the other hand they have been measured at heights between sixty and
eighty feet, and at times dune ridges may have reached elevations up
to 100 feet. Also, their scale is such, leading from one open face to
another, that human figures climbing a steep side across an intervening
slope of no great distance seem tiny. The walls keep looming up and
the valleys dip between, so that the whole landscape is full of a wide
motion.
In all this bare largesse of sand, the texture is clean and clear.
Shadows move over it like loving hands. The wind’s touch in turn has
made grooves, grains, and ribs on the surface. In some areas the black
mineral magnetite joins with garnet to make blackish-purple ripples
in the sand, or irregular masses, or little brushstroke feathers and
clouds. Everything shows clearly, from human footprints and the long
ruts made by beach buggies, to mice or rabbit tracks. And I suppose
that in the summer--if you pounce in time--you can see insects leaving
their traces, like dune grasshoppers, colored and grained like sand,
or a spider that buries down in the sand, thus avoiding extreme
temperatures; or even a toad. I once found a Fowler’s toad quite far
out on the beach where it must have wandered away from the dunes.
[Illustration]
A stick that drops down from one of those shrubs so besieged by wind
and sand waggles down a dune making a fine tracery, or what looks like
a stamping of birds when it is lodged in one place and blown back and
forth. An oak leaf merely blown for a slight distance down the sand
makes a track, with all its lobe ends imprinted like a long tassel or
thin strands of separate strings. Except for the beach-buggy tracks,
that follow one route fairly consistently, and may be visible for
months at a time, and the beach grasses, continually renewing their
precise circles on the sand, most of these tracks soon disappear.
There is a constant moving of sand particles, a sweeping over by the
wind. The open dunes are trackless areas where tracks take on great
significance.
During winter days when the northwest wind blows with fury along the
exposed shores of the Cape, it may be too uncomfortable to stay in
the dunes for any length of time. You gasp in the polar air and hide
your face from the stinging sand. Each sand grain is lifted and sent
with the speed of a projectile along the surface of the dunes. Given a
little shelter from which to watch you could see the dunes change shape
in an afternoon, or an hour. It is on days like this that they migrate
like waves, with long slopes on their upwind sides, steep ones on their
lee.
On their bright and stable days, the long dune shoulders at the top of
each rise tilt you up, body and vision, into the dizzy heights of a
sky graded from cobalt to indigo, the way the scale of things in the
landscape goes from sand grains to rocking seas without distraction.
The dunes almost seem to ask for a long-distance running from both men
and clouds. They are a place of flying, falling, and tumbling, shaping
the motion of what comes to them, asking for an approach that soars.
Also, they have their secrets, their ground-level associations. In
October the beach-grass heads are loaded with yellow seeds. Where
the plants are clumped together, providing protection from the wind,
nests of seed gather on the leeward side, visited by birds that leave
many little tracks and sometimes a feather or two. Mice also leave
their dimpled trails, circling around the beach grass, traveling
across bare sand for short distances before they disappear. There is
a special delicacy in the visits of birds and mice. I had the fancy,
following these small trails, of watching mice under the moon, with all
their scuttling, nibbling, and investigating, so that some of their
excitement, their fidgety life dance might be translated for me. I even
thought it might help bring me down from a world too heavy with size to
a neater reality.
Startled by a little crash of twigs and leaves, I saw a rabbit darting
up a dune slope. It bobbed to the top and stayed motionless for a few
seconds in a bayberry thicket until I followed it to find what might
be the meeting place of a whole tribe of rabbits, if I could judge by
the amount of tracks and pellets of dung there were, all on the rim of
a small bowl held together by the bayberries with a small scrub oak
coming up from its base. These semiprotected hollows are quite typical
of the dunes. There are also small woods of pitch pines, thickly
carpeted with needles, where the tree roots can get some moisture
at the bottom of a valley between the dunes. Scrub-sized oak, pine,
sometimes bayberry, beach plum, or wild cherry, hold down many hollows,
with the help of beach grass on the shoulders around them.
The beach grass has had much deserved honor heaped upon it, in the
proportion that it is able to live with the tons of sand that are
also heaped upon it. It is perfectly adapted to being covered over by
sand since it sends up stems which in turn root themselves, and then
grows on, letting the old roots die. As a sand hill builds up, the
beach grass is able to maintain itself in this fashion without being
buried and to hold down the sand with a network of roots and stalks.
It stabilizes such hills until the point where the wind may sweep
so constantly around them as to expose them and cut away the sand,
leaving the grass in splendid isolation with its outer roots hanging in
mid-air. So beach grass and sand have a special collaboration which man
does his best to encourage, especially after he has made rescue work
necessary.
The sand masses have great weight and volume and are stable in
themselves but it is their surfaces that flow and shift with the wind,
so that the whole region is remolded over periods of time. It is
fascinating to sit in a valley between the dunes and reconstruct their
curves, seeing how the sand has been swept down one side and blown up
another, sent over a hill to make a new one on the other side, held for
a long time and then broken loose to change its residence, motion, and
stability joining to make those noble forms.
The dunes may threaten man’s house, or road, or wood lot in immediate
terms, but in themselves they are like distant monuments dedicated
to natural force, perfect, calm, threatening or joining all that
which lies ahead of them with equanimity. Time and its lapses seem
immaterial, more so than the wind that shifts them. Now, or in years
to come, a migrating dune will kill off a tree or a shrub and what
does it matter? Can I care about what happens to one of a thousand
scrub pines? I think not; but perhaps I can care about the event in the
whole sequence of growth, change, and reshaping. Slow and statuesque,
the dunes under the great air are another balance in process, like the
beach beyond them.
I think of some of the trees in the dunes and their struggle with the
winds and the encroaching sands, and I am unable to shed tears over
something that is unable to cry, but sometimes the word desperation
comes to me, when I see evidence of their long efforts to hold on. You
will see a dying cherry tree that has sent shoot after shoot, trunk
after trunk, all over the side of a dune or sand hill that is being
worn away, and they are full of the contortions of struggle--arrested,
like the statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling with the snakes,
but real enough. Or another hummock or small dune, where a beach plum
or bayberry may not have enough purchase left, has a mass of twisted
branches and twigs strewn down its sides, the wreckage of a genuine
defeat.
On the north edge of Provincetown the migrant dunes skirt the woods
and thickets on their borders like icebergs, clean-rounded, immense
shoulders of satiny sand slipping by trees: shad, bayberry, beach plum,
red maple, oak, or pine. Because of the stable nature of sand, except
when it is blown, they stay where they are, great suspended masses,
their progress only measured at intervals, leaving evidence of trees
that are buried, or about to be buried, behind them.
I am indebted to Dr. Loren C. Petry for pointing out to me that some
trees are able to grow in the same way as beach grass, while they are
being covered with sand. Pines will die when they are only partially
buried, but this is not true, for example, of cottonwoods whose
branches send down roots soon after they are buried, and so maintain
their water and mineral supply. He has seen fifty-foot specimens of
this tree--along the southeast side of Lake Michigan--of which some
forty feet were buried, with the remaining ten feet growing vigorously.
The trees in the wooded areas bordering the dunes, particularly the
pines, look as if they were covered with a soft whitish powder. It
is caused by the very fine sand grains dusted over their leaves and
needles by the wind, and during the winter this can be seen for miles
down the Cape, well south of High Head.
Almost all the trees here have a temporary existence, holding on as
well as they can, fighting for light, food, and moisture. Even if
there used to be more woodland than there is now--and the evidence is
good--there is nothing about this narrow area, stretching into the sea,
made by the sea in collaboration with the wind, that looks settled. The
word stabilized can be applied to a dune and in a sense to anything
that remains rooted, anchored, or in place for a certain length of
time, but in this case the word balance might be better. Motion, either
latent or in view, is in equilibrium throughout this rare place, half
desert, occasionally wooded, full of gardenlike patches of low growth
standing out in their variety of color and shade, seeming to move like
the clouds. There are shadows everywhere, made by low twigs, needles,
or grasses, the slightest thing lying across the sand, in sketchy
rhythmic patterns tossed by the wind, while the greater shadows made by
the high dune outlines are shifting steadily with the time of day.
Aside from mice, rabbits, skunks, toads, insects, and the indigenous
plants, this seems a place for nomads, and the birds that are free to
forage, like a dark pigeon hawk that swoops across on its hunt for
prey, or an occasional marsh hawk, breast feathers gleaming in the
sunlight, its shadow passing across a dune wall. Little flocks of birds
burst here and there through the thickets, like chickadees, myrtle
warblers, or juncos that move around on the ground pecking for seed. In
their fall migration many of the juncos, or “snowbirds,” reach Cape Cod
by a long, over-the-water route, and flocks that arrive on the Outer
Beach begin to move up into the dunes in a search for fresh water,
perennial pilgrims.
I sat on the top of a high dune one afternoon and watched a beach buggy
swaying and swinging up in my direction along a track that led from the
shore. It droned up and careened by me, plowing and slipping through
the sands, and away down a long slope it went on the dunes’ free forms,
cutting across the shadows that were spearheading toward the sea. Then
I heard children’s voices in the distance coming over quite clear
and shrill, falling off at intervals before the wind. The slopes and
valleys stretched with pure travel in between. It was the kind of place
where all views and associations keep on, across a shifting range. It
lacked fixed ways, decided roads. Only packed in by the open ocean and
the long reaches of time, the roving dunes made a continually majestic
statement which no amount of cans, broken glass, or human footprints
could erase.
Off on the end, the edge, past the cities and the suburbs, the fixed
house lots, the fields, and plains that make a patchwork of an entire
nation, here is a country let go, barren, down to an essential minimum,
but tossing and flowing with its own momentum in an envious proximity
to the sea. It is the first and last land in America.
VI
A Change in History
The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say fairly well because
I do not see how it is possible to recapture the deep complexities of
what was present and now is past, although there is enough past left
in us to provide great confusion about the times we have to face.
Many tourists run after “charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are
slight enough to admit that they have very little to do with the dark
realities of three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from
great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We are in no
need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight in the heavens
we have created for ourselves. We look on the earth’s great flowing
beauties with an inclined eye. For all its “conquest of nature,”
perhaps because of it, our civilization has a tenuous hold on the
waters and lands it occupies. We are in danger of being overlords, not
obligated to what we rule.
We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in for fish
chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily invited in
because we are tired and out of our way. There is no time for that, and
besides there are too many of us.
The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape Cod is now
subject to a population spreading out as a result of the tremendous
growth of cities and towns. It is predicted that the number of winter
residents will increase by forty or fifty thousand in the next twenty
years, and the summer visitors to the Great Beach may pass all bounds
eventually. As the speed of transition has been increased between one
era and another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing.
When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an investment,
as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or something too
priceless to let go. There are always other places to move to. Each man
used to be his own nomad, now nomadism is supplied to all of us by the
mechanics and riches of society. During the tourist season the average
length of visit per person has been estimated at three days, enough
time to sense the breadth of things if not the circumstances.
If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites,
Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open beauties it still
displays, even with the National Park, which has saved a great deal of
it from the seemingly unalterable army of bulldozers in the nick of
time.
The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over woodland
and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human foresight at any time,
with or without the bulldozers. In that respect we have not changed,
though we are not as dependent on the locality we live in as we used to
be. Food and resources come from afar. Still, all places, regardless of
the human adventure, have their underlying tides, their own measured
and perhaps measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in
subtle ways. We continue to be affected by what we can neither
transform nor avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have
no barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here
still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while ghosts
of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.
The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period of my own, was
filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the cliff above the beach, a
majority unoccupied but with a house here and there showing a little
more substance to it, the evidence of a year-round resident. With some
exceptions, they were bare in appearance and devoid of individuality.
No uncommon effort had been made to give them much distinction. In
the winter and fall they lost whatever color by human association
they might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed,
pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of exposed wood,
and since they were not in Florida they could not borrow any youth
from the sunshine. Their spirit was old before they were built, and in
that respect indigenous to the seashore. The bare coast and the gray
waters seemed to hold them in contempt, or at least indifference, and
they became as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of
pretension, whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape
with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their own little plots
of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia and scrub oak,
joining the general economy of the landscape, no blowing leaves and
limbs above them, no spreading lawns around. Whoever might live in
them after the mild, money-making season could be gripped by the real
weather without interference.
Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in antiques,
even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is no alternative if
we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there ever be such a thing as
an antique rocket? But there is still a flow of age, a distant sense of
things that it is possible to find, hanging like mist over an inlet,
booming like the sea over the far side of a hill.
You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas, a single-track
road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon or a stage, during
the years when it took two days to get to Boston and the sea route was
the preferred one. Even with the jet planes droning overhead and the
cars grinding gears in the distance and the about-to-break sound of
the future in the sky somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as
the outline of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half
one afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last
there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth
century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented, washed
out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost with definition.
In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the houses were
located here and there along the old highway, or dotted around in
sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the wintertime you are very
likely to meet no one, since there are comparatively few year-round
residents. Once the place was full of local need, local talk, or
tragedy. What wrecks now occur along the treacherous offshore bars can
usually be taken care of by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the
area quickly in a jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was
no radar for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication
with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the wrecks
that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer lifeboat
crews composed of men from neighboring houses, with a boat kept ready
in a hollow above the beach, ready to be launched out to the rescue, in
terrible seas that were a common part of existence.
In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns had between
three and four hundred sailing ships between them and a majority of
their men went out to sea. In a great storm occurring in October of
1841 the town of Truro lost fifty-seven men, being already burdened
with a large population of widows, and on the day after the storm
nearly a hundred bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most
of them were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were
making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast gale
screaming and the sea sweeping their decks.
The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy have been
responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks in the past, and
taking the measure of the storms that strike the coast, it is hard to
see how there could have been as many survivors as there were, even
with the gallantry and local experience of the amateur lifesavers. Many
ships ran aground too far offshore to be reached, and were pounded to
pieces. The death-dealing power of the offshore sea in these storms
seems unparalleled. The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche.
It chews and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away
so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming waters
plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of unapproachable
violence.
Many of the lights that welcomed sailors, or warned them off, are now
gone from the headlands and from houses along the shore that no longer
have to worry about their men any more than they have to worry about
themselves. The mackerel fleets are no longer thick on the horizon.
The wharves are gone that used to take in the mackerel at Wellfleet
on the Bay side. No one eats salt mackerel any more that I know of. I
have a friend who spent his boyhood in New York State who was given
salt mackerel to eat on Sunday mornings. It had been soaked in milk
overnight, having been taken out of a “kentle,” which was a small
wooden keg, the top wider than the base, about a quarter of a barrel
in size. His observation was that it was much too salty a dish for his
taste.
The talkers at the livery stable, the central store, or the barbershop
are also gone, as well as the sea captains who retired at the age of
forty-five or fifty to become big men in their communities. The horses,
truck gardens, fish heads, rum and rum runners are gone too, and what
old men still whittle boats for the tourists on the beach? The ancient
marvels who used to gather Cape Cod moss on their backs, telling
hilarious stories about chicken stealing, cow “dressing” (manure),
boundary disputes, occasional romantic murders, and hard days at sea no
longer seem to be available for reference. What a lot of solid objects
seem to have gone from the world!
Perhaps I have left history behind too soon, saying, in effect: “Choose
what age you like. You may find yourself in another.” Perhaps it is no
fault of mine.
During my autumn and winter walks I did find a lasting pleasure in
recognizing old things, reconstructing neighborliness, even from a
distance, learning to see the silence--the growth and shape of things,
the riches of “slow time.” The ponds especially, in the Wellfleet and
South Truro regions, protected by the woods around them and the land
leading up to the cliffs above the beach, were clear and deep and
seemed to reflect quiet habitation over a long time. The water lapped
on sandy shores in the sweet, airy winter stillness, broken by the
loud, bright braying of blue jays. Coon tracks were sharply etched on
the shallow margins where they had gone fishing for fresh-water mussels
that left meandering traces on the pond bottom. On the far ends in the
shadows there were occasional ducks, like blue-winged teal, mallards,
or scaups.
At Gull Pond in Wellfleet one January day there were scarfs of ice
along the shore, and out in the center herring gulls flew up and
settled down on open water where a light cold wind broke across the
surface. Wavelets were continually pushing and jostling broken ice so
that it made a high singing, almost bell-like sound.
Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen leaves
to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or oaks still carrying
dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike note of a nuthatch as it
was rounding the scaly plated trunk of a pitch pine. Pale light moved
through the woods and across the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle
mossy roads, their tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a
special Cape proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic,
or the herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that
suddenly showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated by any
century but its own.
Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming in, and to
hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the length of the beach.
The sound held and it took away, a monumental assurance of power past
all the roughness and directness of the old life, its quiet suspension
in the present, and the wrenching of the not-yet born.
What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land, in the
continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate change, the way
the beach itself, or the dunes are changing, keeping a general state
for a minute, or even a lifetime, but quite beyond catching. Its
history is water.