the bird fleets ride the waters. The goldeneyes follow one another
bobbing along in a channel, along with mergansers and occasional
buffleheads, whose white heads or sides suddenly shine out as they
round a corner. A rush and glide of water shows brightly in the
distance when an eider plows quickly forward. The Canada geese feed
over the marsh or on the borders of its channels and ditches, honking
low, the sentinel ganders with their proud heads and necks showing
above the grassy levels around them. One afternoon when I was walking
across the coarse cover of the marsh--which seemed to stretch far off
like the pampas, with its indefinite sky and a wide-spread travel of
birds--I caught sight of a deer running up behind me, some fifty yards
away. It was a doe, with a dun-colored winter coat; and seeing me, she
swerved suddenly and headed out toward the middle of the marsh. The
waters of January are bitterly cold, but the doe swam a wide channel
to get to a small island in the middle, and there she stayed, shaking
and scratching now and then, stirring around in an area that became
more and more circumscribed as the tide began to rise and the waters
widened. I left her a couple of hours later in the gathering dusk, a
dark, distant little figure, hunched up far out on the marsh. Deer can
swim for several miles, even in icy waters, so she undoubtedly swam
back after I was safely out of the way, perhaps after dark when the
tide started to go down again. Still, I was troubled by what I had
caused, and I came back early next morning to reassure myself that she
was gone.
When night comes on, the dark flat marsh has a look of absolute
secrecy. The cold winter wind completes its isolation. A few last birds
may fly up over it, or twist and cry in the wind and then drop down and
disappear. What quick movements, starts, flicking actions, what flight
there may be left is at last hidden, downed completely, and the wind
and surf sounds wash out all else.
There is secrecy and at the same time a desolation in the marsh,
the desolation of life pared down to absolute essentials. It offers
no luxury but motion in its tidal context, an absolute minimum of
redundance. It is a spare unity, even with all its life and light, and
the colors that play over it throughout the years, a whole which only
accepts those parts which are necessary to it. This marsh is on its
own, with ancient standards of simplicity. To find fulfillment in them
would be luxury indeed. The lights begin to go on in the houses that
stand over its inner shore, as evening advances. A plane drones in the
sky. The marsh’s flat, wind-blown darkness is alone, and seems to say
that all life is received by those bare standards, that we are all
helplessly interdependent and obligated to tides that none of us can
turn.
XV
The Uses of Light
In the face of what it offers, I have said very little about the great
beach. In some respects it is indefinable even as a geographical
entity, in spite of the fact that it represents a range of sandy
shore line that extends for thousands of miles to the south of it. It
fluctuates so, and it is so closely associated with the sea in that
respect, that the term “transition zone,” while generally appropriate,
seems a little misleading. It is made of land materials but it is
not exactly a land boundary. Cape Cod, whose Outer Shore it defines,
is as narrow and exposed as a spit or shoal by comparison with the
continent behind it. In any case, the beach in its grand exposure, its
instability, seems closer to the sea than land, and that may be the
reason why many visitors, bound to the inland world of human claims,
have often expressed the feeling that it looks untouched.
Small white waves on the sea surfaces beyond the beach may scud like
birds while surf and sand are resplendent in green and silver; or an
evening wind from the north blows over sandbanks and beach grasses,
coming on in hesitant rushes, the gray waters conflicting over
shark-gray shoals, and clouds standing off over the sea. Sometimes the
surf strikes and hisses like snakes curling along the sand. Sometimes
it rises up with green-marbled surfaces, roaring and falling with
ponderous formality. Beach and sea are always involved in mutual storms
and plays of light, mutual readjustments beyond our control.
The beach is naked, malleable, ready to move and be moved. It is
invested with the vast balance of the oceanic tides. It is part of the
systems of wind and weather. It is a receiving ground for light. For
these and countless other reasons it is a power, with an expression
made up of all its communicant and communicating energies, their
substance, and formality. It sweeps on in a long curving line that
is a definition not only of a bound but a horizon, a sea, and a sky.
It expresses growth and the stunting of growth, destruction and its
holding back, the violent storm, the offshore summer swell, the heat
and cold. Many languages, heard or unheard by human ears are in it, and
much that is unknown to us. Its long roving ways invite a man to the
space in which life is shaped and perpetuated, invite him, in a sense,
to where he is unable to go, where nothing is promised; but it is human
perception and realization that it brings out, not security, a man’s
coming at the size of the natural realm with its unceasing winds, where
the birds fly in with a grace and concordance that he will find he
knows, by virtue of a primal inheritance.
Life has particular, even narrow, definitions, like those distinct
levels of the beach to which different species are adapted. Plants and
animals that live in the sand, on the cliff tops, or on the ocean floor
beyond the surf, have been responding in the same way for millions of
years. All this is well known to natural science. In fact, to make too
many ignorant and loose generalities about it is probably an offense
to the circumstances; but together with precise conditions goes a vast
scope, a space, and a speed like the overworld racing of the ocean
tide. The beach and its sands, the waves that cut them away or build
them up, its long roaming, and its give and take with respect to the
sea, involves a balance that cannot be separated from the globe itself,
with an age and a future where time is nearly lost. Seaweed, crabs,
shells, fish, or birds are all ancient, exact, and well defined. (It
may take hundreds of thousands of years to change the shape of a head
or a claw.) They are also part of a motion which is not changed into
a machine by being called perpetual. In any case, each form, through
the countless passages of light and dark, was endowed with a joyful
resistance to finality.
Within the shifting landscape of the sea beach all action, each
affinity, and each response, seems controlled and at the same time
free and exemplary. The elements agree in making the junctures of
light unparalleled. Here are the eternal crossways of tides, wind, and
sunlight, full of an indefinite potentiality that comes more clear to
human eyes because of their lack of obstruction. I think of one area
in particular which combines this wide range of view with conflict and
meeting more than most. Where the great beach has its last break at
Chatham, before the long sandy island, or sandspit, of Monomoy, the
tide races through and behind it into Chatham Harbor, and toward the
west it flows between Morris Island and Monomoy into Nantucket Sound.
There is so much intermingling of currents and tides, so many effects
of sky light and clouds and direct sunlight spreading over this area,
together with sea smells and varying winds, as to give it an effect of
constant remaking and realliance. From the Morris Island shore the surf
shows up in the distance above the long low barrier of the Outer Beach
like a mirage of waves and when the north wind flings back spray on
their crests they might be great dolphins plunging forward through the
sea. The cloud masses shift and change, tall in the spring or autumn
sky, over sand and long stretches of green and blue water.
Morris Island’s sandy, wind-punished shores are full of dead oak and
pine, the oak still standing in many places stripped of its bark,
a slick stonelike gray, and the ground is covered with a tangle of
thickets and beach-grass perimeters all leading to a rim of salt-marsh
grasses that joins with sandbars and tidal flats beyond. Through spring
and summer and during the early fall when the shore birds have not yet
migrated, shoals and bars and flats are covered at low or half tide
not only with shifting light over shallow waters but a silvery crying.
Wind, foghorns, gulls screaming, shore birds piping, sometimes the
faint or bell-like notes of inland birds, planes, perhaps an occasional
ship’s bell heard or imagined, all sound through the seasons.
During the winter the channels provide some shelter and feeding grounds
for ducks and of course the gulls station themselves here and fly up at
all times. This point where the tides turn a corner is a contrast in
force and influence. There is the rolling and tossing of the open ocean
not far away; local waters are agitated by the wind, colored by sun and
sky, and always running in or out along the shore; there is a tidal rip
in one area where currents meet; a great rushing tidal stream at one
place, calm, easing waters in another. Within the framework of tides
and storms water changes the shape and volume of the sand as it does
along the Outer Shore. There is a holding, a circling as the Atlantic
waters meet and turn. The earth seems to toss with all their rhythmic
interplay. Flying or flying sounds are in the hands of oceanic light
and surprise. There is a special tension in things that responds to a
great order and sway.
Whatever animals come here to subsist, or migrate through, have an
alliance with this energy, a tidal intensity of their own, taking part
in all the contrasts and conflicts of the environment. During the late
spring for example, you walk from a relative silence on the Morris
Island shore to wide breath and sound a hundred yards away. When the
birds are nesting leafy tangles and trees collaborate with them in
their concealment. Singing has died down. There are only occasional
calls from small birds half-hidden in the leaves, flying from one
protected spot to another, and now and then the nestlings make squeaky
or rasping little cries in the demands of hunger, but just beyond them
the sky is open and bright with action, and there is no need to hide.
In spring and summer the terns are in constant bright evidence over the
open water and the sands. The woodpeckers and the sparrows stay with
trees or grasses; the terns are birds of the ocean airs and long white
shores, their complement and grace. Thousands of terns nest at Tern
Island, on the shore of Chatham Harbor, and through the summer months
and early fall there are always a great many off Morris Island and
Monomoy, diving for fish. They are sharply made, lithe fliers with a
nervous excitability that is peculiar to them. Flocks will hover over a
stretch of tidal water where schools of small fish are running and they
will fairly batter the water, making a loud sound like paddle wheels
as they cover it with points of spray. Hundreds, crying harshly, hover
some five or six feet up, dropping and rising continually. Many of them
dip forward with wings folded slightly, but others, a little higher
up, make steeper dives, hovering against the wind, their wings beating
hard, to drop, twisting slightly, and then dive with wings back and
head down, sharply and precisely. I have thought that terns seldom miss
when they have a fish in sight, but during this kind of mass fishing,
particularly when they dip forward as if to pick the fish up and try
again, it does look like a matter of trial and error. Also, depending
on the season, there may be a number of immature birds in the flock
that are not as skillful as their elders.
The terns are expert performers in every way. They are small and light
with strong, angled wings that can carry them over thousands of miles.
They have range, persistence, a bright balance that carries them
through the mighty and punishing wilderness in which they live. At the
same time, that lovely harsh crying excellence in the form of a tern is
fragile, even ephemeral. Terns, in the early period of their lives at
least, are expendable, like fish. Common terns especially have large
breeding colonies that are extremely vulnerable to human encroachment
as well as rats, cats, dogs, skunks, and other marauders, and they
definitely need protection. Their existence as a race is hazardous
under the best of conditions. The sandy islands or peninsulas which
they use for nesting sites may be flooded by storm tides in the spring,
destroying thousands of eggs or young birds. An adult tern might live
to between fifteen and twenty years of age, although their annual
mortality is 23 per cent, and their chance of reaching adulthood is
fairly slim, tern mortality in the first year being about 92 per cent.
The hard statistics make short lives of many species, while the sun and
sea keep their steady and infinite relationship. There is a quality
of sacrifice in all life. Nothing is spared in its duration, and at
the same time in the uniqueness of its making, as the fires burn. The
results of evolution may seem haphazard in many respects, and the
processes of nature to involve enormous waste; but natural continuity
holds all things in high honor, through the fine balances of life and
death. The forms of fish or tern, with their own transmutations of
energy, are as excellent as they are perishable.
The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling calm during
the burning days of summer and early fall. They lift into marshy shores
and over sandy flats, and then subside. Sometimes the fog comes on in
the afternoon and the deep foghorn groans through sheets of silver
under the wind, a low curtain moving on and parting slightly here and
there, the sunlight showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over
the flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly
with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward. Small
fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There is an
over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional “huh, huh”
from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts with the breath
of wind over water.
Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing gulls
with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk, stand off in
the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed plovers run hurriedly
forward over the sands and through the shallows. A yellowlegs, tall
and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes along an edge of the shore.
Black-bellied plovers, big-headed, short-billed, stocky by comparison,
trot through the waters, standing up straight at intervals, while the
yellowlegs suddenly races back and forth on its hunt for food, turning
back on its shadow. These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed,
crying out, the black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own.
Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling fogs;
burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds over the rim of
the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and pink and pearly
across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly glittering diamonds over
the water. Light and water and wings flow in and flow past, the motion
of ages, all actions being synchronized, as the hovering and diving
of the tern is synchronized with the fish it catches, part of the
indefinite combinations of things in a universe of motion. Over these
waters and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops,
and starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at
all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed or
merely moving at random.
They are all elements in a great exchange--this ardor and play of one
instant in time, an instant that is equal in importance to all others.
I stand here at the apex of one day. Here out of a thousand years is
another advent, another chance for action, another use for sight, in
the beautiful agreement of all contrary, separate, and divided things.
I remember one evening at Morris Island in the latter part of August,
with the day beginning to fall and the surf’s dull roar sounding from
the sands of the great beach, a beach behind me, still beyond me,
still in a sense not walked. The tide started to ebb, flicking lightly
against the shore, lapsing with the evening as if the sea had an easy
courtesy of its own, and with the smoky sunset low on the western sky,
the waters moved out over gray sands. There was a perfect symmetry to
the evening. Terns flew over, light, airy, floating with a swallow’s
beat, but deep, sure, and strong. Little sanderlings and red-backed
sandpipers, half-seen in the dusk, ran through reflections in the
shallow waters at the edge of the tide, part of its coolness and flow,
the little waves in banked rows rippling. The birds tripped forward and
dipped to the mirrored salmon, copper and crystal in these waters, in
a communication. The terns trilled harshly and sometimes their bodies
trembled as they beat up against the light wind and changed position.
A single herring gull stood still on a hummock at the tide’s edge like
an Indian in a ritualistic acceptance of darkness coming on. The order
of change and constancy began to take light’s fire and warmth and its
colors away, in the graduated motion of the sky, along with all flying
elements like the terns, like thought, and the unimagined combinations
of being. The wavelets edged out. The sanderlings started to flit off
and disappear. Finally there was no turning back the authority of night.
[Illustration]
Transcriber’s Notes
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.