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_