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Title: The outermost house
A year of life on the great beach of Cape Cod
Author: Henry Beston
Release date: April 3, 2024 [eBook #73328]
Language: English
Original publication: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928
Credits: Steve Mattern, Joeri de Ruiter and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OUTERMOST HOUSE ***
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE
BOOKS
BY HENRY BESTON
FIRELIGHT FAIRY BOOK
FULL SPEED AHEAD
STARLIGHT WONDER BOOK
THE BOOK OF GALLANT VAGABONDS
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE
[Illustration: _A Winter Wreck at Pamet_]
THE
OUTERMOST HOUSE
A YEAR OF LIFE ON THE GREAT BEACH
OF CAPE COD
BY
HENRY BESTON
Illustrated with Photographs by
WILLIAM A. BRADFORD
AND OTHERS
[Illustration: [Publisher’s logo]]
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC.
1929
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
& COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TO
MISS MABEL DAVISON
AND
MISS MARY CABOT WHEELWRIGHT
FOREWORD
Only a solitary knows how social and kindly life can be. While living
on the beach, I was helped by so many friends and Cape Cod neighbours
that I should be writing a chapter were I to try to list them all.
There are a few, however, to whom I owe more than neighbourly
gratitude. To my friends Prince and Edna Nickerson Hurd of Eastham,
to Mrs. Mercy A. Mines, and to Mr. John Nickerson I owe both my right
to build on the dune-land and a world of kindest aid. For my chance
to live this book and write it, I would here thank them first of all.
I owe another real debt to Harvey Moore for building me so strong
and snug a little house, another to George and Mary Smith for their
hospitality, good counsel, and encouragement, another to Nate and Helen
Clark. And I should like to thank Captain George Nickerson of Nauset
Station, Bosun’s Mate Charles Ellis, the present No. 1, and the rest of
the Nauset crew for the thousand kind and friendly things they did to
help me.
The majority of my illustrations I owe to the courtesy of my Quincy
friend and neighbour, the Hon. William A. Bradford. Mr. Bradford made
several special trips to the Cape to get the pictures, and spared
no time or effort in preparing them for the book. I would here most
gratefully acknowledge this kindness.
I wish to return thanks to Mr. Alva Morrison for his fine studies of
the winter beach and for his notes on birds, to Mr. Arthur Cleveland
Bent for the use of the two rare photographs from his collection, to
Dr. A. B. Klugh for the sandpiper illustration, to Commander Donald
MacMillan, and the American Museum of Natural History for the dovekies,
to Dr. John E. Fish for his photograph of the summer stranding, to
Mr. George A. Whiting of Eastham for his distinguished studies of the
beach and the _Montclair_, and to Mr. Robert Whiting for his striking
photograph of the fishing schooner in the surf at Pamet. And I wish to
thank Mr. John Farrar with all my heart for the patience and good will
with which he has dealt with so inaccessible an observer as myself.
I have made several references to Mr. E. H. Forbush’s _Birds of
Massachusetts and Surrounding States_. This compendium is a favourite
of mine for it is the work of one who is both a literary artist as
well as a distinguished ornithologist. I wish to record as well an
obligation to the staffs of the various state and federal bureaus which
I have consulted, and I would thank the Hon. A. Piatt Andrew of the 6th
Massachusetts for the unfailing courtesy and good will with which he
responded to my frequent requests for scientific studies published at
Washington.
My narrative concerns itself with the events of a twelvemonth, though I
spent, on and off, a somewhat longer time upon the beach. There was a
season in the spring when I had to leave the house a while.
I would close with the acknowledgment of a special and very great
obligation, my debt to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Kelley of the Overlook Inn
in Eastham. Without their constant and ever-thoughtful aid, without
their hospitable roof to turn to on occasion, without their friendly
care for my interests ashore, it would have been perhaps impossible to
remain upon the beach. With heartfelt gratitude do I thank them here.
Long may their hospitable doors stand open on Cape Cod!
H. B.
QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BEACH 1
II. AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS 19
III. THE HEADLONG WAVE 41
IV. MIDWINTER 59
V. WINTER VISITORS 91
VI. LANTERNS ON THE BEACH 118
VII. AN INLAND STROLL IN SPRING 143
VIII. NIGHT ON THE GREAT BEACH 168
IX. THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE 189
X. ORION RISES ON THE DUNES 218
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A WINTER WRECK AT PAMET _Frontispiece_
_Photo by R. Whiting_
FACING PAGE
THE BEACH 5
_Photo by Morrison_
THE EASTHAM DUNES FROM THE INLET 12
_Photo by Bradford_
THE SIERRAS OF SAND AND SNOW 17
_Photo by Bradford_
HERRING GULLS 32
_Photo by Bradford_
SEMIPALMATED SANDPIPERS 37
_Photo by Dr. A. B. Klugh_
THE EDGE OF FOAM 44
_Photo by Bradford_
SLIDE AND SEETHE 49
_Photo by Bradford_
SUMMER BREAKERS 53
_Photo by G. A. Whiting_
THE BURST OF A WAVE 60
_Photo by Bradford_
THE WINTER BEACH 64
_Photo by Morrison_
THE BANK AFTER THE STORM 85
_Photo by G. A. Whiting_
DOVEKIES OR LITTLE AUKS 92
_Photo by Donald B. MacMillan. Courtesy of the
American Museum of Natural History_
THE RAZOR-BILLED AUK 104
_Photo by A. C. Bent_
BRÜNNICH’S MURRES AT NEST IN THE SUMMER NORTH 113
_Photo by A. C. Bent_
THE WRECK OF THE “MONTCLAIR” 120
_Photo by G. A. Whiting_
NAUSET STATION 128
_Photo by Bradford_
A SURFMAN OF THE CAPE 136
_Photo by Bradford_
THE BAY SIDE 145
_Photo by Bradford_
FIRE IN THE PITCH PINES 160
_Photo by Bradford_
THE EASTHAM MOORS 165
_Photo by Bradford_
THE HIGHLAND LIGHT 172
_Photo by Bradford_
THE SEQUEL OF A FOG ON A SUMMER NIGHT 181
_Photo by Fish_
PIPING PLOVER AT NEST 188
_Photo by Bradford_
NESTING TERN 193
_Photo by Bradford_
TERN COMING TO FULL STOP HEAD-ON INTO THE WIND 200
_Photo by Bradford_
THE TERN CHICK 208
_Photo by Bradford_
A CAPE COD 213
_Photo by Bradford_
LATE SUMMER ON THE DUNES 215
_Photo by Bradford_
THE FO’CASTLE 218
_Photo by Bradford_
SUNRISE FROM CAPE COD 220
_Photo by Bradford_
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE
[Illustration: [Map of Cape Cod]]
THE OUTERMOST HOUSE
_Chapter I_
THE BEACH
I
East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and
more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open
Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty
miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the
form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and
levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet
above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated
by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many
gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours:
old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched
with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west,
the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending
to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean
gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and
vanishes into day.
At the foot of this cliff a great ocean beach runs north and south
unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied
and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might
be the end or the beginning of a world. Age by age, the sea here gives
battle to the land; age by age, the earth struggles for her own,
calling to her defence her energies and her creations, bidding her
plants steal down upon the beach, and holding the frontier sands in a
net of grass and roots which the storms wash free. The great rhythms
of nature, to-day so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their
spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and
tide, tremor of night and day. Journeying birds alight here and fly
away again all unseen, schools of great fish move beneath the waves,
the surf flings its spray against the sun.
Often spoken of as being entirely glacial, this bulwark is really an
old land surfaced with a new. The seas broke upon these same ancient
bounds long before the ice had gathered or the sun had fogged and
cooled. There was once, so it would seem, a Northern coastal plain.
This crumbled at its rim, time and catastrophe changed its level and
its form, and the sea came inland over it through the years. Its last
enduring frontier roughly corresponds to the wasted dyke of the cliff.
Moving down into the sea, later glaciations passed over the old beaches
and the fragments of the plain, and, stumbling over them, heaped upon
these sills their accumulated drift of gravels, sand, and stones.
The warmer sea and time prevailing, the ice cliff retreated westward
through its fogs, and presently the waves coursed on to a new, a
transformed and lifeless, land.
So runs, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it in general terms,
the geological history of Cape Cod. The east and west arm of the
peninsula is a buried area of the ancient plain, the forearm, the
glaciated fragment of a coast. The peninsula stands farther out to sea
than any other portion of the Atlantic coast of the United States; it
is the outermost of outer shores. Thundering in against the cliff, the
ocean here encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.
II
The cliff I write of and the bordering beach face the Atlantic on
the forearm of the Cape. This outer earth is now scarce more than a
great dyke or wall some twenty-five miles long and only three and four
miles wide. At Provincetown it rises from the sea, beginning there in
a desert of dunes and sand plains of the ocean’s making. These sands
curve inland toward the continent, bending toward Plymouth even as a
hand may be bent down at the wrist, and Provincetown harbour lies in
the curve of palm and fingers. At Truro, the wrist of the Cape--the
forearm simile being both exact and inescapable--the land curve falls
from the east and west down through an arc to the north and south,
and the earth cliff begins and rises rather suddenly to its greatest
elevation. South by east from the Highland Light to Eastham and Nauset
Coast Guard Station, the rampart fronts the sea, its sky line being
now a progress of long undulations, now a level as military as a
battlement, hollows and mounded hills here and there revealing the
barren moorland character of the country just above. At Nauset, the
cliff ends, the sea invades the narrowing land, and one enters the
kingdom of the dunes.
[Illustration: _The Beach_]
The cliff ends, and a wall of ocean dunes carries on the beach. Five
miles long, this wall ends at a channel over whose entrance shoals the
ocean sweeps daily into a great inlet or lagoon back of the dunes, an
inlet spaced with the floors of tidal islands and traced with winding
creeks--the inlet of Eastham and Orleans. Very high tides, covering the
islands, sometimes turn this space into bay. Westward over the channels
and the marshland one looks to the uplands of the Cape, here scarce a
good two miles wide. At Eastham, the land is an open, rolling moor.
West over this lies Cape Cod Bay. A powerful tribe of Indians, the
Nausets, once inhabited this earth between the seas.
Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far,
bright rims of the world, meadow land and marsh and ancient moor: this
is Eastham; this the outer Cape. Sun and moon rise here from the sea,
the arched sky has an ocean vastness, the clouds are now of ocean, now
of earth. Having known and loved this land for many years, it came
about that I found myself free to visit there, and so I built myself a
house upon the beach.
My house stood by itself atop a dune, a little less than halfway south
on Eastham bar. I drew the home-made plans for it myself and it was
built for me by a neighbour and his carpenters. When I began to build,
I had no notion whatever of using the house as a dwelling place. I
simply wanted a place to come to in the summer, one cosy enough to
be visited in winter could I manage to get down. I called it the
Fo’castle. It consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-living
room, and its dimensions over all were but twenty by sixteen. A brick
fireplace with its back to the wall between rooms heated the larger
space and took the chill off the bedroom, and I used a two-burner oil
stove when cooking.
My neighbour built well. The house, even as I hoped, proved compact
and strong, and it was easy to run and easy to heat. The larger room
was sheathed, and I painted the wainscoting and the window frames a
kind of buff-fawn--a good fo’castle colour. The house showed, perhaps,
a somewhat amateur enthusiasm for windows. I had ten. In my larger
room I had seven; a pair to the east opening on the sea, a pair to
the west commanding the marshes, a pair to the south, and a small
“look-see” in the door. Seven windows in one room perched on a hill of
sand under an ocean sun--the words suggest cross-lights and a glare;
a fair misgiving, and one I countered by the use of wooden shutters
originally meant for winter service but found necessary through the
year. By arranging these I found I could have either the most sheltered
and darkened of rooms or something rather like an inside out-of-doors.
In my bedroom I had three windows--one east, one west, and one north to
Nauset light.
To get drinking water, I drove a well pipe directly down into the dune.
Though the sea and the beach are alongside, and the marsh channels
course daily to the west, there is fresh water here under the salty
sand. This water varies in quality, some of it being brackish, some of
it sweet and clear. To my great delight, I chanced upon a source which
seems to me as good water as one may find here anywhere. Beneath the
floor, the pipe descended into a bricked-up and covered pit housing a
pet-cock through which I drained the water from the pump in freezing
weather (On bitter days I simply pumped a few pails full and stood
them in the sink, and drained the pump immediately.). I had two oil
lamps and various bottle candlesticks to read by, and a fireplace
crammed maw-full of driftwood to keep me warm. I have no doubt that the
fireplace heating arrangement sounds demented, but it worked, and my
fire was more than a source of heat--it was an elemental presence, a
household god, and a friend.
In my larger room, I had a chest of drawers painted an honest carriage
blue, a table, a wall bookcase, a couch, two chairs, and a rocker. My
kitchen, built yacht fashion all in a line, stood at my southern wall.
First came a dish and crockery cupboard, then a space for the oil
stove--I kept this boxed in when not in use--then a shelf, a porcelain
sink, and the corner pump. Blessed pump! It never failed me or indulged
in nerves.
Using a knapsack, I carried my supplies on my own shoulders. There is
no road through the dunes, and, even if there were, no one would have
made deliveries. West of the dunes, it is true, there exists a kind of
trail on which Fords may venture, but even the most experienced of
the villagers are wary of it and tell of being mired there or stuck in
the sand. Nevertheless, my lumber came by this trail, and now and then
I could get my oil cans carried down by a neighbour who had a horse
and cart. These helps, however, were but occasional, and I counted
myself fortunate to have had them at all. My knapsack remained the only
ever-ready wagon of the dunes. Twice a week, by arrangement, a friend
met me at Nauset Station with a car, took me shopping to Eastham or
Orleans, and brought me back again to Nauset. And there I would pack my
milk and eggs and butter and rolls--being very careful as to which was
sitting on which--and strike off down the beach along the breakers.
The top of the mound I built on stands scarce twenty feet above
high-water mark, and only thirty in from the great beach. The coast
guards at Nauset, a scant two miles away, were my only neighbours.
South lay the farther dunes and a few far-away and lonely gunning
camps; the floor of marsh and tide parted me on the west from the
village and its distant cottages; the ocean besieged my door. North,
and north alone, had I touch with human things. On its solitary dune
my house faced the four walls of the world.
My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod
year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight
ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the
beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held
me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood
for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water
welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.
In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had
their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant
of nature and the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings
of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of
the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of
spring--all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed,
the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and
elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being
alone, I had something of a field naturalist’s inclination; presently
I made up my mind to remain and try living for a year on Eastham Beach.
III
The sand bar of Eastham is the sea wall of the inlet. Its crest
overhangs the beach, and from the high, wind-trampled rim, a long slope
well overgrown with dune grass descends to the meadows on the west.
Seen from the tower at Nauset, the land has an air of geographical
simplicity; as a matter of fact, it is full of hollows, blind passages,
and amphitheatres in which the roaring of the sea changes into the far
roar of a cataract. I often wander into these curious pits. On their
floors of sand, on their slopes, I find patterns made by the feet of
visiting birds. Here, in a little disturbed and claw-marked space of
sand, a flock of larks has alighted; here one of the birds has wandered
off by himself; here are the deeper tracks of hungry crows; here the
webbed impressions of a gull. There is always something poetic and
mysterious to me about these tracks in the pits of the dunes; they
begin at nowhere, sometimes with the faint impression of an alighting
wing, and vanish as suddenly into the trackless nowhere of the sky.
Below the eastern rim the dunes fall in steeps of sand to the beach.
Walking the beach close in along these steeps, one walks in the
afternoon shade of a kind of sand escarpment, now seven or eight feet
high and reasonably level, now fifteen or twenty feet high to the top
of a dome or mound. In four or five places storms have washed gullies
or “cuts” clean through the wall. Dune plants grow in these dry beds,
rooting themselves in under old, half-buried wreckage, clumps of dusty
miller, _Artemisia stelleriana_, being the most familiar green. The
plant flourishes in the most exposed situations, it jumps from the dune
rim to the naked slopes, it even tries to find a permanent station on
the beach. Silvery gray-green all summer long, in autumn it puts on
gold and russet-golden colourings of singular delicacy and beauty.
The grass grows thickest on the slopes and shoulders of the mounds, its
tall leaves inclosing intrusive heads and clumps of the thick-fleshed
dune goldenrod. Still lower down the slope, where the sands open and
the spears rise thin, the beach pea catches the eye with its familiar
leaf and faded topmost bloom; lower still, on desert-like floors,
are tussock mats of poverty grass and the flat green stars of
innumerable spurges. The only real bushes of the region are beach plum
thickets, and these are few and far between.
[Illustration: _The Eastham Dunes from the Inlet_]
All these plants have enormously long taproots which bury themselves
deep in the moist core of the sands.
The greater part of the year I have two beaches, one above, one below.
The lower or tidal beach begins at mean low water and climbs a clean
slope to the high-water mark of the average low-course tide; the upper
beach, more of a plateau in form, occupies the space between high water
and the dunes. The width of these beaches changes with every storm and
every tide, but I shall not be far out if I call them both an average
seventy-five feet wide. Unseasonable storm tides and high-course tides
make of the beach one vast new floor. Winter tides narrow the winter’s
upper beach and often sweep across it to the dunes. The whole beach
builds up in summer as if each tide pushed more and more sand against
it out of the sea. Perhaps currents wash in sand from the outer bars.
It is no easy task to find a name or a phrase for the colour of Eastham
sand. Its tone, moreover, varies with the hour and the seasons. One
friend says yellow on its way to brown, another speaks of the colour of
raw silk. Whatever colour images these hints may offer to a reader’s
mind, the colour of the sand here on a June day is as warm and rich a
tone as one may find. Late in the afternoon, there descends upon the
beach and the bordering sea a delicate overtone of faintest violet.
There is no harshness here in the landscape line, no hard Northern
brightness or brusque revelation; there is always reserve and mystery,
always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature,
honouring, conceals.
The sand here has a life of its own, even if it is only a life borrowed
from the wind. One pleasant summer afternoon, while a high, gusty
westerly was blowing, I saw a little “wind devil,” a miniature tornado
six feet high, rush at full speed out of a cut, whirl itself full of
sand upon the beach, and spin off breakerward. As it crossed the beach,
the “devil” caught the sun, and there burst out of the sand smoke a
brownish prism of burning, spinning, and fantastic colour. South of
me, the dune I call “big dune” now and then goes through a curious
performance. Seen lengthwise, the giant has the shape of a wave, its
slope to the beach being a magnificent fan of purest wind-blown sand,
its westward slope a descent to a sandy amphitheatre. During a recent
winter, a coast guard key post was erected on the peak of the dune; the
feet of the night patrols trod down and nicked the crest, and presently
this insignificant notch began to “work” and deepen. It is now eight or
nine feet wide and as many deep. From across the marshes, it might be
a kind of great, roundish bite out of the crest. On windy autumn days,
when the sand is still dry and alive, and westerly gusts and currents
take on a genuine violence, the loose sand behind the dune is whirled
up by the wind and poured eastward through this funnel. At such times
the peak “smokes” like a volcano. The smoke is now a streaming blackish
plume, now a thin old-ivory wraith, and it billows, eddies, and pours
out as from a sea Vesuvius.
Between the dunes and the marshes, an irregular width of salt-hay land
extends from the sand slopes to the marshier widths of tidal land along
the creeks. Each region has its own grasses, the meadows being almost a
patchwork of competing growths. In the late summer and the autumn the
marsh lavender, thin-strewn but straying everywhere, lifts its cloud of
tiny sun-faded flowers above the tawny, almost deer-coloured grasses.
The marsh islands beyond are but great masses of thatch grass rising
from floors of sodded mud and sand; there are hidden pools in these
unvisited acres which only sunset reveals. The wild ducks know them
well and take refuge in them when stalked by gunners.
How singular it is that so little has been written about the birds of
Cape Cod! The peninsula, from an ornithologist’s point of view, is one
of the most interesting in the world. The interest does not centre
on the resident birds, for they are no more numerous here than they
are in various other pleasant places; it lies in the fact that living
here, one may see more kinds and varieties of birds than it would
seem possible to discover in any one small region. At Eastham, for
instance, among visitors and migrants, residents and casuals, I had
land birds and moor birds, marsh birds and beach birds, sea birds and
coastal birds, even birds of the outer ocean. West Indian hurricanes,
moreover, often catch up and fling ashore here curious tropical and
semi-tropical forms, a glossy ibis in one storm, a frigate bird in
another. When living on the beach, I kept a particularly careful
lookout during gales.
[Illustration: _The Sierras of Sand and Snow_]
I close this chapter with what seems to me the most interesting detail
for a naturalist’s ear. Eastham bar is only three miles long and
scarce a quarter of a mile wide across its sands. Yet in this little
world Nature has already given her humbler creatures a protective
colouration. Stop at the coast guard station and catch a locust on
the station lawn--we have the maritime locust here, _Trimerotropsis
maritima harris_--and, having caught him, study him well; you will find
him tinted with green. Go fifty feet into the dunes and catch another,
and you shall see an insect made of sand. The spiders, too, are made of
sand--the phrase is none too strong--and so are the toads that go beach
combing on moonlit summer nights. One may stand at the breakers’ edge
and study a whole world in one’s hand.
So, choosing to remain upon the beach, I look forward to October and
winter and the great migrations. Earliest autumn and September now
enclose the earth.
My western windows are most beautiful in early evening. On these
lovely, cool September nights the level and quiescent dust of light
which fills the sky is as autumnal in its colouring as the earth below.
There is autumn on the earth and autumn overhead. The great isles of
tawny orange smouldering into darkness, the paths of the channels
stilled to twilight bronze, the scarlet meadows deepening to levels of
purple and advancing night--all these mount, in exhalation of colour,
to the heavens. The beam of Nauset, entering my northern casement,
brushes a recurrent pallor of light across a part of my bedroom wall. A
first flash, a second flash, a third flash, and then a little interval
as the dark sector of the lens travels between the Fo’castle and
the flame. On bright moonlit nights, I can see both the whitewashed
tower and the light; on dark nights, I can see only the light itself
suspended and secure above the earth.
It is dark to-night, and over the plains of ocean the autumnal sky
rolls up the winter stars.
_Chapter II_
AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS
I
There is a new sound on the beach, and a greater sound. Slowly, and
day by day, the surf grows heavier, and down the long miles of the
beach, at the lonely stations, men hear the coming winter in the roar.
Mornings and evenings grow cold, the northwest wind grows cold; the
last crescent of the month’s moon, discovered by chance in a pale
morning sky, stands north of the sun. Autumn ripens faster on the
beach than on the marshes and the dunes. Westward and landward there
is colour; seaward, bright space and austerity. Lifted to the sky, the
dying grasses on the dune tops’ rim tremble and lean seaward in the
wind, wraiths of sand course flat along the beach, the hiss of sand
mingles its thin stridency with the new thunder of the sea.
I have been spending my afternoons gathering driftwood and observing
birds. The skies being clear, noonday suns take something of the bite
out of the wind, and now and then a warmish west-sou’westerly finds its
way back into the world. Into the bright, vast days I go, shouldering
home my sticks and broken boards and driving shore birds on ahead
of me, putting up sanderlings and sandpipers, ringnecks and knots,
plovers and killdeer, coveys of a dozen, little flocks, great flocks,
compact assemblies with a regimented air. For a fortnight past, October
9th to October 23d, an enormous population of the migrants has been
“stopping over” on my Eastham sands, gathering, resting, feeding, and
commingling. They come, they go, they melt away, they gather again; for
actual miles the intricate and inter-crisscross pattern of their feet
runs unbroken along the tide rim of Cape Cod.
Yet it is no confused and careless horde through which I go, but
an army. Some spirit of discipline and unity has passed over these
countless little brains, waking in each flock a conscious sense of its
collective self and giving each bird a sense of himself as a member of
some migrant company. Lone fliers are rare, and when seen have an air
of being in pursuit of some flock which has overlooked them and gone
on. Swift as the wind they fly, speeding along the breakers with the
directness of a runner down a course, and I read fear in their speed.
Sometimes I see them find their own and settle down beside them half
a mile ahead, sometimes they melt away into a vista of surf and sky,
still speeding on, still seeking.
The general multitude, it would seem, consists of birds who have spent
the summer somewhere on the outer Cape and of autumn reinforcements
from the north.
I see the flocks best when they are feeding on the edge of a tide which
rises to its flood in the later afternoon. No summer blur of breaker
mist or glassiness of heat now obscures these outer distances, and as
on I stride, keeping to the lower beach when returning with a load,
I can see birds and more birds and ever more birds ahead. Every last
advance of a dissolved breaker, coursing on, flat and seething, has
those who run away before it, turning its flank or fluttering up when
too closely pursued; every retreating in-sucked slide has those who
follow it back, eagerly dipping and gleaning. Having fed, the birds
fly up to the upper beach and sit there for hours in the luke-cold
wind, flock by flock, assembly by assembly. The ocean thunders, pale
wisps and windy tatters of wintry cloud sail over the dunes, and the
sandpipers stand on one leg and dream, their heads tousled deep into
their feathers.
I wonder where these thousands spend the night. Waking the other
morning just before sunrise, I hurried into my clothes and went down to
the beach. North and then south I strolled, along an ebbing tide, and
north and south the great beach was as empty of bird life as the sky.
Far to the south, I remember now, a frightened pair of semipalmated
sandpipers did rise from somewhere on the upper beach and fly toward me
swift and voiceless, pass me on the flank, and settle by the water’s
edge a hundred yards or so behind. They instantly began to run about
and feed, and as I watched them an orange sun floated up over the
horizon with the speed and solemnity of an Olympian balloon.
The tide being high these days late in the afternoon, the birds begin
to muster on the beach about ten o’clock in the morning. Some fly
over from the salt meadows, some arrive flying along the beach, some
drop from the sky. I startle up a first group on turning from the
upper beach to the lower. I walk directly at the birds--a general
apprehension, a rally, a scutter ahead, and the birds are gone.
Standing on the beach, fresh claw marks at my feet, I watch the lovely
sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into
a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions; I
watch the spiralling flight, the momentary tilts of the white bellies,
the alternate shows of the clustered, grayish backs. The group next
ahead, though wary from the first, continues feeding. I draw nearer;
a few run ahead as if to escape me afoot, others stop and prepare to
fly; nearer still, the birds can stand no more; another rally, another
scutter, and they are following their kin along the surges.
No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the
flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms,
as I have hinted, in an instant of time, and in that same instant
develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from
each other, each one individually busy for his individual body’s
sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one,
coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on
the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such
thing, I may add, as a lead bird or guide. Had I more space I should
like nothing better than to discuss this new will and its instant of
origin, but I do not want to crowd this part of my chapter, and must
therefore leave the problem to all who study the psychic relations
between the individual and a surrounding many. My special interest is
rather the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to
the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does
this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more
tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we
to believe that these birds, all of them, are _machina_, as Descartes
long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely
alike that each cogwheel brain, encountering the same environmental
forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? or is there
some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow
through them and between them as they fly? Schools of fish, I am told,
make similar mass changes of direction. I saw such a thing once, but of
that more anon.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their
tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein
we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never
attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and
travail of the earth.
The afternoon sun sinks red as fire; the tide climbs the beach, its
foam a strange crimson; miles out, a freighter goes north, emerging
from the shoals.
II
It chanced that on a mild September morning, as I was standing a moment
at a window looking west over the marshes and the blue autumnal creeks,
an alarm of some kind began to spread among the gulls. The incoming
tide had already crowded the birds back on the higher gravel banks and
bars, and from these isles, silvery cloud by cloud, I saw the gulls
rise and stream away to the southward in a long, fugitive storm of
wings. They were flying, I noticed, unusually low. Interested to see
what had thus disturbed them, I stepped out a moment to the pinnacle
of my dune. As I stood there staring after the vanishing gulls and
questioning the sky, I saw far above the birds, and well behind them,
an eagle advancing through the heavens. He had just emerged from a
plume of hovering cloud into the open blue, and when I saw him first
was sailing south and seaward on motionless wings, seeming to follow in
the great sky the blue course of a channel far below.
There are sand bars at the mouth of Nauset harbour; many gulls feed
there between the tides, and the gulls from the marsh joined forces
with this gathering. As the eagle approached the bars, I looked to
see if he would descend or fly out to sea. But no; at the harbour’s
entrance he turned south, aligned his flight with the coast line, and
disappeared.
During the autumn I saw this same bird half a dozen different times.
I could tell when he was about by the terror of the gulls. Yet this
eagle--for a bald eagle, _Haliætus leucocephalus leucocephalus_, I
believe him to have been--is, as Mr. Forbush says, “by nature a fish
eater.” I never saw him pay the slightest attention to the fugitives;
nevertheless, he may well have a fancy for gulls when they are plump
and he is hungry. At any rate, they fear him. There are always a few
black-backed or “minister” gulls mingled in with the herring gulls upon
these flats, and these burly giants, I noticed, sought refuge with the
rest.
Eagles are by no means rare upon Cape Cod. The birds arrive here as
coast-wise visitors, find the region to their liking, and establish
themselves in various favourite domains. They fish in our sandy bays
and inlets; they have rather a fancy for the more isolated Cape Cod
ponds. Seen at close range, the bald eagle is a dusky brownish bird
with a pure-white head, neck, and tail. I never had a near view of
this Eastham visitor, but one of the coast guardsmen roused him up one
day from a thicket close by the head of a creek running up into the
moors--he heard a sudden noise of brush and great wings, he said, and,
turning round, he saw the eagle rising free of the scrub and the bright
leaves.
Ever since I came to live here on Cape Cod, I have been amazed at
the number of land-bird migrants I have encountered on the dunes. I
expected to see sandpipers on the beach and scoters in the surf, for
they are coast-wise folk, but I did not expect to see the red-breasted
nuthatch rise out of the September dunes, or find the charming
black-and-yellow warbler sitting on the ridgepole of the Fo’castle, his
black-tipped tail feathers turned to the Atlantic. But perhaps I had
best begin at the beginning and tell how the sparrows and the warblers
came down to us this autumn by the coast.
Various new sparrows were the first strangers to arrive. There are
summer sparrows here, a great abundance of them, for the marsh and
meadow land west of the dunes is the natural habitat of many species.
Walk through these grass-lands on a summer’s day, and you will see
singles and flocks break from the sunburned stubble ahead, some to drop
and hide again farther on, others to watch you from the coastguard
wires. Song sparrows are notably abundant, for these pleasant singers
frequent both the marshes and the dunes; but the seaside sparrow keeps
more to the marsh rim and the salt-hay mowings, the sharp-tailed
sparrow fancies the wheel ruts of the hay carts, and the odd little
grasshopper sparrow, _Coturniculus savannarum passerinus_, trills into
the burning sundowns the two faint notes of his curious and poignant
insect song.
Early in September Hudsonian curlews arrived in Eastham marsh, and to
see them I began going to Nauset through the meadows instead of by the
beach. High September tides were then covering both marsh and meadow
land, and, as I pushed on each afternoon, the curlews rose from close
beside the inundated road, and, circling, called to other curlews; I
could hear, when I listened, the clear reply. And then there would
be silence, and I would hear the sound of autumn and the world, and
perhaps the faint withdrawing roar of ocean beyond the dunes. When I
reached the wider meadows on these days, I found the stubble mobbed
with sparrows; the population had doubled in a week.
Flocks of fox sparrows were feeding everywhere; I whirred up groups
of savannah sparrows and families of white-throats; a solitary
white-headed sparrow watched me from the concealment of a bush. It was
a silent throng. I heard faint “_tsips_” and “_chips_” of alarm as
I passed--nothing more. Love-making was over and done, and all were
importantly busy with the importance of their lives.
On the 24th and the 25th there was wind and rain, and on the 27th I saw
the first of the warblers.
The weather had cleared, and I had risen early and begun to get
breakfast. It is my custom here to sit facing the sea, and I was moving
over my table when I noticed a small bird of some kind foraging about
in the grass before the house. I could not see him well at first,
for he had entered into the grass as into a thicket, but presently
out he came, pushing through the stalks, and I watched him from the
window unsuspected. This first arrival was a Canadian warbler. Steely
ash-gray above, yellow below, and with a broad band of black spots
between his yellow throat and yellow belly, he was a charming bit of
life. Over the pale sand, in and out of the tawny-white roots, in and
out of the variegations of morning light he moved, picking up seeds
while a sea wind shook the tops of the dying grass above his head.
Presently, in search of still more food, he turned the corner of the
house, and when I went out after breakfast he had gone.
Then came, all in one week, a Wilson’s warbler (a female, probably),
the black-and-yellow warbler, and a chestnut-sided warbler. The birds
were singles, they travelled along the dunes, they fed on the fallen
seeds. In October I saw in one day five myrtle warblers; a pair of
these lingered a week near Fo’castle dune. Then came juncos and a
raid of pigeon hawks. The juncos, like the warblers, foraged on the
dunes, and the hawks hunted them there for an hour or so before the
dawn. I went exploring one morning while Nauset was still flashing
into a sullen, cold, and overclouded world, and saw a pigeon hawk rise
unexpectedly out of the cut to the north with a wretched junco gripped
beneath him. Flying seaward through the cut, the hawk carried his
captive to the beach, found himself a sheltered nook close along the
dune wall, stood at attention for a moment, and then unbent and ate.
I saw various other migrant land birds as well, but I shall not dwell
upon them, for the listing and cataloguing of species seems to me of
less interest than their arrival by sea. This outer arm of Cape Cod,
as I have already explained, stands thirty miles or so out from the
continental main, yet there are land birds, little birds, going south
along it as casually as so many arctic geese. Writing here this cloudy
morning, with a great confused roaring of breakers in my ears, I call
to mind the Wilson’s warbler, the female, I saw a fortnight ago, and
I wonder where it was that she forsook her familiar earth for the
grey ocean, an ocean she perhaps had never seen. What a gesture of
ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance
of circumstance and death--land wing and hostile sea, the fading land
behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the
bright, aërial blood.
But who shall say by what sea routes these landsmen reach the Cape?
Some species, I imagine, cross Massachusetts Bay, their jumping-off
place being north of Boston (Cape Ann or Ipswich perhaps); some may
cross over from the South Shore at a point well north of Cape Cod
Bay, others undoubtedly come directly down from Maine. The wooded
archipelago of Maine is a famous place for warblers. It is quite
possible that the species I have mentioned may have followed some great
river to the sea, the Kennebec or the Penobscot, perhaps, and crossed
from the river mouth directly over to Cape Cod. The Highland Light
bears south 3/4 west (true) from Seguin at the mouth of the Kennebec,
and is separated from it by only 101 miles of open water. The birds
could manage this easily.
[Illustration: _Herring Gulls_]
All over the world land migrants go great distances over open water.
Numbers of birds, for instance, migrating back and forth between Europe
and North Africa cross the Mediterranean twice a year, and in our own
hemisphere there are flights across the Gulf of Mexico and movements
between the West Indies and our south Atlantic states.
Late in October there came an easterly gale, and in the afternoon, when
the tide was high, I put on oilskins and went out to see the surf.
About a mile to the north of the Fo’castle, as I was trudging on across
the rain, I saw just ahead and close over the breakers a flying speck
sailing landward out of the wrack, and even as I stared, it fell to the
beach in danger of the waves. I ran ahead, then, and picked the thing
up just as a slide of foam was about to overflow it, and found it to be
an autumn leaf, a maple leaf flat and drenched and red.
Mid-October and the land birds have gone. A few sparrows linger in the
marshes. The plum bushes have lost their leaves. Walking the beach, I
read winter in the new shapes of the clouds.
III
Western cloud, dark substance of cloud, gathered at the wintry horizon
of the short-lived days making them even shorter with the false sundown
of its rim. Now come the sea fowl and the wild fowl to the beach from
the lonely and darkening north, from the Arctic Ocean and the advancing
pack, from the continental fragments and great empty islands that lie
between the continent and the pole, from the tundra and the barrens,
from the forests, from the bright lakes, from the nest-strewn crevices
and ledges of Atlantic rocks no man has ever named or scaled. Over
the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living
streams, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the peoples
and flocks, the clans and families, the young and the old. And the
dying grasslands, the October snows, and the forests fall behind, and
presently the nations behold a first far glint of the sea.
There are many streams, and it is said that two of the greatest bear
down upon Cape Cod. A first river, rising in the interior of Alaska,
flows southeast across Canada to the Atlantic; on this stream move
birds from the north woods and the Canadian lakes together with birds
from the north barrens and the arctic isles and half lands; a second
stream, rising in the shadow of the pole, flows south along the coast
past Greenland and the bays of Labrador--on this move the hardy arctic
folk who get their living from the tides. Many species are common to
both streams. Somewhere north of the Cape, perhaps round and about
the mouth of the St. Lawrence, these streams immix their multitudes,
and south to New England moves the great united flood, peopling with
primeval life the seacoasts and the sky.
Ducks enter the channels, some flying in from the bay, others from the
outer ocean, geese settle at sundown in the golden skin of the western
coves, coveys of winter yellow-legs circle in the gloom, and hide
when disturbed in the taller salt grasses between the meadows and the
creeks. At nightfall and at daybreak I hear birds talking. Strangers in
rubber boots and khaki uniforms now visit my domain, and every Saturday
afternoon I look with philosophy through my western windows to a number
of tufts of grass disguised as gunners.
Now that I have settled down here for the winter, I find myself
becoming something of a beach comber. Every once in a while, when I
chance to look seaward, I spy an unknown something or other rising and
falling, appearing and disappearing in the offshore surges, and at this
sight the beach comber in me wakes. All kinds of things “come ashore”
on these vast sands, and even the most valueless have an air of being
treasure trove. The mysterious something moving from the swells into
the breakers may be nothing but a smelly bait tub washed overboard
from some Gloucester fisherman, or a lobster pot, or a packing case
stencilled with a liner’s name; but in the sea or on the beach a mile
ahead it is something for nothing, it is the unknown, it is hope
springing eternal in the human breast. The other day I found myself
thoughtfully examining a U. S. Navy blue undress jumper which lay flat
and soggy and solitary on the lower beach. It was not, in its day,
an unfamiliar garment, and I have an old friend in the village who
occasionally dons a rather good one he found just south of the light.
Alas, the cloth was rotted and the jumper much too small. But I cut off
and saved the buttons.
[Illustration: _Semipalmated Sandpiper_]
Now, while I stood there slicing off the buttons, I chanced to look up
a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the
only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing
along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high
and travelling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow’s
from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the
solemn unrest of ocean--their passing was more than music, and from
their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms
and heals.
IV
The last two weeks in October see the peak of the autumnal visitations.
In November and December the stream from the inland shrinks, but the
coast-wise stream, continuing to flow, brings us down a rare and
curious world. Of this I shall write at greater length, for I found it
of enormous interest.
Here, approaching the end of my notes on birds and autumn, I chance to
remember that one of the strangest and most beautiful of the migrations
over the dunes was not a movement of birds at all but of butterflies.
There came a morning early in October which ripened, as the sun rose
higher, into a rather mild and September-like day; the wind was
autumnal, I recall, and from the north by west, but the current was
both mildly warm and light. As it was a day to be spent out-of-doors,
soon after ten o’clock I went out round the back of the Fo’castle into
the sunlight and began to work there on a bin I was putting together
out of driftage. I looked about, as I always do, but nothing in the
landscape chanced to take my eye. Sawing and hammering, I worked
for about three quarters of an hour, and then downed tools to take a
moment’s rest.
During the hour, a flight of twenty or more large orange-and-black
butterflies had arrived in the region of the dunes. It was a flight,
yet were the individuals far apart. There was at least an eighth of a
mile between any two; some were on the dunes, some were on the salt
meadows, three were on the beach. Their movements were casual as the
wind, yet there was an unmistakable southerly pull drawing them on. I
tried to catch one of the travellers on the beach, and though I count
myself a fair runner, it was no easy work keeping up with his turns
and erratic doublings. I wished him no ill; I simply wanted to have a
better look at him, but he escaped me by rising and disappearing over
the top of a dune. When I reached the same top after a scramble up a
steep of sand, the fugitive was already a good eighth of a mile away. I
went back to my carpentry with an increased respect for butterflies as
fliers.
An entomologist with whom I have been in correspondence tells me that
my visitors were undoubtedly specimens of the monarch or milkweed
butterfly, _Anosia plexippus_. In early autumn adults gather in great
swarms and move in a generally southward direction, and it is believed
(but not proved) that New England specimens go as far as Florida.
The following spring individuals (not swarms) appear in the North
apparently coming from the South. We do not know--I am quoting this
paragraph almost verbatim--whether these are returning migrants or
whether they are individuals that had not previously been in the North.
We do know that none of the fall migrants had previously been in the
South.
The butterflies of Eastham remained upon the dunes the rest of the
morning. I imagine that they were in search of food. Between half-past
twelve and half-past one they melted away as mysteriously as they had
come, and with them went the last echo of summer and the high sun from
the dunes. And that day I finished my bin and filled it and began to
build a wall of seaweed round the foundation of my house. A cricket
sang as I worked in the mild afternoon, alive and hardy in his cave
under my driftwood mountain, and beyond this little familiar sound of
earth I heard the roar of ocean filling the hollow space of day with
its inexorable warning.
_Chapter III_
THE HEADLONG WAVE
I
This morning I am going to try my hand at something that I do not
recall ever having encountered either in a periodical or in a book,
namely, a chapter on the ways, the forms, and the sounds of ocean
near a beach. Friends are forever asking me about the surf on the
great beach and if I am not sometimes troubled or haunted by its
sound. To this I reply that I have grown unconscious of the roar, and
though it sounds all day long in my waking ears, and all night long
in my sleeping ones, my ears seldom send on the long tumult to the
mind. I hear the roar the instant I wake in the morning and return to
consciousness, I listen to it a while consciously, and then accept and
forget it; I hear it during the day only when I stop again to listen,
or when some change in the nature of the sound breaks through my
acceptance of it to my curiosity.
They say here that great waves reach this coast in threes. Three great
waves, then an indeterminate run of lesser rhythms, then three great
waves again. On Celtic coasts it is the seventh wave that is seen
coming like a king out of the grey, cold sea. The Cape tradition,
however, is no half-real, half-mystical fancy, but the truth itself.
Great waves do indeed approach this beach by threes. Again and again
have I watched three giants roll in one after the other out of the
Atlantic, cross the outer bar, break, form again, and follow each other
in to fulfilment and destruction on this solitary beach. Coast guard
crews are all well aware of this triple rhythm and take advantage of
the lull that follows the last wave to launch their boats.
It is true that there are single giants as well. I have been roused by
them in the night. Waked by their tremendous and unexpected crash, I
have sometimes heard the last of the heavy overspill, sometimes only
the loud, withdrawing roar. After the roar came a briefest pause, and
after the pause the return of ocean to the night’s long cadences. Such
solitary titans, flinging their green tons down upon a quiet world,
shake beach and dune. Late one September night, as I sat reading, the
very father of all waves must have flung himself down before the house,
for the quiet of the night was suddenly overturned by a gigantic,
tumbling crash and an earthquake rumbling; the beach trembled beneath
the avalanche, the dune shook, and my house so shook in its dune that
the flame of a lamp quivered and pictures jarred on the wall.
The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the
sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on
a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices,
that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied. For it is a
mistake to talk of the monotone of ocean or of the monotonous nature of
its sound. The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it
your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings
and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing
seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding
undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the
half-heard talk of people in the sea. And not only is the great sound
varied in the manner of its making, it is also constantly changing
its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and
thundering, now almost placid, now furious, now grave and solemn-slow,
now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose
and elemental will.
Every mood of the wind, every change in the day’s weather, every phase
of the tide--all these have subtle sea musics all their own. Surf of
the ebb, for instance, is one music, surf of the flood another, the
change in the two musics being most clearly marked during the first
hour of a rising tide. With the renewal of the tidal energy, the sound
of the surf grows louder, the fury of battle returns to it as it turns
again on the land, and beat and sound change with the renewal of the
war.
Sound of surf in these autumnal dunes--the continuousness of it,
sound of endless charging, endless incoming and gathering, endless
fulfilment and dissolution, endless fecundity, and endless death. I
have been trying to study out the mechanics of that mighty resonance.
The dominant note is the great spilling crash made by each arriving
wave. It may be hollow and booming, it may be heavy and churning,
it may be a tumbling roar. The second fundamental sound is the wild
seething cataract roar of the wave’s dissolution and the rush of its
foaming waters up the beach--this second sound _diminuendo_. The third
fundamental sound is the endless dissolving hiss of the inmost slides
of foam. The first two sounds reach the ear as a unisonance--the
booming impact of the tons of water and the wild roar of the up-rush
blending--and this mingled sound dissolves into the foam-bubble hissing
of the third. Above the tumult, like birds, fly wisps of watery
noise, splashes and counter splashes, whispers, seethings, slaps, and
chucklings. An overtone sound of other breakers, mingled with a general
rumbling, fells earth and sea and air.
[Illustration: _The Edge of Foam_]
Here do I pause to warn my reader that although I have recounted the
history of a breaker--an ideal breaker--the surf process must be
understood as mingled and continuous, waves hurrying after waves,
interrupting waves, washing back on waves, overwhelming waves.
Moreover, I have described the sound of a high surf in fair weather.
A storm surf is mechanically the same thing, but it _grinds_, and
this same long, sepulchral grinding--sound of utter terror to all
mariners--is a development of the second fundamental sound; it is the
cry of the breaker water roaring its way ashore and dragging at the
sand. A strange underbody of sound when heard through the high, wild
screaming of a gale.
Breaking waves that have to run up a steep tilt of the beach are often
followed by a dragging, grinding sound--the note of the baffled water
running downhill again to the sea. It is loudest when the tide is low
and breakers are rolling beach stones up and down a slope of the lower
beach.
I am, perhaps, most conscious of the sound of surf just after I have
gone to bed. Even here I read myself to drowsiness, and, reading, I
hear the cadenced trampling roar filling all the dark. So close is the
Fo’castle to the ocean’s edge that the rhythm of sound I hear oftenest
in fair weather is not so much a general tumult as an endless arrival,
overspill, and dissolution of separate great seas. Through the dark,
mathematic square of the screened half window, I listen to the rushes
and the bursts, the tramplings, and the long, intermingled thunderings,
never wearying of the sonorous and universal sound.
Away from the beach, the various sounds of the surf melt into one great
thundering symphonic roar. Autumnal nights in Eastham village are
full of this ocean sound. The “summer people” have gone, the village
rests and prepares for winter, lamps shine from kitchen windows, and
from across the moors, the great levels of the marsh, and the bulwark
of the dunes resounds the long wintry roaring of the sea. Listen to
it a while, and it will seem but one remote and formidable sound;
listen still longer and you will discern in it a symphony of breaker
thunderings, an endless, distant, elemental cannonade. There is beauty
in it, and ancient terror. I heard it last as I walked through the
village on a starry October night; there was no wind, the leafless
trees were still, all the village was abed, and the whole sombre world
was awesome with the sound.
II
The seas are the heart’s blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by
the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of earth’s
veins.
The rhythm of waves beats in the sea like a pulse in living flesh.
It is pure force, forever embodying itself in a succession of watery
shapes which vanish on its passing.
I stand on my dune top watching a great wave coursing in from sea, and
know that I am watching an illusion, that the distant water has not
left its place in ocean to advance upon me, but only a force shaped in
water, a bodiless pulse beat, a vibration.
Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a
thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth
liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. Is the original force circular, I
wonder? and do ocean waves ring out from the creative beat as they do
on a quiet surface broken by a stone? Are there, perhaps, ocean circles
so great and so intricate that they are unperceived? Once created, the
wave or the arc of a wave begins its journey through the sea. Countless
vibrations precede it, countless vibrations follow after. It approaches
the continent, swings into the coast line, courses ashore, breaks,
dissolves, is gone. The innermost waters it last inhabited flow back in
marbly foam to become a body to another beat, and to be again flung
down. So it goes night and day, and will go till the secret heart of
earth strikes out its last slow beat and the last wave dissolves upon
the last forsaken shore.
[Illustration: _Slide and Seethe_]
As I stand on my dune top, however, I do not think of the illusion and
the beat of earth, for I watch the waves with my outer rather than my
inner eye. After all, the illusion is set off by an extraordinary,
an almost miraculous thing--the embodiment of the wave beat in an
almost constant shape. We see a wave a quarter of a mile off, then
a few hundred yards nearer in, then just offshore; we seem to have
been watching the same travelling mass of water--there has been no
appreciable change in mass or in shape--yet all the while the original
beat has taken on a flowing series of liquid bodies, bodies so alike,
so much the same, that our eye will individualize them and follow them
in--the third wave, we say, or the second wave behind the great wave.
How strange it is that this beat of earth, this mysterious undulation
of the seas, moving through and among the other forces stirring the
waters close off the continent, should thus keep its constancy of form
and mass, and how odd a blend of illusion and reality it all is! On
the whole, the outer eye has the best of it.
Blowing all day long, a northwest wind yesterday swept the sky clear of
every tatter and wisp of cloud. Clear it still is, though the wind has
shifted to the east. The sky this afternoon is a harmony of universal
blue, bordered with a surf rim of snowiest blue-white. Far out at sea,
in the northeast and near the horizon, is a pool of the loveliest
blue I have ever seen here--a light blue, a petal blue, blue of the
emperor’s gown in a Chinese fairy tale. If you would see waves at their
best, come on such a day, when the ocean reflects a lovely sky, and the
wind is light and onshore; plan to arrive in the afternoon so that you
will have the sun facing the breakers. Come early, for the glints on
the waves are most beautiful and interesting when the light is oblique
and high. And come with a rising tide.
The surf is high, and on the far side of it, a wave greater than its
fellows is shouldering out of the blue, glinting immensity of sea.
Friends tell me that there are certain tropic beaches where waves miles
long break all at once in one cannonading crash: a little of this, I
imagine, would be magnificent; a constancy of it, unbearable. The surf
here is broken; it approaches the beach in long intercurrent parallels,
some a few hundred feet long, some an eighth of a mile long, some, and
the longest, attaining the quarter-mile length and perhaps just over.
Thus, at all times and instants of the day, along the five miles of
beach visible from the Fo’castle deck, waves are to be seen breaking,
coursing in to break, seething up and sliding back.
But to return to the blue wave rolling in out of the blue spaciousness
of sea. On the other side of the world, just opposite the Cape, lies
the ancient Spanish province of Galicia, and the town of Pontevedra and
St. James Compostella, renowned of pilgrims. (When I was there they
offered me a silver cockle shell, but I would have none of it, and got
myself a sea shell from some Galician fisherfolk.) Somewhere between
this Spanish land and Cape Cod the pulse of earth has engendered this
wave and sent it coursing westward through the seas. Far off the coast,
the spray of its passing has, perhaps, risen on the windward bow of
some rusty freighter and fallen in rainbow drops upon her plates; the
great liners have felt it course beneath their keels.
A continent rises in the west, and the pulse beat approaches this
bulwark of Cape Cod. Two thirds of a mile out, the wave is still a sea
vibration, a billow. Slice it across, and its outline will be that
of a slightly flattened semi-circle; the pulse is shaped in a long,
advancing mound. I watch it approach the beach. Closer and closer in,
it is rising with the rise of the beach and the shoaling of the water;
closer still, it is changing from a mound to a pyramid, a pyramid which
swiftly distorts, the seaward side lengthening, the landward side
incurving--the wave is now a breaker. Along the ridge of blue forms a
rippling crest of clear, bright water; a little spray flies off. Under
the racing foam churned up by the dissolution of other breakers the
beach now catches at the last shape of sea inhabited by the pulse--the
wave is _tripped_ by the shoaling sand--the giant stumbles, crashes,
and is pushed over and ahead by the sloping line of force behind. The
fall of a breaker is never the work of gravity alone.
It is the last line of the wave that has captured the decorative
imagination of the world--the long seaward slope, the curling crest,
the incurved volute ahead.
[Illustration: _Summer Breakers_]
Toppling over and hurled ahead, the wave crashes, its mass of glinting
blue falling down in a confusion of seething, splendid white, the
tumbling water rebounding from the sand to a height almost always a
little above that of the original crest. Out of the wild, crumbling
confusion born of the dissolution of the force and the last great
shape, foamy fountains spurt, and ringlets of spray. The mass of water,
still all furiously a-churn and seething white, now rushes for the
rim of the beach as it might for an inconceivable cataract. Within
thirty-five feet the water shoals from two feet to dry land. The edge
of the rush thins, and the last impulse disappears in inch-deep slides
of foam which reflect the sky in one last moment of energy and beauty
and then vanish all at once into the sands.
Another thundering, and the water that has escaped and withdrawn is
gathered up and swept forward again by another breaking wave. Night and
day, age after age, so works the sea, with infinite variation obeying
an unalterable rhythm moving through an intricacy of chance and law.
I can watch a fine surf for hours, taking pleasure in all its wild
plays and variations. I like to stand on my beach, watching a long
wave start breaking in many places, and see the curling water run north
and south from the several beginnings, and collide in furious white
pyramids built of the opposing energies. Splendid fountains often
delight the eye. A towering and deep-bellied wave, toppling, encloses
in its volute a quantity of air, and a few seconds after the spill this
prisoned and compressed vapour bursts up through the boiling rush in
feathery, foamy jets and geyser plumes. I have seen fountains here,
on a September day, twenty and twenty-five and even thirty feet high.
Sometimes a curious thing happens. Instead of escaping vertically, the
rolled-up air escapes horizontally, and the breaker suddenly blows, as
from a dragon’s mouth, a great lateral puff of steamy spray. On sunny
days, the toppling crest is often mirrored in the glassy volute as
the wave is breaking. One lovely autumn afternoon, I saw a beautiful
white gull sailing along the volute of a breaker accompanied by his
reflection in the wave.
I add one curious effect of the wind. When the wind is directly
offshore or well offshore, the waves approach fighting it; when the
wind is offshore but so little off that its angle with the coast line
is oblique--say an angle never greater than twenty-two degrees and
never less than about twelve--the waves that approach the coast do not
give battle, but run in with their long axis parallel to the wind.
Sitting in the Fo’castle, I can often tell the exact quarter of an
offshore wind simply by looking at this oblique alignment of the waves.
The long miles of beach are never more beautiful than when waves are
rolling in fighting a strong breeze. Then do the breakers actually seem
to charge the coast. As they approach, the wind meets them in a shock
of war, the chargers rear but go on, and the wind blows back their
manes. North and south, I watch them coursing in, the manes of white,
sun brilliant spray streaming behind them for thirty and even forty
feet. Sea horses do men call such waves on every coast of the world.
If you would see them at their best, come to this beach on a bright
October day when a northwest wind is billowing off to sea across the
moors.
III
I will close my chapter with a few paragraphs about heavy surf.
It is best to be seen, I think, when the wind is not too high. A gale
blows up a surf, but it also flattens out the incoming rollers, making
monstrous, foamy travelling mounds of them much like those visible from
a ship at sea. Not until the wind has dropped do the breakers gather
form. The finest surf I have ever seen here--it was a Northern recoil
of the great Florida hurricane--broke on three pleasant and almost
windless autumn days. The storm itself had passed us, but our seas had
been stirred to their deeps. Returning to the Cape at night from a trip
to town, I heard the roar of the ocean in Orleans, and on arriving
at Nauset, found the beach flooded to the dunes, and covered with a
churn of surf and moonlight. Dragging a heavy suitcase and clad in my
go-to-town clothes, I had an evil time getting to the Fo’castle over
the dune tops and along the flooded marsh.
Many forces mingle in the surf of a storm--the great earth rhythm of
the waves, the violence of wind, the struggle of water to obey its
own elemental law. Out of the storm at sea come the giants and, being
giants, trip far out, spilling first on the outer bar. Shoreward then
they rush, breaking all the way. Touching the beach, they tumble in
a roar lost in a general noise of storm. Trampled by the wind and
everlastingly moved and lifted up and flung down by the incoming seas,
the water offshore becomes a furious glassiness of marbly foam; wild,
rushing sheets of seethe fifty feet wide border it; the water streams
with sand.
Under all this move furious tidal currents, the longshore undertow of
outer Cape Cod. Shore currents here move in a southerly direction;
old wreckage and driftwood is forever being carried down here from
the north. Coast guard friends often look at a box or stick I have
retrieved, and say, “Saw that two weeks ago up by the light.”
After an easterly, I find things on the beach which have been blown
down from the Gulf of Maine--young, uprooted spruce trees, lobster
buoys from Matinicus, and, after one storm, a great strewing of empty
sea-urchin shells. Another easterly washed up a strewing of curious
wooden pebbles shaped by the sea out of the ancient submerged forests
which lie just off the present coast. They were brown-black, shaped
like beach stones, and as smooth as such stones.
The last creature I found in the surf was a huge horseshoe crab, the
only one I have ever chanced to find on the outside. Poor _Limulus
polyphemus_! The surf having turned him upside down, he had as usual
doubled up, and the surf had then filled with sand the angle of his
doubling. When I discovered him, he was being bullied by a foam slide,
and altogether in a desperate way. So I picked him up, rinsed the sand
out of his waving gills, held him up all dripping by the tail, and
flung him as far as I could to seaward of the breakers. A tiny splash,
and I had seen the last of him, a moment more, and the surf had filled
the hollow in which he had lain.
Autumnal easterlies and November tides having scoured from the beach
its summer deeps of sand, the high seasonal tides now run clear across
to the very foot of the dunes. Under this daily overflow of cold, the
last of the tide-rim hoppers and foragers vanish from the beach. An icy
wind blusters; I hear a dry tinkle of sand against my western wall;
December nears, and winter closes in upon the coast.
_Chapter IV_
MIDWINTER
I
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer
nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it,
one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something
of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the
most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the
last December ebb of his decline. All these autumn weeks I have watched
the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the
marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree,
now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great
deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When
all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama
by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share
in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic
spirit.
The splendour of colour in this world of sea and dune ebbed from it
like a tide; it shallowed first without seeming to lose ground, and
presently vanished all at once, almost, so it seemed, in one grey week.
Warmth left the sea, and winter came down with storms of rushing wind
and icy, pelting rain. The first snow fell early in November, just
before the dawn of a grey and bitter day. I had written a letter the
night before, intending to give it to the coast guardsman who came
south at seven o’clock, but somehow or other I missed him; and no
welcome light flashed an answer to mine as I stood on the crest of my
dune looking into the darkness of the beach and listening to the sombre
thunder of a rising sea. Unwilling to stay up till after midnight for
the next patrol, I went out and put a note on the coast guard key post
just south of me asking the last man south in the morning to wake me
up and come in and get the letter. At about half-past five I woke to a
stamping of feet and a knock on the door, and in came John Blood, the
tall, light-haired New Yorker, very much buttoned up into his blue pea
jacket, and with his watch cap well pulled down upon his ears.
[Illustration: _The Burst of a Wave_]
“Ahoy, John--thanks for coming in. What’s it like outside?”
“It’s snowing. Winter’s come, I guess,” he said, with a meditative grin.
We talked, I gave him the letter, and he went out into the dark break
of dawn, the wind, and the snow.
My fire had gone out, the Fo’castle was raw and cold, but my wood
was ready, and I soon had a fire crackling. All winter long, I kept
a basket of little sticks and fragments of driftwood ready for the
morning, and began the day with a bonfire in the fireplace. A hearthful
of high, leaping flame sends out a quick and plentiful heat. Light
came slowly into the world, coming not so much from the east as from
some vague, general nowhere--a light that did not grow brighter but
only increased in quantity. A northwest snow squall was blowing across
the sedgy marshes and the dunes, “seeming nowhere to alight” in the
enormous landscape, and whirling off to the sullen, iron-green, and
icy sea. As I watched, half-a-dozen gulls came sailing over from the
marsh. These birds like foul weather and have a way of flying out over
along the breakers a few minutes after the edge of a cloud has hidden
the sun, and there is a strange, ominous sense of storm in this great
natural scene.
The snow skirted along the beach, the wind suffering it no rest; I saw
little whirlpools of it driving down the sand into the onrush of the
breakers, it gathered in the footprints of the coast guard patrols,
building up on their leeward side and patterning them in white on the
empty beach. The very snow in the air had a character of its own, for
it was the snow of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic, snow icy
and crystalline, and sweeping across the dunes and moors rather than
down upon them. Chancing to look to the north, I saw Nauset Light
still turning and gleaming, and as I watched, it suddenly sank to a
storm-smothered and distant glow and stopped. By the almanac, the sun
had risen. So began the worst winter on the Cape for close upon fifty
years, a winter marked by great storms and tides, six wrecks, and the
loss of many lives.
The sun, this December morning, has come to the end of his southern
journey, he climbs the whitish sky to the south over the white fury
of the Orleans shoals, and takes on a silvery quality from the pallor
of the sky. On such a morning went ancient peoples to their hills, and
cried to the pale god to return to their woods and fields; perhaps the
vanished Nausets danced a ceremonial dance on those inland moors, and
the same northwest wind carried the measured drumming to these dunes. A
morning to go out upon the dunes and study the work of winter. Between
the cold blue of the sea and the levels of the marshes, the long wall
of the dunes lies blanched to a whiter pallor than the surrounding
landscape, for there is no russet and but little gold in dune grass
when it dies. That intricacy of green, full-fleshed life, which
billowed like wild wheat in the summer’s southwest wind, has thinned
away now to a sparse world of separate heads, each one holding, as in a
fist, a clump of whitish and mildewed wires.
The sand moves beneath. This shrinking of summer’s vegetation, this
uncovering of the body of the dune, has permitted the winter gales to
reach the sand, and all up and down the great wall, on the tops of
the dunes, the surface sand is moving. The direction of this movement
varies, of course, with the direction of the wind, but in general
the movement is toward the sea, for the prevailing winter winds are
northwesterly. In some places the blown and creeping sand has covered
the grass so deeply that only the very tips of the withered spikes
rise out of it; in other places, on the landward rims of the dunes,
the wind has blown the sand entirely away from the plant and left a
withered tangle of roots and stalks sprawling in the wind. Here and
there, in the dead, whitish grass, one encounters a stray tiny spotlet
of snow, relic of a storm a fortnight past. Such spots linger here for
inexplicable weeks and have an air of things disregarded and forgotten.
I have written of the movement of sand on the surface of the dune,
yet the very essence of the work of winter here is the quieting, the
enchainment of the mass of the sand. The sun no longer being hot enough
to dry it, moisture lies on it and within it, it loses its fluidity,
it takes on weight and definition. Footprints which the summer would
erase in a quarter of an hour remain in well-sheltered places for days
and even weeks. There is a winter change of colour, as well. The warm
golden quality vanishes and is replaced by a tone of cold silver-grey,
which makes no flashing answer to the sun.
[Illustration: _The Winter Beach_]
Animal life has disappeared into the chill air, the heavy, lifeless
sand. On the surface, nothing remains of the insect world. That
multiplicity of insect tracks, those fantastic ribbons which
grasshoppers, promenading flies, spiders, and beetles printed on
the dunes as they went about their hungry and mysterious purposes,
have come to an end in this world and left it all the poorer. Those
trillions of unaccountable lives, those crawling, buzzing, intense
presences which nature created to fulfil some unknown purpose or
perhaps simply to satisfy a whim for a certain sound or a moment of
exquisite colour, where are they now, in this vast world, silent save
for the sombre thunder of the surf and the rumble of wind in the
porches of the ears? As I muse here, it occurs to me that we are not
sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which
insects add to the natural scene; indeed, we take it so much as a
matter of course that it does not stir our fully conscious attention.
But all those little fiddles in the grass, all those cricket pipes,
those delicate flutes, are they not lovely beyond words when heard in
midsummer on a moonlight night? I like, too, the movement they give to
a landscape with their rushes, their strange comings and goings, and
their hoverings with the sun’s brilliance reflected in their wings.
Here, and at this especial moment, there is no trace or vestige of the
summer’s insect world, yet one feels them here, the trillion, trillion
tiny eggs in grass and marsh and sand, all faithfully spun from the
vibrant flesh of innumerable mothers, all faithfully sealed and hidden
away, all waiting for the rush of this earth through space and the
resurgence of the sun.
I find no more paths of little paws and claw-tipped feet, each one
with its own rhythm, its own mechanics of walking and running. The
skunks, who linger till the last chilled grasshopper has been pounced
on and eaten, are now lying torpid in their dark snuggles underground,
their heartbeat stilled to a ghost of its summer self. They do not,
apparently, make themselves burrows on the dunes, perhaps because
a wise instinct warns them that a burrow in these open sands might
collapse about them as they slept. November finds them travelling up
the dunes to the firm soil of the mainland moors. The hill nearest
the dunes is full of their winter parlours. Twice during the winter I
saw a wildcat of domestic stock hunting along the edge of the marsh,
and marked how savagery had completely altered the creature’s gait,
for it slunk along, belly close to the grass, like a panther. A large
brown cat with long fur and a wild and extraordinarily foolish face.
I imagined it was out hunting the marsh larks who feed in the stubble
of the salt-hay fields. Another time, I saw the hoofs of a deer in the
sand, but of this deer and its adventures in the frozen marsh I shall
speak later.
At Orleans, an otter, a rare animal here, has been seen, the man who
saw it taking it for a seal until it came out of the breakers and ran
along the sand. Every now and then, from the windows of the Fo’castle,
I catch sight of a seal’s black head swimming about close inshore.
In summer, seals are rarely seen on this part of the great outer
beach--I myself have never seen one--but in winter they come along the
breakers reconnoitring in search of food. They have a trick of swimming
unperceived under a flock of sea ducks, seizing one of the unwary birds
from underneath, and then disappearing with their mouths full of flesh
and frantic feathers. A confusion follows; the survivors leap from the
water with wildly beating wings, they scatter, wheel, and gather again,
and presently nature has erased every sign of the struggle, and the
sea rolls on as before.
There has been a strange tragedy to the north; one of those dread
elemental things that happen in an elemental world. The other evening
my friend Bill Eldredge, of Nauset, told me that there had been a
disaster that same morning off the Race. Two fishermen who had left
Provincetown in a big, thirty-foot motor dory were seen from the beach
to be having trouble of some kind; the dory had then drifted into a
tide rip churned up with surf, and capsized and drowned her crew. A
few nights later, Bill came south again, and I stood for a moment
talking to him on the beach at the foot of the Fo’castle dune. A lovely
night of great winter stars and a quiet sea. “You remember those two
fishermen I was telling you about?” said Bill. “They’ve found them both
now. One of them had a son at Wood End Station, and when he was coming
back from his patrol last night he saw his father’s body on the beach.”
II
On the night of Saturday, January 1st, it was almost pitch dark along
the coast. In the murk, the eye of Nauset Light had a reddish tinge,
and, turning, revealed a world shaped like a disk and pressed between
a great darkness of earth and a low, black floor of cloud. The wind
was on shore and blowing strong. Some time after midnight, a surfman
from Cahoons Hollow Coast Guard Station, patrolling south, discovered
a schooner in the surf, with the seas breaking over her, and the crew
hollering in the rigging. I write “hollering” here without shame, for
“hallooing,” or whatever the proper spelling of the verb may be, simply
would not tell the story, or convey the sound heard in the night. After
holding up a red signal flare to tell the men on the wreck that they
had been seen, the surfman hurried on to Cahoons and gave the alarm.
The crew of the station, under command of Captain Henry Daniels, then
dragged their cart of life-saving apparatus down the beach through a
surf running to the bank, and took off every single man safely in the
breeches buoy. The prompt and gallant rescue had been no easy task,
with the tide thus running high and the seas breaking over the schooner.
I had my first view of her the next afternoon. She turned out to be
the two-masted, motor-auxiliary fishing schooner _A. Roger Hickey_,
Boston-bound from the fishing grounds. Her compass had been at fault,
they said. When I caught sight of her from the top of a path descending
the great earth cliff of the Cape, the vessel lay on the open sand a
mile up the beach to the north, a typical Boston fisherman with a red
bottom and a black hull. A vessel, I judged, something over a hundred
feet long. The whole vast view was really a picture of singular and
moving beauty; it would be hard to forget, I think, that immense and
jade-green ocean under a fine sky, the great, sepia-brown beach with
its overhanging haze of faintest violet, the bright ship so forlorn,
and the tiny black figures moving round and about it. The beach had
already begun to break up its prize. Along it, on my way to the ship,
I saw splintered wood, an undamaged hatch cover painted white, and
several bunches of water-logged manila tags with a fish merchant’s name
printed on them in large black letters.
Presently there came walking toward me three ladies of Wellfleet, good,
pleasant New England housewives, each one with a large haddock under
her arm rolled up in a sheet of newspaper, the three dead-eyed haddock
heads protruding as from paper collars, the three fish tails visible
behind. Apparently the fish which the _Hickey_ had on board when she
struck were being given away.
Arriving at the wreck, I found that her rudder had already carried
away, and that her timbers were badly wrenched, and her seams opened.
The ship’s dog, who had been thrillingly rescued in his master’s arms,
sat shivering on the beach, a most inoffensive and unromantic brown
dog with what looked like an appalling case of mange. A handful of
visitors, men and boys in workaday clothes and rubber boots, were
wandering round the vessel, their boot prints making a chain about
her on the beach, and other men were busy puttering round the steeply
tilted deck. Finding Captain Henry Daniels of Cahoons aboard, an old
friend of years’ standing, I heard that the crew of the _Hickey_, two
or three excepted, had already returned to Boston by train, and that
the vessel was so badly damaged that she was to be stripped as soon as
possible of all gear worth saving, and abandoned.
Midships, a discussion was going on round the open mouth of one
of the fish holds. The _Hickey’s_ catch was still there, a mass of
big greyish fish bodies, haddocks with staring eyes, cod with chin
whiskers, flounders, and huge lemon soles. The discussion concerned
the possibility of the fish having had a bath in fuel oil when the
seas washed into the _Hickey_ at high tide. No one took serious alarm,
and the fish, handed out to all comers by a member of the crew, proved
excellent eating.
So they stripped the _A. Roger Hickey_, took out her engine and such
gear as they could, and then someone set fire to the hulk. By the end
of the winter, there was not even a splinter of this vessel on the
beach. She was the third wreck, and there were others to come.
As the winter closed in upon the beach, I began to look forward to days
when I might see what took place there during icy weather, but such
opportunities proved even rarer than I had expected. Thrust forth as it
is into the outer Atlantic, the Cape has a climate of island quality
and island moderation. Low temperatures may occur, but the thermometer
almost never falls as low as it does on the inner Massachusetts
coast, nor do “spells” of cold weather “hang on” for any length of
time. Storms which are snowstorms on the continental mainland turn to
rainstorms on the Cape, and such snowstorms as do arrive form but a
crust upon these Eastham moors. Two days after the storm the snow has
thinned to great decorative patches on the slopes of sedgy hills; in
another day only fragments, drifts, and stray islets remain. There is
even a difference of temperature between the mainland moors of Eastham
and the dunes. It is warmer on the bar. On a casual winter day I have
noted a difference of eight degrees.
The work of cold weather--I mean weather when the temperature sinks
toward zero--is thus to be observed only on occasion along this beach.
When it comes, it comes all at once, creates a new world overnight,
and vanishes overnight. The agency that brings it is the northwest
wind sweeping down on us across Massachusetts Bay from the forests and
frozen lakes of northern Canada. I remember one of the nights of its
coming, a Thursday night early in January with great winter clouds
moving out to sea, opening and closing over the cold stars, the wind on
the beach so icy that I found myself, when I first went out into it,
breathing it in little reluctant breaths. The next day was as cold
and desolate a day as I have ever seen upon the beach. The ocean was
purple-black, rough, and covered with sombre whitecaps; the morning
light was pewter dull, and over earth and sea and the lonely sands hung
a pall of purple-leaden cloud full of vast, tormented motion as it
crossed the Cape on its way to the Atlantic. Looking off to sea, as I
walked down my dune to go exploring, I saw a solitary freighter hugging
the coast for shelter from the northwest wind; she was plunging heavily
in the great seas and flinging up tons of spray with each plunge,
and her bow and her forward deck were already thick with ice. Gulls
flew along the iron-black and sombre breakers of the ebb, their white
plumage chalky in that impure and arctic light. The wind was a thing to
search the marrow of one’s bones.
Two beaches had formed in the icy night, best seen and studied at low
tide. The upper beach occupied the width between the dunes and the line
of the night’s high tide; the lower beach sloped from this high-tide
mark to the open sea. The upper beach and the dunes were frozen hard.
The frozen sand was delightful to walk upon, for the tiny congealed
grains afforded a safe, sustaining footing, and the surface, though
solid, had the resiliency of thick, unvarnished linoleum on a good
floor. It was an odd, an unnatural experience, to hit one’s foot on
a ridge of frozen sand. Fragments of wreckage imbedded in the sand,
wreaths of imbedded seaweed--all these were as immovable as so many
rocks. At the very foot of the largest of the dunes, I found a male
surf scoter or skunk coot frozen stiff. A few solid kicks dislodged it,
and I picked it up, but could find no wound. The lower beach, that is
to say the width that had been covered by the tide during the night,
was frozen solid at its junction with the upper beach, but the fine
slope down to the breakers, though frozen firm, was not frozen through
and through. Along the edge of the breakers, it was not frozen at all.
Between these two beaches, one above, one below, one frozen solid, the
other crusted over, there ran a kind of frontier some eight or ten feet
wide, a no-man’s-land of conflicting natural forces. At the height of
the night tide, the seething foam rims of the sliding surf, flung by
the ocean into the face of the night cold, had frozen on the sloping
beach in layers of salt ice which preserved all the curves and foamy
ridges of the captured edge of the sea. The brim of a high tide, that
very spirit of energy and motion, lay there motionless on a beach
itself deprived of motion; the scalloped edges, the little curls of
foam, the long, reaching, rushing tongues, all these were to be seen
enchanted into that ocean ice which is so much like a kind of snow. At
its upper edge this image of the surf brim was but a glaze of ice on
the beach; at its lower edge it was twelve to fifteen inches in height
and fell off sheer, like an ice cake, to the beach below. And north and
south it ran, mile upon icy mile, as far as the eye could see.
The subsequent history of this ice is not without interest. After two
days of bitter cold the wind changed in the night, and that night’s
tide quietly removed every vestige of the ice cakes from the beach.
The swathe on which the ice had lain, however, remained half visible,
for there water and sand had mingled and frozen deep. Presently the
upper beach thawed, the cold crumbling drily out of the sand, and the
lower beach, which had yielded its frozen surface to each succeeding
tide and frozen again during the ebb, remained as the last tide left
it. Between the two beaches, the width of buried ice lingered for a
fortnight, resisting sun and whole days of winter rain. It had a way
of coming suddenly to an end, and of beginning as suddenly again; sand
drifted over it, the tide edge seeped through to it, the moving beach,
forever adjusting itself to complex forces, burst it open, yet it
lingered on. For all of us who used the beach, this buried width of ice
became a secret road. The coast guards knew it well and followed along
it in the night. As I set down these words, I think of the times I have
come to a blind end and prodded the sand with my beach staff in search
of that secret footing. Little by little the sun and the tides wore
down its resistance, and so it disappeared, and our searching feet knew
it no more.
The great marsh was another desolation on that same overcast and icy
day. Salt ice had formed in wide rims along the edges of the great
level islands, the shallower channels had frozen over, and the deeper
ones were strewn with ice cakes sailing and turning about in the
currents of the tides. The scene had taken on a certain winter unity,
for the ice had bound the channels and the islands together into one
wide and wintry plain.
On the next morning--it was sunny then, but still freezing cold--I
chanced to go out for a moment to look at the marsh. About a mile and
a half away, in one of the open channels, was a dark something which
looked like a large, unfamiliar bird. A stray goose, perhaps? Taking my
glass, I found the dark object to be the head of a deer swimming down
the channel, and, even as I looked, there came to my ears the distant
barking of dogs. A pair of marauding curs, out hunting on their own,
had found a deer somewhere and driven the creature down the dunes and
into the icy creeks. Down the channel it swam, and presently turned
aside and climbed out on the marsh island just behind the Fo’castle.
The animal was a young doe. I thought then, and I still believe, that
this doe and the unseen creature whose delicate hoofprints I often
found near the Fo’castle were one and the same. It lived, I believe, in
the pines on the northern shore of the marsh and came down to the dunes
at earliest dawn. But to return to its adventures: All afternoon I
watched it standing on the island far out in the marsh, the tall, dead
sea grass rising about its russet body; when night came, it was still
there, a tiny spot of forlorn mammalian life in that frozen scene. Was
it too terrified to return? That night a tide of unusual height was
due which would submerge the islands under at least two feet of water
and floating ice. Would the doe swim ashore under cover of darkness?
I went out at midnight into my solitary world and saw the ice-covered
marsh gleaming palely under a sky of brilliant stars, but could see
nothing of the island of the doe save a ghostliness of salt ice along
the nearer rim.
The first thing I did, on waking the next morning, was to search the
island with my glass. The doe was still there.
I have often paused to wonder how that delicate and lovely creature
endured so cruel a night, how she survived the slow rise of the icy
tide about her poor legs, and the northwest gale that blustered about
her all night long in that starlit loneliness of crunchy marsh mud and
the murmur of the tides. The morning lengthened, the sun rose higher
on the marsh, and presently the tide began to rise again. I watched it
rising toward the refugee, and wondered if she could survive a second
immersion. Just a little before noon, perhaps as the water was flooding
round her feet, she came down to the edge of her island, and plunged
into the channel. The creek was full of ice mush and of ice floes
moving at a good speed; the doe was weak, the ice cakes bore down upon
her, striking her heavily; she seemed confused, hesitated, swam here,
swam there, stood still, and was struck cruelly by a floe which seemed
to pass over her, yet on she swam, bewildered, but resolute for life.
I had almost given up hope for her, when rescue came unexpectedly. My
friend Bill Eldredge, it appeared, while on watch in the station tower
the day before had chanced to see the beginning of the story, and on
the second morning had noticed the doe still standing in the marshes.
All the Nauset crew had taken an interest. Catching sight of the poor
creature fighting for life in the drift, three of the men put off in
a skiff, poled the ice away with their oars, and shepherded the doe
ashore. “When she reached dry land, she couldn’t rise, she was so weak,
and fell down again and again. But finally she stood up and stayed up,
and walked off into the pines.”
III
I have now to tell of the great northeast storm of February 19th and
20th. They say here that it was the worst gale known on the outer Cape
since the _Portland_ went down with all hands on that terrible November
night in ’98.
It began after midnight on a Friday night, and the barometer gave but
little warning of its coming. That Friday afternoon I had walked up the
beach to Nauset Station, found Bill Eldredge on watch in the tower, and
asked him to wake me up when he went by at midnight. “Never mind if you
don’t see a light,” I said. “Come in anyway and wake me up. I may go
down the beach with you.” I often made the patrols with the men at the
station, for I liked to walk the beach by night.
Shortly after midnight, Bill came to the door, but I did not get up
and dress to go down the beach with him, for I was rather tired from
piling up a mass of driftwood, so I sat up in bed and talked to him by
the dying light of my fire. On bitter nights, I used to put a big log
on in the hope that it might flicker and smoulder till morning, but on
average nights, I let the fire die down to a bed of ashes, for I am
a light sleeper, and the little play of flames on the hearth kept me
awake. Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone
stirs in them a certain watchfulness.
The coast guardsman stood against the brick fireplace, his elbow
propped for a moment on the shelf; I scarce could see his blue-clad
figure in the gloom. “It’s blowing up,” he said. “I think we are going
to have a northeaster.” I apologized for not getting up, pleaded
weariness, and, after a little talk, Bill said that he must be going,
and returned to the beach. I saw him use his flashlight a moment as he
plunged down the dune.
I woke in the morning to the dry rattle of sleet on my eastern windows
and the howling of wind. A northeaster laden with sleet was bearing
down on the Cape from off a furious ocean, an ebbing sea fought with a
gale blowing directly on the coast; the lonely desolation of the beach
was a thousand times more desolate in that white storm pouring down
from a dark sky. The sleet fell as a heavy rain falls when it is blown
about by the wind. I built up my fire, dressed, and went out, shielding
my face from the sleet by pulling my head down into the collar of my
coat. I brought in basket after basket of firewood, till the corner
of the room resembled a woodshed. Then I folded up the bedclothes,
threw my New Mexican blanket over the couch, lighted the oil stove,
and prepared breakfast. An apple, oatmeal porridge, toast made at the
fireplace, a boiled egg, and coffee.
Sleet and more of it, rushes of it, attacks of it, screaming descents
of it; I heard it on the roof, on the sides of the house, on the
windowpanes. Within, my fire fought against the cold, tormented light.
I wondered about a small fishing boat, a thirty-foot “flounder dragger”
that had anchored two miles or so off the Fo’castle the evening before.
I looked for her with my glass, but could not see into the storm.
Streaming over the dunes, the storm howled on west over the moors.
The islands of the marsh were brownish black, the channels leaden and
whipped up by the wind; and along the shores of the desolate islands,
channel waves broke angrily, chidingly, tossing up heavy ringlets of
lifeless white. A scene of incredible desolation and cold. All day
long I kept to my house, building up the fire and keeping watch from
the windows; now and then I went out to see that all was well with the
Fo’castle and its foundations, and to glimpse what I could, through the
sleet, of the storm on the sea. For a mile or so offshore the North
Atlantic was a convulsion of elemental fury whipped by the sleety
wind, the great parallels of the breakers tumbling all together and
mingling in one seething and immense confusion, the sound of this mile
of surf being an endless booming roar, a seethe, and a dread grinding,
all intertwined with the high scream of the wind. The rush of the
inmost breakers up the beach was a thing of violence and blind will.
Darkness coming early, I closed my shutters on the uproar of the outer
world, all save one shutter on the landward side.
With the coming of night the storm increased; the wind reaching a
velocity of seventy to eighty miles an hour. It was at this time, I
am told, that friends on the mainland began to be worried about me,
many of them looking for my light. My lamp, a simple kerosene affair
with a white china shade, stood on a table before the unshuttered
window facing the land. An old friend said he would see it or think
that he saw it for a half minute or so, and then it would vanish for
hours into the darkness of the gale. It was singularly peaceful in the
little house. Presently, the tide, which had ebbed a little during the
afternoon, turned and began to come in. All afternoon long the surf
had thundered high upon the beach, the ebb tide backed up against
the wind. With the turn of the tide came fury unbelievable. The great
rhythm of its waters now at one with the rhythm of the wind, the ocean
rose out of the night to attack the ancient rivalry of earth, hurling
breaker after thundering breaker against the long bulwark of the
sands. The Fo’castle, being low and strongly built, stood solid as a
rock, but its walls thrummed in the gale. I could feel the vibration
in the bricks of the chimney, and the dune beneath the house trembled
incessantly with the onslaught of the surf.
[Illustration: _The Bank After a Storm_]
Where were my friends at Nauset Station, thought I, in this furious
night. Who was on his way north, with seven miles of night and sleet
to battle through before he returned to the shelter of the station and
the warmth of that kitchen stove which is kept polished to a brilliance
beyond all stoves? It was Bill, as a matter of fact, and because of the
surf on the beach he was using the path which runs along the top of the
cliff close by its brim, a path exposed to the full violence of the
gale. As I mused thus, troubled about my friends, there came a knock
at my open window, and then steps outside and a knock at the door.
Letting my visitor in was easy enough, but to close the door after him
was another matter. Closing the door against the force of the gale was
like trying to close it upon something material; it was exactly as if I
were pressing the door against a bulging mass of felt. My visitor was
Albert Robbins, first man south from Nauset, a big powerful youngster
and a fine lad; he was covered with sleet and sand, sand and sleet in
his hair, in his eyebrows, in the corners of his eyes, in his ears,
behind his ears, in the corners of his mouth, in his nostrils even. And
a cheerful, determined grin!
“Wanted to see if you were still here,” he said humorously, rooting
sand out of his eyes with a knuckle. I busied myself getting him a cup
of steaming coffee.
“Any news? Anyone in trouble?” I asked.
“Yes, there’s a coast guard patrol boat off the Highland; something’s
the matter with her engine. She’s anchored off there, and they’ve sent
two destroyers out from Boston to get her.”
“When did you hear that?”
“This afternoon.”
“Didn’t hear anything else?”
“No, the wires blew down, and we can’t get beyond Cahoons.”
“Think they’ve got any chance if the destroyers haven’t got to them?”
“Gosh, I hope so,” he said; and then, after a pause, “but it don’t look
like it.” And then, “So long,” and into the storm again.
I did not go to bed, for I wanted to be ready for any eventuality. As
the hour of flood tide neared, I dressed as warmly as I could, turned
down my lamp, and went out upon the dunes.
An invisible moon, two days past the full, had risen behind the rushing
floor of cloud, and some of its wan light fell on the tortured earth
and the torment of the sea. The air was full of sleet, hissing with
a strange, terrible, insistent sound on the dead grass, and sand was
being whirled up into the air. Being struck on the face by this sand
and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip. I have never
looked on such a tide. It had crossed the beach, climbed the five-foot
wall of the dune levels that run between the great mounds, and was
hurling wreckage fifty and sixty feet into the starved white beach
grass; the marsh was an immense flooded bay, and the “cuts” between
the dunes and the marsh rivers of breakers. A hundred yards to the
north of me was such a river; to the south, the surf was attempting to
flank the dune, an attempt which did not succeed. Between these two
onslaughts, no longer looking _down_ upon the sea, but directly into it
and just over it, the Fo’castle stood like a house built out into the
surf on a mound of sand. A third of a mile or so to the north I chanced
to see rather a strange thing. The dune bank there was washing away and
caving in under the onslaught of the seas, and presently there crumbled
out the blackened skeleton of an ancient wreck which the dunes had
buried long ago. As the tide rose this ghost floated and lifted itself
free, and then washed south close along the dunes. There was something
inconceivably spectral in the sight of this dead hulk thus stirring
from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.
As I walked in the night I wondered about the birds who live here in
the marsh. That great population of gulls, ducks, and geese and their
rivals and allies--where were they all crouching, where were they
hidden in that wild hour?
All Sunday morning there was sleet--more sleet fell in this storm than
the Cape had seen in a generation--and then, about the middle of
the afternoon, the wind died down, leaving a wild sea behind. Going
to Nauset Station, I had news of the disaster at the Highland. The
destroyers, in spite of a splendid battle, had been unable to reach the
disabled patrol boat, and the luckless ship had gone to pieces. It is
thought that she dragged onto the outer bar. Nine men had perished. Two
bodies came ashore next day; their watches had stopped at five o’clock,
so we knew that the vessel had weathered the night and gone to pieces
in the morning. What a night they must have had, poor souls!
There was wreckage everywhere, great logs, tree stumps, fragments of
ships, planking, splintered beams, boards, rough timber, and, by itself
in the surf, the enormous rudder of the _Hickey_, splintered sternpost
and all. The day after the storm, people came down from Eastham in
farm wagons and Fords, looked at the sea for a while, talked over the
storm with whoever happened to be standing by, paid a call on the
coast guards, and then went casually to work piling up the best of
the timber. I saw Bill Eldredge in one of the cuts sorting out planks
to be used in building a henhouse. Gulls were milling over the surf
and spume--the greatest numbers gathering where the surf was most
discoloured--and gulls were flying back and forth between the breakers
and the marsh. From their point of view, perhaps, nothing had happened.
_Chapter V_
WINTER VISITORS
I
During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was
entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo’castle as undisturbed as Crusoe
on his island. Man disappeared from the world of nature in which I
lived almost as if he, too, were a kind of migratory bird. It is true
that I could see the houses of Eastham village on the uplands across
the marsh, and the passing ships and fishing boats, but these were the
works of man rather than man himself. By the middle of February the
sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo’castle
would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this
isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only
answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see
and study undisturbed the processes of nature--I like better the old
Biblical phrase “mighty works”--is an opportunity for which any man
might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence
and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost
natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the
hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came
to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune
unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes
as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.
It is not good to be too much alone, even as it is unwise to be always
with and in a crowd, but, solitary as I was, I had few opportunities
for moods or to “lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.” From
the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking
toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the
evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to
do, something to observe, something to record, something to study,
something to put aside in a corner of the mind. There was the ocean in
all weathers and at all tides, now grey and lonely and veiled in winter
rain, now sun-bright, coldly green, and marbled with dissolving foam;
there was the marsh with its great congresses, its little companies,
its wandering groups, and little family gatherings of winter birds;
there was the glory of the winter sky rolling out of the ocean over and
across the dunes, constellation by constellation, lonely star by star.
To see the night sky in all its divinity of beauty, the world beneath
it should be lovely, too, else the great picture is split in halves
which no mind can ever really weld into a unity of reverence. I think
the nights on which I felt most alone (if I paused to indulge myself
in such an emotion) were the nights when southeasterly rains were at
work in the dark, immense world outside my door dissolving in rain and
fog such ice and snow as lingered on after a snowfall or a cold spell
had become history. On such southeasterly nights, the fog lay thick on
marsh and ocean, the distant lights of Eastham vanished in a universal
dark, and on the invisible beach below the dune, great breakers born of
fog swell and the wind rolled up the sands with the slow, mournful pace
of stately victims destined to immolation, and toppled over, each one,
in a heavy, awesome roar that faded to silence before a fellow victim
followed on out of the darkness on the sea. Only one sense impression
lingered to remind me of the vanished world of man, and that the long,
long complaints and melancholy bellowings of vessels feeling their way
about miles offshore.
[Illustration: _Dovekies or Little Auks_]
But I was not entirely alone. My friends the coast guards at Nauset
Station, patrolling the beach every night and in all weathers, often
came in to see how I was faring, to hand me on a letter, or to tell me
the news of the Cape. My pleasure in such visits was very real, and
between half after seven and eight o’clock I always hoped for a step.
When one has not spoken to another human being for twenty-four hours,
a little conversation is pleasant exercise, though to the speaker the
simplest phrases, even the simple idiom, “Come in,” may take on a
quaint air of being breathless and voluble. Sometimes no one came, and
I spent the evening by my fire reading quietly, going over my notes,
and wondering who it was who walked the beach.
It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature;
especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a
way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind.
I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the
conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century
romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and
butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with
the men on night patrol, a mediæval anchorite would have probably
regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch
with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus
upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life
which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus
surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call
the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy.
There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed
as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come
to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the
secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood,
but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open
their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand
well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as
electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains
life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may
mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a
moment with a candle flame.
But now I must begin to tell of the birds who are wintering on the
coast, of the exchange of species which takes place here, and of how
all manage to live.
As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first
impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness. The summer bird
life of the beach has completely disappeared, and at the moment of
which I tell, not a single beach bird or sea bird, not even a resident
gull, is to be seen on the beach along all these empty miles. I walk,
and no terns come swooping down at me out of the dunes, scolding me
for my intrusion on their immense and ancient privacy; no sandpipers
rise at my approach, wheel over the inner breakers, and settle down
again a hundred yards ahead. Summer residents and autumn migrants of
the beach, sandpipers, plovers, yellow-legs, “knots,” and sanderlings,
all have gone south with the sun and are now to be found anywhere from
the Carolinas south to Patagonia. The familiar sanderlings--it is of
_Crocethia alba_ that I write--lingered surprisingly late; they seemed
almost as numerous in October as in August, there were plenty to be
seen in November, but in December flocks were rare, and by Christmas,
there were only a few strays and cripples left behind.
New Year’s Day, on the deserted beach, I surprised a little flock of
ruddy turnstones, _Arenaria interpres morinella_, who took wing on my
approach and flew south close along the seaward face of the dunes. I
shall always remember this picture as one of the most beautiful touches
of colour I have ever seen in nature, for the three dominant colours of
this bird--who is a little larger than the semipalmated sandpiper--are
black, white, and glowing chestnut red; and these colours are
interestingly displayed in patches and bold stripes seen at their best
when the bird is flying. The great dunes behind them and the long vista
of the beach were cold silver overlaid with that faint, loveliest
violet which is the overtone colour of the coast.
As I watched these decorative birds flying away ahead of me into that
vast ocean world, I began thinking of how little has ever been written
or said about the loveliness of our North Atlantic birds. There are
plenty of books about them, there are a world of kind people who
cherish and love them as birds, but there is a lack of printed material
and discussion celebrating their qualities of beauty. Such æsthetic
appreciation of our shore birds as we have had seems to have reached
that showy and unfortunate creature, the wood duck, _Aix sponsa_, and
been permanently overcome. Now, the turnstone is a lovely little bird,
the least tern is another; the king eider is a magnificent creature,
and there are many more whose beauty deserves comment and attention.
A second notion, too, came into my head as I saw the turnstones fly
away--that no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight.
Since my year upon the dunes, spent in a world of magnificent fliers, I
have been tempted to believe that the relation of the living bird with
its wings folded to the living bird in flight is almost that of the
living bird to the same bird stuffed. In certain cases, the difference
between the bird on the wing and the bird at rest is so great that one
might be watching two different creatures. Not only do colours and new
arrangements of colours appear in flight, there is also a revelation of
personality. Study your birds on the ground as you will, but once you
have thus observed them and studied their loveliness, do not be afraid
to clap your hands and send them off into the air. They will take no
real alarm and will soon forgive you. Watch birds flying.
The tide is going out, and the breakers are shallowing to chiding
curls of foam along the edge of the ebb. Gone are the thin-footed,
light-winged peoples, the industrious waders, the busy pickup,
runabout, and scurry-along folk. South, south with the sun, along
bright beaches and across wide bays, south with the sun along the edge
of a continent, with heaven knows what ancient mysteries stirring in
their tiny minds and what ancient instincts waking in their veins. As I
think of the tropical lands to which these birds have flown, I remember
walking one night along a tropical beach in Central America. It was
late at night, no one was about, the warm, endless, pouring wind shook
a sound like rain out of endlessly agitated palms, and a magnificent
full moon sailed through the wind over an ocean and a surf that might
have been a liquid and greener moonlight. Suddenly, a flock of little
birds rose up on the beach from nowhere, wheeled, fell off a little
with the wind, and then disappeared completely into the turbulent
splendour. I wonder now if you were by any chance Cape Cod sandpipers,
little birds!
But now to return to the North Atlantic, the Eastham dunes, and the
exchange of species I mentioned earlier in the chapter. As the smaller
birds have flown south to their tropics, birds from the arctic north,
following the same migrational impulse of the ebbing year, have moved
south along the New England coast, and found in the open, deserted Cape
a region which is to them a Florida. These birds are the arctic sea
ducks, many of them big, heavy, powerful birds, all of them built to
stand icy water and icy weather, all of them enclosed in a water-tight
pack of feathers which is almost a kind of feather fur. These ducks
belong to the subfamily _Fuligulinæ_, the people of the outermost
waters, but there are still other arctic visitors, auks, murres, and
even guillemots. The region which these birds prefer is the region
south of Cape Cod, where the currents of warmer water swirl over the
great south shoals. I have for neighbours the three varieties of
“scoters,” or more familiarly and wrongly “coots,” the black-winged
coot _Oidemia americana_, the white-winged coot _Oidemia deglandi_,
the skunk coot, _Oidemia perspicillata_; I have scaups or blue-billed
widgeons, _Marila marila_, dipper ducks, _Charitonetta albeola_, old
squaws, _Harelda hyemalis_, eiders, _Somateria dresseri_, king eiders,
_Somateria spectabilis_, and others. It is possible that, before the
coming of the white man, the number of these winter outer-sea birds in
the Cape Cod region exceeded that of the summer birds, but now, alas!
the shotgun and the killer had their fun, the winter peoples have been
wasted away, and some even exterminated. To-day, the summer birds
outnumber their winter kin.
A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible
residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills
after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers
and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large
areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They
inevitably die. Just how they perish is still something of a question.
Some die of cold, for the gluey oil so mats and swabs the thick arctic
feathering that creases open through it to the skin above the vitals;
others die of hunger as well. Captain George Nickerson of Nauset
tells me that he saw an oil-covered eider trying to dive for food off
Monomoy, and that the bird was unable to plunge. I am glad to be able
to write that the situation is better than it was. Five years ago, the
shores of Monomoy peninsula were strewn with hundreds, even thousands,
of dead sea fowl, for the tankers pumped out slop as they were passing
the shoals--into the very waters, indeed, on which the birds have lived
since time began! To-day oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate
individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end.
My beach is empty, but not the ocean beyond. Between the coast guard
station and Nauset Light, a “raft” of skunk coots is spending the
winter. Patches of white on the forehead and the hind neck of the
glossy black head of the male are responsible for this local name. The
birds sit in the ocean, just seaward of the surf--the coast guardsmen
say there is a shallow close by and shellfish--and the whole raft rises
and falls unconcernedly as the swells roll under it. Sometimes a bird
will dive through the oncoming ridge of a breaker and emerge casually
on the other side; sometimes a bird will stand up in the water, flap
its wings, and settle down again unconcernedly. There are perhaps
thirty birds in this flock. In Thoreau’s time, these rafts of coots
formed a flock which was practically continuous the whole length of
the outer Cape, but to-day such rafts, though not at all rare, are but
occasional.
Standing at the door of my house, I watch these winter birds pass and
repass, flying well offshore. Now a company of a hundred or more old
squaws pass, now a tribe of one of the scoter folk; now a pair of
eiders come to rest in the ocean directly in front of the Fo’castle.
These birds practically never come ashore during the winter. They
eat, sleep, live, and meet together at sea. When you see a sea duck
on the beach, you can be sure something is the matter with him, so
runs a saying of the Cape which I had from Captain Nickerson. The
only way in which I can observe these winter folk is by using a good
glass or by catching a specimen who has got into some kind of trouble
and taken refuge on the beach. All these creatures are at a great
disadvantage when ashore, and have a world of difficulty trying to
launch themselves into the air; they make unwieldy jump after jump,
the auks being practically unable to rise at all upon their wings. It
was thrilling to walk the beach, and catch sight of a bird sitting
solitary on the sands. What might it be? What had led it ashore? Could
I possibly catch it and give it a careful looking over? The keynote of
my strategy lay in the attempt to prevent the birds from getting back
into the water, so between them and the surf I would rush--for the
birds would begin to move down the slope to the surf the instant they
saw or heard or felt me--and I soon learned that a brisk countercharge
was worth all the ruse and the patient stalking in the world. Then
began a furious game of tag, the alarmed bird skittering all over the
beach, being gradually driven by me toward the dunes, till I manœuvred
him into the angle between the beach and the sandy wall.
My first prisoners were three unhappy little auks, _Alle alle_, who
had dipped themselves in oil somewhere on their way down from the
arctic--odd little browny-black and white birds about the size of a
pigeon, who stood up on queer little auk feet, faced me, and beat
little bent wings with a penguin look to them; indeed, the bird
has much of an Adelie penguin air. On the Cape, these auks are known
as “pine knots”--a term said to be derived from the creature’s tough
compactness--or as “dovekies.” They have always been “aukies” to me. At
the Fo’castle I gave them a generous corner floored with newspaper and
walled in with boards and a chair. I tried to clean off what I could
of the oil; I gave them what I could find of sea victuals, but all in
vain; they would not eat, and I let them go just as soon as I saw that
I could not possibly help them and that Nature had best deal with the
problem in her own way.
[Illustration: _Razor-billed Auk_]
When they stood up almost perpendicularly and tried to walk about on
their little legs set far aft--they are _pygopodes_--it was much as if
an acrobat, standing on his head, were trying to patter about, using
the length between his elbow and his finger tips as feet. These little
birds used both wings and feet when trying to escape me on the beach.
They ran and _rowed_ the sand with their wings; the verb gives the
precise motion. Moreover, what had taken place was beautifully marked
upon the _tabula rasa_ of the sand--little webbed feet running in a
close chain, wing tips nicking the sand once in each stroke. Coming
south from their distant arctic, these little auks do not fly above the
ocean as do the more advanced birds; they “skitter” along just over the
surface of the waves and keep well out to sea, even well out of sight
of land.
One aukie I caught at night. I was on the beach walking north to meet
the man coming south from Nauset, and, as I flashed my searchlight
to see who the surfman might be, I saw an aukie coming toward me,
fluttering along the very edge of surf, all sticky and a-glisten
with fuel oil. Strange little fragment of life on the edge of that
mysterious immensity! I picked him up; he struggled and then kept
still, and I carried him back to the Fo’castle. The bird was small
enough to be carried in one hand, and as I held him, his duck feet
rested on my palm and his head and neck emerged from the fork between
my thumb and index finger. At the Fo’castle he opened his beak,
“chattered” with it (there is no word for that motion without sound),
transformed his short neck into a surprisingly long one, and looked at
me with a kind of “all is well but anything may be expected” expression
in his eyes. Every now and then he rather solemnly winked, showing the
delicate tan-coloured feathering on his lid. I put him in a corner by
himself, and when I went to bed he had given up trying to pick himself
free of the oil with his pointed, sparrowy bill, and was standing in
his corner of shadow, facing the angle of the walls, for all the world
like a small boy who has been naughty at school. The next morning I let
him go at his own insistent request.
I found a razor-billed auk, _Alca torda_, cornered him, looked him
over while he threatened me with a bill held open and motionless, and
then left him to his own devices. I did the same with a Brünnich’s
murre, and I might have had an eider, too, had I wanted one, for Alvin
Newcomb, surfman No. 1 at Nauset, captured a male one night while on
north patrol. The eider, however, is a huge bird, and I was not quite
prepared to turn the Fo’castle into a kind of ocean hen yard. So the
eider at Nauset, after having most unconcernedly listened to the
station radio for a little while, was returned that same evening to
the North Atlantic. I had one chance at a rare bird. On the first day
of the great northeast storm, as I was wandering about at noontime
through the sleet, I found in the mouth of a cut the body of a murre.
The bird had been dead but a short time, for it was still limp when
I picked it up, and as I held it I could even feel a faint vanishing
warmth in its exhausted flesh. This bird was the rarer murre, _Uria
troile troile_, he of the sharper beak whom men have almost erased from
the list of living things. It had apparently died of being caught and
battered about for long hours by the gale. After the storm, I tried to
find the creature again, but the tide and the storm had poured through
the cut and swept everything before them into a confusion of sand and
ruin.
These ocean peoples live on such little fish as they can seize; they
pick up shellfish on shallow areas; they eat certain marine growths.
Some have a taste for the local mussel, _Mytilus edulis_. Unless the
winter is an exceptionally severe one, the birds seem to fare well
enough. Many stay late, and May is usually at hand before the long
lines of scoters fly north again under the command of their feathered
admirals. Such is the history of the migrant seafarers of the Cape. A
word remains to be said about the residents and the migrants in the
marsh.
II
About the middle of December, I began to see that an amusing game of
cross purposes was being played by the sea birds and the land birds of
the region west of the dunes. Food becoming scarce upon the uplands,
crows, bobwhites, and starlings began to take an interest in the sea
and the salt meadows, while gulls took to exploring the moors and to
sitting in the top branches of inland pines. One wise old gull once
discovered that there was good fare to be had in Mr. Joe Cobb’s chicken
yard just off the western rim of the great marsh, and every morning
this sagacious creature would separate himself from the thousands
milling about over the cold tides and flutter down among the hens.
There he would forage about, picking up grain like a barnyard fowl till
he had dulled the edge of his hunger. I doubt if gulls ever do more.
After visiting the chicken yard regularly for several winters, the bird
disappeared one spring and was never seen again. He had probably lived
out the span of his days.
I pause here to wonder at how little we know of the life span of wild
animals. Only cases of exceptionally long life or short life seem
to attract the attention of man. I can open any good bird book and
find a most careful, a most detailed study of the physical selves and
habits of birds, but of their probable length of life, never a word.
Such material would be exceedingly difficult to secure, and perhaps
the suggestion is folly, but there are times when one wishes that this
neglected side of animal existence might have more attention.
During the summer, I never saw starlings on the marsh, but now that
winter is here they leave the uplands by the coast guard station, and
venture out along the dunes. These flights of exploration are very
rare. I have seen the birds flying over the salt meadows, I have seen
them light on the ridgepole of a gunning camp, but I have never once
encountered them on the outer beach. With crows, it is a different
story. The birds will investigate anything promising, and during the
summer I found crows on the beach on four or five different occasions,
these visits being made, for the most part, early in the morning.
Chancing to look toward the marsh one warm October afternoon, I
witnessed a battle between two gulls and a young crow for the
possession of some marine titbit the crow had picked up on the flats;
it was a picturesque contest, for the great silvery wings of the gulls
beat down and inclosed the crow till he resembled a junior demon in
some old lithograph of the war in heaven. Eventually one of the gulls
seized on the coveted morsel, flew off a bit, and gulped it down,
leaving the crow and the other gull to “consider” like the cow in the
old song. Winter and necessity now make the crow something of a beach
comber. The birds cross over to the beach at low tide on mild days,
forage about warily, and return to their uplands the instant they no
longer have the beach all to themselves. A flight of gulls will send
them cawing home, their great sombre wings beating the ocean air. Even
on this immense and lonely beach, they remain the wariest of creatures,
and if I wish to see what they are up to, I have to use ten times the
care in stalking them that I would have to use in stalking any casual
sea bird. I have to creep through cuts and valleys in the dunes and
worm my way over cold sand that drinks the warmth and life out of the
flesh. I usually find them picking at a fish flung out of the breakers
perhaps a day or two before--picking industriously and solemnly.
Once in a while, a covey of shore larks will cross the dunes and alight
on the beach in the lee and the afternoon shadow of the sand bank.
They fly very low, the whole group rising and falling with the rise
and fall of the hills and hollows, a habit that gives their flights a
picturesque and amusing roller-coaster quality. Once having settled
down on the outer side of the dunes, the birds keep well up on the
beach and never seem to venture close to ocean.
This same shore lark, _Otocoris alpestris_, is perhaps the bird I
encounter most frequently during the winter months. This season they
are here by the thousand; indeed, they are so thick that I scarce
can walk behind the dunes without putting up a flock of these alert,
brownish, fugitive creatures. Their kingdom lies to the west of the
dunes, in the salt-hay fields and intermingled marsh areas which extend
between the dunes and the creek running more or less parallel to the
sand bar. Coming from Greenland and Labrador, these birds reach the
Eastham meadows in October and November, and all winter long they
forage and run about in the dead bristles of the hay. Their only
note here is a rather sad little “_tseep, tseep_,” which they utter
as they skim the grass in alarm, but it is said that they have an
interesting song during their breeding season in springtime Labrador.
[Illustration: _Brünnich’s Murres at Nest in the Summer North_]
It is early on a pleasant winter afternoon, and I am returning to
the Fo’castle through the meadows, my staff in my hand and a load of
groceries in a knapsack on my back. The preceding day brought snow
flurries to us out of the northwest, and there are patches of snow on
the hay fields and the marshes, and, on the dunes, nests of snow held
up off the ground by wiry spears of beach grass bent over and tangled
into a cup. Such little pictures as this last are often to be seen on
the winter dunes; I pause to enjoy them, for they have the quality
and delicacy of Japanese painting. There is a blueness in the air, a
blue coldness on the moors, and across the sky to the south, a pale
streamer of cloud smoking from its upper edge. Every now and then, I
see ahead of me a round, blackish spot in the thin snow; these are the
cast-off shells of horseshoe crabs, from whose thin tegument the snow
has melted. A flock of nervous shore larks, hidden under an old mowing
machine, emerge running, take to their wings, and, flying south a
fifty yards, suddenly drop and disappear into the grass. Hesitating on
the half-alert, a little flock of bobwhites, occasional invaders of
this stubble, watch me pass, and then continue feeding. To the west,
from the marsh, I hear the various cries of gulls, the mewing note, the
call, and that queer sound which is almost a guttural bark. Afternoon
shadows are gathering in the cuts of the dunes, blue shadows and cold,
and there is a fine sea tang in the air.
It is low tide, and the herring gulls, _Larus argentatus_, are feeding
on the flats and gravel banks. As I watch them through a glass, they
seem as untroubled as fowls on an inland farm. Their talkative groups
and gatherings have a domestic look. The gull population of the Cape
is really one people, for, though separate gull congregations live in
various bays and marshes, the mass of the birds seem to hear of any
new food supply and flock as one to the feast. So accustomed to man
have they grown, and so fearless, that they will follow in his very
footsteps for a chance to scavenge food; I have seen the great birds
walking round clammers who threw broken clams to them as they might
throw scraps of meat to kittens. In hungry seasons the clammer may hear
a flapping just behind and discover that a gull has just made off with
a clam from his pail. They follow the eelers, too, and on the ice of
the Eastham salt pond you may chance to see a pair of gulls disputing
an eel which the eelers have thrown away; one will have it by the tail,
the other by the head, and both tug with insistence and increasing
bad temper. The victory in this primitive battle goes either to the
strongest gull or to the fastest swallower.
An unhurried observation of the marsh, especially a study of its lesser
creeks and concealed pools, reveals hundreds of ducks. To identify
and classify these birds is a next to impossible task, for they are
very suspicious and have chosen their winter quarters with a sound
instinct for defensive strategy. The great majority of these birds are
undoubtedly black duck, _Anas rubripes_, the most wary and suspicious
of all wintering birds. All day long, back and forth over the dunes
between the marsh and the ocean, these ducks are ever flying; by twos
and threes and little flocks they go, and those who go out to sea fly
so far out that the eye loses them in the vastness of ocean. I like
to walk in the marsh early in the evening, keeping out as far as I can
toward the creeks. The ducks hear me and begin a questioning quacking.
I hear them talk and take alarm; other ducks, far off, take up the
_alerte_; sometimes wings whistle by in the darkness. The sound of a
pair of “whistler” ducks on the wing is a lovely, mysterious sound at
such a time. It is a sound made with wings, a clear, sibilant note
which increases as the birds draw near, and dies away in the distance
like a faint and whistling sigh.
One March evening, just as sundown was fading into night, the whole
sky chanced to be overspread with cloud, all save a golden channel in
the west between the cloud floor and the earth. It was very still,
very peaceful on my solitary dune. The whole earth was dark, dark as
a shallow cup lifted to a solemnity of silence and cloud. I heard a
familiar sound. Turning toward the marsh, I saw a flock of geese flying
over the meadows along the rift of dying, golden light, their great
wings beating with a slow and solemn beauty, their musical, bell-like
cry filling the lonely levels and the dark. Is there a nobler wild
clamour in all the world? I listened to the sound till it died away
and the birds had disappeared into darkness, and then heard a quiet
sea chiding a little at the turn of tide. Presently, I began to feel a
little cold, and returned to the Fo’castle, and threw some fresh wood
on the fire.
_Chapter VI_
LANTERNS ON THE BEACH
I
It is now the middle of March, cold winds stream between earth and
the serene assurance of the sun, winter retreats, and for a little
season the whole vast world here seems as empty as a shell. Winter
is no mere negation, no mere absence of summer; it is another and a
positive presence, and between its ebbing and the slow, cautious inflow
of our northern spring there is a phase of earth emptiness, half real,
perhaps, and half subjective. A day of rain, another bright week, and
all earth will be filled with the tremor and the thrust of the year’s
new energies.
There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the
worst. On Monday morning last, shortly after five o’clock, the big
three-masted schooner _Montclair_ stranded at Orleans and went to
pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.
It had blown hard all Sunday night, building up enormous seas. Monday’s
dawn, however, was not stormy, only wintry and grey. The _Montclair_,
on her way from Halifax to New York, had had a hard passage, and
sunrise found her off Orleans with her rigging iced up and her crew
dog-weary. Helpless and unmanageable, she swung inshore and presently
struck far out and began to break up. Lifted, rocked, and pounded by
the morning’s mountainous seas, her masts were seen to quiver at each
crash, and presently her foremast and her mainmast worked free, and,
scissoring grotesquely back and forth across each other, split the
forward two thirds of the vessel lengthwise--“levered the ship open,”
as Russell Taylor of Nauset said. The vessel burst, the two forward
masses of the ship drifted inshore and apart, a cargo of new laths
poured into the seas from the broken belly of the hold. Seven men clung
to the rocking, drifting mass that was once the stern.
It was a singular fragment, for the vessel had broken as neatly
crosswise as it had lengthwise, and the seas were washing in below deck
as into an open barrel. Dragging over the shoal ground, the mass rocked
on its keel, now rolling the men sickeningly high, now tumbling them
down into the trampling rush of the seas. The fall of the two forward
masts had snapped off the mizzen some twenty-five feet above the deck,
and from the stump cracked-out slivers swung free with the rolling.
Bruised, wet through, and chilled to the bone, the unfortunate men
dared not lash themselves down, for they had to be free to climb the
tilted deck when the ship careened.
Five clung to the skylight of the after deckhouse, two to the
stern-rail balustrade. Laths filled the sea, poured over the men, and
formed a jagged and fantastic wall along the beach.
One great sea drowned all the five. Men on the beach saw it coming
and shouted, the men on the deckhouse shouted and were heard, and
then the wave broke, hiding the tragic fragment in a sluice of foam
and wreckage. When this had poured away, the men on the afterhouse
were gone. A head was visible for a minute, and then another drifting
southward, and then there was nothing but sea.
Two men still clung to the balustrade, one a seventeen-year-old boy,
the other a stocky, husky-built sailor. The wave tore the boy from the
balustrade, but the stocky man reached out, caught him, and held
on. The tide rising, the stern began to approach the beach. A detail
of men hurriedly sent over from Nauset Station now appeared on the
beach and managed to reach and rescue the survivors. The _Montclair_
had chanced to strand near a station classed as “inactive”--coast guard
stations are discontinued if there is not enough work to justify their
maintenance--and the two or three men who garrisoned the station could
do little but summon instant aid. Men came from Nauset, circling the
Eastham lagoon and Orleans cove in local automobiles, but the whole
primitive tragedy was over in a moment of time.
[Illustration: _The Wreck of the_ Montclair.
_Early Afternoon_]
As the vessel was breaking up, men came to the beach and helped
themselves to the laths and what wreckage they fancied. Later on, there
was a kind of an auction of the salvaged material. The other day I saw
half-a-dozen bundles of the _Montclair’s_ laths piled up near a barn.
A week after the wreck, a man walking the Orleans shore came to a
lonely place, and there he saw ahead of him a hand thrust up out
of the great sands. Beneath he found the buried body of one of the
_Montclair’s_ crew.
I can see the broken mast of the schooner from the deck of the
Fo’castle. Sunday last, I walked over to the ship. The space under the
after deckhouse from which the men were swept--officers’ quarters, I
imagine--is an indescribable flung mass of laths, torn wood, wrecked
panelling, sopped blankets, and sailor’s clothing. I remember the poor,
stringy, cheap ties. In the midst of the débris a stain of soppy pink
paper caught my eye: it was a booklet, “If You Were Born in February.”
I have often seen the set of twelve on newsstands. The scarlet cover
of this copy had seeped into the musty pages. “Those who are born in
this month,” I read, “have a particular affection for home”; and again,
“They will go through fire and water for their loved ones.”
Who brought this thing aboard? one wonders. Whose curious hands first
opened it in the lamplight of this tragic and disordered space? The
seventeen-year-old boy is dead of the shock and exposure; the stocky,
husky-built man, the only survivor, is going on with the sea. “He says
it’s all he knows,” said a coast guardsman.
The wreck lies on the edge of the surf and trembles when the incoming
seas strike its counter and burst there with a great upflinging of
heavy spray.
II
To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its
“feel,” one must have a sense of it as the scene of wreck and elemental
drama. Tales and legends of the great disasters fill no inconsiderable
niche in the Cape mind. Older folk will tell you of the _Jason_, of how
she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and of how the breakers
flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of
the tragic _Castagna_ and the frozen men who were taken off while the
snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and
you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken
from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued
mariner. When the coast guards returned to the _Castagna_ on the quiet
morning after the wreck, they found a grey cat calmly waiting for them
in the dead captain’s cabin, and a chilled canary hunched up upon his
perch. The bird died of the bitter cold while being taken ashore in a
lifeboat, “just fell off,” but the cat left a dynasty to carry on his
name.
Cape Codders have often been humorously reproached for their attitude
toward wrecks. On this coast, as on every other in the old isolated
days, a wreck was treasure trove, a free gift of the sea; even to-day,
the usable parts of a wreck are liable to melt away in a curious
manner. There is no real looting; in fact, public opinion on the Cape
is decidedly against such a practice, for it offends the local sense
of decency. The gathering of the _Montclair’s_ laths during the wreck
really upset many people. They did not like it here. When men are lost
on the beach, the whole Cape takes it very much to heart, talks about
it, mulls over it; when men are saved, there is no place where they are
treated with greater hospitality and kindness. Cape folks have never
been wreckers in the European sense of that dark word. Their first
thought has always been of the shipwrecked men.
Forty years ago, a winter nor’easter flung the schooner _J. H. Eells_
on the outer bar of Eastham. Water-logged, leaking, and weighted down
with a cargo of railroad iron, the ship remained on the outer bar,
snow flurries hiding her now and then through the furious winter day.
So swift and powerful were the alongshore currents that a surfboat
could not approach the ship, and so far offshore had she stranded that
the life-saving gun would not carry. All Eastham was on the beach,
the women as well as the boys and men, and all day long villagers and
surfmen fought to reach the vessel. They were powerless, however, and
when darkness and continuing snow closed the winter day, they had to
watch the _Eells_ fading away in the squalls, her dying men still
clinging to the shrouds.
To give these men heart, to let them know themselves remembered, the
villagers that night built great fires of driftwood on the beach.
Men and women shook the thin snow and sand from ancient wreckage and
tossed it on a wind-crazed heap of flame. All night long they fed these
pyres. With the slow return of day, it was seen that two of the men
had already died and fallen overboard. At ten o’clock that morning,
the storm having somewhat abated, the survivors were pluckily taken
off by a lone tug which approached the wreck from seaward. Every once
in a while, the rusty, shell-fouled iron uncovers, and above it, the
yellow-green waters of the outer bar turn blue-black in a strike of
summer sun.
Eighteenth Century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the
mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders,
Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten Nineteenth Century
schooners--all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and
dead. Why this history of wreck and storm? Because the outer Cape
stands a full thirty miles out in the North Atlantic, and because its
shelterless eastern beaches flank the New Englander’s ocean lanes for
fifty miles. When a real nor’easter blows, howling landward through
the winter night over a thousand miles of grey, tormented seas, all
shipping off the Cape must pass the Cape or strand. In the darkness and
scream of the storm, in the beat of the endless, icy, crystalline snow,
rigging freezes, sails freeze and tear--of a sudden the long booming
undertone of the surf sounds under the lee bow--a moment’s drift,
the feel of surf twisting the keel of the vessel, then a jarring,
thundering crash and the upward drive of the bar.
Stranded vessels soon begin to break up. Wrecks drag and pound on the
shoals, the waves thunder in-board, decks splinter and crack like
wooden glass, timbers part, and iron rods bend over like candles in a
heat.
Ships may strand here in dull weather and fog. The coast guards then
work at full speed to get them off before a surf rises; a coast guard
cutter comes to aid.
A few mornings ago, when I walked the beach to Nauset Station, I
followed close along the dune wall to see the wreckage uncovered since
the storm. North of the Fo’castle, along a broken mile, the new seaward
cliff of the dunes stands at least twenty feet west of the former rim,
and all the old wreckage once buried up in the region washed away is
now lying on the beach or tumbling out of the wall. Being young, the
twelve-foot cliff is still sheer, and the wreckage lies solidly packed
in its side like fruits in a sliced pudding. In one place, some ten
feet of a schooner’s mast is jutting from the wall like a cannon from a
fortress; in another, the sand is crumbling away from the fragments of
a ship’s boat, in another appears the speckled and musty yellow corner
of a door. Root tendrils of beach grass, whitish and fine-spun as open
nerves, have grown in the crumbled and sand-eroded crevices.
Some of this wreckage is centuries old. High course tides carry débris
up the beach, sand and the dunes move down to claim it; presently
beach grass is growing tall in sand wedged between a ship’s splintered
ribs and its buried keel. A few laths from the _Montclair_ are
whitening on the beach.
Two miles down the beach, its tiny flag streaming seaward in the
endless wind, stands Nauset Station, chimneys, weathered roof, and
cupola watchtower just visible above the dunes.
III
From Monomoy Point to Race Point in Provincetown--full fifty
miles--twelve coast guard stations watch the beach and the shipping
night and day. There are no breaks save natural ones in this keep of
the frontier.
Between the stations, at some midway and convenient point, stand huts
called halfway houses, and stations, huts, and lighthouses are linked
together by a special telephone system owned and maintained by the
coast guard services.
Every night in the year, when darkness has fallen on the Cape and the
sombre thunder of ocean is heard in the pitch pines and the moors,
lights are to be seen moving along these fifty miles of sand, some
going north, some south, twinkles and points of light solitary and
mysterious. These lights gleam from the lanterns and electric torches
of the coast guardsmen of the Cape walking the night patrols. When the
nights are full of wind and rain, loneliness and the thunder of the
sea, these lights along the surf have a quality of romance and beauty
that is Elizabethan, that is beyond all stain of present time.
[Illustration: _Nauset Station_]
Sometimes a red flare burns on the edge of ocean, a red fireworks flare
which means wreck or danger of wreck. “You are standing in too near to
the outer bar,” says the red light to the freighter lost in a night’s
downpour of March rain. “Keep off! Keep off! Keep off!” The signal
burns and sputters, the smoke is blown away almost ere it is born; the
glassy bellies of the advancing breakers turn to volutes of rosy black,
the seething foam to a strange vermilion-pink. In the night and rain
beyond the hole of light an answering bellow sounds, ship lights dim
as the vessel changes her course, the red flare dies to a sizzling,
empty cartridge, the great dark of the beach returns to the solitary
dunes. The next day it is all entered quietly in the station log: “Two
thirty-six A.M. saw freighter standing in toward outer bar, burnt
Coston signals, freighter whistled and changed her course.”
Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see
the comings and goings of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer
they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a
great northeaster, now through August quiet and the reddish-golden
radiance of an old moon rising after midnight from the sea, now through
a world of rain shaken with heavy thunder and stabbed through and
through with lightning. And always, always alone. Whenever I rise at
earliest dawn, I find the beach traced and retraced with footprints
that vanish in the distances, each step a chain forged anew each night
in the courageous service of mankind.
Night patrols go between the stations and their halfway houses. Under
certain circumstances and at special times of the year, the last
patrol in the morning may end at a key post placed on some commanding
height above the beach. While on patrol, the men carry a stock of red
flare cartridges--the Coston lights--a handle to burn them in, and a
watchman’s clock which they must wind with a special key kept at the
halfway house. In summer, the beaches are covered twice every night,
in winter three times, the first patrol leaving the station soon after
dark, the second at midnight, the third an hour or so before the dawn.
The average patrol covers something like seven miles. Only one man from
each station is on the beach at any given time, so north and south
patrols alternate through the night.
Day patrols are maintained only during stormy or foggy weather. The
men then have to walk the beach night and day with not much chance for
proper rest, mile after mile of a furious winter day on the heels of a
long and almost sleepless night. The usual day watch is kept from the
towers of the stations.
A surfman who has discovered a wreck or found some sort of trouble on
the beach first burns the Coston light I have already mentioned. This
warns his station that there is something the matter, and at the same
time tells men aboard a wreck that they have been seen and that help is
coming. If the wreck lies near the station, the guard returns with his
news; if it lies near the halfway house, he telephones. At the station,
the man on station watch gives the alarm, everybody tumbles up, and in
the quickest possible time the crew and their apparatus are on the
beach hurrying through the darkness to the wreck. Each station has now
a small tractor to draw its apparatus down the beach.
The crew of a stranded ship may be taken off either in the lifeboat or
the breeches buoy. Everything depends on the conditions of the hour.
The life-saving cannon and its auxiliary apparatus, its powder, lines,
hawsers, and pulleys, are kept in a stout two-wheeled wagon called “the
beach cart.” The “shot,” or projectile, fired from this gun resembles a
heavy brass window weight with one end pulled out into a stout two-foot
rod ending in a loop.
When a wreck lies offshore in the surf, the end of a very light
line called the “shot line” is attached to the eyelet in the brass
projectile, and the gun aimed at the wreck with particular care. One
must place the shot where the men in the rigging can reach it, and yet
avoid striking them. If all goes well, the shot whizzes into the very
teeth of the gale and falls aboard, leaving the shot line entangled.
Should the wrecked men succeed in reaching and hauling in this first
cord, a heavier line is sent on, and when the mariners haul in this
second line, “the whip,” they haul out to their vessel the lifebuoy and
its hawser. Pulleys and cables are so rigged as to permit the buoy to
be hauled in and out to the wreck by the coast guard crew.
After everybody has been taken off, an ingenious contrivance is hauled
out to the wreck which cuts the hawser free. The crew then gather up
the apparatus, station a guard, and return.
The crew return, the little group of men in black oilers and the men
they have saved trudge off, tunnelling into the wind, the surfboat
on its wagon-cradle leading the way, the hum-rhythm of the tractor
dissolving in the gale. Ridges and piles of broken, twisted wreckage
rim the breakers’ edges, new wreckage is on its way ashore, strewings
of old weathered planking, a hatchway, sops of sailors’ clothing.
A maze of footprints traces the desolate beach; the air is full of
wind-flung froth and breaker spray; the gale screams unceasing. Just
offshore, in the mile of surf, the wreck lies flat--utterly forlorn,
and helpless as a toy ship neglected by a giant’s child. The guard
left behind walks to and fro, rubs his mittened hands, and watches
the breakers cover the wreck under mountains of surf, overflow, and
sluice off in spouting masses and cascades ... breaking up.... Fishing
schooner, rigging frozen up, one of the men with both his hands frozen
... yes, got ’em all.
IV
I call at Nauset Station several times a week, usually late in the
afternoon. Packages and mail are delivered near by, and every once in a
while I call there for a message sent on to me from Eastham.
The station stands on the mainland of the Cape just where the dunes
begin; it is a white wooden building built snug and low like a Cape
Cod cottage; indeed, it rather resembles a Cape cottage in its design.
On the ground floor is the boat room, a kitchen-dining room, a living
room, and the captain’s quarters; on the floor above are two dormitory
spaces. From the west dormitory, a ship’s ladder leads through a
trapdoor to the tower.
My neighbours of Nauset live there much as men might on a small
vessel. They have drills and duties, their definite enlistments--the
first enlistment is for three years--their pay days, their service
discipline, their uniforms, and days of leave. Breakfast at seven,
drills in the morning--surfboat drill to-day, resuscitation drill or
blinker and flag drill to-morrow--dinner at eleven, tower watch in turn
through all the day, sleep and recreation in the late afternoon, supper
at four-thirty, then sundown, night, and the long miles of loneliness
and ocean. In winter the guards wear a uniform of dark navy blue and
a blue flannel shirt; in summer they shift into sailor whites, broad
collar, white hat, and all. Officially, the men are known as “surfmen”
and are ranked by number according to their standing and length of
service.
A fine group, these wardens of the Cape. Into the worst storm they
go--without a question, with never a hesitation--a storm in which life
would seem impossible. The door clangs behind them, the sleet screams
at the windows, the very earth of the old Cape shakes to the thunder of
the seas, but they are already on the moors, fighting on into the gale;
fighting on, crawling on, for seven dreadful miles. Yet the men make
nothing of it and scarcely ever talk about it--they simply take their
black oilskins and rubber boots from a locker, get into them by lantern
light, and go.
I owe the Nauset crew a very genuine debt. Without their friendly
interest and aid, without their hospitality and continuing good-will,
my experiment might well have been both over-solitary and difficult.
Those long winter nights in the lamplit domesticity of my house, the
rising wail of the wind on the dunes, the flash of the surfman’s light
in the whirls of snow, the moment’s reunion with mankind, the pause on
the beach, the moment’s talk by the fire--all that is written deep. The
winter long, in foul weather, I kept a night lamp burning in a window
and a pot of coffee a-simmer on the hearth. Sometimes I heard steps on
the little deck of the Fo’castle, sometimes no one came, and the light
guttered out unvisited in the dawn.
The majority of my neighbours are of Cape Cod stock. Born of Cape blood
and reared in the Cape atmosphere, even men who have never been to
sea have an instinctive turn for the sea and the ways of ships. But
these wardens of the Cape are not sailors ashore; they are “surfmen.”
The name is a wise one--men of the great beach, inheritors of a long,
local tradition concerning surf and all its ways. These men have heard
the roar of the great beach sounding about their cradles. As I
have already written, the sight of the surf in a great gale on the
Cape is a spectacle of mingled exaltation, magnificence, and terror,
while to venture it in a boat would strike any landsman as a lunatic
performance. On such occasions, the sound, traditional surf knowledge
of Cape men comes into play. Captains of coast guard crews here choose
their launching ground, choose their moment, choose their wave. All
together now, go!--and out she runs, the captain standing astern,
facing the breakers and steering, the men pulling for their lives.
[Illustration: _A Surfman of the Cape_]
V
Five o’clock in the afternoon, and I have arrived at Nauset Station
after a walk up the beach in a cold head-wind. I slip my pack from
my back and stand my beach staff in a corner of the little entry way
outside the kitchen door. The great storm tore down so much of the bank
that the water in the kitchen well now has an odd taste to it, and the
men have had to bring drinking water from the village; a ship’s cask
and a spring-water bottle stand on the entry floor. In the pink-buff
walls are various locker doors.
The four-thirty supper is drawing to a close, but my neighbours are
still at table, for I can hear voices and discussion at the board. I
know each familiar tone. Having an ancient prejudice against disturbing
friends at meals, I wait a little while ... the minutes pass ... I
knock at the kitchen door.
Come in! I find my friends still at their long table at the kitchen’s
farther end. Supper is just about over. Somebody went fishing
yesterday, and on the table a great tureen, once full of good fish
chowder, stands at dead low tide.... Sit down and have a cup of coffee
with us.... Thanks, I’d love to.... Follows a shoving about of chairs
to make room, and presently I am seated at the board, talking beach
gossip, eating coast guard doughnuts, and sipping brown-black coffee
from a giant white coffee cup of the armour-plate variety. The good
hot “mug-up” of coffee, thus hospitably poured, is pleasant after
my long, cold walk. My table mates are all young men, some of them
scarce more than strapping boys on the threshold of the twenties. Here
are the names of my hosts: Captain George B. Nickerson, Commanding
Officer; Alvin Newcomb, Surfman No. 1; Russell Taylor, No. 2; Zenas
Adams, No. 3; William Eldredge, No. 4; Andrew Wetherbee, No. 5; Albert
Robbins, No. 6; Everett Gross, No. 7; Malcolm Robbins, No. 8; Effin
Chalke, No. 9. Other old friends have finished their enlistments or
been transferred--Wilbur Chase, John Blood, Kenneth Young, and Yngve
Rongner, who gave me my swordfish sword.
The captains of the various stations are well-known men and rank high
in the community. When I first came to Eastham, Nauset was under the
command of my kind friend Captain Abbott H. Walker, an expert among
surfmen and boatmen, and one of the best liked and most respected men
on all Cape Cod. Two years ago, after having been in command of Nauset
for twenty-six stirring years, he retired to his pleasant house on
Orleans Bay. The station was fortunate in having as his successor a
distinguished younger officer, Captain George B. Nickerson of Chatham.
Nauset is a busy station, and Captain Nickerson has already added new
laurels to its splendid history.
The table talk is good, the speech racy and vigorous. Sipping coffee,
I hear of a battle at sea fought that very morning between some large
unknown fish and unseen enemies--“right off the station”--the fish
leaping clear, a great wound or spot visible in its side.... Here,
have another cup....
“No, going out in a gale isn’t as bad as facing ‘the sand.’ Rather face
a nor’easter any time.”
Every once in a while, usually in autumn, a dry gale will descend upon
the beach and stir up a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara. I chanced to
see such a storm three years ago. The simoon began, I remember, with a
sunset of fiery rose deepening to smoky carmine, the sky being empty
save for a few thin, sailing wisps. With the smouldering out of this
strange sky and the arrival of starlight, a north wind which had blown
vigorously all day was taken over by a devil. It shifted its quarter,
began to blow directly down the beach, and increased enormously in
force. Within half an hour, the whole world of beach and dune was one
screaming, smoky, inhuman arabia of flying sand. Sucking up the sand
from strewn miles of driftage, tearing at the roots of everything
movable, the wind torrent rushed along the beach as down a channel.
Presently pebbles, sticks, barrel staves, sides of old fruit crates,
hoops, tufts of whipped-out beach grass, clots of breaker spume, and
a world of nameless dark lumps joined the general rush through the
demoniac and smothering gloom. I myself sailed before the storm, my
head turtled down into the very shoulders of a canvas coat, my eyes
blinking and painful from the stabs of sand, my nostrils hot and dry
with the breathing of it, my mouth much occupied in spitting out grits.
And I wondered who was on north patrol that night--walking into it, his
head turned sideways and down, and a board held up before his face.
Once upon a time, so runs a service story, a surfman was walking the
beach on one of these nights of sand when he heard behind him a strange
and uncanny moan. Startled, he turned round, squinted for a second
into the gale, and saw coming toward him a great, dark, bounding thing
which moaned as it ran. The surfman ran. The thing followed, gaining
every instant and sounding its ghostly cry. Out of breath at last,
the fugitive fell flat, caught hold of the sand, and gasped out this
valedictory, “If ye want me, come and git me.” A moment later, an
enormous empty cask rolled over the prostrate figure and disappeared
down the beach toward Monomoy. The bung halfway up its side was open,
and every time the hole had rolled up into the wind, the whistling moan
had terrified the night.
Who goes first south to-night? Malcolm Robbins, he goes first south,
and Long, he goes at two-thirty.
Time to tidy up. Each man carries his plate and cutlery to the sink,
the cook of the day puts on coal, there is talk, the vigorous clank
of the kitchen pump, the sound of a dish pan filling, a smell of pipe
tobacco. The surfman who has been on watch in the station tower during
the meal comes in and eats alone at the cleared-off and deserted board.
Clatter of dish and spoon ... voices. Baseball prospects? Radio news?
Station happenings? Somebody opens a window on the last of the chill
spring afternoon, and suddenly, in an unexpected instant of quiet, I
hear the thundering overspill and ebbing roar of a single giant sea.
_Chapter VII_
AN INLAND STROLL IN SPRING
I
I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room
brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the
ticking of my watch. Unable and half unwilling to sleep again, I
dressed and went out upon the dunes. When something wakes me thus at
night, I often dress and go quietly forth on an exploring expedition.
It was mildly cold in my ocean world, a light westerly breeze was
flowing in fitful eddies close along the earth, the moon was full
and high in a cloudless heaven, the surf was but a wash along the
ebb. Staff in hand, I crossed the beach to the good footing along the
water’s edge, and walked south at a slow pace toward big dune.
As I approached the shadow of the dune, I heard from behind it, and
ever so faint and high and far away, a sound in the night. The sound
began to approach and to increase in its wild music, and after what
seemed a long minute, I heard it again from somewhere overhead and a
little out to sea. I stared into the sky but could see nothing; the
sound that I had heard died away. Again from behind the dune and to
the west of south I heard the lovely, broken, chorusing, bell-like
sound--the sound of a great flight of geese going north on a quiet
night under the moon.
I climbed big dune then, the peak of these sand mountains; the moon
shadow was dark upon its eastern slope, but the crest was lifted to
the light and commanded both marsh and sea. The channels were still as
moonlit forest lakes, the sea was a great deep surfaced with a thin
moon splendour of golden green. I lingered there till the moon began
to pale, listening to the wild music of the great birds, for a river
of life was flowing that night across the sky. Over the elbow of the
Cape came the flights, crossing Eastham marsh and the dunes on their
way to the immensity of space above the waters. There were little
flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty,
there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died
away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings,
and once in a while I could see the birds--they were flying fast--but
scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.
[Illustration: _The Bay Side_]
An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean
lingers on the edge of winter. Day after day the April sun pours an
increasing splendour on the ocean plain, a hard, bright splendour of
light, but the Atlantic mirror drinks no warmth. A chance cloud upon
the sun, a shadow, and the sea of an instant returns to February.
No shadow of cloud may do the same upon the dunes. Under this April
light the mound and landward slopes of the great wall have put on a
strange and lovely colour which lies upon them with the delicacy of a
reflection in a pool. This colour is a tint of palest olive, even such
a ghost of it as one may see in spring on the hillsides of Provence,
and it is born of the mingling of pale sand, blanched grass, and new
grass spears of a certain eager green.
The birds of outer ocean, the “coots” or scoters, the old squaws,
dipper ducks, eiders and widgeons, the auks and their kin, have
practically all of them forsaken the Cape and returned to their
breeding grounds in the North. After the fifteenth of April these sea
peoples are rarely encountered on the Cape. The lakes of Manitoba are
theirs, the glacial hillocks of Greenland and the matted grasses of
the tundra. The spring migrations here do not fill the air and the
hours with birds as do the autumnal visitations. Urged on by their own
imperious instinct and Nature’s general will, the creatures have a
hurried air, and night flights are more frequent with them than on the
southward journeyings.
The first shore birds to pause here on their way back to the Northern
country were “ringnecks”--the semipalmated plover, _Charadrius
semipalmatus_--and even as the last shore birds I saw were strays,
so were these first solitaries and adventurers. On April 2d, I saw a
single ringneck running ahead of me along the upper beach; on the 5th I
met with another stray; on the 8th I put up a flock of twelve. I have
since encountered flocks on several occasions, and sent them wheeling
off above the breakers, uttering their melodious and plaintive cry. The
note is much like that of the piping plover, _Charadrius melodus_, but
without the piping plover’s flutelike purity of tone.
Since April 5th a small company of gannets, _Moris bassana_, have been
fishing just off the Fo’castle. Gannets have long been favourites
of mine. The word “white,” applied to the plumage of birds, covers
a multitude of minor tintings; some birds are yellowish white, some
greyish white, some ivory white, some white with an undertone of rose.
To my eye, the gannet wears as pure and as positive a white as one may
find in nature, and, moreover, the black tips of his wings are a black
past excelling. The bird is large--ornithologists grant him a length
between thirty-three and forty inches--and he has a way of using his
wings as if they were hinged fins. When sea and sky are a pleasant
midday blue, it is a charming bit of life and decorative colour to see
these creatures diving. They make a famous plunge. The birds off the
Fo’castle, as far as I can judge, hover between forty and fifty feet
above the sea and are fishing the shallows on a bar. On catching sight
of fish, they fall on the prey like arrows from a cloud. The impact of
each body strikes a tiny fountain from the sea. When fish are plentiful
on the bar, these living plummets fall, climb, and fall again till the
whole fishing ground is sown with darts of spray. Like the ringnecks,
these gannets are on their way North to the breeding grounds.
Early in March, my friend Kenneth Young of Orleans brought me down a
load of groceries in his Ford, and as we stood talking on the porch of
the Fo’castle I called his attention to the ducks who were stirring
about that morning in the channels and making an unusual noise.
“Surely,” said I, “they are not beginning to mate so early in the
year.” “Well, not exactly,” said my friend, “but they’re ‘choosing
partners.’” Somehow or other, much of the etiquette, of the “tone” of
courtship among gregarious birds has been caught in this phrase born
of the older dance; it has a flavour of the bowings and noddings,
the showing offs, the coy approaches, the coy escapes, the expected
pursuits, the endless conversational whistlings, mewings, squawkings,
and quackings which cover the primitive tensity under the politeness.
Under this April blue, the great marshes are emptier of life than I
have ever known them; no longer do westerly winds carry to my ears a
sound of spring and wooing. The marsh ducks have sought their ponds and
wilderness lakes, the larks have climbed the sky to Labrador, even
the herring gulls are scattering. Though the breeding season of the
latter bird does not begin till the first or second week in May, the
marriageable are already wandering east to Maine. Hundreds of isles
and islets on the Maine coast are as wild to-day as they were when
Champlain visited the archipelago, and the herring gull breeds there by
the twice ten thousands.
The sand has entirely resumed its looseness, its fluidity, but its
colour still tells of winter in a faintest hint of grey. The golden
warmth is there and is emerging; the climbing sun will soon exorcise
this ghost of cold. Through the winter flows and spreadings of the
sand, the new spears of dune grass rise, the leaves rolled into a green
poignard with a tip of rhubarb bed and a terminal spike as piercing
as a thorn. Other leaves, other spikes grow from the withered fists
of the old plant, and what are left of last year’s leaves now crack
from brittleness and drop away. Even the oozy vegetation of the flats
is sharing in the spring. At dead low tide the streaming eel grass of
the channel beds, _Zostera marina_, reveals new patches of wet, bright
yellow-green; these stains dominate the spring colours of my world and
are very beautiful to see when the April sun is shining.
Mammalian life was the first to emerge from the sterility of winter--I
found skunk tracks on the dunes after the certain warm nights in
March--and after the mammals came returning birds. Insect life has
scarce stirred, though a few stray unknown flies have made their
way into the house. In that kingdom life must begin again from the
beginning.
April and the sun advancing, the disk rising each day to the north of
where it leaped from yesterday’s ocean and setting north of yesterday’s
setting, the solar disk burning, burning, consuming winter in fire.
II
I devoted the entire day yesterday to an adventure I have long had in
mind, a walk across the Cape from outer ocean to Cape Cod Bay. As the
crow flies, the distance from the Fo’castle to the west shore is about
four and a half miles; afoot and by the road, it is nearer seven and a
half, for one must follow roads lying north of the great lagoon. The
day was pleasant; cool, easterly winds blew across the moors, and it
was warm enough when I found both shelter and the sun.
I walked to Nauset Station close along the landward edge of the dunes,
out of sight and sound of the sea. All up and down these western
gradients of grass and sand the plant life of the region is pushing
through the surface drifts and sandy overflowings which crept eastward
during winter; green leaves of the beach pea are thrusting up; sand
crumbs still lodged in their unfolded crevices; the dune goldenrod is
shouldering the bright particles aside. Against the new olive colouring
of the dunes, the compact thickets of beach plum are as charred-looking
as ever, but when I stroll over to a thicket I find its buds tipped
with a tiny show of green.
Arriving at Nauset, I found my coast guard neighbours airing their
bedding and cleaning house. Andrew Wetherbee hailed me from the tower;
we shouted pleasantries and passed the time of day. Then down Nauset
road I went, turning my back on ocean and a rising tide.
The first mile of the road from Nauset to Eastham village winds through
a singular country. It is a belt of wild, rolling, and treeless sand
moorland which follows along the rim of the earth cliff for two
thirds of its length and runs inland for something like a mile. Nauset
Station, with its tiny floor of man-made greenery, lies at the frontier
between my dune world and this sea-girt waste. Coast guard paths and
the low, serried poles of the coast guard telephone are the only clues
to the neighbourhood of man.
Desolate and half desert as it is, this borderland of the Cape has
an extraordinary beauty, and for me the double attraction of mystery
and wide horizons. Just to the north of the station, the grass turns
starveling and thin, and the floor of the border waste becomes a thick
carpet of poverty grass, _Hudsonia tomentosa_, variegated with channels
and starry openings of whitish sand. All winter long this plant has
been a kind of a rag grey; it has had a clothlike look and feel, but
now it wears one of the rarest and loveliest greens in nature. I shall
have to use the term “sage green” in telling of it, but the colour is
not so simply ticketed; it is sage green, yes, but of an unequalled
richness and sable depth. All along the waste, the increasing light
is transmuting the grey sand of winter to a mellowness of grey-white
touched with silver; the moor blanches, the plant puts on the dark.
To my mind this wild region is at its best in twilight, for its dun
floor gathers the dark long before the sunset colour has faded from the
flattened sky, and one may then walk there in the peace of the earth
gloom and hear from far below the great reverberation of the sea.
West of this treeless waste the Nauset Road mounts to the upland floor
of the Cape and to the inhabited lands.
When Henry Thoreau walked through Eastham in 1849, warding off a
drenching autumnal rain with his Concord umbrella, he found this region
practically treeless, and the inhabitants gathering their firewood
on the beach. Nowadays, people on the outer Cape have their wood
lots as well as inlanders. The tree that has rooted itself into the
wind-swept bar is the pitch pine, _Pinus rigida_, the familiar tree
of the outer Long Island wastes and the Jersey barrens. _Rigida_ has
no particular interest or beauty--one writer on trees calls it “rough
and scraggly”--yet let me say no harm of it, for it is of value here:
it furnishes firewood, holds down the earth and sand, and shelters the
ploughed fields. In favourable situations, the pine reaches a height
of between forty and fifty feet; on these windy sands, trees of the
oldest growth struggle to reach between twenty-five and thirty. The
trunk of this pine is brownish, with an overtone of violet, and seldom
grows straight to its top; its leaves occur in a cluster of three, and
its dry cones have a way of adhering for years to its branches.
They are forever burning up, these pitch-pine woods. A recent great
fire in Wellfleet burned four days, and at one time seemed about
to descend upon the town. Coast guard crews were sent to help the
villagers. Many deer, they tell me, were seen running about in the
burning woods, terror-stricken by the smoke and the oncoming crackle of
the crest of flame. Encircled by the fire, one man jumped into a pond;
scarce had he plunged when he heard a plunge close by and found a deer
swimming by his side.
The thickets were rusty yesterday, for the tree thins out its
winter-worn foliage in the spring. As I paused to study a group of
particularly dead-looking trees, I scared up a large bird from the wood
north of the road; it was a marsh hawk, _Circus Hudsonius_. Out of the
withered tops flew this shape of warm, living brown, flapped, sailed
on, and sank in the thickets by the marsh. I was glad to see this bird
and to have some hint of its residence, because a female bird of
this species makes a regular daily visit to the dunes. She comes from
somewhere on the mainland north of the marsh, crosses the northeast
corner of the flats, and on reaching the dunes aligns her flight with
the long five miles of the great wall. Down the wall she comes, this
great brown bird, flying fifteen or twenty feet above the awakening
green. Now she hovers a second as if about to swoop, now she sinks as
if about to snatch a prey--and all the time advancing. I have seen her
flutter by the west windows of the Fo’castle so near that I could have
touched her with a stick. Apparently, she is on the watch for beach
mice, though I have as yet seen no mouse tracks on the dunes. She
arrives between ten and eleven o’clock on practically all fair weather
mornings, and occasionally I see her search the dunes again late in the
afternoon. _Circus Hudsonius_ is a migrant, but some birds spend the
winter in southern New England, and I have a notion that this female
has wintered in Nauset woods.
Once Nauset road approaches Eastham village the thickets of pitch pines
to the eastward fall behind, the fields south of the road widen into
superb treeless moorlands rolling down to the shores of the great
lagoon, orchard tops become visible in hollows, and a few houses sit
upon the moors like stranded ships. Eastham village itself, however,
is not treeless, for there are shade trees near many houses and trees
along the road.
All trees on the outer Cape are of interest to me, for they are
the outermost of trees--trees with the roar of breakers in their
leaves--but I find one group of especial interest. As one goes south
along the main highway, one encounters a straggle of authentic western
cottonwoods, _Populus deltoides_. The tree is rare in the northeast;
indeed, these trees are the only ones of their kind I have ever chanced
to find in Massachusetts. They were planted long ago, the village
declares, by Cape Codders who emigrated to Kansas, and then returned,
homesick for the sea. The trees grow close by the roadside, and there
is a particularly fine group at the turn of the road near Mr. Austin
Cole’s. In this part of the Cape, an aërial fungus paints the trunks of
deciduous trees an odd mustard-orange, and as I passed yesterday by the
cottonwoods I saw that the group was particularly overspread with this
picturesque stain. The growth seems to do no harm of any kind.
At a boulder commemorative of the men of Eastham who served in the
Great War, I turned south on the main highway and presently reached the
town hall and the western top of the moorland country. There I left the
road and walked east into the moors to enjoy the incomparable view of
the great Eastham marshes and the dunes. Viewed from the seaward scarp
of the moors, the marsh takes form as the greener floor of a great
encirclement of rolling, tawny, and treeless land. From a marsh just
below, the vast flat islands and winding rivers of the marsh run level
to the yellow bulwark of the dunes, and at the end of the vista the
eye escapes through valleys in the wall to the cold April blue of the
North Atlantic plain. The floor of ocean there seems higher than the
floor of the marsh, and sailing vessels often have an air of sailing
past the dunes low along the sky. A faint green colours the sky line
of the dunes, and on the wide flanks of the empty moorlands stains of
springtime greenness well from the old tawniness of earth. Yesterday I
heard no ocean sound.
So beautiful was the spacious and elemental scene that I lingered a
while on the top of the moor cliff shelving to the marsh. The tide
was rising in the creeks and channels, and the gulls remaining in the
region had been floated off their banks and shoals. The great levels
seemed, for the moment, empty of their winged and silvery life.
During the winter, one bird has made this moorland region all his
own, and that bird the English starling. The birds apparently spend
the winter on these hills. I have crossed the open country during a
northeast gale just to watch them wheeling in the snow. Scarce had one
flock settled ere another was up; I saw them here and there and far
away. I find these Eastham birds of particular interest, for they are
the first American starlings I have seen to recover their ancestral and
European mode of life. In Europe, the bird is given to congregating in
vast flocks--there are river lowlands in England where such starling
flocks gather in crowded thousands--and once this starling army has
established itself in a region it is theirs completely and forever.
Are the flocks at Eastham the beginning of one of those European mobs?
Will the various flocks now inhabiting the moors ultimately mingle to
form one enormous and tyrannous confederacy? The separate winter swarms
already consist of fifty to seventy-five birds, and I imagine that, if
the stray members of each flock were to return to their congregations,
these bands might be found to contain well over a hundred individuals.
Such a mingling as I speak of may possibly take place; again, it may
be that the resources of the region are already taxed to support the
present birds; let us hope that this last is the truth. The presence
of these rabble blackbirds disturbs the entire natural economy of the
region, for they strip every autumnal bush and plant bare of its last
seed and berry and leave nothing for our native birds to feed on when
they return in the spring.
With spring, the birds desert the moors, pair off, and retire to the
village barns and the chimneys of unopened summer cottages.
The hour of flood tide approaching, I left the moors behind and went
to the west shore to see what I could of the strangest of all regional
migrations.
III
Some five years ago, on a night in early April, I happened to be aboard
a United States naval vessel bound coastwise from the southern drill
grounds to New York. Our course lay well out of sight of land; the
night was springlike, still and mild, the stars thick-sown in a faintly
hazy sky. I remember that we saw the lights of a few ships standing
in to Philadelphia. Once these had dimmed and disappeared behind, the
sea was entirely our own, a vast, lonely, still, and starlit sea. Just
after one o’clock I saw ahead of us on the sea a field, a shimmer of
pale light, formless as the reflection of a cloud and mysteriously
troubled by auroral undulations. We had overtaken a migration of fish
moving north along the coast with the advance of spring. The skirts of
the sun’s robe, trailing over ocean, stir the deep, and its mysterious
peoples move North on the fringes of the light. I do not know what
species of fish I chanced that night to see, for there is a definite
and populous area of marine life lying between Hatteras and Cape Cod.
They may possibly have been herring. As our vessel neared the living
shoal, it seemed to move as one thing, there coursed through it a new
vibration, and it turned east, grew vague, and vanished completely in
the night.
Every spring even such a fish migration, moving through ocean as
mysteriously as the force of a wave, breaks against our south New
England shore. In colonial times the younger Winthrop wrote of it,
telling of “the coming up of a fish called aloofes into the rivers.
Where the ground is bad or worn out, the Indians used to put two or
three of the forementioned fishes under or adjacent each corn hill.
The English have learned like husbandry where those aloofes come up in
great plenty.” This “aloofe” of the colonists, better known as the
“alewife,” and often and incorrectly called a “herring,” is really not
a herring at all but a related fish, _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_. It is
distinguishable from the true sea herring by its greater depth of body
and by the serrations on the midline of its belly which are stronger
and sharper than those of the true herring--so sharp, indeed, that the
fish is sometimes called a “saw belly.” In April they leave the sea and
run up our brooks to spawn in freshwater ponds.
[Illustration: _Fire in the Pitch Pines_]
There is a famous brook in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which I try to
visit every year. I remember the last warm April day. The “herring”
brook--it is scarce more than ten or twelve feet wide and hardly
more than a foot deep--was flowing freely, its clear brownish waters
rippling almost noiselessly in the morning light. The fish were “in,”
moving up the brook as thickly massed as a battalion along a narrow
road; there were no ranks--only an onward swarming. So numerous were
the fish, and so regimented, that I stopped at the water’s edge and
easily caught two or three with my bare hand. Through the brownish
stream the eye looked down to numberless long backs of a subdued dark
lavender-grey and to a fleet of dorsal fins breaking water. The brook
smelt of fish. Here and there were dead ones, aground on the edges of
the stream or held by the current against a rock; dead things lying
on their sides, with opaque, slime-coated eyes, and rock bruises on
their sides--raw spots of fish blood red in a side of brown and golden
scales. Sometimes the advance seemed stilled till the studying eye
perceived the constant individual advance. A hundred thousand had come.
These alewives of Weymouth come up out of the sea, and from Heaven
knows just where out of the sea. They run up Weymouth Brook, are
stopped by a dam, are fished out in a net, dumped into barrels of
water, and carted overland in a truck to Whitman’s Pond. I have
watched them follow currents in the pond, once they have been spilled
out into it. Then comes, perhaps, a sense of arrival and intended time;
each female lays from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand glutinous
eggs, these drop to the bottom, drift along the mud, and ooze and
attach themselves as chance directs. The spawning females and the
males then go over the dam and back to sea, the herring born in the
pond follow them ten months or a year later, and then comes another
spring and a great mystery. Somewhere in the depths of ocean, each
Weymouth-born fish remembers Whitman’s Pond, and comes to it through
the directionless leagues of the sea. What stirs in each cold brain?
what call quivers as the new sun strikes down into the river of ocean?
how do the creatures find their way? Birds have landscape and rivers
and headlands of the coast, the fish have--what? But presently the fish
are “in” at Weymouth, breasting the brook’s spring overflow to the
ancestral pond.
Some remember Whitman’s Pond, others remember the ponds of the Cape.
There are “herring” ponds and “herring” brooks on the map of Eastham.
The road to the bay leads off at the town hall, passing an old
windmill which still has its grinding machinery in place. I entered
it once, long ago, to see the dusty chutes, the empty bins, and the
stones in their cheese-box cases of ancient and mellow wood. Locust
trees inclose it, and song sparrows perch on the arms that have not
turned for years. I heard one as I trod the dusty floor, his mating
song entering through a broken pane. Beyond the mill, the road passes
a scatter of houses, crosses the railroad track, winds between the
ponds of Eastham, and then comes to an open mile of sandy fields and
pitch-pine country extending to the bay.
The road descends, for the bay rim of the outer Cape is lower than the
ocean wall. North of the road, it is but a bank at the end of fields.
Accustomed to the roar of the ocean beach and to the salt wind in my
ears, the quiet of the bay fell strangely about me. There was no surf,
scarce a lakelike ripple; masses of weed, shaped in long undulations
by water waves, lay heavy on the beach; forty miles across, earth-blue
beyond blue water, and mounded and separate as so many isles, appeared
the highlands of Plymouth woods and Sagamore. A few ducks were feeding
more than a mile offshore, and, as I watched, a solitary drake rose
from the broad marshes to my right and flew off to join them.
[Illustration: _The Eastham Moors_]
The quiet of the bay, the subdued easterly blowing across the fields,
the belt of winter weed, the glint and warmth of the sun, the
solitary bird--there was a sense of old times dead and of new times
beginning--recurrence, life, the turn of the sun’s wheel, always the
imperative, bright sun.
I walked along the beach to the mouth of the “herring” brook. The
stream is but a clogged gully of clean water running down to the sea
through the sandy open meadows. Arriving at the shore, it spills out
over the beach and trickles down to the bay. Low tides wash at the
trickling rills and cover them; high tides climb the beach and enter
a pool which has formed at the mouth behind a dam of weed. Yesterday,
the low course tide had scarce touched the edge of the barrier and
had begun to ebb an hour before my coming. Between the dam and the
high-tide mark of the day lay a twenty-foot interval of beach traced
by flat rillets seeping from the barrier. I looked into the pool. The
“herring” had been in, for there was a dead one lying on the bottom of
weed, a golden fish silted over with fine mud.
Suddenly, on chancing to look bay-ward, I saw a small school of
“herring” just off the mouth of the brook and scarce more than fifteen
feet from the motionless rim of the tide. There were, perhaps, fifty
or a hundred fish in the school. Occasional fins chopped the quiet
water. “Herrings” of Eastham brook unable to enter the pond in which
they were born, barred from it by a dam of Nature’s making. As I stood
looking off to the baffled creatures, now huddled and seemingly still
in deeper water, now huddled and all astir in the shallowest fringes
of the tide, I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life
everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the
air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things
and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead,
life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning
ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures,
even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what
bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish
the earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal
their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will
of life universal?
The tide ebbed, swiftly shallowing over the flats, the “herring”
vanished from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell
when they were gone or the manner of their going.
Returning to the outer beach late in the afternoon, I found the ocean
all a cold jade-green sown with whitecaps, the wind rising, and great
broken clouds flowing over from the east. And in this northern current
was a new warmth.
_Chapter VIII_
NIGHT ON THE GREAT BEACH
I
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of
nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk,
gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear,
rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the
age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies,
now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights,
we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the
sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.
Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast
serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having
made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which
explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night
for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the
answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have
not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who
have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial
night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other
half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or
trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfilment, it is rest. Thin clouds
float in these heavens, islands of obscurity in a splendour of space
and stars: the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean; the beach resolves
itself into a unity of form, its summer lagoons, its slopes and uplands
merging; against the western sky and the falling bow of sun rise the
silent and superb undulations of the dunes.
My nights are at their darkest when a dense fog streams in from the sea
under a black, unbroken floor of cloud. Such nights are rare, but are
most to be expected when fog gathers off the coast in early summer;
this last Wednesday night was the darkest I have known. Between ten
o’clock and two in the morning three vessels stranded on the outer
beach--a fisherman, a four-masted schooner, and a beam trawler. The
fisherman and the schooner have been towed off, but the trawler, they
say, is still ashore.
I went down to the beach that night just after ten o’clock. So utterly
black, pitch dark it was, and so thick with moisture and trailing
showers, that there was no sign whatever of the beam of Nauset; the sea
was only a sound, and when I reached the edge of the surf the dunes
themselves had disappeared behind. I stood as isolate in that immensity
of rain and night as I might have stood in interplanetary space. The
sea was troubled and noisy, and when I opened the darkness with an
outlined cone of light from my electric torch I saw that the waves
were washing up green coils of sea grass, all coldly wet and bright
in the motionless and unnatural radiance. Far off a single ship was
groaning its way along the shoals. The fog was compact of the finest
moisture; passing by, it spun itself into my lens of light like a kind
of strange, aërial, and liquid silk. Effin Chalke, the new coast guard,
passed me going north, and told me that he had had news at the halfway
house of the schooner at Cahoon’s.
It was dark, pitch dark to my eye, yet complete darkness, I imagine, is
exceedingly rare, perhaps unknown in outer nature. The nearest natural
approximation to it is probably the gloom of forest country buried in
night and cloud. Dark as the night was here, there was still light on
the surface of the planet. Standing on the shelving beach, with the
surf breaking at my feet, I could see the endless wild uprush, slide,
and withdrawal of the sea’s white rim of foam. The men at Nauset tell
me that on such nights they follow along this vague crawl of whiteness,
trusting to habit and a sixth sense to warn them of their approach to
the halfway house.
Animals descend by starlight to the beach. North, beyond the dunes,
muskrats forsake the cliff and nose about in the driftwood and weed,
leaving intricate trails and figure eights to be obliterated by the
day; the lesser folk--the mice, the occasional small sand-coloured
toads, the burrowing moles--keep to the upper beach and leave their
tiny footprints under the overhanging wall. In autumn skunks, beset by
a shrinking larder, go beach combing early in the night. The animal
is by preference a clean feeder and turns up his nose at rankness. I
almost stepped on a big fellow one night as I was walking north to meet
the first man south from Nauset. There was a scamper, and the creature
ran up the beach from under my feet; alarmed he certainly was, yet was
he contained and continent. Deer are frequently seen, especially north
of the light. I find their tracks upon the summer dunes.
Years ago, while camping on this beach north of Nauset, I went for
a stroll along the top of the cliff at break of dawn. Though the
path followed close enough along the edge, the beach below was often
hidden, and I looked directly from the height to the flush of sunrise
at sea. Presently the path, turning, approached the brink of the earth
precipice, and on the beach below, in the cool, wet rosiness of dawn,
I saw three deer playing. They frolicked, rose on their hind legs,
scampered off, and returned again, and were merry. Just before sunrise
they trotted off north together down the beach toward a hollow in the
cliff and the path that climbs it.
Occasionally a sea creature visits the shore at night. Lone coast
guardsmen, trudging the sand at some deserted hour, have been startled
by seals. One man fell flat on a creature’s back, and it drew away from
under him, flippering toward the sea, with a sound “halfway between
a squeal and a bark.” I myself once had rather a start. It was long
after sundown, the light dying and uncertain, and I was walking home
on the top level of the beach and close along the slope descending to
the ebbing tide. A little more than halfway to the Fo’castle a huge
unexpected something suddenly writhed horribly in the darkness under my
bare foot. I had stepped on a skate left stranded by some recent crest
of surf, and my weight had momentarily annoyed it back to life.
[Illustration: _The Highland Light_]
Facing north, the beam of Nauset becomes part of the dune night. As
I walk toward it, I see the lantern, now as a star of light which
waxes and wanes three mathematic times, now as a lovely pale flare
of light behind the rounded summits of the dunes. The changes in the
atmosphere change the colour of the beam; it is now whitish, now flame
golden, now golden red; it changes its form as well, from a star to a
blare of light, from a blare of light to a cone of radiance sweeping a
circumference of fog. To the west of Nauset I often see the apocalyptic
flash of the great light at the Highland reflected on the clouds or
even on the moisture in the starlit air, and, seeing it, I often think
of the pleasant hours I have spent there when George and Mary Smith
were at the light and I had the good fortune to visit as their guest.
Instead of going to sleep in the room under the eaves, I would lie
awake, looking out of a window to the great spokes of light revolving
as solemnly as a part of the universe.
All night long the lights of coastwise vessels pass at sea, green
lights going south, red lights moving north. Fishing schooners and
flounder draggers anchor two or three miles out, and keep a bright
riding light burning on the mast. I see them come to anchor at sundown,
but I rarely see them go, for they are off at dawn. When busy at
night, these fishermen illumine their decks with a scatter of oil
flares. From shore, the ships might be thought afire. I have watched
the scene through a night glass. I could see no smoke, only the waving
flares, the reddish radiance on sail and rigging, an edge of reflection
overside, and the enormous night and sea beyond.
One July night, as I returned at three o’clock from an expedition
north, the whole night, in one strange, burning instant, turned into
a phantom day. I stopped and, questioning, stared about. An enormous
meteor, the largest I have ever seen, was consuming itself in an
effulgence of light west of the zenith. Beach and dune and ocean
appeared out of nothing, shadowless and motionless, a landscape whose
every tremor and vibration were stilled, a landscape in a dream.
The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony
with its spirit and mood--with its little, dry noise of sand forever
moving, with its solemn, overspilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity
of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high
heavens--and that sound the piping of a bird. As I walk the beach in
early summer my solitary coming disturbs it on its nest, and it flies
away, troubled, invisible, piping its sweet, plaintive cry. The bird I
write of is the piping plover, _Charadrius melodus_, sometimes called
the beach plover or the mourning bird. Its note is a whistled syllable,
the loveliest musical note, I think, sounded by any North Atlantic bird.
Now that summer is here I often cook myself a camp supper on the beach.
Beyond the crackling, salt-yellow driftwood flame, over the pyramid of
barrel staves, broken boards, and old sticks all atwist with climbing
fire, the unseen ocean thunders and booms, the breaker sounding hollow
as it falls. The wall of the sand cliff behind, with its rim of grass
and withering roots, its sandy crumblings and erosions, stands gilded
with flame; wind cries over it; a covey of sandpipers pass between the
ocean and the fire. There are stars, and to the south Scorpio hangs
curving down the sky with ringed Saturn shining in his claw.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for,
with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes
as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the
adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with
man--it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past;
at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day,
rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens
for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness
of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment
of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in
its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons
across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant
be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of
emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and
experience.
II
At intervals during the summer, often enough when the tides are high
and the moon is near the full, the surf along the beach turns from a
churn of empty moonlit water to a mass of panic life. Driven in by
schools of larger fish, swarms of little fish enter the tumble of the
surf, the eaters follow them, the surf catches them both up and throws
them, mauled and confused, ashore.
Under a sailing moon, the whole churn of sea close off the beach
vibrates with a primeval ferocity and intensity of life; yet is this
war of rushing mouth and living food without a sound save for the
breaking of the seas. But let me tell of such a night.
I had spent an afternoon ashore with friends, and they had driven me
to Nauset Station just after nine o’clock. The moon, two days from
the full, was very lovely on the moors and on the channels and flat,
moon-green isles of the lagoon; the wind was southerly and light. Moved
by its own enormous rhythms, the surf that night was a stately incoming
of high, serried waves, the last wave alone breaking. This inmost wave
broke heavily in a smother and rebound of sandy foam, and thin sheets
of seethe, racing before it up the beach, vanished endlessly into the
endless thirst of the sands. As I neared the surf rim to begin my walk
to the southward, I saw that the beach close along the breakers, as
far as the eye would reach, was curiously atwinkle in the moonlight
with the convulsive dance of myriads of tiny fish. The breakers were
spilling them on the sands; the surf was aswarm with the creatures; it
was indeed, for the time being, a surf of life. And this surf of life
was breaking for miles along the Cape.
Little herring or mackerel? Sand eels? I picked a dancer out of the
slide and held him up to the moon. It was the familiar sand eel or sand
launce, _Ammodytes americanus_, of the waters between Hatteras and
Labrador. This is no kin of the true eels, though he rather resembles
one in general appearance, for his body is slender, eel-like, and
round. Instead of ending bluntly, however, this “eel” has a large,
well-forked tail. The fish in the surf were two and three inches long.
Homeward that night I walked barefooted in the surf, watching the
convulsive, twinkling dance, now and then feeling the squirm of a fish
across my toes. Presently something occurred which made me keep to the
thinnest edge of the foam. Some ten feet ahead, an enormous dogfish
was suddenly borne up the beach on the rim of a slide of foam; he moved
with it unresisting while it carried him; the slide withdrawing and
drying up, it rolled him twice over seaward; he then twisted heavily,
and another minor slide carried him back again to shore. The fish was
about three feet long, a real junior shark, purplish black in the
increasing light--for the moon was moving west across the long axis of
the breakers--and his dark, important bulk seemed strange in the bright
dance of the smaller fish about him.
It was then that I began to look carefully at the width of gathering
seas. Here were the greater fish, the mouths, the eaters who had driven
the “eels” ashore to the edge of their world and into ours. The surf
was alive with dogfish, aswarm with them, with the rush, the cold
bellies, the twist and tear of their wolfish violence of life. Yet
there was but little sign of it in the waters--a rare fin slicing past,
and once the odd and instant glimpse of a fish embedded like a fly in
amber in the bright, overturning volute of a wave.
Too far in, the dogfish were now in the grip of the surf, and presently
began to come ashore. As I walked the next half mile every other
breaker seemed to leave behind its ebb a mauled and stranded sharklet
feebly sculling with his tail. I kicked many back into the seas,
risking a toe, perhaps; some I caught by the tails and flung, for I did
not want them corrupting on the beach. The next morning, in the mile
and three quarters between the Fo’castle and the station, I counted
seventy-one dogfish lying dead on the upper beach. There were also a
dozen or two skates--the skate is really a kind of shark--which had
stranded the same night. Skates follow in many things, and are forever
being flung upon these sands.
I sat up late that night at the Fo’castle, often putting down the book
I read to return to the beach.
A little after eleven came Bill Eldredge to the door, with a grin
on his face and one hand held behind his back. “Have you ordered
to-morrow’s dinner yet?” said he. “No.” “Well, here it is,” and Bill
produced a fine cod from behind his back. “Just found him right in
front of your door, alive and flopping. Yes, yes, haddock and cod often
chase those sand eels in with the bigger fish; often find them on
the beach about this time of the year. Got any place to keep him?
Let me have a piece of string and I’ll hang him on your clothesline.
He’ll keep all right.” With a deft unforking of two fingers, Bill drew
the line through the gills, and as he did so the heavy fish flopped
noisily. No fear about him being dead. Make a nice chowder. Bill
stepped outside; I heard him at the clothesline. Afterward we talked
till it was time for him to shoulder his clock and Coston case again,
pick up his watch cap, whistle in his little black dog, and go down
over the dune to the beach and Nauset Station.
[Illustration: _The Sequel of Fog on a Summer Night_]
There were nights in June when there was phosphorescence in the surf
and on the beach, and one such night I think I shall remember as the
most strange and beautiful of all the year.
Early this summer the middle beach moulded itself into a bar, and
between it and the dunes are long, shallow runnels into which the ocean
spills over at high tide. On the night I write of, the first quarter
of the moon hung in the west, and its light on the sheets of incoming
tide coursing thin across the bar was very beautiful to see. Just after
sundown I walked to Nauset with friends who had been with me during
the afternoon; the tide was still rising, and a current running in
the pools. I lingered at the station with my friends till the last
of sunset had died, and the light upon the planet, which had been
moonlight mingled with sunset pink, had cleared to pure cold moon.
Southward, then, I turned, and because the flooded runnels were deep
close by the station, I could not cross them and had to walk their
inner shores. The tide had fallen half a foot, perhaps, but the
breakers were still leaping up against the bar as against a wall, the
greater ones still spilling over sheets of vanishing foam.
It grew darker with the westing of the moon. There was light on the
western tops of the dunes, a fainter light on the lower beach and the
breakers; the face of the dunes was a unity of dusk.
The tide had ebbed in the pools, and their edges were wet and dark.
There was a strange contrast between the still levels of the pool and
the seethe of the sea. I kept close to the land edge of the lagoons,
and as I advanced my boots kicked wet spatters of sand ahead as
they might have kicked particles of snow. Every spatter was a crumb
of phosphorescence; I walked in a dust of stars. Behind me, in my
footprints, luminous patches burned. With the double-ebb moonlight and
tide, the deepening brims of the pools took shape in smouldering, wet
fire. So strangely did the luminous speckles smoulder and die and glow
that it seemed as if some wind were passing, by whose breath they were
kindled and extinguished. Occasional whole breakers of phosphorescence
rolled in out of the vague sea--the whole wave one ghostly motion, one
creamy light--and, breaking against the bar, flung up pale sprays of
fire.
A strange thing happens here during these luminous tides. The
phosphorescence is itself a mass of life, sometimes protozoan its
origin, sometimes bacterial, the phosphorescence I write of being
probably the latter. Once this living light has seeped into the
beach, colonies of it speedily invade the tissues of the ten thousand
thousand sand fleas which are forever hopping on this edge of ocean.
Within an hour the grey bodies of these swarming amphipods, these
useful, ever hungry sea scavengers (_Orchestia agilis_; _Talorchestia
megalophthalma_), show phosphorescent pinpoints, and these points grow
and unite till the whole creature is luminous. The attack is really
a disease, an infection of light. The process had already begun when
I arrived on the beach on the night of which I am writing, and the
luminous fleas hopping off before my boots were an extraordinary
sight. It was curious to see them hop from the pool rims to the
upper beach, paling as they reached the width of peaceful moonlight
lying landward of the strange, crawling beauty of the pools. This
infection kills them, I think; at least, I have often found the larger
creature lying dead on the fringe of the beach, his huge porcelain
eyes and water-grey body one core of living fire. Round and about him,
disregarding, ten thousand kinsmen, carrying on life and the plan of
life, ate of the bounty of the tide.
III
All winter long I slept on a couch in my larger room, but with the
coming of warm weather I have put my bedroom in order--I used it as a
kind of storage space during the cold season--and returned to my old
and rather rusty iron cot. Every once in a while, however, moved by
some obscure mood, I lift off the bedclothing and make up the couch
again for a few nights. I like the seven windows of the larger room,
and the sense one may have there of being almost out-of-doors. My couch
stands alongside the two front windows, and from my pillow I can look
out to sea and watch the passing lights, the stars rising over ocean,
the swaying lanterns of the anchored fishermen, and the white spill of
the surf whose long sound fills the quiet of the dunes.
Ever since my coming I have wanted to see a thunderstorm bear down
upon this elemental coast. A thunderstorm is a “tempest” on the Cape.
The quoted word, as Shakespeare used it, means lightning and thunder,
and it is in this old and beautiful Elizabethan sense that the word is
used in Eastham. When a schoolboy in the Orleans or the Wellfleet High
reads the Shakespearean play, its title means to him exactly what it
meant to the man from Stratford; elsewhere in America, the terms seems
to mean anything from a tornado to a blizzard. I imagine that this old
significance of the word is now to be found only in certain parts of
England and Cape Cod.
On the night of the June tempest, I was sleeping in my larger room, the
windows were open, and the first low roll of thunder opened my eyes.
It had been very still when I went to bed, but now a wind from the
west-nor’west was blowing through the windows in a strong and steady
current, and as I closed them there was lightning to the west and far
away. I looked at my watch; it was just after one o’clock. Then came a
time of waiting in the darkness, long minutes broken by more thunder,
and intervals of quiet in which I heard a faintest sound of light
surf upon the beach. Suddenly the heavens cracked open in an immense
instant of pinkish-violet lightning. My seven windows filled with the
violent, inhuman light, and I had a glimpse of the great, solitary
dunes staringly empty of familiar shadows; a tremendous crash then
mingled with the withdrawal of the light, and echoes of thunder rumbled
away and grew faint in a returning rush of darkness. A moment after,
rain began to fall gently as if someone had just released its flow, a
blessed sound on a roof of wooden shingles, and one I have loved ever
since I was a child. From a gentle patter the sound of the rain grew
swiftly to a drumming roar, and with the rain came the chuckling of
water from the eaves. The tempest was crossing the Cape, striking at
the ancient land on its way to the heavens above the sea.
Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy
thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast
detonations which jarred the walls. Houses were struck that night
in Eastham village. My lonely world, full of lightning and rain, was
strange to look upon. I do not share the usual fear of lightning, but
that night there came over me, for the first and last time of all
my solitary year, a sense of isolation and remoteness from my kind.
I remember that I stood up, watching, in the middle of the room. On
the great marshes the lightning surfaced the winding channels with
a metallic splendour and arrest of motion, all very strange through
windows blurred by rain. Under the violences of light the great dunes
took on a kind of elemental passivity, the quiet of earth enchanted
into stone, and as I watched them appear and plunge back into a
darkness that had an intensity of its own I felt, as never before, a
sense of the vast time, of the thousands of cyclic and uncounted years
which had passed since these giants had risen from the dark ocean at
their feet and given themselves to the wind and the bright day.
Fantastic things were visible at sea. Beaten down by the rain, and
sheltered by the Cape itself from the river of west wind, the offshore
brim of ocean remained unusually calm. The tide was about halfway up
the beach, and rising, and long parallels of low waves, forming close
inshore, were curling over and breaking placidly along the lonely,
rain-drenched miles. The intense crackling flares and quiverings of
the storm, moving out to sea, illumined every inch of the beach and
the plain of the Atlantic, all save the hollow bellies of the little
breakers, which were shielded from the light by their overcurling
crests. The effect was dramatic and strangely beautiful, for what one
saw was a bright ocean rimmed with parallel bands of blackest advancing
darkness, each one melting back to light as the wave toppled down upon
the beach in foam.
Stars came out after the storm, and when I woke again before sunrise
I found the heavens and the earth rainwashed, cool, and clear. Saturn
and the Scorpion were setting, but Jupiter was riding the zenith and
paling on his throne. The tide was low in the marsh channels; the
gulls had scarcely stirred upon their gravel banks and bars. Suddenly,
thus wandering about, I disturbed a song sparrow on her nest. She flew
to the roof of my house, grasped the ridgepole, and turned about,
apprehensive, inquiring ... _’tsiped_ her monosyllable of alarm. Then
back toward her nest she flew, alighted in a plum bush, and, reassured
at last, trilled out a morning song.
[Illustration: _Piping Plover at Nest_]
_Chapter IX_
THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE
I
Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on
the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an
individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye.
I like a good smell--the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm
morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild
Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the
good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows
late on summer afternoons.
What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever
learned to endure that foul blue air? In the Seventeenth Century, the
air about a city must have been much the same air as overhung a large
village; to-day the town atmosphere is to be endured only by the new
synthetic man.
Our whole English tradition neglects smell. In English, the nose is
still something of an indelicate organ, and I am not so sure that
its use is not regarded as somewhat sensual. Our literary pictures,
our poetic landscapes are things to hang on the mind’s wall, things
for the eye. French letters are more indulgent to the nose; one can
scarcely read ten lines of any French verse without encountering the
omnipresent, the inevitable _parfum_. And here the French are right,
for though the eye is the human master sense and chief æsthetic gate,
the creation of a mood or of a moment of earth poetry is a rite for
which other senses may be properly invoked. Of all such appeals to
sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in
the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover
of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to
keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never
have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them,
indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense
grown duller.
One reason for my love of this great beach is that, living here, I
dwell in a world that has a good natural smell, that is full of keen,
vivid, and interesting savours and fragrances. I have them at their
best, perhaps, when hot days are dulled with a warm rain. So well do
I know them, indeed, that were I blindfolded and led about the summer
beach, I think I could tell on what part of it I was at any moment
standing. At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool--cold
even--and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution
of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope
beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the
innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It
is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is
blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward
the dunes, now a point toward the sea. For twenty feet a humid and
tropical exhalation of hot, wet sand encircles one, and from this one
steps, as through a door, into as many yards of mid-September. In a
point of time, one goes from Central America to Maine.
Atop the broad eight-foot back of the summer bar, inland forty feet
or so from the edge of low tide, other odours wait. Here have the
tides strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted
festoons of ocean vegetation--with common sea grass, with rockweed
olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled
green leaves of sea lettuce, with edible, purple-red dulse and bleached
sea moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long.
In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering--for their very
substance is water--and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into
the burning air. I like this good natural savour. Sometimes a dead,
surf-trapped fish, perhaps a dead skate curling up in the heat, adds to
this odour of vegetation a faint fishy rankness, but the smell is not
earth corruption, and the scavengers of the beach soon enough remove
the cause.
Beyond the bar and the tidal runnel farther in, the flat region I call
the upper beach runs back to the shadeless bastion of the dunes. In
summer this beach is rarely covered by the tides. Here lies a hot and
pleasant odour of sand. I find myself an angle of shade slanting off
from a mass of wreckage still embedded in a dune, take up a handful
of the dry, bright sand, sift it slowly through my fingers, and note
how the heat brings out the fine, sharp, stony smell of it. There is
weed here, too, well buried in the dry sand--flotsam of last month’s
high, full-moon tides. In the shadowless glare, the topmost fronds
and heart-shaped air sacs have ripened to an odd iodine orange and a
blackish iodine brown. Overwhelmed thus by sand and heat, the aroma of
this foliage has dissolved; only a shower will summon it again from
these crisping, strangely coloured leaves.
[Illustration: _Nesting Tern_]
Cool breath of eastern ocean, the aroma of beach vegetation in the
sun, the hot, pungent exhalation of fine sand--these mingled are the
midsummer savour of the beach.
II
In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long
and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind
blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary
river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on
the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot
days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by
the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh
blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a
mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked
glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its
sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the
Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.
The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the
tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its
new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s
withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange
wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either
edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and
greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes,
the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies
as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a
week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the
sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep,
that I trudge through it as through snow.
The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer
sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light
and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected
on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows
and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue,
burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes
ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that
glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.
Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from
the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers
with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” _Tabanus costalis_,
stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the
sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor
unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a
precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the
coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect
bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August
height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however,
I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra
allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable
as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from
mosquitoes.
Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I
watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed.
Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with
the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed,
has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and
doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in
June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the
dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go
various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the
wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.
On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep,
finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the
cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a
hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave
her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles
through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller,
sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach
the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him
at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny,
sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if
an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.
“June bugs,” _Lachnosterna arcuata_, strike my screens with a formidable
boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door,
and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon
the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary black wasps scratch
themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon
flies.
The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind
blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea;
heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost
in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.
III
I have spoken in another chapter of the melting away of bird life
from this region during April and May. There was a time when the
all-the-year-round herring gulls seemed the only birds left to me,
and many of these were immature birds or birds whose plumage was then
changing from immature brown to adult white and grey. One cold, foggy
morning late in May, I woke to find the beach in front of the Fo’castle
crowded with these gulls, for a number of hake had stranded during the
night, and the birds had discovered them and come to feed. Some fed on
the fresh fish, findings being keepings--I saw various birds defend
their individual repasts from late arrivals and would-be sharers with a
show of wings and a hostile cry--others stood on the top of the beach
in a long, senatorial row facing the sea. The maturing birds were of
all tones of white and brown; some were chalky and brown, some were
speckled like hens, others were a curious brown-mottled chalky grey.
The moults of herring gulls are complicated affairs. There are spring
moults and autumn moults, partial moults and second nuptial plumages.
Not until the third year or later does the bird seem to assume its full
nuptial and adult coloration.
When I first open my eyes on a bright midsummer morning, the first
sound that becomes part of my waking consciousness is the recurrent
rush and spill of the summer sea; then do I hear a patter of tiny feet
on the roof over my head and the cheerful notes of a song sparrow’s
home-spun tune. These sparrows are the songbirds of the dunes. I hear
them all day long, for I have a pair nesting on the seaward slope of
this dune in a clump of dusty miller. My building of the Fo’castle
has given them something to sit on, something they can see the world
from, and on its ridgepole they perch, singing at life in general with
a praiseworthy persistence. The bird really has two songs, one the
nuptial aria, the other the domestic tune; it sings the first in the
nest-building, egg-laying season, and the second from the close of the
honeymoon to the silence in the fall. I was amazed this year at the
suddenness of the change. On the afternoon of July 1st I heard the
birds on my roof singing aria number one; on the morning of July 2d
they had turned the page to aria number two. The songs are alike; they
resemble each other in musical “shape,” but the first is much more of a
warble than the second.
On throwing open my door on the dunes, the morning sea, and the vast
empty beach with its coast guard paths, I find the house being stormed
by swallows--they are picking up the half-torpid flies that have
spent the night on the shingles and just buzzed off--and on looking
north and south along the dunes I see swallows everywhere. The grass
glistens in the early morning light, the slant of the sun picks out the
ripening spears, the graceful birds swim close above the green. Most
of these birds are bank swallows, _Riparia riparia_, but I often see
barn swallows, _Hirundo erythrogastra_, and tree swallows, _Iridoprocne
bicolor_, scattered in among them. A little after seven o’clock they
melt away. Through the day stray birds come foraging, but the swarm is
a morning affair. The bank swallows (the bird with whitish underparts
and a dark band across the breast) have nests north of Nauset Station
in a clay stratum of the great bank; the tree swallows and the barn
swallows live farther inland near the farms. Some say that the bank
swallows nest in these dunes. I have never found their nests in this
living sand, but the swallows may manage it, after all. Time and again
have I been astounded at the manner in which animals use this sand as
if it were ordinary earth. Not long ago, on the top of big dune, I
found that moles had tunnelled a surface of live sand for six or
seven feet.
[Illustration: _Tern Coming to Full Stop Head-on into the Wind_]
The common tern, _Sterna hirundo_, here called the mackerel gull,
dominates both the beach and the summer day. Three or four thousand of
these birds are nesting in the region; there are nests on the dunes,
and whole colonies on certain gravelly areas in the marsh islands near
Orleans. All day long I watch them flying to and fro past my windows,
now sailing with a favouring wind, now battling into an opposing
breeze; I see them going along the breakers long before sunrise, white
birds flying past a rosiness of eastern sky and an ocean still blue and
dark with night; I see them pass like spiritual creatures in the dusk.
There are crowded days when I live in a cloud of their wings and the
clamour of their cries.
_Sterna hirundo_, the common tern--Wilson’s tern, some call him--is
indeed a lovely bird. His dominant colours are pearl-grey and white,
his wings are bent, he is from thirteen to sixteen inches long, and he
is marked by a black hood, an orange-coral bill tipped with black, and
bright vermilion-orange legs and feet. To my ear, the bird’s call has
a cawing quality; it is, indeed, a cawing screech with an “e” sound and
a high pitch. Harsh though it is, it is not disagreeable; moreover, it
is capable of wide emotional variations. Going south on a recent day
along the dunes, I arrived at the place where the parent terns, homing
from the sea, were crossing the sand bar on their way to their nests,
and as the birds came in sight of their mates and their fledglings,
their cry changed its quality, and took on a kind of wild, harsh
tenderness that was touching to hear.
On Monday morning last, as I sat writing at my west windows, I heard
a tern give a strange cry, and on looking out and up I saw a bird
harrying the female marsh hawk, of whose visits to the dunes I have
already told. The sea bird’s battle cry was entirely new to my ear.
“_Ke’ke’ke’aow!_” he cried; there was warning in the harsh, horny cry,
danger and anger. The greater bird, flapping her wings as if they were
spreads of paper--the winging of this hawk, near earth, is sometimes
curiously like the winging of a butterfly--made no answer, but sank to
earth slowly, wings outspread, and rested for a long half minute on
the shell-strewn floor of the sand pit forty feet back from my house.
Thus perched motionless, she might have been a willing mark. Scolding
without pause, the tern, who had followed the enemy down into the pit,
then rose and dived on her as he might have dived on a fish. The hawk
continued to sit motionless. It was an extraordinary scene. Regaining
level wing just above the hawk’s head, the tern instantly climbed and
dived again. At his third dive, the hawk took off, flying ahead and low
across the sand pit. The battle then moved into the dunes, and the last
I saw of the affair was the hawk abandoning the hills and flying south
unpursued far out over the marsh.
Watching the hawk thus a-squat on the sand in a summer intensity of
light, with the grey sea bird angrily assailing her, there came into my
mind a thought of the ancient Egyptian representations of animals and
birds. For this hawk in the pit was the Horus Hawk of the Egyptians,
the same poise, the same dark blood-fierceness, the same authority. The
longer I live here and the more I see of birds and animals, the greater
my admiration becomes for those artists who worked in Egypt so many
long thousand years ago, drawing, painting, carving in the stifling
quiet of the royal tombs, putting here ducks frightened out of the Nile
marshes, here cattle being herded down a village street, here the great
sun vulture, the jackal, and the snake. To my mind, no representations
of animals equal these Egyptian renderings. I do not write in praise of
faithful delineation or pictorial usage--though the Egyptian drew from
his model with care--but of the unique power to reach, understand, and
portray the very psyche of animals. The power is particularly notable
in Egyptian representations of birds. A hawk of stone carved in hardest
granite on a temple wall will have the soul of all hawks in his eyes.
Moreover, there is nothing human about these Egyptian creatures. They
are self-contained and aloof as becomes folk of a first and intenser
world.
So completely do the thronging terns dominate the beach that they will
often gather to chivvy off a human intruder. I am often chased all the
way to Nauset. Three made for me yesterday afternoon as I was going
north at two o’clock, trudging the hot and heavy sand.
It is an odd, a rather amusing experience to be thus barked at and
chivvied along by birds. Down the beach they followed me, keeping pace
with me and stopping when I stopped, their swallow-like tail feathers
fish-tailing out as they manœuvred close above my head. About once
every half minute one of the three would climb twenty or thirty feet
above me and behind, tread air for a second or two, and then swoop
directly down at me with a scolding cry, the rush ending in an up-lane
scarce a foot above my head. So soundly was I scolded, and so constant
was the sharp clamour, that one might have thought that the birds had
found me pirating eggs and nestlings. As a matter of fact, I was miles
away from any nest or nesting place. Those who disturb terns actually
on their nests are chivvied by dozens in just such a manner, and are
even struck, and struck vigorously, by the birds.
I suspect the marsh hawk of being on her way to raid these nests. Madam
Hawk has probably been sitting on eggs of her own, for I have seen
little of her since she gave up her daily forays sometime in the spring.
From mid-June to mid-July, the terns are at their best. Their eggs are
hatching, the fish are running, and all day long the parent birds are
going back and forth between their nests and the sea. When I open my
door at sunrise, the terns are already passing my house, flying twenty
or thirty feet above the curling, oncoming seas. Hour by hour they pass
in two endless streams, one going fishing, the other bringing home
the catch; hour after hour they pass--thousands of birds an hour when
the fishing is good and near at hand. Returning birds, almost without
exception, hold silvery fish crosswise in their bills, and, unlike the
crow in the fable, a tern can cry out without dropping his prize.
The great majority of these birds are males bringing food to their
mates and the new-born young. The catch usually consists of three- and
four-inch sand eels, but I occasionally see birds flying bow-down with
tinker mackerel. Sometimes a bird passes carrying two “eels,” holding
the pair as best he can.
A week ago, just after two o’clock on a bright afternoon, the birds
suddenly came streaming from everywhere to the surf along the dunes.
Skates had again driven in a people of “eels.” It was high tide; the
seas gathered and broke, the heaviest shaking the beach. Into the
curling baroque crests of the waves, into the advancing slopes of
the gathering green swells, into the race and flow of white seethe
and yellow sand, the bright air rained down birds on the now doubly
imperilled and darting prey. The air was cut with wings and pierced
with eager, hungry, and continuous cries. The birds make plummet dives
and strike up jets of water from the surf. The harassed fish moving
south, the terns followed after them; an hour later, through field
glasses, I could see the thing still going on just north and seaward of
the shoals.
Piratic jaegers, _Stercorarius pomarinus_, _Stercorarius parasiticus_,
apparently never trouble these Eastham birds. I have seen but one
jaeger on this beach, and that a solitary bird who chanced to pass the
house one morning last September. Cape Cod neighbours, however, tell me
that jaegers are numerous in the bay, and that they harry the terns who
fish the shoals off Billingsgate.
Almost every day, in the full heat of noontide, I go down to the lower
beach and lie down for a while on the hot sand, an arm over my eyes.
The other day, in a spirit of fun, I raised my arm toward a passing
tern--the returning birds fly scarce thirty feet above the beach--and
to my amusement the creature paused, sank, and hovered above me for a
few seconds scarce ten feet from my hand. I saw then that its under
plumage, instead of being white, was a lovely faint rose; I had halted
a roseate tern, _Sterna dougalli_. I wriggled my fingers; the bird
responded with a cry in which I read bewildered indignation; then on it
flew, and the incident ended.
This year a number of laughing gulls, _Larus atricilla_, accompany the
terns fishing, the dozen or so gulls keeping to themselves while flying
with their neighbours.
The most interesting adventure with birds I have had this summer I
had with a flock of least terns, _Sterna antillarum_. It came to pass
that early one morning in June, as I happened to be passing big dune,
a covey of small terns unexpectedly sailed out at me and hovered about
me, scolding and complaining. To my great delight, I saw that they were
least terns or “tit gulls,” rare creatures on our coast, and perhaps
the prettiest and most graceful of summer’s ocean birds. A miniature
tern, the “leastie,” scarce larger than a swallow, and you may know him
by the lighter grey of his plumage, his bright lemon-yellow bill, and
his delicate orange-yellow feet.
The birds were nesting at the foot of big dune, and I had disturbed
their peace. In the splendour of morning they hung above me, now
uttering a single alarmed cheep, now a series of staccato cries.
[Illustration: _The Tern Chick_]
I walked over to the nests.
The nest of such a beach bird is a singular affair. It is but a
depression, and sometimes scarcely that, in the open, shelterless
beach. “Nest building on the open sand,” says Mr. Forbush, “is but the
work of a moment. The bird alights, crouches slightly, and works its
little feet so rapidly that the motion seems a mere blur, while the
sand flies out in every direction as the creature pivots about. The
tern then settles lower and smooths the cavity by turning and working
and moving its body from side to side.”
I have mislaid the scrap of paper on which I jotted down the number
of nests I found that morning, but I think I counted twenty to
twenty-five. There were eggs in every nest, in some two, in others
three, in one case and one only, four. To describe the coloration
of the shells is difficult, for there was a deal of variation, but
perhaps I can give some idea of their appearance by saying that they
were beach-coloured with overtones of bluish green, and speckled with
browns and violet-browns and lavenders. What interested me most,
however, was not the eggs, but the manner in which the birds had
decorated their nests with pebbles and bits of shell. Here and there
along the beach, the “leasties” had picked up flat bits of sea shell
about the size of a finger nail, and with these bits they had lined the
bowl of their nests, setting the flat pieces in flat, like parts of a
mosaic.
For two weeks I watched these “leasties” and their nests, taking every
precaution not to disturb or alarm the setting birds. Yet I had but
to pass anywhere between them and the tide to put them up, and when I
walked south with coast guardsmen, I heard single cries of alarm in the
starry and enormous night. Toward the end of June, a sudden northeaster
came.
It was a night storm. I built a little fire, wrote a letter or two, and
listened to the howling wind and the bursts of rain. All night long,
and it was a wakeful, noisy night, I had the “leasties” on my mind.
I felt them out there on the wild shelterless beach, with the black
gale screaming over them and the rain pouring down. Opening my door,
I looked for a moment into the drenching blackness and heard a great
roaring of the sea.
The tide and the gale had ebbed together when I rose at five the next
morning, but there was still wind and a grey drizzle. At the foot of
big dune I found desolation. The tide had swept the beach. Not a nest
remained or a sign of a nest, and the birds had gone. Later that day,
just south of big dune, I saw bits of bluish-green eggshell in a lump
of fresh weed. Where the birds went to, I never knew. Probably to a
better place to try again.
Bless me! I thought, returning; what of the song sparrows?
Through the drenching grass, bare-legged, I hurried to the dusty-miller
bush. The sand had been moving during the night; it had crept along the
dunes, it had rained down with the drops of rain, and the bush was now
well embedded. Indeed, it was a bush no more, but a thicket of separate
stalks growing out of a deep, rain-soaked mound of sand. As I drew
close to it, I saw through the rain the prudent eye of Madam Sparrow
aglint in the leaves. The sand had risen to within an inch of her nest,
the leaves which concealed it were awry with wind and choked with
sand, but there sat the little bird, resolved and dutiful. She raised
her brood--how well she deserved to--and some time in July the whole
family moved out into the dunes.
I must now add a paragraph from my autumnal notes and tell of my last
sight of the great summer throng of terns. It was an unforgettable
experience. During August the birds thinned out, and as the month
drew to a close, whole days passed without a sight or sign of their
presence. By September 1st, I imagined that most of them had gone.
Then came the unexpected. On Saturday, September 3d, friends came down
the beach to see me, and at the close of their visit, as I opened the
Fo’castle door, I found that the air above the dunes was snowy with
young terns. The day had been mild, and the late afternoon light was
mild and rosy golden--the sun was an hour from his setting--and high in
space and golden light the myriads of birds drifted and whirled like
leaves. North and south we saw them for miles along the dunes. For
twenty minutes, perhaps, or half an hour, the swarming filled my sky,
and during all that time I did not hear a single bird utter a single
sound.
At the end of that period, withdrawing south and inland, the gathering
melted away.
It was really a very curious thing. Apparently some impulse from
heaven had suddenly seized upon the birds, entered into their feathered
breasts, and led them into the air above the dunes. Whence came that
spirit, whence its will, and how had it breathed its purpose into those
thousand hearts? The whole performance reminded me very much of a
swarming of bees. A migrational impulse, yes, and something more. The
birds were flying high, higher than I had ever seen terns go, and as
far as I could judge--or guess--the great majority of the fliers were
young birds of the year. It was a rapture, a glory of the young. And
this was the last of the terns.
[Illustration: _A Cape Cod_]
Late August, and day by day, I see more shore birds and see them
oftener. All summer long there have been sandpipers and ringnecks
on the beach, but earlier in the season the birds are elusive and
may disappear for days. The first great flocks to return from the
Northern breeding grounds arrived here about the middle of July. I
remember their coming. For four interminable days a strong and tireless
southwest wind had billowed across the lagoon and off to a smoky sea;
on the morning of the fifth day, just before sunrise, this wind had
died; then had come dullness and quiet, and, between nine and ten
o’clock, a breath of easterly air. All that fifth afternoon the beach
had been black with birds, most of them ringnecks or semipalmated
plovers. The long southwester had apparently dammed up a great
migrational stream. These first flocks were vagrant mobs. Walking to
Nauset between two and three o’clock, I must have put up between two
and three thousand birds. As I drew near, mob after mob after mob
crowded the air and sought feeding grounds ahead. The smaller autumnal
flocks had flown in psychic unity, rising and falling, wheeling and
alighting together; these mobs scattered and divided into wandering
companies.
Late August, and my wild ducks, having raised their families, are
returning by hundreds to the marsh. During May and June and early July,
when I wandered about this region in the night, I heard no sound from
the flats. Now, when I get out to signal to the first coast guardsman
coming south at half-past nine, I hear from the dark levels a sentinel
quack, a call. The marsh fills with life again; the great sun goes
south along green treetops and moorlands fruiting and burned brown.
The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and
sexual, becomes social in midsummer. Stirred by the vernal fire, a
group psychically dissolves, for every creature in a flock is intent
upon the use and the offering of his own awakened flesh. Even creatures
who are of the flocking or herding habit emerge as individuals. With
the rearing of the young, and their integration into the reëstablished
group, life becomes again a social rhythm. The body has been given and
sacrificially broken, its own gods and all gods obeyed.
[Illustration: _Late Summer on the Dunes_]
IV
The other day I saw a young swimmer in the surf. He was, I judged,
about twenty-two years old and a little less than six feet tall,
splendidly built, and as he stripped I saw that he must have been
swimming since the season began, for he was sunburned and brown.
Standing naked on the steep beach, his feet in the climbing seethe,
he gathered himself for a swimmer’s crouching spring, watched his
opportunity, and suddenly leaped headfirst through a long arc of air
into the wall of a towering and enormous wave. Again and again he
repeated his jest, emerging each time beyond the breaker with a stare
of salty eyes, a shake of the head, and a smile. It was all a beautiful
thing to see: the surf thundering across the great natural world, the
beautiful and compact body in its naked strength and symmetry, the
astounding plunge across the air, arms extended ahead, legs and feet
together, the emerging stroke of the flat hands, and the alternate
rhythms of the sunburned and powerful shoulders.
Watching this picture of a fine human being free for the moment of
everything save his own humanity and framed in a scene of nature, I
could not help musing on the mystery of the human body and of how
nothing can equal its rich and rhythmic beauty when it is beautiful or
approach its forlorn and pathetic ugliness when beauty has not been
mingled in or has withdrawn. Poor body, time and the long years were
the first tailors to teach you the merciful use of clothes! Though
some scold to-day because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are
not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful. All
my life it has given me pleasure to see beautiful human beings. To
see beautiful young men and women gives one a kind of reverence for
humanity (alas, of how few experiences may this be said), and surely
there are few moods of the spirit more worthy of our care than those in
which we reverence, even for a moment, our tragic and bewildered kind.
My swimmer having gone his way, out of a chance curiosity I picked the
top of a dune goldenrod, and found at the very bottom of a cocoon of
twisted leaves the embryo head of the late autumnal flower.
_Chapter X_
ORION RISES ON THE DUNES
So came August to its close, ending its last day with a night so
luminous and still that a mood came over me to sleep out on the open
beach under the stars. There are nights in summer when darkness and
ebbing tide quiet the universal wind, and this August night was full
of that quiet of absence, and the sky was clear. South of my house,
between the bold fan of a dune and the wall of a plateau, a sheltered
hollow opens seaward, and to this nook I went, shouldering my blankets
sailorwise. In the star-shine the hollow was darker than the immense
and solitary beach, and its floor was still pleasantly warm with the
overflow of day.
I fell asleep uneasily, and woke again as one wakes out-of-doors. The
vague walls about me breathed a pleasant smell of sand, there was
no sound, and the broken circle of grass above was as motionless as
something in a house. Waking again, hours afterward, I felt the air
grown colder and heard a little advancing noise of waves. It was still
night. Sleep gone and past recapture, I drew on my clothes and went to
the beach. In the luminous east, two great stars aslant were rising
clear of the exhalations of darkness gathered at the rim of night and
ocean--Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, the shoulders of Orion. Autumn had
come, and the Giant stood again at the horizon of day and the ebbing
year, his belt still hidden in the bank of cloud, his feet in the deeps
of space and the far surges of the sea.
[Illustration: _The Fo’castle_]
My year upon the beach had come full circle; it was time to close
my door. Seeing the great suns, I thought of the last time I marked
them in the spring, in the April west above the moors, dying into the
light and sinking. I saw them of old above the iron waves of black
December, sparkling afar. Now, once again, the Hunter rose to drive
summer south before him, once again autumn followed on his steps. I had
seen the ritual of the sun; I had shared the elemental world. Wraiths
of memories began to take shape. I saw the sleet of the great storm
slanting down again into the grass under the thin seepage of moon, the
blue-white spill of an immense billow on the outer bar, the swans in
the high October sky, the sunset madness and splendour of the year’s
terns over the dunes, the clouds of beach birds arriving, the eagle
solitary in the blue. And because I had known this outer and secret
world, and been able to live as I had lived, reverence and gratitude
greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else
aside, and space and silence an instant closed together over life. Then
time gathered again like a cloud, and presently the stars began to pale
over an ocean still dark with remembered night.
During the months that have passed since that September morning some
have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange
a year? I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that
the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great
and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow’s
morning will be as heroic as any of the world. _Creation is here and
now._ So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of
the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have
will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a
symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is
as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live
without reverence as it is without joy.
[Illustration: _Sunrise from Cape Cod_]
And what of Nature itself, you say--that callous and cruel engine,
red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you
think. As for “red in tooth and fang,” whenever I hear the phrase or
its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting
life from books. It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware
of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect
Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and
sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its
measurements of competing life--all this is its great marvel and has
an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for
all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain. As I write I think
of my beloved birds of the great beach, and of their beauty and their
zest of living. And if there are fears, know also that Nature has its
unexpected and unappreciated mercies.
Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know
that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature.
A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more
justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry
which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the
mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you
dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over
a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins,
she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless
tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth,
her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in
her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are
given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and
the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
THE END
Transcriber’s notes
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Small capitals are changed to all capitals.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up the paragraphs.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected
after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources. Except for those changes noted below,
all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have
been retained.
The following corrections have been applied to the text (before/after):
(p. xiv)
BRUNNICH’S ...
BRÜNNICH’S ...
(p. 24)
... instant or origin, ...
... instant of origin, ...
(facing p. 113)
Brunnich’s Murres at Nest ...
Brünnich’s Murres at Nest ...
(p. 122)
... swept--officers, quarters, ...
... swept--officers’ quarters, ...
(p. 161)
... This “alooofe” of the ...
... This “aloofe” of the ...
(p. 197)
... Lachnosterna arcuta ...
... Lachnosterna arcuata ...
(p. 214)
... I heard from the ...
... I hear from the ...
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