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.