[Illustration]
The
Great
Beach
Books by John Hay:
A PRIVATE HISTORY
THE RUN
NATURE’S YEAR
A SENSE OF NATURE (with Arline Strong)
THE GREAT BEACH
The
Great
Beach
JOHN HAY
ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
1963
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-18198
Copyright © 1963 by John Hay
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
To Conrad and Mary Aiken
Henry and Gertrude Kittredge
Foreword
I suppose that anyone writing another book about Cape Cod can be
convicted of temerity, in the face of such predecessors as the
three Henrys--Thoreau, Beston, and Kittredge--as well as Dr. Wyman
Richardson. However, each to his own eye. I write about the Cape
because of the circumstances of living there, long enough to have begun
to learn a little about it; also, the coast is long and the sea will
not stop with the outer beach. All Americans who not only love nature
but stand in awe of it will be more and more hard put to explain their
reasons, as we crowd our magnificent land and diminish it in proportion
to the size of our demands. In _The Great Beach_ are some of my reasons.
I am grateful to Dr. Alfred C. Redfield, Dr. John M. Zeigler, Mr.
Joseph Chace, Dr. Loren C. Petry, Dr. Howard L. Sanders, and Dr. Ransom
Somers for various assistance during the writing of this book, and hope
they will not have any serious objections to the way I have used such
information as they may have given me. This book also owes a great deal
to the discerning and useful criticisms made by Richard K. Winslow, of
Doubleday.
Contents
_Foreword_ vii
I--From a Distance 1
II--An Unimagined Frontier 8
III--The Resources of the Sea 18
IV--A Rhythmic Shore 26
V--Dune Country 35
VI--A Change in History 46
VII--Barren Grounds 56
VIII--A Landscape in Motion 63
IX--Who Owns the Beach? 76
X--Deer Week 87
XI--Impermanence Takes Its Stand 93
XII--The Depths of Sight 99
XIII--The Flight of Birds 107
XIV--The Marsh 116
XV--The Uses of Light 124
The
Great
Beach
I
From a Distance
The Pilgrims who reached Cape Cod in 1620 had heard of it before. It
got its name in 1602 and had been touched on by European seamen at
least a century before that, and so when the Pilgrims “... fell in with
that land which is called Cape Cod; the which being made and certainly
known to be it, they were not a little joyful.”
Their coming had taken a long time, and they had passed over “a tedious
and dreadful” sea; but as Bradford’s history relates it further: “...
they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or
refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to
repair to, to seek for succor.”
“And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of
that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruell
and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to
search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous
wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there
might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up
to ye top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country
to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save
upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in
respect of outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand
upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of
woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked
behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was
now as a main barrier and gulf to separate them from the civil parts of
the world.”
Now, nearly 350 years later, that lone land reaching out into the
mighty ocean seems to be full of the “solace and content with respect
to outward objects” which the Pilgrims lacked. Roads, gas stations,
shopping centers, and a continually increasing number of houses,
proclaim it as human territory, another populated home ground from
which we have to go far to be separated from civilization. The simple,
raw existence which the Pilgrims not only endured but anticipated has
been replaced by a world of goods, which is not to say that we do not
have to have a fortitude of our own, made inevitable, in great measure,
by the very abundance we have achieved.
The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general outline
as it is now, although the original woodland has been cut down, or
burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees, much of the topsoil
has eroded and blown away, and the shore line altered in the course
of natural change. Superficially at least, it has been tamed, and in
most areas the primal, unknown wildness is hard to imagine. The last
thing you would expect to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a
Cape Cod beach would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one,
wilderness being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the
effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both by
its vastness and the difference between water and air, could answer the
description, and also the sands that define its limits.
Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the tip of the
Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island is not undiscovered
country. Many men have walked it. Planes skim over it in no time at
all, and the beach buggies bruise it with impunity. Still, the marks we
make on it are all erased in time. The sea and sand insist on their
own art. The beach is in a continuous state of remaking and invites
discovery. It was first called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David
Thoreau. Otherwise it has been known for a long time as the Outer
Beach, the Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now
it forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park--in the process
of establishment--and is therefore not owned by individuals, or the
towns in which they reside, but by the people of the United States. It
is under national protection and possession at the same time, so how we
approach and treat its future is a very great responsibility, which is
appropriate enough.
The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to America
before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most travelers it
means the end of a highway, a place of summer sands. It is in fact one
end of a whole continent of roads, of communications, of the vast and
intricate business of human passage. In a sense it used to be the other
way around. With all the known parts of the civilized world behind
them, the Pilgrims found in this beach not an end but a beginning,
whatever it might entail, and that of course, is why they went there.
This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the “tedious
and dreadful” highway of the sea--city dwellers, road, rocket, car, and
plane makers that we are--to the extent that we too may find it again
for the first time. The beach, lying by the sea and sea invested, is
always ready for a new kind of attention in a new world. That is the
nature of the place. Cape Cod itself, now and ultimately, is at the
disposition of the sea rather than human enterprise.
The Cape is a narrow peninsula, a little terminal arm jutting out in to
the Atlantic, constructed of loose material left by the last glacier
some 20,000 years ago. Its upper part, starting beyond High Head at
Truro and forming the Provincetown hook, or hood, is of recent origin.
It lacks the cliffs that stand over the beach from a mile or so north
of Highland Light to as far as the Nauset Coast Guard Beach at Eastham,
and for the most part has a history of deposition and accretion rather
than removal. It was formed by storms, tides, and currents, piling
in sand and other materials from the shore to the south, over bars
and reefs of glacial debris. The sand is still packing up around Race
Point, as it is also adding to the shore south of Nauset to the tip end
of Monomoy Island, while storms take it away from other parts of the
shore line. Within living memory a large island called Billinsgate, on
which there was a lighthouse and at one time a “Try Yard” for whales,
disappeared under the surface of Cape Cod Bay. It now appears as a
shoal at low tide and is otherwise covered over by water, although the
rocky lighthouse foundations still show above the surface in all but
the highest tides. On the Bay side the shore line has been filled in in
some areas, while it has receded in others, revealing for example, the
bones of horses and cows in the bank at the head of a beach, which were
once presumably, some distance behind it. Many a cottage owner after
a storm has found his living-room floor with nothing below it but the
tide.
Over the centuries great changes have occurred in the nature and extent
of marshlands, inlets, ponds, estuaries, and beaches. No year, or
even month, goes by without some alteration in the shore line. These
changes, not always obvious, sometimes violent and immediate, are
not such as to threaten the physical existence of Cape Cod for many
thousands of years to come, but they are of the kind that accentuate
its close relationship to water and tides and weather. As the map
makers are well aware, it is not a static piece of land. It moves.
The trunk of the Cape starts out from the mainland and then that
slender curving arm juts up and out into the water with a kind of brave
assertion beyond the continental limits; but it is the shape and sweep
of waves and sands, of molding and at the same time of pulling away
that strikes you most about it, as if it were a conception to be made
or discarded, standing out in its trial. The whole physical earth, in
spite of its apparent constancies, its orbital speed, the speed of
light, the regularity of the tides, the fine, exact balances to life,
is subject to rhythmic change, or in a deeper sense, to re-creation.
From 20,000 feet up, Cape Cod looks very much as it does on topographic
maps, its heights and depths eliminated, a flat level land of sandy
margins and wide green patches emerging out of the sea. In fact,
with all its glacial lakes and ponds--between three and four hundred
in number--its streams, marshes, bays, coves, and inlets, it might
seem to consist as much of water as of earth. On a clear day at a
lower altitude, skirting or passing over the shore line, you can see
configurations of sand, the slopes and curves of the shoals, the white
swirls and scallops under water made by currents and tides. The sea
sparkles, and explodes with light where the sun strikes it directly.
The spilling waves make small white accents along the shore. Tilting
in the heights, you get a sense of mobility on a great scale. All the
close, pressing impressions of locality are replaced by the roving of
the waters, the islands of the mapped world floating there, the height
and weight and emptiness of the sky.
However far their ageless impunity may reach, the world’s argument
is that Cape Cod and its Outer Beach are under human guidance,
surveillance, and authority. Those who come there bring their own
distance with them. If we are not yet world-minded, we are world
engaged. This is not a cast-off, self-sufficient countryside any
longer, and it has lost most, if not all, of the look of a bleak,
cut-over, and yet habitable seaside land that it had in the nineteenth
century, when the inhabitants still depended on the sea for their
livelihood, when you could smell the fish and hear the sermons on its
shores.
An estimated 300,000 people visit the Cape during the summer, or even
more, depending on the tides of economy and change, but after they
have gone there are 80,000 year-round residents left, with more to be
expected in the future. So, in spite of its stretches of comparatively
uninhabited sands and its wooded areas, the Cape is caught up in the
human scheme of things, and we can hardly avoid looking at it with
modern eyes, for good or ill. We own it, and that is the way we are
inclined to see it, not for its sake but ours. All roads lead to a Cape
Cod beach, or to Los Angeles, or Yellowstone. Every place is invested
with human importunity, and the crowd will tell you where you are.
Drive down any of the great concrete highways of the nation in the
heat of the summer along with thousands, or millions, through a
landscape whose scale affected our ideas of size to begin with, and you
realize that Americans have an affinity for distance--which is also
a capacity for laying the distance bare. We have learned this from
our continent. We have learned how to exploit, turning the native,
active riches of a great land into passive objects of our will, and we
have taken a greatness from it for our own. While we have transformed
our surroundings, we ourselves have been transformed without being
altogether aware of the debt we owe.
Abstracted, in the summer months especially, to the terms of the
contemporary world, some of Cape Cod’s more crowded areas have a
familiar, continental look. They are covered with asphalt, cars,
motels, cheap housing, shops full of grotesque souvenirs with no
relation to the place they serve, and they amount, when you come right
down to it, to receiving grounds for power, made by a conquering
civilization. Will it be the same on the moon? The great scale is in
us, the effort and the risk of desolation.
The beach’s openness is nearly filled with bodies, lying everywhere,
or sitting, talking, absorbing the sun, or dashing suddenly into the
relatively cold water, shouting, jumping, and splashing there, and
then returning, flesh in warmth and radiance, performing the blessed
ritual of doing nothing.
This hot surface, this wide open brilliance of sand, water, and sky
is a summertime release for those in want. We claim it, and fill it
with human demands; and yet it keeps its distance, resisting our bland
assumption of authority.
Clouds like heaps of spun silk float up across the sky. The low waves
splash along the sands, very lightly to the ear. Surfcasting rods are
lodged in the sand, leaning out toward the water. Offshore, a white
tern rises fluttering after a dive into the water, and a herring gull,
large and deliberate by contrast, beats low over the surface. Behind
all the crowd and the voices, hanging over like the intense and heavy
sun, is a stillness, a suspension. Perhaps it is the soul of summer,
that gives a provision of relief for those in want; and if we wait and
watch there might be more to this beach and sea than what we came for.
Waiting, in fact, seems to be its essence, since it gives no answer to
what it is, being a wide, surface brightness, a tidal beat, a sounding
whose monumental depths are concealed, suggesting too, that we might
wait for it forever and know nothing.
II
An Unimagined Frontier
One afternoon in the middle of June I set off from Race Point at
Provincetown, carrying a pack and sleeping bag, with Nauset Light Beach
in Eastham, twenty-five miles away, as my destination, and my purpose
simply to be on the beach, to see it and feel it for whatever it turned
out to be, since most of my previous visits had been of the sporadic
hop, skip, and jump kind to which our automotivated lives seem to lead
us.
The summer turmoil was not yet in full voice but the barkers were there
on behalf of beach-buggy tours over the dunes, and a sight-seeing
plane flew by; cars drew up and droned away, and families staggered
up from the beach with their load of towels, shoes, bags, or portable
radios. The beach did not contain quite the great wealth of paper,
cans, bottles, and general garbage that it would later on, in July and
August, but one of the first things to catch my eye as I lunged down on
to the sands was an electric-light bulb floating in the water, a can of
shaving soap, the remains of a rubber doll, and a great scattering of
sliced onions--probably thrown off a fishing boat.
The air was dancing with heat. The sun seemed to have the power to
glare through all things. With the exception of a camper’s tent on the
upper part of the beach, and a few isolated gray shacks perched on
dune tops behind it, there was nothing ahead but the wide belt of sand
curving around one unseen corner after another with the flat easing
and stretching sea beside me. Two boys waved to me from where they were
perched high up on a dune, and I waved back.
Then I heard an insistent, protesting bird note behind me, and a piping
plover flew past. It was very pale, and sand colored, being a wild
personification of the place it lived in. It suddenly volplaned down
the slope of the beach ahead of me, fluttering, half disappearing in
holes made by human feet, side-winged, edged away, still fluttering,
in the direction of the shore line, and when it reached the water,
satisfied, evidently, that it had led me far enough, it flew back.
These birds nest on the beach above the high-tide line, and like a
number of other species, try to lead intruders away when they come too
close to their eggs and young.
With high, grating cries, terns flew over the beach and low over the
water, occasionally plummeting in after fish. Among the larger species,
principally common terns, there were some least terns--a tiny, dainty
version of the “sea swallow,” chasing each other back and forth. They
have the graceful, sharply defined bodies and deep wingbeat of the
other terns, but in their littleness and excitability they seem to show
a kind of baby anger.
Also there were tree swallows gathering and perching on the hot,
glittering sand, and on smooth gray driftwood just below the dunes. It
was a band of them, adults, and young hatched during the early spring,
chittering and shining with their brilliant blue-green backs and white
bellies.
It seemed to me that out of these birds--my unwilling or indifferent
companions--came a protest, the protest of a desert in its beauty, an
ancient sea land claiming its rarity, with these rare inhabitants, each
with its definition and assertion, each having the color and precision
of life and place, out of an unknown depth of devising.
Behind the beach at Provincetown and Truro are eight square miles of
dunes, making a great series of dips and pockets, innumerable smooth
scourings, hollows within wide hollows. Standing below their rims are
hills, mounds, and cones, chiseled by the wind, sometimes flattened
on the top like mesas. These dunes give an effect of motion, rolling,
dipping, roving, dropping down and curving up like sea surfaces
offshore. When I climbed the bank to see them I heard the clear,
accomplished notes of a song sparrow. There were banks of rugosa roses
in bloom, with white or pink flowers sending off a lovely scent, and
the dunes were patched with the new green of beach grass, bayberry, and
beach plum, many of the shrubs looking clipped and rounded, held down
by wind and salt spray. The purple and pink flowers of the beach pea,
with purselike petals, were in bloom too, contrasting with dusty miller
with leaf surfaces like felt, a soft, clear grayish-green. Down at the
bottom of the hollows the light and wind catching heads of bunch grass,
pinkish and brown, waved continually; and the open sandy slopes were
swept as by a free hand with curving lines and striations.
A mile or so at sea, over the serene flatness of the waters, a fishing
boat moved very slowly by. I started down the beach again, following
another swallow that was twisting and dipping in leafy flight along the
upper edge of the beach. On the tide line slippery green sea lettuce
began to glimmer as if it had an inner fire, reflecting the evening
sun. I stopped somewhere a mile or two north of Highland Light in
Truro, built a small fire of driftwood to heat up a can of food, and
watched a bar appearing above the water as the tide ebbed. Low white
waves conflicted and ran across a dome of sand, occasionally bursting
up like hidden geysers.
The terns were still crying and diving as the sun’s metal light,
slanting along the shore, began to turn a soft yellow, to spread and
bloom. They hurried back and forth, as if to make use of the time left
them, and fell sharply like stones into the shimmering road of light
that led across the water.
Where I live on the upper Cape, that part of it which lies between the
Cape Cod canal and Orleans, the land heads out directly to the sea,
toward the east from the continental west. Cape Cod Bay lies to the
north and Nantucket Sound to the south. The arm of the lower Cape turns
in the Orleans area and heads up on a north-south axis, the head of
it, or hand if you like, curving around so that the sandy barrens in
the Provincetown area are oriented in an east to west direction again.
I am used to looking toward Kansas to see the setting sun, and from
the curving shore line at Truro I had the illusion that it was setting
in the north and that when it rose the next morning it appeared to be
located not very far from where it set, a matter of ninety or a hundred
degrees. In fact it does set closer to the north at this time of year,
and along the flat ocean horizon this becomes more clear to the eye, as
well as its relative position at dawn and its arc during the day. On
the open beach in spring and summer you are not only at the sun’s mercy
in a real sense, but you are also under wider skies. In the comparative
isolation of the beach, which is convex, slanting steeply toward the
water, and therefore hides its distances, I felt reoriented, turned
out and around through no effort of my own, and faced in many possible
directions.
Shortly before sundown a beach buggy, curtains at its windows and a
dory attached, lumbered slowly down some preordained ruts in the sand,
and then a smaller one passed by at the top of the low dunes behind me.
Fishing poles were slung along the outside of both machines. It was
getting to be a good time to cast for striped bass.
I sat on the sands and listened to the sonorous heave and splash of
low waves. The sun, like a colossal red balloon filled with water, was
sinking in to the horizon. It swelled, flattened, and disappeared with
a final rapidity, leaving a foaming, fiery band behind it. I suddenly
heard the wild, trembling cry of a loon behind me, and then saw it fly
over, heading north. The wind grew cool, after a hot day when the light
shone on metallic, glittering slow waters, and sharp, pointed beach
grasses clicked together, while I watched the darkness falling around
me.
A small seaplane flew by at low altitude, parallel to the shore. A
sliver of a moon appeared and then a star; and then single lights began
to shine on the horizon, while from the direction of Highland Light an
arm of light shot up and swung around. A fishing boat passed slowly by
with a light at its masthead and two--port and starboard--at its stern.
A few night-flying moths fluttered near me. The sky began to be massive
with its stars. I thought of night’s legitimacies now appearing, the
natural claim of all these single lights on darkness, and then, making
my bed in a hollow just above the beach, I lowered down into infinity,
waking up at about one o’clock in the morning to the sound of shouting,
a strange direct interruption to the night. It was the loud implacable
voice of the human animal, something very wild in itself, filling the
emptiness.
“For Chrisake bring her higher up! I can’t have her dig in that way.”
The tide had come in and someone was having trouble maneuvering his
beach buggy along the thin strip of sand now available.
The light of dawn opened my eyes again before the sun showed red on
the horizon, and I first saw the tiny drops of dew on tips and stems
of beach grass that surrounded me. A sparrow sang, and then, somewhere
behind the dunes, a prairie warbler with sweet notes on an ascending
scale.
When I started walking again I caught sight of a young fox. Its fur
was still soft and woolly and its gait had a cub’s limpness where it
moved along the upper edge of the beach. I wished the young one well,
though I suspected it might have an uncomfortable life. In spite of
an excessive population of rabbits, and their role in keeping it down,
foxes have not been too highly regarded on the Cape. In recent years
they seem to have been a skinny and somewhat dilapidated bunch for the
most part, suffering from parasitic skin diseases, and ticks in season.
I once saw a fox out on an asphalt road sliding along on his chin and
side, shoving and dragging himself in such a frantic way that I began
to feel very itchy myself. I have heard them referred to in scornful
way as “spoilers,” fond of scavenging and rolling in dead meat. In
other words, they are smelly, diseased and, to add another epithet
“tricky,” not to be trusted.
Yet this cub exploring an early morning on the sands had a future,
however limited, and I remembered the lively trot of foxes when they
are in good health, and their intelligence and curiosity, and simply
their right to whatever special joys they might inherit.
I carried a pair of field glasses with me, along with the somewhat
thoughtlessly assembled equipment I wore on my back and which seemed
increasingly heavy as time went on. When not too conscious of my burden
I would use the glasses to bring an inland or offshore bird closer
to me. I noticed five eider ducks across the troughs of the waves, a
remnant of the thousands that winter off the Cape along with such other
sea birds as brant, Canada geese, scoters, mergansers, old squaws,
and various members of the auk family. I passed a dead gannet lying
on the sand. It had been badly oiled, reminding me of the hazards of
jettisoned tanker or freighter oil to all these water birds which land
on the sea to rest or feed.
There were a number of kingbirds on the dune rims, and they kept
dropping down over the beach in their special way, to hover with fast
wingbeat and flutter after flying insects. I heard the grating call of
redwings, indicating marshy areas inland of the beach, but the cliffs
above began to increase until they were 100 to 150 feet high or more,
and the sun was so fierce that I had little interest in trying to scale
them to see what was on the other side.
I plodded on, noticing very little after a while, my attention blunted,
reduced to seeing that one foot got in front of the other. The more
level upper parts of the beach provided fairly good walking, but the
sand was soft, and to relieve my aching muscles I would then angle
down to the water’s edge where it was firmer, and there I was obliged
to walk with one leg below the other because of the inclination of the
beach. So I would return to the upper beach again and push ahead. I
walked on, very hot and slow, seeing no one for miles until I came up
to a group of bathers below a road and parking lot giving access to the
beach, of the kind that are scattered along its reaches; and there I
refilled my canteen at a cottage and went on.
I found that if I rested too long during this hike I had little desire
to go on again, so I confined myself to an army “break” of ten minutes
every hour. Renewed walking unlimbered me a little and the wind off the
water cooled my sweating skin. I listened to the sound of the waves.
In addition to their rhythmic plunge and splash, their breathing, they
clashed occasionally with a sound like the breaking of heavy glass, the
falling of timber, or a load of bricks.
I passed what was left of two shipwrecks during the day, a reminder of
the dangers that still face ships along this coast with its fogs, its
shifting winds, its storms, the hidden, treacherous offshore bars. The
sands often reveal the timbers of old ships. One day their ribs, sodden
and dark, barnacle encrusted, may reach up out of oblivion, and not
long after that the water buries them under tons of sand. From them a
local history calls out for recognition. Thousands of ships over three
centuries wrecked on shoals, engulfed by violent seas, men with the
dark of doom in them, to drown or to survive, and only a few timbers
left to declare the ultimate dangers and their terror.
I was not in Death Valley, or on a raft at sea. My walk was not
unusually long, and I could leave the beach if I had to, but the
enormity of the area filled me more and more. It had so much in it that
was without recourse. Its emptiness, the great tidal range beyond it
and through it, the raw heartbeat of the waves, the implacable sun,
established the kind of isolation and helplessness in me which the
commerce and community of our lives tries so hard to disguise. Even the
birds, I began to think, were more secure than I. They had their strong
bright threads of cognizance to the areas they came to, the water, the
sands, the marsh. They were fixed in entity and grace, eating what was
theirs by evolution to be eaten, using land and air in the ways that
had come to them, knowing this place and all places like it in terms of
its bounds and boundlessness, meeting its naked eye in the ways they
had been sent to do.
I started off in the morning admiring the brilliance of the sun, the
small shadows from the dunes and across the beach, through driftwood,
isolated beach plants and tidal wrack, with the wide flooding of light
ahead and the variation in reflected light across the sea. I felt the
sea moving quietly beside me. The waves heaved and sighed and spray was
tossed lightly above the sand. Everything was continuous, untroubled,
and deliberate; but as the day wore on the sun became my enemy, and
I had very little rage or resource in me to fight it with. I was not
fitted to environmental stability, like a bird, or fox or fish. I found
myself in an area of whose reaches I had never been wholly aware, and
in me there was no mastery. The sun was not only hostile. It was an
ultimate, an impossibility; and the waters beside me began to deepen
from their pleasant daytime sparkle and freshness into an incalculable
realm which I had hardly entered. I was touching on an unimagined
frontier.
I spent my second night on the beach a few miles from Nauset Light
where I left it the following morning. It was in the South Wellfleet
area, and as I started to sleep on the sand a little above the
high-tide line, I remembered that this was about the same place where
a fishing boat had been wrecked two years before and two men drowned.
I had seen the boat, with its cargo of fish, and some of the men’s
clothing strewn along the shore, and I had heard a little about the
depths of their ordeal. Their story haunted me; and then I began to
feel that I might be caught by the tide while I was asleep. There were
only about twelve feet between the bottom of a steep cliff and the
high-tide line. I would soon be lying on a narrow shelf at the sea’s
edge. So as the vague thought of being engulfed began to invade me,
I took up my pack and sleeping bag again, retraced my steps down the
beach, and found a way to the top of the cliff, where I spent the night
in another hollow.
The light of dawn, lifting quickly out of the sea, flooding into the
range of low-lying land, woke me up again, and it signaled to the
birds, who started singing in all the thickets and heath around me with
a sweet, high, shrill intensity, a kind of automatic worship; and after
a while they quieted down again.
Little dirt roads dropped back from headlands through green slopes
covered with bearberry and patches of yellow-flowered Hudsonia, or
“poverty grass,” and there were hollows dipping back inland, and woods
of stunted pitch pine. From the top of the cliff I watched the sun
starting to send light running across the blue table of the sea, making
it glitter and move. The intensity of light and heat began to grow
steadily as I walked down the beach again for the last stretch toward
Nauset.
The beach is not so very far from where I live, or for that matter
where anyone lives on the Cape. It is a few miles down the road, beyond
the trees; and yet when I came back from my walk I felt as if I had
been at enormous remove from my surroundings, caught out where I might
have feared to be. The long line of sand and surf, the intensity of the
sun, the cover of stars had come close enough to put me in council with
that which had no answers. I was in awe of nature; and I understood
that the sun and sea could be our implacable enemies. It was in this
context that I saw our human world as subject to a stature that it
never made.
III
The Resources of the Sea
Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color, shadows, sound,
substance, novelty in great detail, invade the smallest areas. One
flower may attract many species of insects, brilliantly patterned
and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating, gathering pollen, in
any number of arresting ways, and the growth of plants around you,
the shape of leaves, the general stir of things comes running like a
carnival.
On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling, moving
slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of the green
surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead; the wind
flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an occasional dead skate
or dogfish comes to your attention as you walk on. A black crow pecks
at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling flits by. You notice a finger sponge
attached to a large mussel or a sea scallop, broken loose and washed
in from offshore beds, and that seems to be all, in a relatively empty
world; but between these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a
bird or bird track, a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space.
The sea and its shores are still not caught, still relatively immune to
human claims. Fill them with knowledge and with crowds and they still
escape us, outrunning us like the sunlight on the water. Specifically,
this age which is able to measure everything but mystery, might tell
you just how capacious the oceans are. They comprise two thirds of the
earth’s surface; they have a close relationship to the atmosphere and
are in large measure responsible for our weather; and we know, with the
assurance of conquerors, that if all else fails we may be able to save
the human race from dying of thirst and starvation by extracting water
and food from them, providing our atomic wastes do not prohibit it. We
are also learning how to mine the ocean floors for their minerals, how
to harness the tides, and how to use their depths for concealment.
Oceanography is one of the great modern sciences and it has revealed
mountains, rifts, plains, and canyons on a scale that would astonish us
if we saw them on earth, as it has also brought us more knowledge of
marine animals at all depths. It has made great contributions to the
restless modern mind. How can we look at the sea without at some time
thinking of our earth’s submerged geology, gigantic, uneroded by wind,
sun, or rain, in calm waters inhabited by strange aquatic lives?
Strange is still the word for them. No amount of assessment of the
sea’s contents quite translates them for us. What, for example, is a
fish? What is that flat creature the skate lying there on the sand,
with its tough hide and the small slit of a mouth on the same side as
its belly?
There is an aquarium at Woods Hole with a collection of many of the
kinds of fish that inhabit the waters off Cape Cod. They seem foreign,
weird, almost unexampled when you see them in their captured state. I
saw a woman standing in front of one of the windows looking at some
toadfish, little fat animals with great mouths, squat, with round-edged
fleshy fins that gave the appearance of warts and knobs, expertly
camouflaged in varied patterns so that they can at once sink in and
become a part of the bottom: “Oh!” she cried. “Horrible!”
All the others there become more than the term “fish” when you see
them suspended behind glass, floating in their own world of water,
strangers in the perfection of their own remoteness. Their dull jaws
open and close as they breathe. Their filmy, diaphanous fins wave
lightly and loosely. Their flicking eyes pass you by, with a kind of
self-enclosed abstractness, a stiffness, as if they had not seen you
at all, and no doubt the blurred human form means very little to them.
The glass separates the world of water from the world of air. Their
bodies curve deliberately and slowly, and then suddenly switch into an
unsuspected quickness, while we tourists shove and crowd and gawk from
our unbridgeable distance.
At other windows the rays and skates, with fins fused to bodies like
wafers, wave through the water. Bottom fish suddenly disappear in
puffs of sand. The lean, long sand shark, primitive, tough, swims with
infinite smoothness back and forth, an expression of coldness, an
incarnate simplicity.
They are all unknown, not of our race, and giving the unknown the old
credit of fear, they _are_ horrible, monsters in their realm, with
intercommunications, receptions, that we are unable to touch.
An aquarium is a luxury. Most of the fish we see are dead, a boatload
of wet, cold, slippery white and gray flounder, cod, or haddock just
come into port, or dying, like a striped bass caught by a fisherman
casting off the beach--flipping on the sands with all its cool
brightness still alive, a slippery, lucent sea green. The color loss is
quick as a fish dies, leaving the rippling shades of its great medium
behind.
The world of ocean color comes inland in the spring with the alewives
that migrate from salt water up inlets, streams, and estuaries on both
sides of Cape Cod. They are silver, like the sea they come from, with
backs of gray green, and in a shallow stream they seem to reflect the
colors of the season, having in fact the ability to change the pigment
in their skin so as to blend with their surroundings. They mouth the
water and stare forward with their big eyes, running upstream with the
unswerving directness of their need to reproduce--which gives us at
least one reassuring alliance with them!--and being of a fairly large
size compared with most fresh-water fish, they have a look of marine
capacities, a fast-schooling fish made for water masses, great sweeping
currents, and tides.
Even the alewives, which migrate by the hundred thousands, are only
suggestive of the far running but hidden nature of the oceanic depths.
Most of us, failing a glass-bottom boat or a glass-sided submarine,
have to stand on the beach and take in the vast motions of the sea
surface with only the vaguest idea of what is happening below.
Sometimes it looks like a bowl of dazzling, dashing light, and at
others a gray, monotonous range under a raw wind with white-groined
waves constantly moving across its distances. The sea takes all the
light and air, the storms, clouds, moon, and stars, in endless, various
reflections over its watery reaches, with a monumental acceptance.
Are there not a thousand ways to describe the sea which in their sum
amount to inscrutability? How can you translate its abundance even by
counting so many thousands of protozoa in a drop of water? Who can
fathom the range of appetite it contains, the ferocity of the life its
amplitude allows?
One day in early fall I traveled from the Cape with a party of people
in a chartered boat, heading for an area some ten or fifteen miles
out. The offshore breezes coasted over smooth, sun-bright waters that
carried some of the land’s litter with them, sticks, leaves, petals,
and even butterflies. At one point a dragonfly skimmed past us; and
silky seeds of milkweed and dandelions went sailing and twisting by to
land eventually where they could never take root. Farther out, oceanic
birds like jaegers, shearwaters, and phalaropes began to appear. When
we were plowing out across the open ocean with its short-crested waves
we came upon a broad path of waters which were foaming and flashing
and leaping, a white windrow of fish flipping violently above the
surface, lasting perhaps a mile or more. Evidently we had come upon an
area that was rich in plankton, attracting many small fish, attacked in
turn by larger ones. What we were seeing was part of the classic food
chain that leads, in terms of size, from microscopic plants and animals
to whales. The sea was splitting its sides with riches, and a kind of
savagery that most of us hardly dare admit, although as a race we are
not so far removed from it ourselves.
As the glass on the aquarium window separates the spectator from the
world of the fish, so the long nearly unbroken line of the Outer Beach
stands between us and the vast, alien reaches of the North Atlantic.
It is not _our_ natural environment, and so we can legitimately call
it treacherous, sullen, cold, and grim, and even in its hours of
brilliance and warmth it seems to lead us off in no terms we can call
familiar. It is full of fickle changes, fogs, and storms, unpredictable
shifts in mood. We are still unable to set forth on the open ocean
without the skill of a sailor or the protection that a technical
civilization affords us.
Yet our neighbor the sea provides the amplitude and even, being still
relatively unaffected by human ownership, the regenerative power of
what is both dangerous and undiscovered in the universe. All its shores
are washed by a capacity. If it is constant in peril for us, and for
its own voracious inhabitants, it is also beneficent as a medium
for life. Those tidal rhythms, watery colors, and reflections are
translated into living organisms whose uncounted numbers are assured by
their vast and relatively temperate home.
We only see a small part of those numbers, at least consciously,
since sea water may be swarming with invisible life, but during
spring, summer, and early fall, the sea’s bounty often reveals itself.
Countless moon jellies for example, pulse through waters inland of the
sea during the springtime or in Cape Cod Bay, where I have seen comb
jellies in great profusion during late summer. Watching them, it is
not only their primitive, brainless nature, or their numbers, that has
seemed incredible to me, but their approximation to their environment.
It has been estimated that jellyfish are 95 per cent water. Dried out,
they resolve into almost nothing. How could such evanescent creatures
be predators, killing and ingesting living organisms? When you see such
transparent flower-animals it is even difficult to believe that they
have the nerves and muscles to be able to pulse through the water;
but their chemical balance, their physical responses have a direct
relationship with the sea water, whose salts are in them. Salt water is
a liquid medium for life, a blood that circulates through the creatures
of the sea. So close is the association of the sea and its lives,
though each species has its unique kind of locomotion, respiration,
aggression, its own way of feeding and being food, joining in the
employment of energy, that it is almost tempting to inquire whether the
sea does not have an organic nature of its own. I will not get very far
by suggesting that a medium and environment “knows” anything beyond
what all nature knows, but this primal “mother” great provider and
provided, has its own deep rights in the realm of being.
In summer and into fall you can see thousands of small fish schooling
in the shallow tidal edges of Cape Cod Bay, moving slowly until
approached, when those closest to you swing forward, or run, rush,
and circle as need be, the whole crowd sometimes escaping with a
simultaneous, sideward sweep. They are all spontaneity, life on the
run, endowed with limited attributes from the point of a “higher
animal” but of strict extravagance in form and action, born of ocean
waters. They suggest the incomparable, swimming out of range.
There is something of this suggestion in many specific aspects of
animal, or even plant, life in the sea. In a sense their fascination
lies in what has not yet been discovered about them, but just as much,
from the average human point of view, in the way their actions are
those of the sea rather than the land to which we are accustomed. In
fact all of us are obliged to make surface discoveries a great deal
of the time, even with respect to what is around us, or even inside
us, like fishermen following the seasonal movement of fish, sometimes
predictable but often hidden and unreliable, or students who chase
after migratory birds in planes. So the sight of grunions wiggling in
California sands, depositing and fertilizing their eggs, bound to a
complex interrelationship of spring tides and the moon, still excites
our curiosity, being a phenomenon that is not fully understood, taking
place in a proximate but different world.
Migrant fish, like the alewives, may return not only during the same
season each year but very close to the same day as a run of the year
before. Perhaps the cycles involving sea and climate average out very
accurately, but it is too complex a phenomenon to say that it goes like
clockwork. Tides are measurable but constantly changing in time and
amplitude. Environmental conditions in sea water are various and the
seas coordinate relationship to the atmosphere is an elaborate one.
Rhythmic response in an organism may be simple and spontaneous--like a
fucus, or rockweed, only ready to spawn after a period of exposure at
low tide--and it will have its causes, but the causes themselves are
greatly complex in nature.
The sea’s discovery will not be made by factory ships that process
their huge catches of fish, by killer submarines chasing after whales,
or by mining equipment. We can physically affect its life with our
one-sided power, but it will remain protean and indifferent and we will
go on imagining our conquest of it.
On this overdiscovered and overexploited earth the sea remains a
wilderness, a resource not of goods but of what is rich and wild. That
which we have been unable to use up, or harry to extinction, has
the power to renew. The sea is a positive mystery. I hear the surf’s
continual breathing in the distance; I see the stars that literally
cover the sky over the beach on a winter’s night like white animal
plankton in the spring waters; and I realize that I know no more about
them than I know about myself. The depths are still ahead, with the
fear and the temptation that the undiscovered arouses in us.
All of us are drawn to the sea’s edge as to a fire. Its vast reaches
roll and heave in the light. There is an incalculable weight of waters
withheld just beyond us, a roaming kept in check. What an exalting
thing it is to see those waters dancing with silver castings from the
moon! Even in our careless, civilized state, drinking beer, watching
driftwood burn, or absorbing the sun and one another, in no way
obligated to the kind of cold suffering or exile which sea and seashore
have meant to men in the past, there is something in us that wants this
brilliance, this barren waste.
The sheeted surfaces blown over by all winds rove on with their freight
of light during the day, constantly changing, sometimes black, purple,
and gray under pigeon-silver skies, with hazy, soft horizons, sometimes
silver scudding with gold, or blue, green, and white in all shades; and
always the tidal balance, the surf’s fall and drag at the sand’s edge,
whatever the season.
During the autumn and winter months the cliffs hang their shadows over
the beach very early in the afternoon, cold darkness moving toward an
iridescent surf that reflects the last light of the sun. The sunset
shows curly salmon and fiery orange streaks on the other side of the
vast flat table that often runs with sea ducks at this time of year;
and then, singly, the stars begin to shoot up their spears and arrows,
alignments for eternal navigation.
IV
A Rhythmic Shore
On the beach it might be said that there is no such thing as decline
and decay, although in a physical sense drastic change is obvious,
from year to year and even from minute to minute. In a northern forest
where the trees have been left to grow for many years, I have sensed
the presence of a great establishment, something silent and absolutely
personal, a society of trees with its own strong relationship to the
sun, to the roaring winter winds and snows, to dry years and wet,
using the earth-bound materials of growth, decay, and old age as
provisions for indefinite residence. These tree communities culminate
in “climax” formations, dominated by particular varieties of trees such
as maple and beech, or spruce and fir, to progress no further until
some great interference, such as a lumbering operation, or climatic
change--an increase or decrease in average temperatures over a period
of years--may start a community succession all over again.