states the truth somewhat strongly, perhaps (it must be remembered where
I got it), but aside from that one bit of harmless borrowed hyperbole, I
have delivered a plain, unvarnished tale. For all that, however, I do
not expect my industrious fellow-citizens to fall in at once with my
opinion that winter is a pleasant season at the seashore (it would be
too bad they should, as far as my own enjoyment is concerned), and
December a month propitious for leisurely all-day rambles. How foreign
such notions are to people in general I have lately had several forcible
reminders. On one of my jaunts from Marblehead to Swampscott, for
example, I had finally taken to the railway, and was in the narrow,
tortuous cut through the ledges, when, looking back, I saw a young
gentleman coming along after me. He was in full skating rig, fur cap and
all, with a green bag in one hand and a big hockey stick in the other. I
stopped every few minutes to listen for any bird that might chance to be
in the woods on either hand, and he could not well avoid overtaking me,
though he seemed little desirous of doing so. The spot was lonesome,
and as he went by, and until he was some rods in advance, he kept his
head partly turned. There was no mistaking the significance of that
furtive, sidelong glance; he had read the newspapers, and didn't intend
to be attacked from behind unawares! If he should ever cast his eye over
these pages (and whatever he may have thought of my appearance, I am
bound to say of him that he looked like a man who might appreciate good
literature), he will doubtless remember the incident, especially if I
mention the field-glass which I carried slung over one shoulder.
Evidently the world sees no reason why a man with anything better to do
should be wandering aimlessly about the country in midwinter. Nor do I
quarrel with the world's opinion. The majority is wiser than the
minority, of course; otherwise, what becomes of its divine and
inalienable right to lay down the law? The truth with me was that I
_had_ nothing better to do. I confess it without shame. Surely there is
no lack of shoemakers. Why, then, should not here and there a man take
up the business of walking, of wearing out shoes? Everything is related
to everything else, and the self-same power that brought the killdeers
to Marblehead sent me there to see them and do them honor. Should it
please the gods to order it so, I shall gladly be kept running on such
errands for a score or two of winters.
DYER'S HOLLOW.
"Quiet hours
Pass'd among these heaths of ours
By the grey Atlantic sea."
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
I lived for three weeks at the "Castle," though, unhappily, I did not
become aware of my romantic good fortune till near the close of my stay.
There was no trace of battlement or turret, nothing in the least
suggestive of Warwick or Windsor, or of Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the
Castle was not a building of any kind, but a hamlet; a small collection
of houses--a somewhat scattered collection, it must be owned,--such as,
on the bleaker and sandier parts of Cape Cod, is distinguished by the
name of village. On one side flowed the river, doubling its course
through green meadows with almost imperceptible motion. As I watched the
tide come in, I found myself saying,--
"Here twice a day the Pamet fills,
The salt sea-water passes by."
But the rising flood could make no "silence in the hills;" for the
Pamet, as I saw it, is far too sedate a stream ever to be caught
"babbling." It has only some three miles to run, and seems to know
perfectly well that it need not run fast.
My room would have made an ideal study for a lazy man, I thought, the
two windows facing straight into a sand-bank, above which rose a steep
hill, or perhaps I should rather say the steep wall of a plateau, on
whose treeless top, all by themselves, or with only a graveyard for
company, stood the Town Hall and the two village churches. Perched thus
upon the roof of the Cape, as it were, and surmounted by cupola and
belfry, the hall and the "orthodox" church made invaluable beacons,
visible from far and near in every direction. For three weeks I steered
my hungry course by them twice a day, having all the while a pleasing
consciousness that, however I might skip the Sunday sermon, I was by no
means neglecting my religious privileges. The second and smaller
meeting-house belonged to a Methodist society. On its front were the
scars of several small holes which had been stopped and covered with
tin. A resident of the Castle assured me that the mischief had been done
by pigeon woodpeckers,--flickers,--a statement at which I inwardly
rejoiced. Long ago I had announced my belief that these enthusiastic
shouters must be of the Wesleyan persuasion, and here was the proof!
Otherwise, why had they never sought admission to the more imposing and,
as I take it, more fashionable orthodox sanctuary? Yes, the case was
clear. I could understand now how Darwin and men like him must have felt
when some great hypothesis of theirs received sudden confirmation from
an unexpected quarter. At the same time I was pained to see that the
flickers' attempts at church-going had met with such indifferent
encouragement. Probably the minister and the class leaders would have
justified their exclusiveness by an appeal to that saying about those
who enter "not by the door into the sheepfold;" while the woodpeckers,
on their part, might have retorted that just when they had most need to
go in the door was shut.
One of my favorite jaunts was to climb this hill, or plateau, the "Hill
of Storms" (I am still ignorant whether the storms in question were
political, ecclesiastical, or atmospheric, but I approve the name), and
go down on the other side into a narrow valley whose meanderings led me
to the ocean beach. This valley, or, to speak in the local dialect, this
hollow, like the parallel one in which I lived,--the valley of the
Pamet,--runs quite across the Cape, from ocean to bay, a distance of two
miles and a half, more or less.
At my very first sight of Dyer's Hollow I fell in love with it, and now
that I have left it behind me, perhaps forever, I foresee that my
memories of it are likely to be even fairer and brighter than was the
place itself. I call it Dyer's Hollow upon the authority of the town
historian, who told me, if I understood him correctly, that this was its
name among sailors, to whom it is a landmark. By the residents of the
town I commonly heard it spoken of as Longnook or Pike's Hollow, but for
reasons of my own I choose to remember it by its nautical designation,
though myself as far as possible from being a nautical man.
To see Dyer's Hollow at its best, the visitor should enter it at the
western end, and follow its windings till he stands upon the bluff
looking out upon the Atlantic. If his sensations at all resemble mine,
he will feel, long before the last curve is rounded, as if he were
ascending a mountain; and an odd feeling it is, the road being level, or
substantially so, for the whole distance. At the outset he is in a
green, well-watered valley on the banks of what was formerly Little
Harbor. The building of the railway embankment has shut out the tide,
and what used to be an arm of the bay is now a body of fresh water.
Luxuriant cat-tail flags fringe its banks, and cattle are feeding near
by. Up from the reeds a bittern will now and then start. I should like
to be here once in May, to hear the blows of his stake-driver's mallet
echoing and re-echoing among the close hills. At that season, too, all
the uplands would be green. So we were told, at any rate, though the
pleasing story was almost impossible of belief. In August, as soon as we
left the immediate vicinity of Little Harbor, the very bottom of the
valley itself was parched and brown; and the look of barrenness and
drought increased as we advanced, till toward the end, as the last
houses were passed, the total appearance of things became subalpine:
stunted, weather-beaten trees, and broad patches of bearberry showing at
a little distance like beds of mountain cranberry.
All in all, Dyer's Hollow did not impress me as a promising farming
country. Acres and acres of horseweed, pinweed, stone clover, poverty
grass,[8] reindeer moss, mouse-ear everlasting, and bearberry! No wonder
such fields do not pay for fencing-stuff. No wonder, either, that the
dwellers here should be mariculturalists rather than agriculturalists.
And still, although their best garden is the bay, they have their
gardens on land also,--the bottoms of the deepest hollows being selected
for the purpose,--and by hook or by crook manage to coax a kind of
return out of the poverty-stricken soil. Even on Cape Cod there must be
some potatoes to go with the fish. Vegetables raised under such
difficulties are naturally sweet to the taste, and I was not so much
surprised, therefore, on a certain state occasion at the Castle, to see
a mighty dish of string beans ladled into soup-plates and exalted to the
dignity of a separate course. Here, too,--but this was in Dyer's
Hollow,--I found in successful operation one of the latest, and, if I
may venture an unprofessional opinion, one of the most valuable,
improvements in the art of husbandry. An old man, an ancient mariner, no
doubt, was seated on a camp-stool and plying a hoe among his cabbages.
He was bent nearly double with age ("triple" is the word in my notebook,
but that may have been an exaggeration), and had learned wisdom with
years. I regretted afterward that I had not got over the fence and
accosted him. I could hardly have missed hearing something rememberable.
Yet I may have done wisely to keep the road. Industry like his ought
never to be intruded upon lightly. Some, I dare say, would have called
the sight pathetic. To me it was rather inspiring. Only a day or two
before, in another part of the township, I had seen a man sitting in a
chair among his bean-poles picking beans. Those heavy, sandy roads and
steep hills must be hard upon the legs, and probably the dwellers
thereabout (unlike the Lombardy poplars, which there, as elsewhere, were
decaying at the top) begin to die at the lower extremities. It was not
many miles from Dyer's Hollow that Thoreau fell in with the old wrecker,
"a regular Cape Cod man," of whom he says that "he looked as if he
sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort." Quite
otherwise was it with my wise-hearted agricultural economists; and quite
otherwise shall it be with me, also, who mean to profit by their
example. If I am compelled to dig when I get old (to beg may I ever be
ashamed!), I am determined not to forget the camp-stool. The Cape Cod
motto shall be mine,--He that hoeth cabbages, let him do it with
assiduity.
[8] In looking over the town history, I was pleased to come upon a note
in defense of this lowly plant, on the score not only of its beauty, but
of its usefulness in holding the sand in place; but, alas, "all men have
not faith," and where the historian wrote _Hudsonia tomentosa_ the
antipathetic compositor set up _Hudsonia tormentosa_. That compositor
was a Cape Cod man,--I would wager a dinner upon it. "Thus the whirligig
of time brings in his revenges," I hear him mutter, as he slips the
superfluous consonant into its place.
This aged cultivator, not so much "on his last legs" as beyond them, was
evidently a native of the soil, but several of the few houses standing
along the valley road were occupied by Western Islanders. I was crossing
a field belonging to one of them when the owner greeted me; a milkman,
as it turned out, proud of his cows and of his boy, his only child. "How
old do you think he is?" he asked, pointing to the young fellow. It
would have been inexcusable to disappoint his fatherly expectations, and
I guessed accordingly: "Seventeen or eighteen." "Sixteen," he
rejoined,--"sixteen!" and his face shone till I wished I had set the
figure a little higher. The additional years would have cost me nothing,
and there is no telling how much happiness they might have conferred.
"Who lives there?" I inquired, turning to a large and well-kept house in
the direction of the bay. "My nephew." "Did he come over when you did?"
"No, I sent for him." He himself left the Azores as a cabin boy, landed
here on Cape Cod, and settled down. Since then he had been to
California, where he worked in the mines. "Ah! that was where you got
rich, was it?" said I. "Rich!"--this in a tone of sarcasm. But he added,
"Well, I made something." His praise of his nearest neighbor--whose
name proclaimed his Cape Cod nativity--made me think well not only of
his neighbor, but of him. There were forty-two Portuguese families in
Truro, he said. "There are more than that in Provincetown?" I suggested.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, about half the people." And pretty good
people they are, if such as I saw were fair representatives. One boy of
fourteen (unlike the milkman's heir, he was very small for his years, as
he told me with engaging simplicity) walked by my side for a mile or
two, and quite won my heart. A true Nathanael he seemed, in whom was no
guile. He should never go to sea, he said; nor was he ever going to get
married so long as his father lived. He loved his father so much, and he
was the only boy, and his father couldn't spare him. "But didn't your
father go to sea?" "Oh, yes; both my fathers went to sea." That was a
puzzle; but presently it came out that his two fathers were his father
and his grandfather. He looked troubled for a moment when I inquired the
whereabouts of the poorhouse, in the direction of which we happened to
be going. He entertained a very decided opinion that he shouldn't like
to live there; a wholesome aversion, I am bound to maintain, dear Uncle
Venner to the contrary notwithstanding.
A stranger was not an every-day sight in Dyer's Hollow, I imagine, and
as I went up and down the road a good many times in the course of my
visit, I came to be pretty well known. So it happened that a Western
Islands woman came to her front door once, broom in hand and the
sweetest of smiles on her face, and said, "Thank you for that five cents
you gave my little boy the other day." "Put that in your pocket," I had
said, and the obedient little man did as he was bidden, without so much
as a side glance at the denomination of the coin. But he forgot one
thing, and when his mother asked him, as of course she did, for mothers
are all alike, "Did you thank the gentleman?" he could do nothing but
hang his head. Hence the woman's smile and "thank you," which made me so
ashamed of the paltriness of the gift (Thackeray never saw a boy without
wanting to give him a _sovereign_!) that my mention of the matter here,
so far from indicating an ostentatious spirit, ought rather to be taken
as a mark of humility.
All things considered, I should hardly choose to settle for life in
Dyer's Hollow; but with every recollection of the place I somehow feel
as if its score or two of inhabitants were favored above other men. Why
is it that people living thus by themselves, and known thus transiently
and from the outside as it were, always seem in memory like dwellers in
some land of romance? I cannot tell, but so it is; and whoever has such
a picture on the wall of his mind will do well, perhaps, never to put
the original beside it. Yet I do not mean to speak quite thus of Dyer's
Hollow. Once more, at least, I hope to walk the length of that
straggling road. As I think of it now, I behold again those beds of
shining bearberry ("resplendent" would be none too fine a word; there is
no plant for which the sunlight does more), loaded with a wealth of
handsome red fruit. The beach-plum crop was a failure; plum wine, of the
goodness of which I heard enthusiastic reports, would be scarce; but one
needed only to look at the bearberry patches to perceive that Cape Cod
sand was not wanting in fertility after a manner of its own. If its
energies in the present instance happened to be devoted to ornament
rather than utility, it was not for an untaxed and disinterested
outsider to make complaint; least of all a man who was never a
wine-bibber, and who believes, or thinks he believes, in "art for art's
sake." Within the woods the ground was carpeted with trailing arbutus
and a profusion of checkerberry vines, the latter yielding a few fat
berries, almost or quite a year old, but still sound and spicy, still
tasting "like tooth-powder," as the benighted city boy expressed it. It
was an especial pleasure to eat them here in Dyer's Hollow, I had so
many times done the same in another place, on the banks of Dyer's Run.
Lady's-slippers likewise (nothing but leaves) looked homelike and
friendly, and the wild lily of the valley, too, and the pipsissewa.
Across the road from the old house nearest the ocean stood a still more
ancient-seeming barn, long disused, to all appearance, but with old
maid's pinks, catnip, and tall, stout pokeberry weeds yet flourishing
beside it. Old maid's pinks and catnip! Could that combination have been
fortuitous?
No botanist, nor even a semi-scientific lover of growing things, like
myself, can ever walk in new fields without an eye for new plants. While
coming down the Cape in the train I had seen, at short intervals,
clusters of some strange flower,--like yellow asters, I thought. At
every station I jumped off the car and looked hurriedly for specimens,
till, after three or four attempts, I found what I was seeking,--the
golden aster, _Chrysopsis falcata_. Here in Truro it was growing
everywhere, and of course in Dyer's Hollow. Another novelty was the pale
greenbrier, _Smilax glauca_, which I saw first on the hill at
Provincetown, and afterward discovered in Longnook. It was not abundant
in either place, and in my eyes had less of beauty than its familiar
relatives, the common greenbrier (cat-brier, horse-brier, Indian-brier)
of my boyhood, and the carrion flower. This glaucous smilax was one of
the plants that attracted Thoreau's attention, if I remember right,
though I cannot now put my finger upon his reference to it. Equally new
to me, and much more beautiful, as well as more characteristic of the
place, were the broom-crowberry and the greener kind of poverty grass
(_Hudsonia ericoides_), inviting pillows or cushions of which, looking
very much alike at a little distance, were scattered freely over the
grayish hills. These huddling, low-lying plants were among the things
which bestowed upon Longnook its pleasing and remarkable mountain-top
aspect. The rest of the vegetation was more or less familiar, I believe:
the obtuse-leaved milkweed, of which I had never seen so much before;
three sorts of goldenrod, including abundance of the fragrant _odora_;
two kinds of yellow gerardia, and, in the lower lands at the western end
of the valley, the dainty rose gerardia, just now coming into bloom; the
pretty _Polygala polygama_,--pretty, but not in the same class with the
rose gerardia; ladies' tresses; bayberry; sweet fern; crisp-leaved
tansy; beach grass; huckleberry bushes, for whose liberality I had
frequent occasion to be thankful; bear oak; chinquapin; chokeberry; a
single vine of the Virginia creeper; wild carrot; wild cherry; the
common brake,--these and doubtless many more were there, for I made no
attempt at a full catalogue. There must have been wild roses along the
roadside and on the edge of the thickets, I should think, yet I cannot
recollect them, nor does the name appear in my penciled memoranda. Had
the month been June instead of August, notebook and memory would record
a very different story, I can hardly doubt; but out of flower is out of
mind.
In the course of my many visits to Dyer's Hollow I saw thirty-three
kinds of birds, of the eighty-four species in my full Truro list. The
number of individuals was small, however, and, except at its lower end,
the valley was, or appeared to be, nearly destitute of feathered life. A
few song sparrows, a cat-bird or two, a chewink or two, a field sparrow,
and perhaps a Maryland yellow-throat might be seen above the last
houses, but as a general thing the bushes and trees were deserted.
Walking here, I could for the time almost forget that I had ever owned a
hobby-horse. But farther down the hollow there was one really "birdy"
spot, to borrow a word--useful enough to claim lexicographical
standing--from one of my companions: a tiny grove of stunted oaks, by
the roadside, just at the point where I naturally struck the valley
when I approached it by way of the Hill of Storms. Here I happened upon
my only Cape Cod cowbird, a full-grown youngster, who was being
ministered unto in the most devoted manner by a red-eyed vireo,--such a
sight as always fills me with mingled amusement, astonishment,
admiration, and disgust. That any bird should be so befooled and imposed
upon! Here, too, I saw at different times an adult male blue
yellow-backed warbler, and a bird of the same species in immature
plumage. It seemed highly probable, to say the least, that the young
fellow had been reared not far off, the more so as the neighboring
Wellfleet woods were spectral with hanging lichens, of the sort which
this exquisite especially affects. At first I wondered why this
particular little grove, by no means peculiarly inviting in appearance,
should be the favorite resort of so many birds,--robins, orioles, wood
pewees, kingbirds, chippers, golden warblers, black-and-white creepers,
prairie warblers, red-eyed vireos, and blue yellow-backs; but I
presently concluded that a fine spring of water just across the road
must be the attraction. Near the spring was a vegetable garden, and
here, on the 22d of August, I suddenly espied a water thrush teetering
upon the tip of a bean-pole, his rich olive-brown back glistening in the
sunlight. He soon dropped to the ground among the vines, and before long
walked out into sight. His action when he saw me was amusing. Instead of
darting back, as a sparrow, for instance, would have done, he flew up to
the nearest perch; that is, to the top of the nearest bean-pole, which
happened to be a lath. Wood is one of the precious metals on Cape Cod,
and if oars are used for fence-rails, and fish-nets for hen-coops, why
not laths for bean-poles? The perch was narrow, but wide enough for the
bird's small feet. Four times he came up in this way to look about him,
and every time alighted thus on the top of a pole. At the same moment
three prairie warblers were chasing each other about the garden, now
clinging to the side of the poles, now alighting on their tips. It was a
strange spot for prairie warblers, as it seemed to me, though they
looked still more out of place a minute later, when they left the
bean-patch and sat upon a rail fence in an open grassy field. Cape Cod
birds, like Cape Cod men, know how to shift their course with the wind.
Where else would one be likely to see prairie warblers, black-throated
greens, and black-and-white creepers scrambling in company over the red
shingles of a house-roof, and song sparrows singing day after day from a
chimney-top?
In all my wanderings in Dyer's Hollow, only once did I see anything of
that pest of the seashore, the sportsman; then, in the distance, two
young fellows, with a highly satisfactory want of success, as well as I
could make out, were trying to take the life of a meadow lark. No doubt
they found existence a dull affair, and felt the need of something to
enliven it. A noble creature is man,--"a little lower than the angels!"
Two years in succession I have been at the seashore during the autumnal
migration of sandpipers and plovers. Two years in succession have I seen
men, old and young, murdering sandpipers and plovers at wholesale for
the mere fun of doing it. Had they been "pot hunters," seeking to earn
bread by shooting for the market, I should have pitied them,
perhaps,--certainly I should have regretted their work; but I should
have thought no ill of them. Their vocation would have been as
honorable, for aught I know, as that of any other butcher. But a man of
twenty, a man of seventy, shooting sanderlings, ring plovers, golden
plovers, and whatever else comes in his way, not for money, nor
primarily for food, but because he enjoys the work! "A little lower than
the angels!" What numbers of innocent and beautiful creatures have I
seen limping painfully along the beach, after the gunners had finished
their day's amusement! Even now I think with pity of one particular
turnstone. Some being made "a little lower than the angels" had fired at
him and carried away one of his legs. I watched him for an hour. Much of
the time he stood motionless. Then he hobbled from one patch of
eel-grass to another, in search of something to eat. My heart ached for
him, and it burns now to think that good men find it a pastime to break
birds' legs and wings and leave them to perish. I have seen an old man,
almost ready for the grave, who could amuse his last days in this way
for weeks together. An exhilarating and edifying spectacle it
was,--this venerable worthy sitting behind his bunch of wooden decoys, a
wounded tern fluttering in agony at his feet. Withal, be it said, he was
a man of gentlemanly bearing, courteous, and a Christian. He did not
shoot on Sunday,--not he. Such sport is to me despicable. Yet it is
affirmed by those who ought to know--by those, that is, who engage in
it--that it tends to promote a spirit of manliness.