melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble out in the
sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins, gullies, the
“kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs, or still holding
water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad and narrow runs with
outlets to the sea. At one time Cape Cod must have been streaming with
water like a whale’s back when it rises to the surface. Now many of
the original streams, rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried
out, but without too much imagination you can fill the landscape with
water all over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction,
make it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant
and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire
peninsula that does not suggest this.
It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from the
motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying, pushing,
grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water in the deep,
still ponds; water in the underground darkness; in the gentle seaward
running streams; in the tidal estuaries and marshes lowering or
flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy gales full of the howling
emptiness of the winter sea, when the cold metal of the wind pounds
on your back and cuts at your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen
sands of the beach where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and
churning with impersonal passion.
Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring weather, of
the same exposures. Only our terms are not the same. Some years ago I
stood on the high hills of North Truro late one afternoon, watching the
suns red path shining and moving across the wide waters of the bay,
thinking of sea surfaces moving over the round earth to its poles,
and the poverty of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates,
everywhere exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were so
bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in hollows
or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They glittered like
so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come from Provincetown and
seen a dragger unloading its fish, and the fishermen cutting them up
with red, raw-meat hands. The wind was shipping up the water. The gulls
were crying over the racing, lathered shore.
It came to me that what had brought me here had not so much to do with
a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches in their simple New
England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing, old wrecks, driftwood,
or fish weirs, real as it was in me, but a great new outwardness, a
universal human event. Each man undergoes a series of changes during
his lifetime in a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of
the world. He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust,
the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry
that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination and
measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a Cape Cod
term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning far from your home
base, with very few old promises behind to sustain me. I had to come to
terms with an age without age, a locality without location, perhaps a
divinity in fires of no precedent or name. Above all I was required to
change, to face in new directions.
* * * * *
The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On my way home I
saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and inlet, its broad wings
spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched straight behind it, with
feet curled up stiffly, head and neck crooked back. Then it landed
in shallow water. Its wings folded and it stood straight up, with a
surprising, statuesque height and gaze, the long neck and head above
a flock of ducks that were swimming and feeding near by, assuming
the kind of composure special to a race of herons that would serve
indefinitely. The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving
grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors over
the entire marsh.
All the measured lights and shadows of day and night, the tides of the
sea and the tides of the season, the response and joint association of
all life’s components in that place stayed much the same as they had
ever been, in spite of the way we hurled in our roads and relocated
ourselves without rest. Its natural order was still there for old
expectation to seize upon; though in terms of accumulated knowledge
and wants it was more complex than it had ever been, and would have to
endure a human association that was itself on the waters of change,
holding hard to the mechanics of its coming. Cape Cod had suddenly lost
a slow, accumulative history, perhaps in a matter of twenty years,
and would be treated like the rest of the world--as it happened, as
it would come about under human auspices. Our problem, one of many,
might be this: how could we reconcile universal commitment with the
inviolable nature of a single place?
VII
Barren Grounds
The oceanic landscape reaches across the round earth, over a curved
horizon, and that may be one reason why men keep returning to it. The
sea attracts the experience of distance. There is still some vicarious
adventure to standing on a cliff, breathing the far-ranging air and
imagining ships hidden by mists on the horizon, or unknown lands beyond
that, or even remembering lands once visited. Over there is where the
great passages of history have gone by.
As recently as fifty or sixty years ago, man and sea were involved in a
more personal alliance on Cape Cod, and its seamen once voyaged around
the world. At the same time there were some local inhabitants who
considered it a major expedition to go from one side of the Cape to the
other. The fishing, shipbuilding, and voyages to foreign lands that was
more characteristic of the Cape before the Civil War than after it gave
what might have been a too narrow community, concentrated only on its
own affairs, a healthy connection with the rest of the world.
Since the Second World War Cape Cod has been filled with relative
outsiders, many of whom have been transported, not necessarily through
any fault or wish of their own, to stations around the globe. A place
that once went out for its sustenance now waits for the world to come
to it.
One of the few people I met during my off-season walks on the beach
turned out to be a man who had retired from the city. The open air may
have been conducive to revelation, because he told me a great deal
about his life during the ten or fifteen minutes I talked to him.
It turned out that the place where we stood had some significance
in his own history. He looked out to sea from the edge of the cliff
and pointed out over the water to show me the general region where
transports used to gather during the First World War on their way
overseas. He had been on a Navy escort vessel.
“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war, small
business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size and
circumstances of the men and societies he had met and fought and
endured. Through a life-long experience of waste--or waste space--and
all his tired compliance with authority and anger against it, he had
saved room in him for voyages. He told me that he had come to live near
the sea so that he could walk along the cliffs and the beach whenever
he wanted to, and to look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a
relatively free command view of destiny.
After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out for several
miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within the boundaries of
the National Seashore Park, and one day, when the beach grass takes
hold of its denuded areas, it will no longer be recognizable as a
military reservation, but when I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet
had just been formally disbanded. Although it was completely deserted,
its buildings and some of its installations were still intact. It had
been an antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast
which was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents
speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which made
the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and for several
years after the war ended fishermen used to protest that their boats
were in the line of fire.
The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain. It was on
these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo Marconi built his
wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic message in
January of 1903. The year before, he had built an elaborate structure
with twenty masts, and this had blown down in a heavy onshore wind.
The successful message, which took the form of an exchange between
Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from
only four masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is
typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted waves that
crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On the day I walked
through nearly sixty years later there was nothing left of what he had
constructed but a few fallen bricks on the face of the cliff.
Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet lookout towers
and firing range were still more or less intact, and the place only
lacked occupation to make it come alive again. The public had been kept
out of the area for many years, but now I could walk in on a winter’s
afternoon and not meet a soul. I passed a sign saying: MILITARY
RESERVATION NO TRESPASSING, not without vague qualms, and memories of
my own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of “Halt!” to
ring out.
“Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses to
some ghost of past authority.
There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that fell on bare
gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks. Bareness was
something the Army brought to all its posts, so that a bunch of grass
was considered unnecessary, or tended for dear life. The Army city,
once a humming, purposeful anonymity, was now completely silent and
alone, but for me it still kept some of the power of its restrictions,
arousing old apprehensions--that tightening of the stomach at facing
some new unknown. The bare white barracks were still intact, and
the power lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or
latrines. There were off-limits signs on empty streets.
I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order, with its
own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the feelings of
frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered the routine,
the rote-mindedness which often passed for efficiency, the utter
helplessness that many soldiers felt during wartime, and were obliged
to accept, about being part of something huge, anonymous, even
reckless and uncalculated, an ignorance of which they themselves were
ignorant and to which they had not been invited. I also remembered the
unassuming friendships you could make in the Army, the directness with
which men accepted each other.
A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the ground. They
were interruptions of a nature that did not concern me very much as
a draftee in an Army camp, although--more than most--we were exposed
to the wide nights and their stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn,
and the extremes of heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to
Army life that allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted
and oversimplified--he was not his own agent--and at the same time he
acted for the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him,
equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands. When he
protested, he was protesting against the passage of all the nights on
all the waters.
I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after dark saying he
had something of great importance he had to speak to me about. We went
out and talked in the company street, standing on the sandy grounds
between the buildings, conscious of a towering night with flashing
stars. He talked desperately, on and on, about the life he had been
planning before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the
girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about the job
which had now been denied him, the business he was going to establish,
and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business was it of the President of the
United States to start a war and send him into it?
It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate
for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach grass that
holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for the sea to roam
on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall and the sands to shift
and blow. It is inevitable, at one time or another, that each of us
should stand on these barren grounds. The gloom of the sea puts all
other darkness and gloom in jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable.
It carries light over the earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is
overbearing and restless and at the same time as strict and balanced
as its tides. Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because
then it stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns
us, the desert without illusion.
Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of the cliff
for several miles. Watchers could look out from their transversing
positions over the coastline and the sea and signal the accuracy of
the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile targets over the water.
I climbed two of the towers that still had ladders. They were in fair
condition, but clearly not too long for this world of wind and spray,
of ice, rain, and snow, and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows
were broken, the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors,
with boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and
broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered how many young
men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this lookout over the dark
sea. Some of those on duty had left their names behind, probably after
the war was over, judging by the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and
they also left the names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls,
or would-be girls, the signs of need in wastes of order.
Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact, with empty
cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground outside. A strand of
barbed wire made a little clanging sound of unused warning as I brushed
by it. Toward the far end of the reservation, on the Eastham side,
I passed another off-limits sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags
located in a little hollow on the very edge of the cliff; they were
beginning to slide down the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking
down on the beach where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only
sentinels, facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how
many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at a faster
rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal weight of one
war had gone, but the knowledge and power it let loose had sent us on,
committing us to our human ends in the most inclusive and at the same
time isolated sense, universally vulnerable.
[Illustration]
The wind sent dark clouds of ruffled waters along the sea surfaces,
surfaces that tilted and flew, stretching away and disappearing, and
the sky light, feather gray in the rain, reflected everywhere. The long
surf line sounded with the crash and rattle of stones. The vast flow
went on unhindered, restless and controlled, delivering and holding
back, a nay and yea sayer at the same time, passing all experiments,
accepting all possibility without a care. How could the sea do anything
about reassuring mankind as to whether or not we would survive our own
acts and commitments? Did man make war, or did war make him? Perhaps we
love the sea for its denial of us.
Sitting on the sandbag, I thought of the GI who had last been there,
manning a gun now replaced by missiles and rockets--bothered perhaps
by the cold, penetrating wind, feeling useless, waiting for his
discharge from the Army, wishing he were somewhere else, not knowing
beach grass from seaside goldenrod, or one gull from another, but
knowing the sea, with its one sound.
VIII
A Landscape in Motion
There are a number of elevations on the Cape from which it is possible
to see both sides, getting above intervening houses, trees, or hills.
On the same Wellfleet Plain where Camp Wellfleet was located the
moraine tilts all the way down from the cliff above the Outer Beach to
the shores of the bay, and reaches of land and water come into view
from all directions. One plane leads to another by easy transitions.
The cliff tops shine in the wind above the steady pouring sound of
the waves and the dancing of molten gold and silver on the sea. Beach
grasses glitter. The land ahead is full of coarse scrub oak and green
patches of bayberry moving toward dark green woods of pitch pine and
clusters of houses, reaching the sheltered shores of the bay beyond
them, with salt marshes, gold and red; water-shining, brown tidal
flats, and a rim of blue water on the distant horizon.
It is a stunted land, not overhospitable to life by the looks of it,
although flocks of chickadees bounce gaily through the scrub as if
giving it their free acknowledgment. As the autumn progresses the reds
change to brown, plants darken or die down, shrubs lose their leaves,
and the grasses bleach. In all seasons it is a place of low growth,
ready in its hardy way to receive what the wind and sun can send it.
The sky is very wide overhead. You can see from one tidal area to
another--almost from one climate to another--standing on the bare
ground. In scale the view approximates what you can see from high in
the air.
A plane shows you a much wider panorama, while diminishing the land,
eliminating the size of locality and local things. It takes you high
enough to see the curve of the earth, the concrete highways like
ribbons across the country, the thin lines of roads and streets, the
checkered fields, patches of lakes, and sprawling cities. A jet plane
cuts across time. You can run after the sun as it falls on the other
side of the world and almost catch it, following the mountain shadows
over America, and since you pass time in that sense, not able to go
faster than the speed of light, but crossing the rhythmic stations of
earth and sun, I have felt it as a longer journey than that involved in
a car or train. What might ordinarily take days is reduced to hours,
but when we landed I have felt the days in me as much as the hours.
We bypass the clock. We go from low to high, bridging a gap between
the individual and the universe, leaving earth’s confinements for
indefinite space, but local time is still inside us.
On the ground, obviously enough, you limit the horizon by the extent of
your vision, and the horizon in turn limits you, but land and water are
held by their relationships to space and to each other. Apparently all
climatic cycles are world-wide; and the immediate, local weather is in
part dependent on the weather behind and ahead of it. In the same way
the only limit to the landscape is the globe itself. Its reaches go out
of sight, if not of universal measure.
This seaside country often gives you the feeling that the sky is the
limit. One opening beyond the trees, another mile revealed, and the
earth and sea from the top of a dune, the world you stand on, may
become exalted in its scope. Perhaps people climb hills and mountains
not only to get to the top, or as an activity in its own right--reasons
often given in answer to questions that may be of no great value--but
to join the range of the world, to be up and outward bound, and above
all to have a sense of the unities in and beyond them. A greater
landscape means a new communion.
I once climbed a small mountain in Maine with a group of Sea Scouts.
We stopped just below its summit, where there was a bowl surrounded
by rocky heights and slopes and holding clear, cold water, the size
of a small pond. The boys stripped and went in swimming, and all
their excited yelling as they jumped in and out of the water resolved
along the rock faces and deep crevices into echoes that rang and
choired--heard from above--like _Te Deums_ in a cathedral. And far down
and around for hundreds of miles were the houseless mountains flaming
with color.
One of the boys asked: “How many acres do you think there are?”
For all its matter-of-factness, his question brought us in touch with
massive distance, an over-all light and wind above the great carpets
of color, a landscape running with power, having a latent silence, a
prodigious weight and matter.
Mountains or seashore make for revelation. So on this sandy, tilting
peninsula sight can keep on going. On one side the head-on majesty
of cliffs, beach, and open sea, and on the other, calm low headlands
facing sheltered waters, two different environments, with the west wind
blowing over and the clouds flaring and shifting in the sky. You are in
the lap of the waters, the balance of the tides, and in the arms of the
weather.
Each patch of ground, varying in the degree to which it is receptive to
organic life, is a complexity of substance and influence. The weather
that circulates over it, and in terms of light, relative moisture, and
varying temperatures invests it too, has its seasonal constancies but
it is always in a state of change. Cape Cod feels much of the time as
if it were two-thirds wind, and people with touchy nerves might well
think they were being pushed by it in directions they were unable to go.
The Cape has a maritime climate, somewhat milder than the mainland.
There is no use exaggerating its mildness since it can feel as cold
or colder than the rest of New England when the northwest wind takes
its uninterrupted course through the ribs of the land and sears its
way along the shore, but, in general, annual temperatures are slightly
higher. In central and western Massachusetts, in New Hampshire,
Vermont, and New York State, the average number of days between the
first severe, killing frost in the autumn and the last one in the
spring has been estimated at 180-210. For Cape Cod, on the other hand,
this is 120-150, the same that prevails in a thin coastal belt south of
the Cape to Virginia and North Carolina where it widens and starts west
across Tennessee.
The waters to the south, in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound, have a
higher annual temperature than the waters of the open Atlantic along
the Outer Beach and in Cape Cod Bay, a southern extension of the Gulf
of Maine. On the other hand the waters north of Cape Cod, though cooler
during the summer, tend to be warmer during the winter, because of the
depths of the Gulf of Maine and their heat-carrying capacity. Cape Cod
Bay, and Buzzards Bay have more sea ice than any equal area on the
coast of the United States with the exception of Alaska. Sustained
cold during January and February often results in weeks of pack ice
stretching off into the Bay as far as the eye can see, at least from
the level of the shore. This extra touch of the Arctic off the Cape is
due mainly to a combination of cold winter winds from the continent and
shallow water.
The difference in average water temperatures between one side of the
Cape and the other may have its effects on the local weather. During
the fall especially, when cold air moves over the waters of Nantucket
Sound they may be covered with fog, whereas it can be bright and clear
over the Bay, only a few miles distant. The normal kind of fog occurs
when warm, moisture-laden air moves over cool or cold water, and is
quite common in spring and summer. When a cold, dry air mass, on the
other hand, moves over warmer waters it may result in what is called
“Arctic sea smoke” a kind of wispy, steamy fog in turbulent, rolling
air, rising to ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the water.
During the winter Cape Cod is also subject to rapid changes in
temperature depending on whether the wind comes from the northwest,
with cold, dry, continental air, or from east and south off the ocean,
the latter being seldom below the freezing point.
The tip at Provincetown has much the same temperature as the sea island
of Nantucket. On the other hand the town of Barnstable on the lower
Cape may have an average summer temperature which is slightly warmer
than Provincetown and a colder temperature in winter, since it is that
many miles closer to the interior. I have driven down the coast from
Boston several times during snowstorms when an area as close to the
Cape as Plymouth was completely covered with snow; and as I drove south
the storms turned to heavy flakes of wet snow on the near side of the
Cape Cod canal and then to rain as I went on.