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.