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.”