I
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of
nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk,
gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear,
rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the
age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies,
now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights,
we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the
sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.
Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast
serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having
made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which
explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night
for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the
answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have
not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who
have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial
night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other
half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or
trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfilment, it is rest. Thin clouds
float in these heavens, islands of obscurity in a splendour of space
and stars: the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean; the beach resolves
itself into a unity of form, its summer lagoons, its slopes and uplands
merging; against the western sky and the falling bow of sun rise the
silent and superb undulations of the dunes.
My nights are at their darkest when a dense fog streams in from the sea
under a black, unbroken floor of cloud. Such nights are rare, but are
most to be expected when fog gathers off the coast in early summer;
this last Wednesday night was the darkest I have known. Between ten
o’clock and two in the morning three vessels stranded on the outer
beach--a fisherman, a four-masted schooner, and a beam trawler. The
fisherman and the schooner have been towed off, but the trawler, they
say, is still ashore.
I went down to the beach that night just after ten o’clock. So utterly
black, pitch dark it was, and so thick with moisture and trailing
showers, that there was no sign whatever of the beam of Nauset; the sea
was only a sound, and when I reached the edge of the surf the dunes
themselves had disappeared behind. I stood as isolate in that immensity
of rain and night as I might have stood in interplanetary space. The
sea was troubled and noisy, and when I opened the darkness with an
outlined cone of light from my electric torch I saw that the waves
were washing up green coils of sea grass, all coldly wet and bright
in the motionless and unnatural radiance. Far off a single ship was
groaning its way along the shoals. The fog was compact of the finest
moisture; passing by, it spun itself into my lens of light like a kind
of strange, aërial, and liquid silk. Effin Chalke, the new coast guard,
passed me going north, and told me that he had had news at the halfway
house of the schooner at Cahoon’s.
It was dark, pitch dark to my eye, yet complete darkness, I imagine, is
exceedingly rare, perhaps unknown in outer nature. The nearest natural
approximation to it is probably the gloom of forest country buried in
night and cloud. Dark as the night was here, there was still light on
the surface of the planet. Standing on the shelving beach, with the
surf breaking at my feet, I could see the endless wild uprush, slide,
and withdrawal of the sea’s white rim of foam. The men at Nauset tell
me that on such nights they follow along this vague crawl of whiteness,
trusting to habit and a sixth sense to warn them of their approach to
the halfway house.
Animals descend by starlight to the beach. North, beyond the dunes,
muskrats forsake the cliff and nose about in the driftwood and weed,
leaving intricate trails and figure eights to be obliterated by the
day; the lesser folk--the mice, the occasional small sand-coloured
toads, the burrowing moles--keep to the upper beach and leave their
tiny footprints under the overhanging wall. In autumn skunks, beset by
a shrinking larder, go beach combing early in the night. The animal
is by preference a clean feeder and turns up his nose at rankness. I
almost stepped on a big fellow one night as I was walking north to meet
the first man south from Nauset. There was a scamper, and the creature
ran up the beach from under my feet; alarmed he certainly was, yet was
he contained and continent. Deer are frequently seen, especially north
of the light. I find their tracks upon the summer dunes.
Years ago, while camping on this beach north of Nauset, I went for
a stroll along the top of the cliff at break of dawn. Though the
path followed close enough along the edge, the beach below was often
hidden, and I looked directly from the height to the flush of sunrise
at sea. Presently the path, turning, approached the brink of the earth
precipice, and on the beach below, in the cool, wet rosiness of dawn,
I saw three deer playing. They frolicked, rose on their hind legs,
scampered off, and returned again, and were merry. Just before sunrise
they trotted off north together down the beach toward a hollow in the
cliff and the path that climbs it.
Occasionally a sea creature visits the shore at night. Lone coast
guardsmen, trudging the sand at some deserted hour, have been startled
by seals. One man fell flat on a creature’s back, and it drew away from
under him, flippering toward the sea, with a sound “halfway between
a squeal and a bark.” I myself once had rather a start. It was long
after sundown, the light dying and uncertain, and I was walking home
on the top level of the beach and close along the slope descending to
the ebbing tide. A little more than halfway to the Fo’castle a huge
unexpected something suddenly writhed horribly in the darkness under my
bare foot. I had stepped on a skate left stranded by some recent crest
of surf, and my weight had momentarily annoyed it back to life.
[Illustration: _The Highland Light_]
Facing north, the beam of Nauset becomes part of the dune night. As
I walk toward it, I see the lantern, now as a star of light which
waxes and wanes three mathematic times, now as a lovely pale flare
of light behind the rounded summits of the dunes. The changes in the
atmosphere change the colour of the beam; it is now whitish, now flame
golden, now golden red; it changes its form as well, from a star to a
blare of light, from a blare of light to a cone of radiance sweeping a
circumference of fog. To the west of Nauset I often see the apocalyptic
flash of the great light at the Highland reflected on the clouds or
even on the moisture in the starlit air, and, seeing it, I often think
of the pleasant hours I have spent there when George and Mary Smith
were at the light and I had the good fortune to visit as their guest.
Instead of going to sleep in the room under the eaves, I would lie
awake, looking out of a window to the great spokes of light revolving
as solemnly as a part of the universe.
All night long the lights of coastwise vessels pass at sea, green
lights going south, red lights moving north. Fishing schooners and
flounder draggers anchor two or three miles out, and keep a bright
riding light burning on the mast. I see them come to anchor at sundown,
but I rarely see them go, for they are off at dawn. When busy at
night, these fishermen illumine their decks with a scatter of oil
flares. From shore, the ships might be thought afire. I have watched
the scene through a night glass. I could see no smoke, only the waving
flares, the reddish radiance on sail and rigging, an edge of reflection
overside, and the enormous night and sea beyond.
One July night, as I returned at three o’clock from an expedition
north, the whole night, in one strange, burning instant, turned into
a phantom day. I stopped and, questioning, stared about. An enormous
meteor, the largest I have ever seen, was consuming itself in an
effulgence of light west of the zenith. Beach and dune and ocean
appeared out of nothing, shadowless and motionless, a landscape whose
every tremor and vibration were stilled, a landscape in a dream.
The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony
with its spirit and mood--with its little, dry noise of sand forever
moving, with its solemn, overspilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity
of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high
heavens--and that sound the piping of a bird. As I walk the beach in
early summer my solitary coming disturbs it on its nest, and it flies
away, troubled, invisible, piping its sweet, plaintive cry. The bird I
write of is the piping plover, _Charadrius melodus_, sometimes called
the beach plover or the mourning bird. Its note is a whistled syllable,
the loveliest musical note, I think, sounded by any North Atlantic bird.
Now that summer is here I often cook myself a camp supper on the beach.
Beyond the crackling, salt-yellow driftwood flame, over the pyramid of
barrel staves, broken boards, and old sticks all atwist with climbing
fire, the unseen ocean thunders and booms, the breaker sounding hollow
as it falls. The wall of the sand cliff behind, with its rim of grass
and withering roots, its sandy crumblings and erosions, stands gilded
with flame; wind cries over it; a covey of sandpipers pass between the
ocean and the fire. There are stars, and to the south Scorpio hangs
curving down the sky with ringed Saturn shining in his claw.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for,
with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes
as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the
adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with
man--it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past;
at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day,
rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens
for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness
of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment
of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in
its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons
across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant
be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of
emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and
experience.