to resist being torn by the waves, with bladders serving as floats,
with gelatinous surfaces, with hollow stems, are eloquent of the nature
of salt water, its ebb and flow, its depths, its capacious circulation.
The seaweeds found on the beach, black, thin, dried out, or fresh and
slippery, olive green, brown, or red, having been torn loose by a
storm, start growing beyond the violent action of the surf, and grow
for the most part to a depth of some forty or fifty feet. Different
varieties like different depths, but since they are not free floating
unless torn loose they are not found beyond the point where rays of
sunlight, necessary for manufacturing food, cannot reach them.
Over and beyond them, in surface waters where the light penetrates
before being absorbed, is a vegetation, varying in abundance according
to place and season, but of incredible numbers over all, the one-celled
microscopic organisms that are the basic food of all the seas. The
seaweeds are simple and primitive in structure compared with much of
the plant life on land, the more hazardous, contrary environment, and
the members of the phytoplankton (the planktonic plants), even more so,
although the diatoms, which form a large part of it, show a variety
of outer form. Each diatom has a skeleton, made largely of silica, an
outer shell hard enough to resist easy dissolution when the plant dies.
It is formed like a pillbox, or a casket, or it is shaped like a quill,
a ribbon, or rod, or it is joined with others in beads and chains.
Each is minute, an etched, crystalline perfection, and each is lost
in other billions, which we might only see on occasion as a green or
greenish-brown stain across the water.
The shells of dead diatoms rain down through the water and form thick
deposits on the floor of the sea. The cliffs above the beach are full
of them. Cities have been built on their fossilized shells. In their
number the diatoms balance the magnitude of the sea. In size they are
basic to the existence of the minuscule animals of the zooplankton that
feed upon them, and are eaten by larger animals in turn. A diatom’s
delicacy and sparkling beauty as it reflects the light could indicate
that universal productivity must start with a jewel, and perhaps end
with it too.
That which is minute, like the diatoms, or cells, which are the basic
structure of life, is a clue to the significance of things, leading
from the simple to the complex and multifarious, but finally rounding
us back to where we started. A man himself is the unique single cell
with its own nature. Each life has its irreducible quality. I have been
told that if you look at a diatom through an electronic microscope,
from one increased magnification to another, you can see all its
protuberances and layers disappear, and finally a sparkling crystalline
form is revealed, like a cosmic surprise.
I suppose it is part of my fate as a large and clumsy animal of the
mammalian order, crashing through the underbrush, knocking down trees,
and displacing earth’s other inhabitants, to miss a great deal, at
least with my unassisted eyes. To learn about some new form of life
which I may have been passing by for years is often something of a
redemption. I can then say that we have not yet been so run down by our
own traffic that we have lost the capacity to see.
Not long ago a colony of bryozoans was pointed out to me, at least the
gelatinous crusts of the compartments in which they lived, like little
tufts and fringes attached to the fronds of seaweed cast up on the
beach. They are tiny colonial animals that make cups and compartments
joined together in branching stems, from which they send out little
crowns of delicate, filamentous tentacles waving in the water. There
are three thousand marine species of them, growing in different forms,
and having different surfaces for their attachment. I had thought
previously that the little pale-colored, branched tufts were a part of
the seaweed. Now another small marvel had appeared on my horizon.
The beach was empty where I walked, except for bird tracks, tidal
wrack, driftwood, bits of shell, or a finger sponge in evidence of
the life alongside it, and depending on the warmth and receptivity to
life that the season held, excepting also whatever microscopic animals
might be crawling over wet surfaces around the sand grains. Again,
emptiness, or poverty, is always qualified. After all the copepods, the
nematodes or thread worms, and other groups unseen or unknown to me
might be underfoot in vast numbers; and as I continued on there was no
counting the number of little holes in the sand made by beach fleas or
sand hoppers. As the autumn deepened I supposed they were unoccupied
and deserted, since these beach dwellers, as I had heard it, should
have been tucked away in their burrows by this time, with the door shut
above their heads, waiting for March and April to bring a warm sun
which could tease them out of dormancy. But one bright morning in the
middle of November I saw a great many of them hard at work.
At first I noticed thousands of little mounds on the surface of the
sand in a strip some six to fifteen feet wide along the upper part
of the beach, following in general the outlines of the previous high
tide. Where a log or shelving bank was in the way, these mounds, and
the many holes accompanying them, about knitting-needle size, were
concentrated on the seaward side. I noticed that shore birds had
attempted to pluck the occupants from their holes and had reached down
two to three inches. I scooped out the sand where a hole was, spread
it around, and revealed a little animal not over a half inch long,
with two large eyes covering the sides of its narrow head. The eyes
were not only conspicuous, they were also startlingly white; and the
sand-hopper’s body flattened on both sides, was a mother-of-pearl,
somewhat translucent. This odd creature, one of a family in the order
of amphipods, is called _Talorchestia megalopthalma_, a title that
gives special credit to its eyes.
I put my pale-moon animal back in its hole, but to be held and thrust
against its own volition apparently immobilized it, so I let it go free
down the sands. After a second or two it made a few big and seemingly
crazy hops--on sidelong springs like a toy--down a line of mounds and
holes, popped into a hole and promptly disappeared.
I noticed that little spouts and bursts of sand were coming from many
of these holes and with a little patience I could see some of the
hoppers coming up as if to look around, as is customary with gophers
and chipmunks, and then turning around and going back down again. What
they were doing of course was a major job of digging, passing the sand
up from one pair of legs to another and throwing it out the hole with
a jerk. There was hardly time or inclination to pause and look around
the far horizon. It was work that had to be done unceasingly, between
tides and between seasons. Perhaps, if tomorrow brought consistently
freezing temperatures, they might not appear again in any great numbers
until spring; but their usual daily round meant frenzied feeding at
low tide and after dark when no winged predators were around, followed
by another return to the upper beach and another furiously energetic
period of digging homes for themselves. Terrestrial animals, which
might drown after a period of immersion, and yet bound on this strip of
sand to the tides, they had a more legitimate claim to the beach than
most of us.
Looking down at them, or in on their busyness, I had an extraordinary
Gulliverlike feeling of encroaching on a world to which I did not
belong. It was one kind of an eye looking at another without any sense
of whether it was seen in turn or not, in a dichotomy of function,
race, size, and place. It took the beach out of my possession. This was
a place of other-world connections at which I could hardly guess. Do
we need to wait for the men from Mars?
These are extravagant animals, with their grandiose if relatively blind
eyes, with their feats of digging, their hunger dance. In a sense they
have a very narrow range, between upper and lower tide, between one
season and the next, between feeding and digging on their strip of
sand, between hiding and emerging, and their life span is short; but
what a use they make of it!
_Talorchestia megalopthalma_ is now on my life list, as the “birders”
put it, a pearly prodigy of moon leaps that may, for all I know, be the
beach’s foremost citizen.
I also caught a glimpse of another little animal as I turned over a
piece of driftwood. It had numerous legs (seven pairs in all, I have
learned), and a flattened body, though slightly rounded on top, and
oval in shape, reminding me of a pill bug or sow bug, one of my most
familiar landed neighbors, which can be found under almost any boulder
or log that provides shade and moisture. The marine, or beached member
of the family I met, was grayish white in color, and apparently had the
same preference for moisture--if not too much, since it evidently lived
at the high-tide line, and was “terrestrial” like the sand hoppers.
Some of these isopods swim in the open sea, others live in shallow
water, or at the low-tide line, and most are scavengers, feeding on
dead animal matter.
All these and countless others are symptomatic of a tidal range, an
ebb and flow that extends between sea and land in terms of millions
of years of emergence and adaptation. In them the two worlds find
their division and also their meeting and intercommunication. Their
characteristic areas, their “life zones,” from the tropics to the
poles, all require extremes of risk and of the struggle to survive it.
In one place or another they dance to the inexorable measure of things,
limited in what they do but exceptional in their way of doing it.
On this beach, so unique, so well defined, and at the same time so
widely involved, every upward surge of the waves and every bubbling
retreat sinking through the sand, every range of tide, from the new
moon to the old, every storm, every change in the season, every day and
every night, is embodied in existence.
I would think it presumptuous of me to claim any more on behalf of a
bug or myself than we could in our honest natures fulfill, but faced by
the shining tides of life, I am sure we have great things to do.
My translations are on this beach. I am still a part of its measure,
and when I forget those overwhelming controls that human power insists
on, and all the artificiality men use to overcome their natural
limitations, I begin to partake in this miraculous context. It is a
cold beach, a bitter sea. Covered with cold, the sands impersonally
receive the shadows moving over them tall and wide, gradually shifting
and easing over slopes and shoulders toward the surf with its continual
lunge, its pull and push, displacing the pale light that stands over
the beach and gives it a hard winter brightness. The waves pour and
foam and bubble up the beach and recede with a rainlike glistening and
seething that sinks in, leaving dark stains behind. The middle part of
the beach shows long thin lines like scars where the last tides came,
part of the never ending drawing and erasing on this tablet of the
sea’s art. It is all clean, and naked, defined, and at the same time
rhythmically boundless, providing everything that comes to it with an
inexhaustible dimension. It needs another language, and at the same
time no language could really encompass it. In this bold breath and
silence moving up, scene shifting, always starting again, there are
decisions of sun and waves, of wind and light, that leave me with a
true silence, a great room to fill, though it is in my blood and veins,
the roots of me to feel, and any companion whom I meet must be in an
ancient earth sense completely new, with a freshness made of a million
years.
X
Deer Week
The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were loaded with
whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking up and down
offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside from the two men that I
could see in the boat, the shore was a world unoccupied, bright, wide,
and cold, one about which the mass of us might care or know very little.
On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the bay, black
ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers rode the choppy
waters. The bay also ran hard with whitecaps; and the wind with a bare
fury roared head on at empty summer houses facing the north, and drove
across headlands glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes
in its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking and
shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought the whole north
with it and the gulls that hung there or rose steeply into it, were
allied with its violence in a way that was hard to understand.
Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of human
preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in December, and the
pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of guns like the hard slamming
of doors, and down the highway at least every other car was loaded with
hunters dressed in red, and on nearly every sandy side road several
cars were parked. Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff
looking out to sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in
that direction.
Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent
patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out of their cars
like spectators at a football game, they seemed as covered with neon
lighting as a city street. In fact many of them do come from cities
to the north and south of the Cape, which can now be reached in much
faster time than used to be the case, and they follow the same pattern
as many of the summer tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who
live away from streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The
lookouts stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars
across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the woods where
I live. The guns resound from all points of the compass.
Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game birds.
One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning from a hunting
expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless. One man had managed to
shoot a partridge on the way, but he ruefully admitted that someone had
stolen it from the back of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started
straggling back, while guns were still going off in what seemed a
completely indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion.
“Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great
cheerfulness.
I was helping one of the hunters extricate his station wagon from a
muddy hole, and by that time I had a feeling that, like many other
human enterprises, hunting was a communal affair which might turn out
one way or another, but like a battle, had no certain outcome. It was
clear, in any case, that very few of these men had much of an idea
about the habits of the animals they were hunting. Some species of
ducks, for example, feed more readily after sundown and so are more
easily found, and more vulnerable. A half century ago, the population
of wild fowl was probably less safe than it is now. A yellowlegs,
flying up out of a marsh in late autumn, did not have much of a chance
to start south. Some local hunter was waiting in anticipation, someone
who probably knew the marshes and the shore as his ancestors had known
them.
If the hunters had an unlimited season on this narrow peninsula, Cape
Cod would be in a state of siege the year around, regardless of what
happened to the ducks, partridge, quail, or deer. We have the universal
problem of room and numbers. After all, the human population is
increasing at a faster rate than most birds. Perhaps our populatedness
results in less concern for the rest of life simply through lack of
association with it. Do we know what we are shooting at? Hunters who
blast away into flocks of eiders or Canada geese, leaving many of them
wounded, unable to retrieve the rest because they are too far out in
the water, are not doing anything but getting rid of their feelings,
which are not necessarily worth cherishing.
The deer population may not decline because of hunting. Their numbers,
their balance between starvation and survival depends largely on the
kind of country they live in, on its vegetation. Cape Cod is only a
half mile in width in some parts of it, seven or eight in others, but
down the middle of it there is a wide belt of low growth, of tangles,
shrubs, and low, cut-over woodland which provides good forage for deer
and good concealment, even with the human armies in their midst.
Hunting deer is thought of as an American heritage, our birthright,
part of the Thanksgiving celebration, handed down from fathers to sons.
Since deer are one of those species, unlike their predators the wolf
and the mountain lion, that have managed to live abundantly in the
presence of man, so much so that they sometimes require “weeding” to
save them from starvation, hunting them is as legitimate as it ever
was, provided the hunting is controlled; but we no longer need them as
we did.
Having left the age behind when venison was our essential meat,
we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed deer. In
some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters. They are
directly influenced by human civilization. In turn, civilization is
dependent on them to the extent that they provide the basis for a
multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is our hunter’s right
that deer should exist, but we are not the hunters that we used to be.
What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline, clothing, ammunition, whiskey?
The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be more to
our advantage than any claims we make on them. They are afraid of man
and keep their distant beauty from him. The heritage _they_ keep is
wildness, which still has the power to arouse fear in us, and sometimes
pity, as we may pity all life, including our own, that is cut short or
broken by the inexorable laws of the universe.
On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and the
sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some distance ahead
of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two cars had just roared by
with hunters in them, before she made her appearance. She seemed either
wounded or exhausted, going very slowly, pulling her hindquarters
stiffly behind her. When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew
up and she went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only
moderate speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs under
the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men, who turned up
their car heaters and sped away.
Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked, and a
hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass. I could see
the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore road, waiting
with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind, getting in and out
of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,” sounded across
the way. After a while a number of them began to hurry ahead, almost
tumbling as they ran, to converge on a deer which had apparently run
to the bottom of a hollow. They surrounded the hollow on all sides,
many men standing on their car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether
there was actually a deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to
escape, I never learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood
for comfort.
The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the sea, not
too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat--a very rough
trade on that day for common flesh and blood--rocked forward through
the waves. After a while the darkness began to fall, with a thin smoky
yellow and pink band on the western horizon and a new blanket of gray
clouds mounting overhead, so that all of us began to turn in under the
cold breath of night.
I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every minute
of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through the countless
years of earthly inheritance and change, how we became so overmastering
in our numbers and needs, so divorced from the exactions of nature?
Shall we meet up only with ourselves?
Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains, and
their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even those who abuse a
hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion, are trying to keep in
contact with a natural mortality which our world denies. Perhaps we
need help from other animals besides the human one.
Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood,
marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach with its
perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone and lifted
each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and sand. The gulls
hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky. Even the boat had
a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so with feathers, logs, or
purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but swept and washed into a
mutual keeping by the air and the tidal presence of the sea. I asked
it to show us light and life which was our undiscovered own to help us
through our mutual violence and upheavals, our narrow days.
XI
Impermanence Takes Its Stand
Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually, and the beach
loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the plants and trees work
so hard to hold on in their shifting ground that they never reach a
climax state. They are pioneers. Such a place is open, as all earth’s
shores must be, to drifters, like the black stork.
The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up in great
numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm, could come in
from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, Maine, or Nova
Scotia, depending on how it was transported, by ships or by the sea
itself. Years ago, sailing ships traveling along the Outer Cape with
cargoes of lumber chained to their decks might encounter heavy seas and
be in serious danger of grounding on the shoals, in which case they
would occasionally jettison the cargo, which would land up and down
the beaches, to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the
“moon-cussers.” Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or
studding, it supplied many a family with material for their houses. I
can think of at least one house which is largely constructed of it.
Or as it happened not so many years ago, a log jam in a Maine river
broke the boom and the logs went careening and dipping down to the sea,
a great many landing after a while on the Outer Beach. Huge trunks of
trees sometimes appear, carried in by the sea. I have found cherry,
red and white pine, cedar, spruce, beech, and even some canoe birch
with the bark still on it, a tree not indigenous to the Cape. Mahogany
and walnut have been found at times, and a few years ago the cross
section of a tree was discovered near Eastham that turned out to be a
very hard and heavy wood from Brazil, probably fallen off a ship. Parts
of dories, or larger vessels, broken oars; buoys of all colors and
shapes, glass floats from lobster pots, branches, logs; boards of many
different sizes and lengths, wharf pilings and planks, and dunnage,
timbers used in stowing ship’s cargoes, cases of scotch, always, in
my sad experience, without the scotch; crates from vessels of all the
world, South American, Russian, Japanese, French, and most of the
nations you can name; all these and more have been carried by the sea,
sometimes for twenty or thirty years, until they were finally landed on
the beach. It is wood for the fire, a house, a shack, or a table, and
material for any curious scavenger, on behalf of aesthetics, science,
or history.