moderating influence on the Cape, which is warmer during the winter
than the mainland and cooler during the summer. Also, there are
less thunderstorms on Cape Cod during the summer months than on the
mainland, and the annual rainfall is likely to be lower because there
is less showery precipitation, although local residents might be
justified in thinking that water was on them much of the year in one
form or another, as fog, salt spray, rain, or humidity.
The late fall and winter is often characterized by cold, raw windy
days, with the temperature just above freezing or at the freezing
point, and the air is loaded with moisture from the sea and sometimes
smells of it. During heavy storms the wind drives the salt spray
inland with great force, depositing coats of salt on houses, telegraph
poles, and wires.
During the winter the Cape seems at times to be caught and tossed
between the weather of the sea and that of the continent, but in
general the principal air masses during fall and winter come from
inland and in summer from the southwest. Winds from the north and west
usually bring in continental polar air, which is dry and cold, though
it may also arise in part from pacific maritime air. The source regions
for many of the storms of early spring and early fall are the Gulf of
Mexico and the Caribbean. Most of the severe spring storms, sometimes
coming after a fairly mild winter, are the so-called “coastwise
southeasters” which blow up the coast from off the Carolinas rather
than from the west. They can result in blizzards because their coastal,
maritime air if drawn into a low from the continent is cold enough to
make snow.
Such simple generalities and fact sampling is not to suggest, like the
Chamber of Commerce, that more people ought to come to Cape Cod, but
that it is a land like all others, which is influenced by the forces
beyond it. It is no more gripped, pulled, and let go by the weather
than most other areas. In fact its temperature made it a good place for
the first English settlers to find. Think of the Middle West in July,
or January, for extremes! Yet Cape Cod has a special place in the wind,
an outside hold on the roaming of the seas and the advent of the air.
The tides that rise and fall along this ocean-going spit of land are
just as varied in their way as the weather, but more predictable. They
accentuate the difference between one part of the Cape and another,
and they are responsible for some of its physical characteristics.
Great tidal ranges on the north side expose wide salt flats at low tide
and allow the development of broad areas of salt marsh in sheltered
embayments, whereas along the shores of Nantucket and Vineyard sounds,
where tide ranges are much smaller, the marshes and more exposed flats
are less extensive.
In Cape Cod Bay and eastward to the coast of Maine the average tide
rises and falls about nine feet, but in Nantucket and Vineyard sounds
the range is up to four feet at the most, being as little as two feet
off Woods Hole and in some of the salt ponds. The time of high water
varies also. It occurs four hours later on the north side of the Cape
than at Buzzards Bay.
The Outer Beach is an area of transition so far as the tides are
concerned, and their range drops steadily from nine feet at Race Point
to four feet at the end of Monomoy. These diverse tides, all along the
shores of the Cape, are a product of its very shape, and of the coast
from which it juts out, astride the submerged continental shelf, whose
shallow water also affects them.
It is the nature of waves--and a tide is a wave of a special kind--to
move more slowly in crossing shallow water, rising at the same time to
a greater height. Waves expend the energy of their motion when they
increase in height, an effect which can be observed as they heap up
before breaking as surf on the beach. So the tidal wave moves in from
far offshore starting with relatively low ranges, some two or three
feet at Sable Island off Nova Scotia, with similar readings in Bermuda
and the Bahamas; but when it reaches the outer coast of the Cape it is
augmented. To the southwest of the Cape the increase is only moderate,
the figure for the entrance to Buzzards Bay being three and one half
feet; but moving north it gets much higher. To reach the shores of the
great embayment of the Gulf of Maine, formed where the coastline drops
away north and east of the Cape, the ocean’s tidal wave must first
cross the shallow waters of George’s Banks, a passage that requires
more than three hours (which explains the later time of high water in
the Bay). In the process the tidal height increases to the nine-foot
figure, a reading which is true of Provincetown, Plymouth, and on up
to the coast of Maine.
So the Cape lies between two tidal systems, created and separated by
its geography. On the south side, incidentally, there is a complex
pattern of tidal movement caused by the fact that both systems meet.
Tidal waves enter the sounds between the Cape and the islands of
Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from two directions and pass each
other. The combined effect of this “interference” results in rapid
changes in the time and height of the tide between Monomoy and Woods
Hole. Off Nobska Point one tidal wave movement is high, while the other
passing it is low. Their interference results in the smallest range of
tide (one and a half feet) to be found along the south shore. A similar
minimum tidal range occurs off the southeast corner of Nantucket.
I am neither a trained scientist nor an accomplished sailor. I am
inclined to use facts for unfactual ends and do not have enough
knowledge of the wind not to be tipped over at any time, but if you
feel complexity and admire mathematics while in a state of comparative
ignorance then perhaps you have some claims on knowing. Most of us have
had a hand in observing the weather or gauging the levels of the tide.
Weather guessing or complaining is second nature, and on the beach, or
by means of the pilings on the wharf, you can guess the tidal range
quite easily or judge whether the tides are in or out. On some level
below that we have air and tides in us that know the energies of earth
from past acquaintance, but we are much too ready to mistrust these
depths and to let other authorities do our work for us. Perhaps our
natural senses are becoming atrophied. In any case, we do not seem to
be sure whether it is the energy of the head or of the heart that we
should use for our purposes. But put yourself in the middle of the
weather and within the reach of the tides and they sometimes begin to
roam in concert in as many ways and to the incalculable extent that you
have responses stemming from your brain. All the distant swelling and
swinging, the synchronization and intermoving of the waters, becomes
as real and immediate as the repositioning of the sun and the changing
of its shadows. The over-all wind; the light that shines on the beach
grass, moves over the pebbled ground, and sparkles the sea, or turns it
into a blazing white cauldron; the knowledge of cold massive depths in
one place, warm shallows in another, come into feeling as both unified
and infinitely complex. I may fail at mathematics but be an unconscious
mathematician, judging galaxies by the ways of light before my eyes.
At my feet, as I sit on the sandy ground on the cliff top, there is a
hole made by a spider, neatly defined at the top by a little rim of
grasses. Rabbit dung lies here and there. There are a broken puffball,
dried leaves, and seeds; and the wind has blown so constantly over the
level and open parts of the ground as to take away loose sand and leave
a surface of pebbles, which are more or less stable, while mounds and
hillocks are held together by shrubs and grasses. These are evidence
of a poor community, holding down as best it can, though it is open to
migrants and migration all the same.
What lies underfoot changes in a few hundred yards toward vegetation
which is a little more protected, and less exposed to violent light
and dessicating wind, with low oaks and pitch pines, wood floors,
with a certain amount of decaying litter, graduating upward in the
quantity of organic life, but the open, exposed, diminished look of
this environment also suggests its inherent mobility with all the other
component parts of this running world, taking original light and shadow
from the vast sky.
The crow with its ragged wings banking away over the tree-tops, the
rabbit hopping into a thicket, the fish that school unseen in the salt
waters, the man who watches, are all manifestations of a complexity
of association and alliance that stops on no single shore. Like our
restrictions with respect to the horizon, we only see, we only live,
a fraction of the possibilities allowed in so great a range; and being
restricted, we oversimplify, cutting life and land down to size ... a
poverty that makes for poverty.
I hear the steady pouring sound of the depths behind me and I see and
feel them rising and falling, taking their inexorable passage around
the Cape. The wind whistles through and like the in and out of breath
lifts and subsides. Field crickets trill monotonously and faintly
in competition with the wind. Crows call. Seeds blow along the bare
ground. A winged seed flies by, next year’s fruition if it lands, this
year’s providing, perhaps destined to skim out over the surface of the
sea. A flock of snow buntings swings back and forth, twittering high in
the air. Gulls circle in the distance above a garbage dump hidden by
the trees.
In this landscape, here and out of sight, is a mutuality of response,
through the sea with its thousands of miles of variety constantly in
motion, and the land besieged by the sea, with dry and infertile soil,
but in a web of tides and climatic influence that keeps its character
actively in tune. Like the buntings, or a flock of sanderlings
spinning, sun reflecting, diving through the heights above the shore,
the opportunity of grace and power is always waiting for its use,
and nothing that lives and participates can be called insignificant,
from the cricket to the crow. Diversity is the rule, and each form is
exceptional in its employment.
Through any part of the earth there is a placement, the appropriate
condition for plants, animals, the soil, and its constituents, to
maintain themselves. The optimum is that there shall be full use within
any given range of opportunity. The more diversified a living community
is the more healthy it is, not only in numbers, but in complex
relationships. Even a “poor” seaside environment proves this by the
very demands it makes for survival. The plants that adapt themselves
to it do so by means both various and precise. Even sand grains have a
relationship to each other in the rhythmic order of wind and waves.
The life that comes to these shores, winging in, trying to take hold,
blown out, taking semipermanent residence, has its own affinity for
place, an organic knowledge of its own part in the physical world. It
belongs to an innumerable company with exacting tasks.
Each life proves the need of all others. In a miraculous way, as each
natural form is miraculous, the single is also manifold. The rabbit,
as it nibbles grass, calls in the hawk. The spider is related, in its
reproduction and survival, to the insect it eats. The soil requires
microbes to break it down. The growth of plants is directed toward
capturing the energy of the sun. Life calls life in the context of
earth, water, and sky.
Throughout the wide landscape are a succession of environments, with
communities adapting to constant change, characterized by so much
mutual attraction and repulsion, so many delicate balances, such a
variety of response to influence inside and out that there is hardly a
stopping point for attention. We study particular environments so as to
predict and understand the behavior of animals, the reaction in plants
to variations in the intensity of light, or to relative moisture, or to
the chemical constituents of the soil. Each place has its character,
its complexity, and bounds.
But environment is more a characteristic of range than a separation in
its own right. All migration says so. The division between a pond and
its surrounding woodland is fairly distinct. A pond is an entity unto
itself. So is the division between salt water and fresh. But the frog
that lays its eggs in a pond may travel through the woods during the
summer. The salmon, the alewife, and the shad reproduce in fresh water
and grow up in the sea. Eels do the opposite.
In a sense each area has its representative, like the water birds,
from petrels that spend most of their lives over the open ocean, to
fresh-water ducks dabbling among the reeds. There are herons adapted
to spear fishing in the shallows; terns that dive for fish in surface
waters; others that swim after them under the water. Some of the
adaptations are so precise that if the particular food supply of a
species is endangered, so is existence of the bird itself.
On the other hand the very distinctness of each species, sharp-billed,
webfooted, with gliders’ or divers’ wings, seems to impart range to
countless others, those which exist and have existed, those which
may develop in a vast and unknown future. The difference, the space,
between a gannet and a dovekie, a great blue heron and a frigate bird,
proves all the depths of opportunity.
As I look out on the waters to east and west, to north and south,
I either see or envisage banks of fog far offshore, warm summer
squalls, biting cold air, torrents of brilliance in the sky, leaping
and ponderous deliberation in the waves. Warm air meets me from the
Bahamas, cold air from the Arctic, and the migrants pass me as they
travel in between. This earth, regardless of man’s construction of it,
is always re-relating its contexts, playing out new themes ahead.
In this distance, near to far, there is force, and its limits, a
counterbalancing as well as intermingling in the land, weather, and
tides, and in almost hidden terms the concurrent response of countless
inhabitants: the seed makers and dispensers, the hole diggers, the
fliers, scuttlers, and divers, those that swim, crawl, or walk. They
take part in range after range of consumption and growth, of trials and
failures, with endless patience, sudden quickness, flows of energy,
going through death and the travel-round of reproduction. They are
dancers in a realm that knows where all its leadings are.
There are dynamic secrets underfoot. Lives dawn of which we are
entirely unaware. Can we bring ourselves down to their great
participation, waiting through dawns, attending the sun, hiding under
the reality of wind and storm, where obedience means praise? Here
is that universal guarantee of novelty and increase which we try so
narrowly to imitate, substituting our simplicity for its complexity,
our distressed communality for its balanced crowds, our greed and
invention for its terrible provenance. Lord have mercy on us!
IX
Who Owns the Beach?
In the “off” and empty season, after the tides had erased all signs of
a hundred thousand human feet, it was hard to believe that the beach
could be owned or claimed by any one. It took on the air’s cold or
warmth, receiving, passing things on, from one day and seasonal mood
to another, not as on the land with its plant and animal reactions and
obstructions, the hiding; shadowing; coming forth intermittently; but
in bold and naked sight, reducing weather to its single qualities.
One day the Cape would be sunny and comparatively warm, and on the
next in would come the authentic northern wind, the polar air, roaring
and sweeping around with fierce abandon, riotously hard and cold,
freezing the ground, cutting at a man, diving on him with an icy
weight. The winter wind is so definite when it comes, overwhelming a
fairly moderate climate, where roses often bloom late into the fall
and hollies grow, as to make you think of icebergs, sliding down from
the north unexpectedly to stand hundreds of feet overhead. The sky,
threatening snow, writhes and purls up with gray clouds spreading
fanwise like auroras, and in the evening the sun goes down with a
coppery band on the horizon overhung by a bank of steely-blue clouds as
menacing as a shark.
And the great beach received what came to it, retaining its primal
right to a deeper breath and regularity, a harsh “poverty-stricken”
environment where man has no lease worth the paper. It did seem utterly
deserted, although the herring gulls and blackbacks flew up steeply
over the wind-buffeted waves, then banked and glided away, and draggers
occasionally moved parallel to the beach bucking the choppy seas, their
lines out astern. The wind threw stinging clouds of sand ahead of it.
Except for the fishermen and the gulls, it was an abandoned world,
glistening wide and cold, lost to importance and sense so far as human
society was concerned. For man there is no force quite so inclusive as
his own.
Since the beach is comparatively empty and isolated during fall and
winter, the sight of life on its sands may seem as rare as a rider
approaching you across the desert. I remember what an extraordinary
thing it seemed one afternoon to see a tiny red crab moving very slowly
along, high-legged over the bare slopes of the beach. I identified it
later as a species of spider crab. Green crabs, rock crabs, calico
crabs, and others are common along the protected shores of the Cape,
but out on this stretch of beach they are rarities. This baby, with
its beak, antennae, and eyes backed and covered by a knobbed and spiky
shell, seemed like an exotic from another world, which in fact it was,
having been flung in by the surf from rocks and seaweed forests in the
waters beyond it. It not only added to the beach, but to me, since it
made me realize that these sands were only shelving off into further
dimensions. The beach is a repository of freight, wreckage, and lives
from foreign lands.
This also happens occasionally on land. We all know that the sea is
out there, that the wind swirls over us, and the storms carry more
traffic than planes, but strangers sometimes appear as if to prove that
no place is what it seems to be. One spring a vermillion flycatcher
suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. I saw it in its exciting
tropical gaiety as it flew down next to a shining patch of spring rain
on an asphalt road. It is a native of Texas and New Mexico. Black
or turkey buzzards ride the great airs of spring and sometimes fly
northward, wheeling unexpectedly overhead. In November of 1962 I saw a
black stork, _Ciconia nigra_, which had somehow managed to make it all
the way across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps managing to stop for rests
in such areas as Greenland and Newfoundland. It landed near the Coast
Guard Station, now National Seashore Park headquarters, at Eastham, in
an exhausted state, to be picked up by the Audubon Society and later
transported to the warmer climate of Florida.
The black stork breeds from Central Europe to Korea and China, and it
winters in Africa after a long round of migratory journeys. Its advent
was greeted with a certain amount of mild curiosity and even some jokes
in the local paper, one of which had to do with its liking for Cape
Cod scallops on its arrival. What better reason for coming here! (The
truth is that like other newly captured birds, it had to be force-fed.)
In any case it was a rare event, joining Cape Cod with Africa, and to
see it was equivalent to seeing an antelope on Route 6. With large
strong wings, attenuated red legs, a long, stout pinkish bill, red
around the eyes, it waited in captivity with what seemed to be an air
of great sadness, transplanted as it was, taken in to a gray, cold land
without any sound but engines, human voices, and the wind, without any
greenery but the thin-needled pines; and it roosted silently, twitching
occasionally in its inactive unused state, an unwilling, unwitting
Marco Polo in New England.
This is a narrow place, restricted by nature and by men, but foreign
lives still fly to it like sparks in the air, and the sea beyond it
takes things on their way with more room than analogy is yet aware of.
What the sea sends in, like a dead skate, a starfish, horse mussel, or
finger sponge, seems perfectly familiar as fish, marine, background
animals, but they are also genuine primitives, remote not only from
human physiology and complete understanding but from that part of the
earth’s surface that we inhabit. In fact many of the hints of marine
life that are either brought up along the beach, or that appear in
offshore waters, like a whale or a dolphin, have a theatricality, an
off-stage hint of a wealth of other acts, tricks, and forms still to be
seen. The simple, primal watery element has embodiments of use which
are comprehensible and have been studied for a long time, but these
are endowed with physical natures and capabilities that might make an
air-breathing, earth-bound human quite envious.
During a violent coastal storm, with winds up to seventy and eighty
miles an hour, an exhausted harbor porpoise was cast up on a bay beach
recently, and there it died. I confess I had never seen one out of
water or even close to me before. For all the pictures I had seen, and
all I had read, nothing prepared me for such perfection. Its round
body, four to five feet long, was butt-ended at its head, in which
there were small eyes, and small teeth in the jaws. It had just as much
of the quality of flow as a raindrop, and at the same time was a solid
packing of energy. Its skin graded down from the jet black of its back
and upper sides through streaks of gray like rain along the sea down
to a white belly, and without scales, it had a thick, smooth satiny
polish like ebony or horn, perhaps reminiscent of synthetic rubber or
plastic but of an organic texture which neither of those products could
equal. The porpoise had a single fin on its back and a tail that could
strike vertically for power and thrust. Its body was fairly heavy,
weighing about a hundred pounds, but everything of speed and liquidity
and dashing, leaping strength was reflected there. It lay on the upper
part of the beach, conspicuous among the long piles of storm litter,
the logs, pieces of broken dories, and thick seaweed, spectacular in
its simplicity, a black and white that made me think of breaking waves
in the night sea. I saw it curve over the surfaces of the water with
consummate grace, slide away, and disappear.
“Where did you ever see more of nothing?” I was once asked as I looked
out over endless dry Texas plains billowing like waves. Nothing or
everything. Who knows? Who knows what the emptiness leads to or
contains? The beach lies open. Its sands and rattling stones lead back
through ages of weathering and change and are at the same time part of
the wide give and take of the present.
The tiny spider crab, though isolated on the beach, was also a link
with a teeming offshore existence, which hid in shadowy worlds of kelp
and rockweed, or floated and roamed by with a free energy that was in
complete denial of our tightening fall and winter world. Backed by a
cliff, walking on sands shadowed and cold, faced by the churning waves,
it is hard to believe in a life so rich. There are no rocky shores
revealed at low tide and streaming with weed to prove the temperate
fertility of the sea. The beach is a transition zone between one
environment and another, but except in those areas where the cliffs are
reduced to low sand hills, protecting a marsh or estuary behind them,
the transition is a sharp one, the sands dipping from the inconstant
sky to the constancy of salt water.
Along those stretches of beach where the sea has taken stones and
boulders and deposited them offshore, storms sometimes bring in fairly
large quantities of seaweed, which need beds of stone for their
attachment. The fucus or rockweed, the laminaria or kelp, and some of
the “red” algae like Irish moss which are among the more common kinds
found along the beach, have no roots, since the plants take all their
nourishment from the sea water that surrounds them, but are anchored by
holdfasts, stubby structures which in the laminaria may look like the
exposed, above-ground roots of some tropical trees, and in the fucus
a round expansion of the tissues at its base, which is strongly and
tightly sealed to the surface of rocks and stones.