FOOTING IT ACROSS THE CAPE
The Pilgrims might have been envied their discovery of Cape Cod if
they had come in the spring of the year. As it was, though they
hailed it with joy, it being land anyway, yet they must have found
it inexpressibly lonesome and spooky. To the newcomer it is apt to
be a ghostly sort of place at any time of year, unless mayhap he
be from some similar strand, for its rolling sand hills are swept
by winds that wail, and beaten by a sea that grumbles when it does
not cry aloud. At the time of year when Standish and his men
patrolled its beaches, it is no wonder they saw savages behind
every liliputian pitch pine and heard them shouting in the wind
and sea. So far as the records go the Icelanders came first of all
and Thorfinn Karlsefne, who set sail about 1000 A.D., called the
place "Furdurstandir," or wonderstrands, perhaps because of the
immense stretches of sea beach along the outside, but quite as
likely on account of the mirage which so often greets one in the
region thereabouts. A much later explorer tells how the curious
atmospheric effects made the land seem to tip up in front of him
in whichever direction he walked, making level land and even
downhill look like uphill, so uplifting is the Cape air.
Gosnold was perhaps the first Englishman to set foot there, doing
it first in 1602 and coming again, as we all must, once we know
the region. Gosnold and his men got the eerie feel of the place
too when the winter approached. They colonized Cuttyhunk and did
very well through the summer, digging sassafras by day and
retreating to their fort on the little island in the pond on the
bigger island every time the goblins chased them: But the shouting
of warlocks in the autumn gales was too much for them and they
reembarked for England, glad to get away from the land which was
so beautiful and so strange.
A dozen years later came Captain John Smith, who feared neither
man nor devil, and who saw nothing unprosaic about the place. As
mariner and cartographer to him it was a cape, and nothing more.
"Cape Cod," he writes, "which next presents itself, is only a
headland of hills of sand, overgrown with scrubby pines, hurts and
such trash, but an excellent harbor in all weathers. The Cape is
made of the main sea on one side, and a great bay on the other in
the form of a sickle. On it doth inhabit the people of Pawmet, and
in the bottom of the Bay those of Chawum."
The bottom of the bay means the region of Barnstable and west, and
the people of "Chawum" were the Indians of that region. The word
sounds dangerous and suggests cannibals, which I do not believe
the Indians were, even in those days. Perhaps it refers to their
chief, who may well have been an aboriginal Dr. Fletcher. The word
"hurts" is more difficult to dispose of but I find it was just his
way--and indeed the way of the English of his time--of saying
huckleberry. That delectable fruit which is so common on the Cape
ought to have a name more significant of its delectability, but
perhaps the original sponsors ate it before it was ripe, or too
much. Hurts is short for hurtleberry, which is another way of
writing whortleberry, the correct old English form which we have
since corrupted into huckleberry. That Smith should, have classed
the Cape huckleberries as "such trash" is proper cause for a riot.
Two and a half centuries later came Thoreau, the very prince of
explorers, for he can take one over well trodden ways and through
familiar fields and show him India and the Arctic regions.
Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a sand hill.
Cape Cod was as full of romance of remote regions as was Concord.
He, too, notes the mirage. "Objects on the beach," he says,
"whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly
grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually
are. Later, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of
this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what
appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach fifteen feet
high and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it
proved to be low heaps of rags--part of the cargo of a wrecked
vessel--scarcely more than a foot in height." Thoreau felt the
eerie strangeness of beach and sand dunes as all explorers have,
and he noted, too, the characteristics of the sand and its
vegetation and of the inhabitants with a humorous minuteness.
Writing of the dunes, which seem always about to overwhelm
Provincetown, he says, "Some say that while the Government is
planting beach grass behind the town for the protection of the
harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in
wheel-barrows, in order to make houselots," which seems
characteristic of the beach grass, the harbor and the Cape Cod
spirit of making the most of real estate opportunities to this
day.
[Illustration: Along a Byway of the Cape]
"Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were," he goes
on, "by a myriad little cables of beach grass, and, if they should
fail would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom.
Formerly the cows were permitted to go at large, and they ate many
strands of the cable by which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh
set it adrift, as the bull did the boat that was moored by a grass
rope, but now they are not permitted to wander."
All of which would seem to prove that Thoreau liked to crack a sly
joke at the region he loved, as well as do the rest of us. The
other day I too crossed the Cape, not exactly in Thoreau's
footsteps but through the region of the "Chawums," which, I take
it, are the Mashpees of later days. The trail began at East
Sandwich where the sandy road crosses the State highway and goes
on up the sandhills, always with the blue of the sea teasing from
behind the keen javelin of the north wind pushing me on southward.
It was wonderful, that blue of the cold, wind-beaten sea. It shone
through the maze of mingled twigs for miles till I finally lost it
in topping the plateau, passing from loose sand to clayey bottom
and fairer growth in moister and more fertile soil. One
fascination of the region comes in the fact that in a few rods one
leaves all trace of civilization behind, unless one may call the
narrow road a trace, and traverses the Cape Cod wilderness for
mile on mile, just such a wilderness as Thorfinn Karlsefne may
have tramped in armor with spear and crossbow of his day, such as
Myles Standish and his men shivered through or Verrazani and
Captain John Smith marched over and mapped. Pitch pines, small
oaks of many varieties with an undergrowth "trash" of "hurts" and
scrub oaks make up the forest which presses narrow cart paths and
hangs over them. All the way up the slope the persistent chill of
the north wind filled the air with the tonic tang of brine and
held back the gray-green mist of leaves that strained at the buds,
eager to be out. In hollows the spring had come. On ridges it
delayed, finding the auguries unfavorable and waiting a new voice
from file altar. But wherever the sun shone in and the wind was
stayed it had loosed the butterflies that soared or flitted or
flipped about in joy of long awaited warmth. Broad wings of
gold-margined, brown Vanessa antiopa soared serenely along under
overarching white oaks. "Little Miss Lavender" folded her gray-blue
wings in demure beauty on the gray cladium-mossed stumps by
the roadside, and dusky-winged species of the skipper brood were
agile with new-born life, yet glad to fold wings and sleep in the
sun on the road. These were sprites of the deep forest. None were
visible in the town margin, though perhaps it was the sweep of the
north wind that kept them away. Bird regions, too, showed a
definite demarcation. In the orchards and open fields of the town
were the home-loving birds, bluebirds, robins, song and other
sparrows, swallows, and in the marshes the red-wing blackbirds.
Not one of these did I see after leaving the open spaces behind.
The avifauna of the scrub-oak underbrush and of the white oak and
pitch-pine trees overhead was as distinct as that of a new
continent. A flight of pine warblers was on and the oaks and pitch
pines were alive with them. The juncos had gone north to nest in
flocks of thousands, in a wonder of full song, all eagerly
pressing on towards the hills but they left their songs behind
them, as it were, to be sung by the other birds. In the pastures
and cultivated fields the chipping sparrows, newly arrived from
the South, took up the trill with an accent of their own, and all
the pine warblers sang it, each with an individuality that
slightly but clearly marked him from his fellow. I think all birds
show this slight but definite individuality in manner and voice
and are probably known to their neighbors of the same clan, as we
are, each by his voice. And even so simple and definite a thing as
the pine warbler's song may be varied by the individual singer
from time to time. I heard one fine bird singing in the
stereotyped form. As he sang a flicker flicked in the distance.
Whereupon the pine warbler sang again, the same trill but with a
tittering twang about it that just jocosely imitated the flicker.
I saw no other warbler or other bird near enough to be the
beneficiary of this joke. He did it just for himself, and his
motions as he flew over to the next tree seemed a visible chuckle
that ended in a saucy flirt of the two white tall feathers which
are one distinguishing mark of the bird in flight.
[Illustration: Dusty Miller blossoming among the Cape Dunes]
Other warblers I noted none. The woods seemed given up for the
occasion to Dendroica vigorsi.
The wood warblers disappeared at the border line of the open
fields at Wakeby and the home-loving birds appeared again in
numbers, robins, bluebirds, swallows and the sparrow kind. The
downy woodpeckers and flickers, to be sure, passed to and from
both zones, though they, too, seemed to love the trees of the open
rather than those of the deeper wood, but in the main the boundary
line, as usual, was quite distinctly marked. The noon sun was high
and the north wind's chill had been fairly combed out of it by the
bristly harrows of a thousand pine tops. In its place was a warm,
resinous fragrance, an incense to the season. The heart of the
Cape forest is passed at Wakeby and the blue waters of a great
lake lap in crystal clearness on the clean sands. The Cape sands
are a vast water filter and strain out of the streams all
sediment. The ponds are liquid crystals in narrow settings of pale
gold.
Someone told me it was only eight miles across the Cape from East
Sandwich to Cotuit. Perhaps it is as the crow flies, but I could
not clear the scrub as they do and I found the roads adapted to
delightful leisure. No wonder the Cape folk do not hurry. How
could they? The narrow, gray ribbon of road strolled with me
through what seemed eight miles of forest before we reached
Wakeby.
Somewhere along there the holly stood green and statuesque in
occasional clumps. And thus we fared on to Mashpee. The Mashpees,
very mild and genial descendants of the "Chawums," if descendants
they are, live quietly in little yellow houses that do not look
prosperous, though the children are fat and the elders contented.
Modern civilization has reached them in phonographs, bicycles and
folding baby-carriages, if the shingles are vanishing from the
roof. In 1620 Mashpee was their chief and they lived in wigwams.
But the last pure blood died in 1804. Nauhaut, one of the deacons
of the Cape Indian church, which seems to have thrived a century
or two ago, was the hero of a wonderous snake story which, if it
were not about a deacon, one might think apocryphal. I did not see
a black snake on the whole journey, but they are common enough
even now and were once perhaps much more so. At any rate Nauhaut
was attacked by a whole ring of them--so the story runs--which
approached him from all sides, the snakes with black heads
raised and hissing venomously. Nauhaut with true Indian strategy
stool still as they approached, and even when the largest of them
twined about his legs and climbed to his neck he made no move
other than to open his mouth wide. The chieftain snake thrust his
head into this mouth with its glistening white teeth, and Nauhaut
immediately bit the head off. Thereupon panic fear seized the
other snakes and they fled, leaving the deacon master of the
battleground. The Cape grows some big black snakes to this day,
but none like those, nor have any later stories appeared to match.
The Cape has informative guide boards, though whether the facts
match the information I am not quite so sure. Perhaps, sailor-like,
I was circumnavigating Cotuit, beating in, as one might say,
instead of sailing directly to port, for I found three guideboards
at intervals of a mile or two and each announced with monotonous
regularity that it was two and a half miles to Cotuit. When it
comes to making statements the Cape guideboards stand loyally by
one another. But the little town hove above the horizon at last
with its lovely blue bay of warm Gulf-stream water, set in a sweet
curve of white sand and backed by neat cottages bowered in green
trees. It is worth walking across the Cape to reach Cotuit at the
journey's end, but I doubt the eight miles. If it is not fifteen
by way of Wakeby, Mashpee, Santuit and the rest I am mightily
mistaken.
Thoreau with his usual clear gift of prophecy said of the Cape:
"The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for
those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At
present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world and probably
it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin
alley, or a circular railway or an ocean of mint julep, that the
visitor is in search of--if he thinks more of the wine than the
brine, as I suspect some do at Newport--I trust that for a long
time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be
more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable
are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea
shifting the sands. Lynn and Nantucket! this bare and bended arm
it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. What are
springs and water falls? Here is the spring of springs, the
waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the winter is the time to
visit it--a lighthouse or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. A
man may stand there and put all America behind him."
This was all true in Thoreau's day and long after. But the
fashionable world has since found the Cape, and brought its
palatial hotels and its million-dollar cottages to sit down in
friendly fashion among the villagers and share their summer life
with them. Thereby both are benefited. But after all the chief
charm of the Cape is still that vast stretches of it are as free
from fashion as Thoreau said they always would be, and the forests
like those Captain John Smith and Myles Standish, Karlsefne and
Verrizana traversed still grow there in wide stretches.