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.