off the beach, burned in a fire, or lodged and buried deep above the
high-tide line. It may serve temporarily as a place where seaweed and
other litter gathers, or where crustaceans might congregate. The birds,
if it is an accessible clump of branches fingering over the sands,
rather than a log or heavy timber, may peck through it after such tiny
animals, their tracks making a delicate tracery running under it and
arrowing away. Driftwood migrates like the sand and the birds. It is
another aspect of the surf’s swing and draw, its dragging out, its
removal and its deposition, part of the constant remolding of this
shore.
On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon, everything
goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only rule. As it does
everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across from one direction of
the compass or another, streaming with light and moisture, lifts up,
lifts you to it, and with long low swoops, sudden breaths and seething,
it whisks the waters of the marshes and inlets, rounds their brown
shoulders, races through trees and over cliffs clean through across the
sea. The land under it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes,
also waves as they do.
The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though
vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard,
look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light,
the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and
beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the
winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This
is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers.
There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above
the pouring of the surf.
Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of
huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips
to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held
by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog
cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves.
Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia,
“beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has
golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die,
flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them.
Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold
on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away,
though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in
some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost
luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.
Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with
burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at
the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when
building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and
half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.
The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping back
as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just above the beach
its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost denuded of vegetation,
deep cups with drops below them sheer down to the beach. I have seen
the remnants of house foundations in such hollows, or a creosoted pole
or two sticking up above the surface of the sand, not too old by the
look of them, proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be.
Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry, or
in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain finality, giving
a free, waving look to the surface of things. On the other hand this
vegetation is definite enough. There is no fragility to it. It is
scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth may be held down but it
also gives the landscape a symmetry and economy; it does not give the
impression of being hit or miss at all but very definite and sure of
its place, as sure as wind-struck, salt-sprayed plants can be. Each
plant stays rooted from place to place through this sandy earth, being
adapted to intense light, drought, and constant winds, holding on
hard against being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move
into new areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in
on newly deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in
which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the plants
formerly rooted there.
So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance,
temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes made by
the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to be hummocks
or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock may be held down
by beach grass and have a core of bayberry bushes with only an inch
or two of leaves and branches sticking out at the tops. Beach grass,
bayberry, seaside goldenrod live in close if embattled communities, at
least with respect to the wind. These plants and others may all join in
holding such hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded
clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around them.
There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way, ericoides and
tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,” but the name is
usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more common of the two.
They are not always easy to tell apart. The ericoides, sometimes
called golden heather, has tiny spinelike leaves that stand out fairly
distinctly from the stem and each other and it is a plant that stays
green for a much longer time during fall and winter. The tomentosa is
densely tufted, downy, softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or
bluish green, being subject to winter kill more readily than the other
species. On Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried,
and used for fuel.
The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely
dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face
of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A
“succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large
fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought
conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has
to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest
of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil
needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots
fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted
like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment,
where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod
at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period,
remaining ever since.
Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault
made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the
ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic
weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape
trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment
more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water,
but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill
their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat
on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.
[Illustration]
Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground,
each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit
it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the
thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of
reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which
taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success
in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is
allied to all life’s insistence on success.
We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly
the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like
bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea
stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its
tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as
they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result
of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment
in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.
XII
The Depths of Sight
Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter,
to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths
suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of
quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all
the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted,
barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of
the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and
the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and
primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be
so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at
their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I
suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part
in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity.
It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make
sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book
or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of
closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass.
Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull
and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with
the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once
for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had
for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to
be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are
not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a
misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a
sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its
lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other
animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may
have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing
across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not,
and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The
strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth,
result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from
self-knowledge.
That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human
civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of
our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work
for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as
if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific
purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As
likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off
at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow.
And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response
to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the
sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies
in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the
effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it
seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a
herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by
intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected
with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why
leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape
mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.
One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were
congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As
soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they
took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and
they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and
the surf line.
Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming
just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though
the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was
on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head
first, over and down, slipping under the water.
On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of
good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First
one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through
field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up
at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind.
The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming
up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping
through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing
animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less
numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of
these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a
great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact
with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an
electric communication made between one far pole and another.
Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very special way,
but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and reception, and in
animals without consciousness and means of assessment this may mean
more than automatic reaction to light. I think of a crowd of newly
hatched minnows like tiny slivers of glass, running up and quivering
through the water. The most definite thing about them is their large
black eyes, contrasted with a bodily transparency so fragile as to
seem past fragility, an artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of
universal actions that might have their matrix in a dream. Those large
eyes are the eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an
alliance with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual
attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration in a
man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new to life.
Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are looking
at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses there is a
watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a lightning and at
the same time a listlessness there is in them, in their hurrying ways
through currents of fluid light, and their suspension in its stillness!
Many of them only last for a day or a few minutes before disappearing
as a food for other animals, in the mercurial depths of water allied
with life, this intoxicant, this terror.
My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains this
landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own eye and its
own depth to find. The expression of water, sand, and sky leads vision
beyond itself.
One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low over
the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the same time
illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard light of a
fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or so away down the
shore. I kept walking toward them with the illusion that the boat was
moored close to the beach, but after a couple of miles the lights were
still receding and I turned back. The tide was close in and sheets
of foam pitched in and dragged back with a sound of rattling stones
but in gentle rhythm. It was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could
detect little strikes of light, the curling over and stirring of white
and silver. Up through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared
intermittently, riding above the water. The beach was covered with
soft airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood
of ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was
out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond the
atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away and joined with
fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation, a familiar place
turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I might sense all sorts of far
nerve ends tingling out of the night behind the mist. We receive very
little of what reaches us out of this tribal universe, whose messages
light through us unseen and unheard until we, as individuals, are
turned to the dust of the sky.
Night or day, the sea and sea beach offer their changing spaces of
light. One afternoon in January, halfway between hours of warmth
and hours of cold, rain and snow, morning and evening, the sea off
Nauset was racing green, spray tossing off the tops of the waves that
simultaneously paused, curved up, and broke down in thunder. The whole
sky was full of cloud featherings borne over before the wind and along
the horizon out to sea were colors of lavender and gray, and pale-green
openings like caves. The wide, steep beach was full of gloss, with
a roll and fire of its own, and above it fringing the edge of the
sandbanks the beach grass curved out and waved. I felt a resonance in
the beach, a tremendously heavy and vibrant tone, the tonnage of sand
and surf in harmony along with a low moan from the sea’s lungs.
Small flocks of black ducks quivered over the water and then flew in
to Nauset marsh. Then the heavier Canada geese beat in with stalwart
wings, to thin out from their V formation to a long line as they
wheeled in low against the wind and then regathered as they settled
down on the marsh.
Blackback gulls glided low across the outer line of the surf and
sometimes their shadows appeared on the curving wall of a wave. Herring
gulls soared in the heights and then beat forward on sinewy wings like
flounders pulsing and beating through the water.
One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which it had found on
the marsh and dropped it from high in the air. Then the bird retrieved
its food and tried again, taking a chance on whether or not it would
strike some boulders and break, since this is a haphazard and not a
very knowledgeable game with the gulls. They pick up the habit from
each other, by example rather than inheritance. Sometimes it works and
just as often it does not.
The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the clouds
ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand were waggling
back and forth in the wind. There was a swish of milky surf up the
beach. Over the uncountable numbers of sand grains, each with its own
size, shape, and color was a clean radiance, even a magic. Because in
this realm of wide, majestic use, of continual advent, each offering
was still of a proportion perfect for its moment in time. Each single
action, the silhouette of the straw-colored grasses curving before the
wind, or a gull shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the
light, was of such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they
were magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they had
life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not subject to
lessening or degradation in this world of nature.
Like the lights that appear under the mist, or over the open barrens of
the sea at night, like St. Elmo’s fire on the _Pequod_’s mast, there
are electric tricks playing on the horizon, perhaps at all times,
since there seems to be no end to light’s action over the waters with
the sky’s depth behind it. As I walked up the beach there was a radiant
white patch hanging up in the soft, scudding overcast, not in the sun’s
direction--reflected off the water perhaps--but having a wild aura of
its own. It gave me a feeling of communication with something which
had a right to awe. We may have passed the primitive stage, but the
primitive respect for what was beyond human control and the magic used
to propitiate it or bring it to play may still have their sources. The
light and its manifestations is still too quick for the eye, or for the
facts.
Science itself goes on proving that there is no infinite exactitude
and that many things can only be explained in terms of probability.
The fact that nothing is stopped by our constant search for a simple
solution to life is what keeps science in business. The search into
the nature of cells finds them full of inner whirlings, the motion
of countless component parts, of a universal restlessness. They are
structurally fantastic and each kind is manifestly different. Our
voyage toward the invisible is unending. The molecule or the jellyfish,
seen through one human lens or another, retain their share of the
marvelous. And if we marvel, we are still capable of learning.
A radiance above me, a changing freshness in the air, between warm and
cold, a shudder of wings over the beach, another language of unexplored
dimensions, life expressions understood in terms of sight and spirit,
and still to be learned--the nonhuman advents that pass the limits of a
man. There is a common realm of action and perception, whose boundaries
we may never reach, where men can be more grateful for their belonging
than their isolation. It is part of the changing state of inanimate
things, the response of lesser forms of life to the construction and
motion of the world that invades them and which they invade, and it is
acted out by the mind. The tidal waves run through us all. To see as
men see and merely to react like a moon snail or a horseshoe crab to
the difference between light and dark are two representative actions in
the same vast realm of response.
Do men belabor the special nature of consciousness too much, as if it
were some kind of A-1 badge that separated mankind from the rest of
animate creation? Consciousness must be infinitely more mysterious,
more connective, than any attributes we may assign it of personal
distinction.
XIII
The Flight of Birds
The appearance of migratory birds in fall and spring, or simply their
constant activity, suggests their range. The ability that a gull
displays in the turmoil of the air is enough to bring other winds to
these shores, to make you realize that the beach joins the long shore
line between Cape Cod and Florida, that the waters to the north of us
move on toward Labrador and Baffin Bay. Their wings are allied to the
circulation of the North Atlantic. New England is not so far from the
Arctic Circle, and when the auks, the old squaws, or the buntings come
down to Cape Cod in the autumn they bring the proof with them.
We have had an appalling record this side of the Atlantic, of
decimating the population of sea birds, which are more vulnerable than
other species because of their nesting habits, on islands or rocky
foreshores. The great auk has gone, and the puffins reduced to small
numbers. If we were able to kill them all off, either on purpose or
through lack of responsibility, what little island people it would make
us!
The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting black
and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and rocky headlands
where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the cast of deep and icy
waters. One June day, when the beach at Race Point was glaring with
light, and all the winter leavings, like the twisted dead stalks of
dusty miller, were being replaced by a freshness in the shine and
scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or little auk, on the beach a few
yards away from the water. It is a very small bird, though conspicuous
enough with its penguinlike stance, its black and white plumage, and
though it was in full view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When
I approached, this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away
from me down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of
sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since most
dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a “nonbreeding
straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more temperate waters not
locked in ice like their home feeding grounds. Over a period of years
and at unpredictable times, there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds
are blown inland by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places:
ponds, back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping
centers. Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease,
if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided they
survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a number of
them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod highway.