real color of the pond. From without, on the banks, this varies.
Oftenest it is a dull, clear green like that of alexandrite, a
chrysoberyl gem from the mines of Ceylon and the Ural mountains.
You see this best from the higher points of the hills along the
borders and at certain angles of the sun the green shows red
reflections and tints of blue as does the gem. If, swimming in the
center, you will tip up as a duck does and go head foremost with
open eyes into the depths, you will see none of this color. There
with all the influences of reflection and refraction eliminated
you find yourself moving through an infinitely soft blue that
is semi-opaque merely because a million generations of use has
fitted the human eye for seeing details through air only. Yet the
perception of color remains. Hold your breath desperately and swim
as far down as you may and there is no change. The color has all
the softness and gentle beauty of the turquoise. In certain lights
among the Florida Keys I have seen this sweetest, gentlest of blues
in the Gulf Stream, but in no other water.
To turn and look at yourself in this water is to have another
surprise. Already it seems as if the mystic fires of its depths
had begun to inform you with a pure whiteness that should be akin
to nobility of soul, and as you step forth on the shore mayhap
this quality, passing subtly to the blood and brain, lingers for a
while, and in the clear fire of renewed vitality you feel that the
morning has indeed brought back to you the heroic age.
To come to Walden at mid-day, even with Thoreau’s account of it in
the back of your head, is not at first to be impressed with the
clear spirituality of its waters nor their depth. Here, you say,
is the path from Concord, lightly worn by the spring of his tread,
clumsily rutted by the heavy footsteps of many who follow, having
indeed hitched their wagon to a star. Here is the cairn erected
in his memory, to which with doffed hat you may well add a stone
from the pond shore. And here is the pond itself, a gem of silvered
water set among low, wooded hills. Your eye may well catch first
a sight of the driftwood on the shore, of which there is much and
think it makes the place untidy and wish that the Concord selectmen
might have it removed. But the thought which this first mid-day
glimpse stirs soon passes from you and standing on the very brink
you realize the limpidity of the water and the spirit of dignity
and peace which prevails over all. The world grows up around many
shrines of its great ones and so changes the environment that you
go away sorry that you came, wishing that you had let the place
live in your imagination as it was in its heroic age, rather than
as it has since degenerated.
[Illustration: “Here is the cairn erected to his memory, to which
with doffed hat you may well add a stone.”
_See page 65_ ]
Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau painted it. No chimney
smoke rises in view from its shore. No picnic pavilion disturbs
its outline or jangle of trolley echoes within its spaces. The
woods grow tall all about it, and if they are more frequented by
men than in his day and less by wild creatures the casual visitor
need hardly know the difference. The pond was low when he wrote
of Walden. So it is now and the same stones with which it was
“walled-in” then pave the wide margins to-day. You may walk all
around it on this crushed granite and note the sparkle of plentiful
mica in the pebbles. Near the beach where he took his morning swim
is the tiny meadow which in the years of high water is a cove to
be fished in. You may throw a stone across this meadow cove and
in any direction save at its narrow entrance from the pond you
will hit tall woods that in dense array lean lovingly over it and
give it cool shadows except when the sun is high. Between the tall
trees and the meadow grasses grows the clethra, its white spikes
of perfume seeming to make a lace collar all about the place.
In the bottom of this meadow grows much thoroughwort, which is a
plain, homely weed to the passing glance, not considered fit for
a garden nor thought to beautify a roadside as do so many fairer
pasture blooms. Yet its gray-white heads add a soft friendliness
to the coarse meadow grasses and give delicacy to the whole place,
seeming to invite invasion and preparing the invader to find the
more fragile flowers of the Gerardia tenuifolia that nestles
beneath it, its pink bells set by some fairy bell-ringer of the
dawn with mute throats open toward the sky. The little enclosure is
as deep as a well, stoned in by forest walls, and is beloved of the
argynnis butterflies whose spangled underwings shine with the same
silver as the mica along the pond shore. Meadowsweet and a half
dozen other August flowers warm their heads in the sun and cool
their feet in the shadows of this same meadow, but the thoroughwort
seems to possess it most and to have a feeling of rightful
ownership as if it were Thoreau’s own plant. All about the pond you
will find it blossoming in the same way, standing bravely out from
the wood with its feet among the close-set stones. Always before
thoroughwort has seemed to me coarse and unattractive. Here it
seems to belong and to give and take a certain beauty of virility
and appropriateness. Perhaps it is because with it came so often
the fond fragrance of the white alders and the soft, rose-pink
beauty of the gerardia bells. In many places the stones of the
beach are set so close together and have so little soil beneath
them that nothing can grow, yet in others the plucky, bright-faced
hedge hyssop has crept into the interstices among them and made a
carpet pattern of soft green that is all flecked with the golden
yellow of their blooms. And all behind these rise the woods, oak
and chestnut, maple and scattered pines, whose plumed tops seem
like the war-bonnets of Indian chiefs, standing guard over the
homely, beautiful, simple, mysterious little pond which seems to
excite love and reverence in the hearts of all who remain long on
its banks.
The hills climb abruptly from the brink of Walden on all sides. The
woods climb the hills and top their summits with half-century-old
growth that yearly adds to its girth and stature.
Nor, one fancies, need these trees again fear the sweep of the
woodchopper’s axe. The spirit of reverence for its shores, which
through the one-time hermit of Walden has spread to us all, should
prevent that. For now the pond is much as Thoreau remembered it had
been in his boyhood, walled in by dense forests, a place of echoes.
Your spoken word comes back to you from this shore and from that,
refined and made more sonorous, as if the wood gods would fain
teach you oratory and had taken your phrase into their own mouths
and put it forth again as an example. To your ears it comes again
sweetened with the gentle essences of juniper, birch and sassafras,
rich with the melodies taught to bare boughs by winter winds. In
the haze of the August noon these other shores are distant to the
eye. The sight must swim a long way through the quivering air to
reach one or the other. The hearing, thanks to the kindly offices
of the wood gods, leaps the space at a bound.
The kingfisher seems as much a familiar of the place as the
echoes. Like them he flies back and forth from shore to shore till
you wonder whether he is trying to keep pace with them or whether
he is the embodiment of one that does not need to be set going by
a word but has volition of its own. The kingfisher’s voice hardly
seems to belong at Walden, it is so harsh and unlovely. Even in
this very school of sweet echoes it has learned neither modulation
nor singing quality. Far different is the gentle peet-weet of the
sandpipers which precede you along shore in scalloped flight.
Something of the bright sweetness of the hedge hyssop strolls along
the moist stones of the margin with them, as if the two became
yearly more and more related. Each fall I think the olive-fuscous
backs of these little birds get just a little more of a golden
tinge from this continual neighboring with the equally gentle,
friendly Gratiola aurea. If in return some fine summer the hedge
hyssop should blossom into twittering song no one need be terribly
surprised.
[Illustration: “Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau
painted it.”]
In contrast to the fearless rattle of the kingfisher as he echoed
from shore to shore and to the twittering, friendly sandpipers who
ran so fearlessly along the margin, was the single little green
heron that has made the pond his abiding place for a while. There
is but one, nor are there any signs that herons have nested about
the pond this year, so I fancy this bird is a bachelor visitor
seeking to reduce living to its lowest terms and finding on the
Walden shore the simplicity and seclusion that is the spirit of the
place. He is as taciturn and patient as any hermit could be. When
his country seat on one shore is invaded he simply flies silently
to another and there resumes that inward contemplation which is as
characteristic of the bird as the rattling, vibrating flight is of
the kingfisher. The little green heron was a recluse of the pond
shore long before the first pioneer planted his cabin in Concord.
His kin still cling to the place which is as lovely and lonely now
as it was then.
At nightfall deep peace settles upon the little pond. The shores
that were so distant to the eye in the noonday haze draw in
friendlily toward one another, and the last light slips through the
trees to westward and throws a coverlet of shadow over this sleepy
child of the woods. In the growing dusk there is no mystery about
the place. It is just a wee baby of a pond that is tired and has
been put to bed. But as children often do when we think them asleep
for the night the pond, as darkness gathered, seemed to dimple
with wakeful laughter, to kick off the shadow quilt and dance
with a new radiance of life. Gathering clouds of sultry August
thunderstorms had gloomed the sky with the passing of the sun,
and there was no star to give an answering twinkle, but the whole
surface of the pond laughed up to the clouds in silvery light. It
was as if all the mica-shine of all the granite ground together and
sifted to make its unfathomed bottom had come to the surface, the
infinitesimal flakes joining hands in a fairy dance to the tiny
tune of the little evening winds. The pond was such a gentle little
part of the vocal earth then that it did not seem as if it had ever
been mysterious and informed with all the deep wisdom of the stars.
Its surface was no bigger than the counterpane of a white crib on
which danced the fairy dreams of the child that slumbered happily
below.
Later someone lighted a fishing fire on the opposite shore, and
with a flash the mystery of the place returned. The cove where
it burned seemed infinitely far withdrawn, and about it stalked
shadowy giants who were the fishermen. Their voices, coming in
brief sentences and at long intervals, were as weird as their
shadows and as unsubstantial, from that immense distance to which
they seemed withdrawn. The whole was a mystery of the elder earth,
as if man had fished here before the flood and came, a shade among
the shadows, to try it again.
By and by the fishing fire ceased to flare and sank to a red glow
of embers. The dense clouds, tempest-drawn toward distant skies,
dropped southward. The moon rode out of them and all dignity and
crystal beauty returned to the pond, no longer little but wide and
deep and mysterious. Down the moon’s radiance a spirit of fire
strode, walking the water along a path of golden light, right into
Thoreau’s cove as I sat there on his shore. The pond was once again
a well of crystal, now leading from the zenith to the nadir, and
the white radiance of its spirit made mountain peaks of snow-white
grandeur of the receding clouds. In the dark depths below these
peaks flashed still the crimson scimitars of the lightning, but all
about them and the pond shone a radiance of purity and serenity
such as that in which we know Thoreau walked, day by day.
VI
ON THE FIRST TRAIL OF THE PILGRIMS
_Present-Day Aspects of the Route of Myles Standish and his
Scouts along the Tip of Cape Cod_
Cape Cod reaches like a vast fishhook into the sea, the tip of the
hook Race Point, Long Point the barb. It is as if the children of
giants had come down to the coast to play and had modeled a hook in
sand that Providence ordained should remain for all time, a sign
for the nations. For here if anywhere has been notable fishing. On
a November day in 1620 this hook caught and held for Massachusetts
the expedition of the Pilgrims that had planned to sail for the
mouth of Hudson River. Hence the epic which is William Bradford’s
account of the adventures of these argonauts is a New England epic.
Had not the Cape caught and held them, who knows if there had been
any story?
The present-day pilgrim to Provincetown comes by the Mayflower
route, in part, at least, if he come by sea, following in the
wave-washed track of destiny. Like Gosnold’s ship, like that which
bore Captain John Smith, and like that greatest of all small
vessels which carried Bradford and his friends, his ship glides by
Race Point, coasts the long convexity of sand to and round Long
Point, and heads northwest as if to go out to sea again, but is
fairly caught by the barb of the hook, and landed. Between Boston
Light and the tip of the Cape the voyager gets a taste of that same
sea which Bradford and his friends breasted for two long months. If
the sweet summer winds have been off shore for long enough there is
little trouble, even for the landsman in this sea. It is likely to
be smooth and smiling as an inland lake. If on the other hand the
salt vigor of the east winds has shouldered it for a day or two the
pilgrim of to-day may well hail the sight of the sand hills of the
Cape with a joy as great and a hope of early relief as intense as
did the lone voyagers of 1620. Fish out of water that rolls like
this bite eagerly at the hook of sand and are happy when they are
landed.
[Illustration: “Pilgrim Lake,” where that first washing was done by
the Pilgrim mothers]
The summer voyager of to-day finds this land which was so lone,
this sea which was so bleak to the Pilgrims, teeming with
humanity. The harbor waters sparkle within their rim of sand and
toss innumerable boats on their bright waves. Provincetown grows
steadily between the sand hills and the sea and stretches daily
nearer Long Point at one end of the curve and the North Truro
line on the other. The town which began with a single little row
of houses and the long slant of the beach for a street, is now
miles long, has grown somewhat back among its sand hills, and is
steadily topping some of them. The fishing hamlet seaport of a half
century ago is rapidly merging in the summer resort of to-day;
is fast becoming a Pilgrim shrine also, whither come Mayflower
descendants to comfortably worship their ancestors. So far as the
old town goes little of its early quaintness remains, and that
withdraws more closely within itself day by day. The hardy English
fisherman and sailor stock that settled the Cape, such of it as
remains, is smothered under Portuguese and summer boarders; not
bad people these, but vastly different. The wind and the sea make
minor changes in the Cape itself from year to year, especially this
end of it. The waves give and the waves take away sand bars, now
making an inlet where none was, now closing one that has existed
perhaps for centuries. The winds pack the sands hard in drifts of
rounded hills where once was a tiny valley, and again they come and
take these away and establish them elsewhere as suits their vagrant
fancy. Race Point, within the friendly shelter of whose barb the
Mayflower fleet first cast anchor, is Race Point still, but I doubt
if anyone can surely locate that pond on the margin of which the
Pilgrim mothers did that first tremendous two months’ wash. The
caprice of the shifting sands may have whelmed and re-dug it a half
dozen times since then. A century ago that little creek at what is
now North Truro, that blocked the way of doughty Myles Standish and
his men, sending them inland on a detour, was open still to the sea
and a port of safety for the North Truro fishing boats. A half
century later a storm brought sand and so effectually closed this
little harbor entrance that the North Truro fishermen have ever
since launched their boats from the bare beach and the little
inland sea thus enclosed has become a long, narrow, fresh-water
pond, on which the Truro children skate in winter while their
elders cut ice for the shipment of fish and the retention of summer
visitors.
But after all it is only man’s changes that make the tip of the
Cape and its near-by narrowness different in our day from what
it was when Myles and his men trod it with matchlocks ready and
matches lighted, spying out the land. These as yet have not gone so
deep but you may find portions that seem as wild and untrammeled
now as they were then. Indeed they may well be identical. That a
row of sand dunes has moved before the winds a half mile east or
west matters little to the eye. They are sand dunes still, and the
vegetation which grew up on them in one place or was wiped out,
cut off by gnawing sand particles and blown away by the wind, or
buried beyond all hope of resurrection in the over-riding drifts
is the same to-day as it was three centuries ago. On this primal
wildness of the Cape the march of human progress has in some
measure encroached, but it is a long way from obliterating it yet.
I fancy a man, choosing his route, could start at Race Point and
go down the land by beach and by dune, to a point far beyond the
one reached by the second, farthest, land-exploring expedition of
the Pilgrim scouts from this point, without seeing more evidence
of human settlement than the wheel tracks of a road deep in sand
or a glimpse of the towering turrets of the Pilgrim monument which
dominates the landscape for a long distance. Through this same
length of Cape wind, of course, the hard ribbon of a State-built
automobile road and the railway. But it is easy to lose and forget
these.
In fact, you need but to climb sand hills and slide down sand
declivities a very short distance north of the center of
Provincetown itself to be as near lost as the Pilgrim scouts were
and to find those dense thickets of thorny growth which they
complained were like to tear their clothes and their very armor
itself off their backs. No doubt the greenbrier was responsible
for much of this wreckage of Pilgrim habiliments. Most varieties of
this wild smilax, of which we have a dozen or so in this country,
are to be found in more southern latitudes. But we grow here in
eastern Massachusetts commonly the Smilax rotundifolia which climbs
to treetops, is as strong almost as cod line, and is well set
with vigorous thorns. In the moist hollows among the sand dunes
this vine finds good sustenance, puts forth most vigorous growth,
and barricades gullies sometimes with an almost impenetrable
entanglement of its thorny ropes. I have rarely seen a tropical
tangle which is more impenetrable than one of these. It climbs and
twines among beach plums and scrubby wild cherry shrubs, weaving
all together in a dense matting. To Pilgrim warriors fresh from
English fields or Dutch meadows this thorny wild tangle must have
been embarrassing indeed. Even without the greenbrier the rich
growth of blueberries, high and low blackberry, wild rose, bayberry
and sweet-fern may well have sorely tangled and tripped their
unaccustomed feet.
All these are growths of the bottom lands, the hollows among the
sand dunes back of the town. Within some of these are little fresh
ponds in which grow waterlilies and the usual aquatic plants of
such places. Here amid the prevailing wildness are many little
beauty spots which, could the Pilgrims have come to them before the
winter frosts had wrecked the vegetation, might have tempted them
to stay. Passing on down the Cape you soon leave these behind and
get into the higher dunes on the narrowest part where vegetation
has little chance for its life. Here for a mile or two one might
well think himself in Sahara. The sands, blown hither and thither
and piled in fantastic shapes by the winds, are as clean as those
of the beaten sea beach, as free from all suspicion of humus.
Yet if you will cross Sahara in most any direction to the
camel’s-hump hills which are scattered over its border as if
a caravan had become petrified there, you will find the humps
sprouting vegetation, a vegetation that is sparse, perhaps, but to
your astonishment is glossy and luxuriant of leaf. More than one
of these mounds represents a drawn battle between whelming sands,
wind-driven, and a vigorous wild cherry tree. How such a tree finds
its start in these shifting, scouring sands is a puzzle. Yet once
started it is easy to follow with more or less accuracy the course
of the war which lasts years. The winds take the young shoot for
a nucleus and pile their sands all up about it, yet may not quite
cover the very tip, for there the varying draft whirls the topmost
sands away again. The sand really helps. It mulches the young plant
and protects it from the winter cold and the gales, from the summer
heat and the drought. Each year the thus protected plant grows
joyously more straight shoots, to be whelmed again almost to the
tips by the sand, and so the merry war goes on till finally we have
a dune twenty-five or thirty feet high, with the trunk and larger
branches of a wild cherry tree for a core, its smooth, hard-packed
surface wreathed with green leaves and often bearing rich, dark
fruit for the delectation of all who pass.
These brief, hilltop oases do not relieve the desert-like wildness
of this narrowest part of the Cape, however; they merely serve to
accentuate it. From them you see the vasty blue velvet of the ocean
outside the Cape and think it but a brief plunge to it through the
glittering sands. Yet as you go toward it you find that one sand
ridge hides another and that the valleys between hide brackish
meadows in which grow strange plants, fleshy of stem and stubby and
thick of leaf, as if they were degenerate offspring of land plants
that had most unhappily intermarried with sea weed. On the margins
of these witch pools it is a pleasure to find growing good old
sturdy homely dusty-miller. Whatever broomstick-riding hags infest
these weird hollows of windy midnights, here stands that plain
common-sense Puritan to shame their reveries. Cineraria maritima
may not have come in the Mayflower, but some ship from England
brought him and he is a Puritan without doubt. If the witches do
gather in these wild hollows of Cape Cod’s desert I warrant you he
gets after them with a tithing rod and drives them back abashed to
their own chimney corners.
Passing the desert you find the Cape widening again and growing
green with vegetation. Yet something of the witch impress is on
it still. In the distance you see forests of pitch pine which as
you approach show branching trees of seemingly luxuriant growth.
As you stride up to these trees you find them shrinking in stature
while yet keeping their proportions and luxuriance, and finally you
march, a modern Gulliver, through this Liliputian forest that may
not reach higher than your shoulder. Here was a Pilgrim’s progress
for Myles and his men that may well have added an eerie touch to
their expectation of wild men of the woods. Such a forest--and I
have no reason to believe the North Truro forests have changed much
in just three hundred years--might well produce trolls or giants,
as well as Indians. I can fancy the mail-clad explorers glancing at
the glades of these enchanted woods with a bit of superstition in
their apprehensions, saying prayers out of one side of their mouths
and charms against evil spirits out of the other. Nor can one blame
them, thinking what these hills are in dreary November weather,
with snow squalls hiding the sun and the wind complaining among
these loneliest of forest trees.
[Illustration: “That little creek that blocked the way of doughty
Myles Standish and his men, sending them inland on a detour.”
_See page 85_ ]