freezing weather has been reached. Then on the thirtieth the
temperature drops to 20 degrees. I notice a flower, Queen Anne’s lace,
still blooming, all by itself in a field of matted grass. During the
night the surface of the ground is frozen hard ... a cap of reality at
last, with no more lingering. There is a genuine glittering clarity
of cold, in cloud, and branch and stone. Out on the bay the low waves
look as if they had a harder push and pull to make, imbued with new
heaviness. A boy shows me the frozen body of a red-legged grasshopper,
perfectly preserved for a little while by a power to which its only
adaptation is death. What still stands above ground now faces poverty,
and primitive recalcitrance.
There is a kind of ice sludge being nudged in by the tides along the
shore and through rippling purple waters of tidal inlets. There are ice
circlets around the marsh grass. Thin ice sheets form at the rim of
fresh-water ponds.
The inland world seems either subdued or facing survival’s icy stare,
and even self-sufficient human society looks ready to draw in and hole
up for the winter. But since Cape Cod is surrounded by the sea, it has
another depth, another range, where other populations roam while the
rest of us wait and shiver. Above water, the more visible migrants are
those wintering sea birds--auks, scoters, black ducks, eiders, old
squaws, brant and Canada geese--that feed along the shore, in sheltered
inlets, or in waters farther out, depending on their habit.
In my locality Canada geese and black ducks are swimming through
peat-rooted grasses off Paine’s Creek where the terns were fishing two
months ago. A line of white-winged scoters flies low over the heaving
waters of the bay. I watch two black ducks in the sky, approaching
from the north. They are coming over at high speed downwind with wings
beating hard. Then more ducks fly up across inlet and marsh, taking off
to windward. They swing back for a short stretch, then up again, as if
to hold position, like travelers reconnoitering, then fly on and out of
sight.
Two miles or more from shore I see points of spray going up from the
surface of the water, and above them many large white birds continually
turning and diving, from a considerable height. These are the gannets,
that appear off Cape waters in the autumn after they have nested on
their island territories in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The immature,
first-year birds, which can also be seen diving for fish, are almost
totally black. They are usually not with us for long, since they pass
to winter feeding grounds, which may be as far south as the Caribbean.
Anyone who has seen them crowding their nesting grounds on Bonaventure
Island off the Gaspé Peninsula, will know, from close observation,
how spectacular these birds are. They allow tourists to come almost
as close to them as chickens in a yard. Thousands of pairs nest at
the top of high cliffs or along their ledges above the water, each
with its established square foot or two of nesting territory. A loud,
rattling cry goes up, out of a multitude of hoarse croaks and groans.
I felt a great sense of pressure and establishment in this bird city,
this singular society with its consistent behavior and ceremony. The
pairs greet one another bowing, or with heads raised and the long thick
bills fencing. Their stiff carved heads are always in motion, always in
response to one another. It is a pressing, elaborate spectacle, ancient
and authoritative.
Gannets are awkward landers. They come in stiffly and do a kind of
top-heavy tumble when they hit the ground; but as ocean flyers they
have no superiors. When I see them again silently gliding over the
waters off the Cape, I greet them for their earth-honored mastery. At
a distance they might be mistaken for herring gulls, but they are much
larger, and their long black-ended wings are typical. When you see
points of spray going up far out on the water, and white birds diving,
you have unmistakably seen the gannets.
Earlier this month, during an easterly storm, with pouring, blinding,
deafening wind and rain, a few gannets were flying close to the
shore off Paine’s Creek where the water was a little calmer and the
atmosphere less overcast than farther out in the bay. The birds flew
low, since the fish they were hunting were in shallow water and
presumably close to the surface. On this stormy morning they flew in
an almost leisurely way over the surface, flapping their wings and
gliding. They would turn casually and dive, their wings half spread.
Then they rose and flew steadily on with power and ease, their wings
feeling the stiff wind, using it like the ancient professionals they
were.
Now the north wind is blowing hard in the late afternoon. There are
slate-gray cloud masses in the sky, with a steely light where the sun
rays through, and the temperature has dropped to about 40 degrees.
Offshore over rocking, ponderous, gray waters, I can see the crowds
of gannets following a shoal line in the distance. They catch the
light from the sun when it strikes occasionally through the clouds,
intensifying their whiteness and turning the water green. They seem to
drift and turn continually, their arrowed bodies plummeting down, the
splashes appearing against white bordered waves. As I walk inland the
sun goes westward behind massive clouds and the gannets, far out, high
and white, keep diving with exact abandon.
The intermittent sunlight wheels in to brighten the yellow grasses and
make the sand sparkle. To the north it is as if the sky were moving
down from its Arctic limits and announcing new themes, with iceberg
clouds, and high walls of cold against which the sun strikes new
fire, while the wind rushes down to make the message felt. A flock of
sharp-tailed sparrows lands on the sand, the marsh-side of a dune. They
fly up into the stiff, cold air, and then drop down into a small hollow
for protection. They stay there for a while under the great force of
wind and blown sand, not closely knit so much as spread out in what
looks like a perilous unanimity. If one sparrow should stray even a
foot away from the rest, in their over-all, though loose, pattern, I
feel as if it must be irretrievably lost, blown off, and separated.
That which holds the sharp-beaked, yellow-headed little birds together
is in their senses. They intercommunicate as one flock and form. It is
a control--as lightly manifested as the sparrows themselves, but as
powerful as the elements against which they stand.
_December_
_An Old Place, an Old Man_
When the feel of winter comes, in November or early December--though
by astronomical calculation winter does not start until December
twenty-second--when the first hard seal is set on the ground, and we
are settled in with a new plainness, then it is not difficult to bring
back yesterday and its country living. Winter’s role in the year’s
wheel is an arresting, for the sake of renewal, a sleep, or half sleep,
for later waking. It has its own suspense and violence, its roars and
silences, like the other seasons, but in general its order is of a
different quality, having an inwardness and resistance, a bare, gray
need to keep things inside and hidden down. This is the time of year
that shows a plain connection between human beings and their land.
I see last leaves whipping around the hollows off an old Cape road,
or walk through the now more oblique rays of the sun that yellow the
sandy ground held by thin, waving grasses, gray beach plum or bayberry
bushes, and I recognize what has been left behind.
Here, surrounded by open slopes, is an abandoned house site, now a
cellar hole, walled by square blocks of glacial granite. Orchard
grass, timothy, and redtop still engage the old domesticity. Inside
their circle you can see where children played, water was fetched and
carried, chickens fed, and voices raised. There are yucca plants close
to the foundations, and a rose or two. I transplanted such a rose a
few years ago, and with added nourishment it turned from a slight,
single-petaled flower to a great bunch of pinkish-purple fragrance.
Unlike some abandoned farm sites in other parts of New England, there
is nothing left here to show what the inhabitants did. There are no
harrows, stone bolts, yokes, or farm implements, not even any pots and
pans. The stones are left, and the faithful grasses, and beyond them
the crunchy, gray deer moss, and beard grass of indigenous fields.
It was a small place, of bare subsistence. Whatever the qualities
of the people who lived there, they left simplicity behind them.
Not too far away, a bulldozer is making a desert with giant scoops,
high-tension wires are marching by, and a plane rips the air overhead.
We are encroaching in our oblivious fashion, without delay. The new
domesticities may occupy only a tenth of an acre each, but they
engage all lands. The old domestic wildness cannot be replaced. It
was a lodgment limited by need, gray outside and dark within, perhaps
unbearably close and confined at times, but with a knowledge of its
earth.
It seems to me that as the world has grown outward in recent years,
even I, a comparative newcomer to Cape Cod, have lost some local life
to memory. When you live in a place for the first time you see behind
it to its roots and grain, before the storms of circumstance blow you
away from it. I remember a few old men who seemed so representative of
the old Cape that it will never be the same now that they are gone.
The loss is of a country speech, the flavor of a flesh and blood
nurtured on locality. What has replaced them can be defined in terms of
California as well as Cape Cod, which means no detriment to either, for
what we are now obliged to consider is locality in a wider field. But
those old men were born as we may not yet be born, sturdily, in custom
and resignation.
Nathan Black died in October 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He was
born in 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a near
neighbor. His land abutted mine, and since he was the proprietor of the
Black Hills Barber Shop, I could walk down through the woods to get my
hair cut, for the price, in a trillion-dollar world, of fifty cents.
He was a heavy man, with bright brown eyes, and a head of curly white
hair. He fitted the open Cape Cod weather, or the weather fitted him.
I am not sure of the distinction. Nearly ninety years of change, of
natural cataclysm, of both peace and abysmal war in the human world,
had left him in the same place, with the same measure, outwardly at
least, of stability.
When he left his place, or the customary orbit of work and old friends
that constituted his life, perhaps to drive out on a new highway or
to the chain store, he may never have stopped being surprised. I
remember his looking at me with a kind of amused questioning--but no
alarm--and saying something about no one belonging here any more. The
new population didn’t quite make sense to him.
In the way of old countrymen who knew their boundaries, he was tough
and unforgiving in his role of landowner. He had his rights, “By
gawly!” and he would know when someone did him wrong. He held on hard,
and I suspect there were neighbors who felt the possessiveness too
strongly, but this being none of my business, I will go in and get my
hair cut.
The shop, with a tool shed under the same roof, where “Nate” used
to grind knives and axes, stood, and still stands, across the yard
from the house where he was born. There are some other gray-shingled,
outlying buildings on both sides of a dirt road that runs through
scrubby woods and hollows, dry hills sloping down to marshy bottom land
... wood-lot country. One December day I rapped at the door, and he
put his jacket on and walked across the yard with me, where two white
ducks were parading and some red chickens giving the frozen ground a
going over. The old man bent down a little and spoke to his dog Bonnie,
a cream-colored spaniel, which had just wagged up to him: “Did you get
it?”
Then, to me: “I lost an egg. Picked up five eggs, out of the hen yard
this mornin’, and came back with four. Maybe there was a hole in these
old pants of mine.”
The barber shop was small, long and narrow, but he had a stove in
there that kept it warm. There were some old magazines on a bench
against the wall, with a black Homburg hat hanging on a peg. It had
been given him by an old customer, a wealthy man who had lived on the
Cape during the summer and had come in to have his hair cut for many
years before he died. There was a photograph on the wall of the two of
them with an inscription underneath that read: “Established 1884. A
satisfied customer is our best advertisement.” They were standing out
in front of the shop, smiling in the sun.
“Feller came here yesterday and I had to clip him in the kitchen. Shop
was too cold,” Nate said.
The calm of the place was comforting. It came, I suppose, from an
acceptance that emanated from him, and brought in many old friends, who
would sit down to say: “Nate, just thought I’d come over and pass the
time of day.”
Whatever he had to say about other people never left them without the
honor of human circumstances. “Pretty close, he is,” he would say with
a little laugh, or “I guess he had a shade on” (a Cape Cod expression
for being drunk). “Guess you can’t hold on to nothin’,” he said about
some local theft, in a way that insisted on not being roused beyond
necessity.
His origins were out of a kind of history of which there was very
little left intact except himself. He once showed me a tintype of his
mother, a handsome girl named Bridget Malady, who had emigrated from
Ireland in 1862. His father, Timothy Black, was born in Yarmouth, on
the Cape. At the age of ten he signed on as a cook aboard the packet
which sailed between East Dennis and Boston, and seems to have spent
a good deal of his life on intermittent voyages at sea. He was also
in the butchering and slaughtering business with his two sons. In the
autumn they used to butcher eighty-five hogs or more, at the rate of
three a day. And in some rough but related way, Timothy Black started
his son in the barbering business. Nate remembered how his father used
to cut his hair in the kitchen, long before the Black Hills emporium
was established: “I used to sit there while he was sort of pummeling
at me on the back of the neck. By gol! I sure did cringe when he was
chopping me with those women’s scissors.”
While I, seventy or eighty years later, was sitting in the barber’s
chair, getting more expert and calmer work done on me, I assembled a
little of the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an
expedition to the post office or the store took up a large part of the
day. That was the time when you could hitch the horse up to a post and
stop for a long chat, “having the capacity to waste time” as I heard a
Texan phrase it about some of his countrymen in the western part of the
state. People walked between their houses--there are foot paths still
showing--on barren hills. They had small herds of cows that foraged
on the sloping fields. Families used to picnic together by the ponds,
and there were barn dances on Saturday nights, which were sometimes
the occasion for a rip-roaring fight. I have heard it said that Nate
Black was the strongest fighter in the region, when outraged beyond his
normal patience, but he would reveal none of this prowess to me.
The Black family also held dances in their kitchen. The father of
the house played the violin. On such occasions they would have plum
porridge suppers, or they served crackers, milk, and raisins, and
sometimes hulled corn.
He was of a piece with his surroundings. I think of many things he
talked about while I was having my hair cut and they all meant the
gray, sea-girded land, and a human closeness to it. I think of the
deer that ate his beans, of his duck that was carried off by a fox, of
foxes being reduced in population by the mange, of a watering place
for horses by Cedar Pond in East Dennis (a beautiful pond with ranks
of dark cedars backing it up, and now being encroached upon by house
lots); and he talked about the big eels waiting to eat young herrin’
(or alewives) at the mouth of a pond, and of sounding the depths of
Round Pond here in West Brewster.
And then there was his dog which had to be chained up because it got
so wildly excited chasing rabbits through the woods that it was
constantly lost, having once been picked up nearly ten miles away; and
the coon that climbed a tree after a hen; and his little granddaughter
wanting to shine a flashlight through the window one night and
take a picture of a coon she saw outdoors, because it was “such a
pretty-looking animal.”
There also come to mind the fishing boats all-over white with screaming
gulls, that he once spoke about with real excitement, and, of course,
the yearly work on his cranberry bogs ... he and his tart and lively
wife used to pick them together; and the shifting price of cranberries,
and his wood lots, and who was after him to buy some of his land.
“Yes yes” he would say, in the Cape Cod fashion, and always, when a
customer was leaving the shop: “Come again.”
His wife Emily died two years before him. Some time before that I
stopped to talk with him when he was scything the family plot in Red
Top Cemetery, which lies at the junction of two country roads, on a
little hill or high knoll up in the sky and the ocean winds. He told
me two women had come up one day while he was there and said: “What a
nice place!” He and his wife are buried there, in a place which has no
more permanence than any other, but for them and by them had the simple
power of acquaintance.
[Illustration]
_Night in the Afternoon_
If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when
I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at
least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not
to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to
make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the
examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and
stars never fail us.
The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain
or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you
listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to
apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives
open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In
any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I
am not one to disparage such banalities.
“Good morning.” “What’s good about it?” Dead oak leaves hang like wet
rags in the cold rain. After the rain stops there is a cold moisture
suspended in the air with its own whiteness. There is a silence
everywhere, except for a chickadee’s harsh split trills nearby, the low
tone of offshore waters, and the indiscriminate sound of engines on
roads or in the sky. The woodchuck, the box turtle, and the chipmunk
are asleep. There are no insects above ground to catch the eye. The day
shortens, and we who are always calling for more sunshine, pleased at
the idea of some perpetual, impossible comfort, are obliged to confront
night in the afternoon. Life is quiet, stripped of redundancy. There
is a new restraint about our depopulated local world, and at the same
time new openings afforded. At least the season seems to offer another
quality for interpretation. Perhaps, for example, because the trees are
bare and the ground devitalized, we are to look up and find the sky.
I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as
thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness
through the ground, but overhead the infinite dome almost resounds. It
is blazing, bounding, soaring with the means and light of existence.
I am not troubled at all that I look out from an unimportant planet
dependent on a common star, and am only able to see a few light-years
away, each light-year being a distance of six million million miles.
There is sight past sight. The strongest telescope is still an
extension of the human eye. Our measurements themselves are a form of
participation in that fantastic distance, which may not make us any
less lonely, but we have a mind in space; and since men calculate, by
observation of the heavens and of their earth, that the laws of life
are the same as far and farther than they can see, then they have
hearts and blood there too. I stand here on the cold ground, and take
sensual note of the universe.
Then I move back into my domestic hole to do a little hibernating of my
own. A winter withdrawal sets in, when outer resources escape me. I am
drawn inward to human want and its frustrations, to common egotism or
inertia. The December days progress almost remotely. Who cares about
the secrets of that cold and darkening earth outside? Our problems are
sufficient unto themselves.
But there is a natural complex of greed, a provision for appetite,
that brings men and earth to mutuality. Manifested by the weather, it
sometimes puts us out of doors to understand real fortitude. Instead
of easing on toward January, December begins to tug and roar. It snows
all day and there are north winds of from thirty to forty miles an hour
driving the snow against our houses, suggesting an extra struggle we
might not be quite ready for. Then it warms up to 2 or 4 degrees above
freezing, and the following morning begins with a cold rain and sleet
falling down with hissing, disheartening force. The temperature drops.
The sleet turns to snow, driving in violently from the north, hitting
the trees like bullets. The sky closes in. There is no horizon. The
wind swirls. Trees rock and bend. This is a storm with a great rush of
savagery, setting wild, grim traps for the unprotected. “Now,” it says,
“I have you. Try some adventures in this.”
There is ice or cemented snow along the tree trunks in the direction
of the storm, so that by sight and feel I know the wind is from the
northeast quarter, without need of instruments. My hand tells me where
the present power is coming from.
When the snow and wind let up a little, I head for the shore and find
signs down, gutters yanked out, and telegraph wires dangling across
the road. Salt water ahead of me is churning, tossing white spume
against the open shore, while the wind seethes, whines, and howls with
growing intensity. The feeling of conflict is everywhere around me--a
hurling and letting go, a bend and give, a clash, a holding against
insufferable strain. The sand on the upper beach is whipped into
stinging strength. The sea is almost boiling, its racing, conflicting
edges spray-lined. On top of an exceptionally high tide, great waves
run in over a sheltered inlet, sending their combers farther toward
the land. All points of contact and withdrawal, rise and fall, seem
to be concentrated in this monumental turbulence, a force that is
almost uncontained. Is it a replica in violence of the normally
unseen stresses and strains lying under a peaceful season, or a life?
Our bodies are made of air and salt water, in their components of
hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. A storm should be our organic
companion. But this cold screaming fury makes me take refuge behind a
wall. Man may have overcome the elements, but not his elemental frailty.
Out over the gray and white waters, hovering against the wind in an
almost idle way, are several herring gulls. And, at the mouth of the
inlet, riding calmly on the roaring, running tide, facing up against a
thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind, is a loon--close-reefed, well fitted in
all respects to weather the worst.
_Two Encounters_
After the storm a hard cold sets in for many days. As a rule our
Decembers are comparatively mild, with the days alternating between
light rain and cool sunshine. Now the very great plunges of the cold,
driving the frost deep into the ground, freezing the pond waters,
starting a rim of pack ice around Cape Cod Bay, comes as a surprise,
something not known before. The weather bureau, explaining the cold
as being the result of a vast Canadian high-pressure system, speaks
of its unusual “fetch and intensity.” Ten degrees above zero is not
severe as compared with conditions in other parts of the world, but
this unseasonal extreme is a local reminder of the earth’s potential,
and just how much we depend on the normal rhythms of the year. We gasp
with cold, turn up the heat, and think that cataclysm is a small thing
to the universe.