William Cooper noted that when he visited Bayocean Park in 1928 it was "fairly well covered with brush and grass, and there were a few young pines and spruces upon it." 


190 rings on a 38" diameter log along Dike Road

On April 1, 1857, General Land Office surveyor Samuel Snowden noted a 16" pine in his field notes, while working on Bayocean. Various websites use 5 years per inch of diameter for pine and spruce, which matches the rings per inch I found on an old log next to the Dike Road on February 24, 2015. Based on this ratio, the pine that Snowden saw was about 80 years old. We can estimate that it sprouted in 1777 and that Bayocean has been vegetated for at least 238 years. But Paul Levesque thinks it more likely the tree photographed got there due to heavy flooding after 1934, due to the Tillamook Burns. Heavy rain landing on bare soil washed logs down into the rivers, that took them into the bay. Some likely ended up in the low spot across the Dike Road during a flood, and could not return when the water receded. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the natural ecological cycle has brought trees back to the southern dunes of Bayocean more recently. Photos taken by Bert and Margie Webber, and published in their  Bayocean: The Oregon Town that Fell Into the Sea , show dunes covered with grasses and Scotch broom, but no trees. If the photos were taken before the original 1989 edition, the shore pine and shrubs present today are less than 36 years old in 2015.  If the photos were taken just prior to the book's 1992 revisions, the trees are less than 23 years old. It's nice to see young 'uns when admiring the old-timers.

Bayocean Then and Now

The shape of Bayocean Peninsula has changed dramatically since the town was platted in 1907. At that time, the connection to Cape Meares was a strip of sand west of where the beach is now (in the ocean) as shown in my earlier post, Bayocean Lots in Pacific Ocean . Going north, the peninsula grew wider, the dunes taller. The main hotel and a few of the nicer homes were 100' above the ocean. Stand on the beach sometime, look out and up, and see if you can imagine a hotel in the sky.

Bayocean Peninsula shifted east

The dike we now drive in on, the parking lot, and the Dike Road up to the gate at the base of the hills, were all in Tillamook Bay when Bayocean was a town. About a half-mile north of the parking lot, Dike Road crosses where the dock would have projected into the bay from the end of 12th Avenue. After skirting the east (bay) side of town, Bay Drive took a hard right at 15th Avenue to avoid climbing the hills and to keep out of the tidal flats. It turned back north where the gate is not, and from that point on Bay Drive and Dike Road were the same.

After decades of eating away at the entire western shore of the peninsula, the sea totally wiped out what was left of the thinner southern section of Bayocean in 1952. The northern hills were left as an island until the dike was built in 1957. These hills were platted, and some sites sold, but no building was ever built there. They'd still be there if they had been because their topography has changed little, including the sand gap and U-shaped turn on Dike Road that is shown just north of the gate on the diagram.

To create the diagram I spliced together two Tillamook County Assessor maps: 1N1031a and 1N1031d. The original town plat shows the boundaries of Bayocean as it was then, which I highlighted in red. Dike Road and the current shoreline is highlighted in blue. The reason the blue line crosses the open part of the U on Dike Road is that the interior of it is a wetland.

The building locations were taken from a drawing provided by Bert and Margie Webber on page 42 of the 1999 edition of  Bayocean: The Oregon Town that Fell Into the Sea. I added more notes of my own to give perspective. 

My method is admittedly crude, but it helped me understand  Bayocean then and now, and I hope it will do the same for others. 

For stories about the buildings shown, and the precise locations for some of them, look for them on the Index page. 

Prehistoric Geomorphology of Bayocean Peninsula

While bushwhacking Bayocean's highlands looking for its highest point, I wondered how it had been formed. In researching that, I was surprised to discover that it had once been much larger and was in decline by the time the Potters discovered it in 1906. If they had known that, they might have had second thoughts on building a resort there. 

William Skinner Cooper is the source of this information. On pages 84 of his 1958 Coastal Sand Dunes of Oregon and Washington, he said the sandspit had been a "parabola complex (Pl. 2, Locality 7) is represented by a single short massive ridge just north of the bay outlet and adjacent to the pre-jetty shoreline. The ridge rises 75 m [246'] above sea level." Cooper sketched dotted lines on a 1939 Army Corps of Engineers topographic map inserted between pages 78 and 79 that show the dune passing over Barview and ending in the foothills behind it. He noted the obvious: the bay entrance would have been at the south end then. 

In an email exchange on February 17, 2015, Jonathan Allan (see Changes In Bayocean Beaches Studied By DOGAMI)  saw evidence of a prehistoric south inlet in Bayocean Road being "backed by marine cliffs, which were likely cut by the ocean." In 1955, Port of Tillamook Bay commissioner Margaret Coates told Howard Morgan (Richard Neuberger papers, UO Special Collections Ax078) that Tillamook Indians had a tradition of the bay's entrance having once been at the spit's south end. However, I have found no tribal histories, ethnological recordings of Tillamook legends and mythology, or any reference to such a tradition. 

Allan said I had found nothing other than Cooper's analysis because no extensive study of the spit's creation had ever been carried out. But he offered some general background and comments on the subject. At the peak of the last ice age, roughly 18,000 years ago, the sea level was "as much as 400 ft" lower than it is now. In effect, the current edge of the continental shelf was the Oregon Coast. As ice caps melted, and seas rose, sediments of the continental shelf, as well as new sand delivered by coastal rivers, were transported landward by waves and wind and moved up and down the coastline unhindered. 

When the Pacific Ocean approached the modern coastline, sands were entrained by rocky headlands in littoral cells. Bayocean is part of the Rockaway cell, bounded by Cape Meares and Neahkahnie Mountain. The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area is part of a much larger littoral cell, fed by sands from a much larger river - the Umpqua. Those, of course, are not sandspits. Despite its shrinkage,  Bayocean remains the largest sandspit on the Oregon Coast, and one of the largest in the world.

Lloyd Ruff, a civilian geologist who wrote Preliminary Notes on the Geology of Bayocean Peninsula for the Corps of Engineers during its first study of erosion in 1939, said the five rivers that now drain into Tillamook Bay would have once merged into a single river before entering the ocean at the edge of the continental shelf. When the spit was at its largest extent and the ocean at its maximum submergence, the bay reached farther up each river than today. Allan agreed, adding that Oregon's climate was warmer and more humid then, resulting in greater river flows. 

Plate 2, # 1 and #2, Preliminary Notes on the Geography of Bayocean Peninsula. Explanations on pages 3-4. 

Where bay and ocean met, the movement of water of course slowed, and sediment from both dropped out of suspension to form a bar, much like at the mouth of the Columbia River. Allan said that, typically, discrete barrier islands emerge first and that later join to become a consolidated sand spit. He agreed with Ruff's conclusion that boulders falling from Cape Meares, pushed north by powerful winter storms, gave Tillamook Spit its original foundation.

Plate 2, # 6, Preliminary Notes on the Geography of Bayocean Peninsula

Geological studies indicate that the thawing of the ice caps was uneven. As the ocean receded a bit, sands of Bayocean spit would be exposed. Tectonics plate movement, slowly forcing the Oregon coastal area upwards, could have also factored into exposing the spit. Sands from both the ocean and rivers and/or bay would have continued adding to it at high water and during storms. Winds are predominantly from the west, so they would have blown the sand farther and higher inland, with the east slopes steeper than the west, as seen on topographic maps of Bayocean. 

Allan noted, "during the past 8,000 years there have been at least 19 great earthquakes (magnitude 9 or greater) on the Cascadia subduction zone and their associated tsunamis, all of which would have significantly influenced the evolution of the coast."  The 315th anniversary of the last great earthquake and tsunami was celebrated by the Cape Meares Community Association on January 26, 2015. 

This page was updated on February 19, 2022. Other posts about Bayocean's geology can be found on the Index page. 

Changes in Bayocean Beaches Studied by DOGAMI

Jonathan Allan, a coastal geomorphologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), is leading the Oregon Beach and Shoreline Mapping and Analysis Program which is mapping and analyzing changes in beach profiles along the Oregon coast, including seven sites on Bayocean. Their mission is to “provide important information concerning the temporal (time) and spatial (cross-shore) variability of the shape of a section of beach.” Bayocean is one of three sub-cells within the Rockaway littoral cell, which spans the shoreline between Cape Meares and Neahkahnie Mountain.

"Littoral” is defined as the area from where waves splash on a beach, just above the high water mark, out to the continental shelf. As for "littoral cells", let's turn to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography :

All coasts are divided into natural compartments called littoral cells. Each cell contains a complete cycle of sedimentation including sources, transport paths, and sinks. The presence of sand on any particular beach depends on the transport of sand within the cell. When structures such as dams or harbors interfere with sand transport, downcoast beaches will erode. Therefore, the littoral cell and its budget of sediment are essential planning tools for regional and coastal management.

“Littoral drift” refers to the migration of sand up and down a coastline, caused by wave action. Because of the sand that accumulated north of the north jetty at Barview, the Corps of Engineers assumed that there was a southward littoral drift along the Oregon coast; but in in1973 Thomas Terich, a doctoral candidate in the Oceanography School at Oregon State University showed that there was the littoral drift in the Rockaway cell was net near zero. He and his advisor, Professor Paul Komar, made Terich's findings public the same year in  Development and Erosion History of Bayocean Spit, Tillamook, Oregon. They pointed out that if sand were continually moving south, the beach at Barview would have continued growing until it reached the end of the jetty, which is obviously not the case. And the south side of Cape Meares is made up of rock and gravel rather than sand. They also broke a long-held belief that jetty construction had no effect in cases of net-zero littoral drift. 

Komar's next student, master's candidate Jose Roman Lizarraga-Arciniega, confirmed that net-zero drift applied to all of the littoral cells along the Oregon Coast. Their 1975 co-authored  Shoreline Changes Due to Jetty Construction on the Oregon Coast helped me understand that building a jetty replicates the geological process of creating a small cape. The established, seasonally-reversing, littoral cell is cut in two, and two smaller cells are formed on each side. If you look at any cape along the Oregon Coast, you will see that sand beaches round off the edges on each side. That sand comes from the shores between the capes. Those natural processes engage very quickly to create the same effect on each side of a new jetty. 

In the summers following the construction of Tillamook's north jetty, the sand that accumulated north of it came from such a long expanse of coastline (up to Neahkahnie) that the loss of it was negligible in any one location. The distance from the jetty to Cape Meares, on other hand, was very short, so sand removed in the winter was more noticeable, and it never returned because bay waters flowing out the inlet washed it all out to sea twice a day. As soon as construction of the south jetty began, in 1969, sand began filling the "embayment" created by it and continue to do so until a new shoreline ran parallel to predominant winter wave crests. Only then did Bayocean erosion come to an end. 

Oregon coast beaches naturally fluctuate on an annual cycle. Winter storms pull sand offshore and the milder waves of summer move it back. But the beach is never exactly the same. In The Pacific Northwest Coast (1992) Professor Komer explained why this is important for potential beach home buyers: “New retirees arrive from the Midwest in summer to settle into the comfort of a beach home fronted by a wide beach and gentle surf, only to see the sand disappear during the next winter and the waves lapping at their doors.” 

This is the dynamic that Jonathan Allan is studying for DOGAMI. He has co-authored several publications with Paul Komer.