ALONG THE SALT MARSHES
When the wind is east Sumner's Islands seems to tug at its
moorings like a cruiser swinging at a short hawser in the shelter
of Stony beach. If you will stand on the tip of its gray rock prow
and face the sea it is hard not to feel the rise and fall of
surges under you, and in fancy you have one ear cocked for the
boatswain's whistle and the call to the watch to bear a hand and
get the anchor aboard. Just a moment and you will feel the pulse
of the screw, hear the clink-clank of shovels and slice-bars,
tinkling faintly up the ventilator; one bell will sound in the
engine room and under slowest speed she will fall away from the
sheltering beach, round the fragrant greenery of the Glades rocks
and, free from their buttressing, prance exultantly to four bells
and a jingle out into the surgent tumult of the roaring sea. Wow!
but the fancy sets your blood to bubbling and your pulse to
swinging in rhythm with the long surges that leap about Minot's
and froth white over Chest ledge and the Willies, that come on to
drown the inner Osher rocks in exultant whirlpools and fluff the
loose stones of the beach into a foam that ripples over the
breakwater into the road that snuggles behind it.
But that is when the wind is east and really blows, when November
has stripped the oak and hickory upper works of the cruiser bare
of leaves and she stands grim in her gray war-paint, ready for the
winter's battles. Now she is gay in summer greenery and many a
string of flower signals flutters from mast head and signal yard.
You must go astern to get the wind in your face, for now it sings
gently in from the west across a mile of salt marsh, pools of
imprisoned tide where night-herons feed and tiny crabs and
cobblers scurry to shelter beneath the mud at the jar of your
footfall, winding creeks that twice a day brim with silver water,
and levels of quivering marsh grass, to Cohasset harbor and the
green hillsides of the Jerusalem road.
The island is an island by courtesy only at this time of year,
aground in the green marsh. The bashful tides of summer yearn
shyly toward it, and twice every twenty-four hours stretch soft
white arms up the creeks from Cohasset harbor to the east and the
west and fondle it. They hold it close at the hour of flood, but
hand does not clasp hand about it, and the dry sand that links it
to the beach and the breakwater is not wet. When the autumn winds
shall come and the sea shakes itself out of its summer lethargy
and asserts its power and will not be denied, it is different. At
such times it roars over the beach and the breakwater and drowns
the white sands that have kept the hands of its summer tides
apart. It marches deep green up Cohasset harbor and brims the
slender creeks. It passes their limits at a leap, and swirls in
defiant, dogged depths over the drowned marshes. Then the island
is an island in very truth, and the sea takes his love upon his
broad bosom and rocks it, not always so tenderly. No man can guess
the power of the floods and the deep sea currents herded by an
easterly gale till he has seen the leaping of the flood tide at
such a time.
Now it is a time of July gentleness and fripperies of color. The
salt marsh, to be sure, never lacks these, even in the dead of
winter, when high tides continually load it with sea ice, and then
receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure
ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure
welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson
of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged
beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still
evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to
use it for a mixing pot for the coloring of the October woods. All
their flame and gold are there, toned to soft warm browns and
tender olives just flecked with crimson and with yellow flame.
Looking westward from the island at high tide this morning you
could see already deep hints of this coming autumn coloring,
swelling out of the deep green of grasses that make up the main
carpeting of the marsh, touches of brown and olive that are
singularly pleasing to the eye under the summer blue of the sky
and its fleecy flecking of white clouds. Amid these, scattered
here and there, round eye-like pools reflect this summer blue and
fleecy whiteness and all along the island's verge and that of
other islands and the borders of the Glades was the pink of wild
roses and morning glories, both of which seem to thrive better and
bloom later in the season here than inland. But the softest and
loveliest coloring that the marsh will ever get is that which the
gray mists of early morning seem to have brought in and left like
a fragrant memory of themselves, the lavender gray of the
marsh-rosemary. "There's rosemary; that's for remembrance," said
Ophelia, and many a lover of sea and marsh-side will carry longest
in memory the gentle sadness that the tint of the sea-lavender
gives the marsh when all its other colors are still those of the
flush joy of summer. Remembering Ophelia, marsh-rosemary seems its
best name, though you have a right to sea-lavender if you wish. If
the sea fogs did not bring it as an essence of the first glimpse
of dawn in gray ocean spaces, then I am convinced that the loving
tides bear it as a gift to the island and scatter it shyly at its
feet, after dark.
You have but to wander about the shores of the island at the marsh
line to find strange evidence of this gift-bearing propensity of
the shy tides. Trinkets of all sorts that they gather in travels
in distant seas the tides bring and lay lovingly at the roots of
black oak and sweet gum, hickory and stag-horn sumac. Here is
bamboo that for all I know grew near the head waters of the
Orinoco, though it may have sprouted in the Bahamas, floated north
by the Gulf Stream, shunted from its warm edge into the chill of
the Labrador current and drawn thence by the Cohasset tides.
Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester
fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks
that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come,
chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a
thousand tiny things picked up at points between.
But the tides bring to the marsh and the island in it, to all
shores that they touch here on our Atlantic seaboard, more than
this. They bear deep in their emerald hearts, generated in their
cool, clear depths, a rich vivific principle that bears vigor to
all that they touch and sends rich emanations forth on the air
beyond. Today on the inland hills and land-bound pastures the sun
beat in sullen insolence and the wind from the west scorched and
wilted the life in all things. The same wind, coming to me across
two miles of salt marsh, had in its cool, salty aroma a life-giving
principle that set the pulse to bounding and renewed vigor.
It had gathered up from the marsh this tonic of the tides, this
elixir vitae which all the doctors of the world have sought in
vain. Some day some one of them, wiser than the rest, will distil
its potency from the cool salt of sea tides, and humanity, poor
hitherto, will find itself rich in possibilities of physical
immortality. Sea captains have a foolish custom of settling down
at eighty to enjoy life on shore, else there is no knowing how
long they would live. They have breathed the aroma of this
life-giving essence all their lives.
Yet the sea itself is dead; it is a vast accumulation of the
product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as
dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite space, shocking
together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the
beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life
thereon, so it seems as if the atoms of sea water, ever rushing to
restless collision, burst continually into renewed life. All forms
are in it, from the mightiest mammals to the protozoa which the
microscope suspects rather than surely discovers. Every time
molecule touches molecule in the depths, a new spark of tiny life
must flare up, else never so many could inhabit the water. The
coarser aggregations of these we see in bewildering profusion and
variety every time the tides fall back and leave the rocks bare.
At the bottom of the ebb I like to climb perilously down the rough
Glades cliffs to life-brooding pools and inlets, where lazy waves
swirl or are for a brief hour cut off. At the half-tide line the
rock that is a reddish granite becomes chalky white with the
shells of barnacles that cover every inch of space from there
down. Acorn-like, they cluster closer than ever acorns did on the
most prolific oak. After the tides reach them as they rise, the
whole surface of the rock must be fuzzy with their curved cirri of
tongues which protrude and lap the rising waves. Their number is
legion, yet how infinite must be the fine floating life, so fine
that we cannot note that it clouds the limpid water, on which
these sessile gray creatures feed.
Below a certain level these are crowded out by the mussels which
grow in such dense accumulations that they cling not only to the
rock but to one another and to stubby brown seaweed till they are
like nothing so much as pods of bees swarming about their queen.
So dense is this grouping of living creatures that the inner ones
are smothered by their crowding fellows and serve merely as a
foundation on which these build. Even among these swarm starfishes
and limpets and other crustaceans, and streamers of kelp squirm
out from the rock where they keep slender hold, to sway in the
restless water, just as all the rocks above a certain depth and
below a certain height are olive black with dense hangings of
rockweed while in depths that are just awash at low tide they are
olive brown with unending mats of Irish moss. These are but the
forms of overwhelming life that meet the eye on first descending
into the cool depths. To name all that may be noted in just the
pause of a single ebb would be to become a catalogue.
[Illustration: Along the Salt Marsh]
Yet howsoever vivid the life or astounding by its multiplicity it
is not impressions of these that linger long after one has come up
from the bottom of the ebb. It is rather that here one has
breathed the air of the deep life laboratory of the world, that
into his lungs and pores and all through his marrow has thrilled a
breath of that subtle essence, that life renewing principle which
Fernando de Soto sought in the fountain of youth which he thought
bubbled from Florida sands but which in reality foamed beneath his
furrowing keel as he ploughed the sea in search of it. It is the
same thrill which the wilting west wind steeps from the salt marsh
as it comes across, some baffling and alluring ether distilled
from under-sea caverns where cool green mermen tend emerald fires.
The scent of it levitates from the wash of every wave and if you
will watch with pure eyes and clear sight you may of moonlight
nights see white-bodied mermaids flashing through the combers to
drink of it. No wonder these are immortal.
Nor can you take from the things of the sea this life-giving
essence, once they have attained it through growth during
immersion in its depths, though perchance, as Emerson sang, "they
left their beauty on the shore, with the sun and the sand and the
wild uproar." The shell on the mantel shelf of the mariner's
inland home may be unsightly and out of place. But put your ear to
it. Out of the common noises of the day, it weaves for you the
song of the deep tides, the murmur of ocean caves and the croon of
the breakers on the outer reef, and dull indeed is your inner ear
if you cannot hear these things, and at the sound see the perfect
curl of green waves and smell that cool fragrance which comes only
from their breaking.
To the marshes in summer come the farmers from far inland, making
holiday for themselves while they work. They cut the short salt
hay that seems so stiff and tough, that is so soft and velvety, in
fact, and pile it on their wains and take it home to the cattle
that like it better than any English hay that they can cut from
the carefully tilled home fields. Indeed the cattle ought to like
this hay. It is soft as the autumn rowen, and mixed with all the
delicate, fragrant herbs of the marsh. The tang of the sea salt is
in it, and no man knows what delicate essence borne far on the
wandering tides to the flavoring of its fibre. No matter how long
you may leave this hay in the mow you have but to stir it to get
the soft rich flavor of the sea and breathe a little of that salty
vigor which seems to go to the seasoning of the best of life. I
have an idea the cattle love it for this too, and as they chew its
cud inherited memory stirs within them, and they roam the marshes
with the aurochs and tingle with the savage joy of freedom.
Out along the rocks to seaward at low tide go the mossers and with
long rakes rip the carragheen from its hold and load their dories
with its golden-brown masses. Then they bring it ashore and spread
it out in the sun as the farmers do their hay, that it may dry and
bleach. Just as the salt hay, touched for a brief happy hour at
each tide with the cool strength of the sea, retains the flavor of
it always, so the Irish moss that grows in the depths and is
hardly awash at the lowest of the ebb, overflows with it and is so
bursting with this fragrance of the unknown that no change that
comes to it can drive it out. When the wind is off-shore and you
may not scent the sea, when the sun bakes the hot sand and dries
the blood so that it seems as if the only way to prolong life is
to wade out neck deep in the surges and there stay until the wind
comes from the east again, you have but to go to the leeward of
these piles of bleaching carragheen to find it giving forth the
same cooling fragrance which the tides have made a part of its
structure. You may take this moss home with you and cook it, but
the heat of your fire will no more destroy its essence than did
the heat of the sun, and in your first mouthful of the produce,
which may in appearance give no hint of its origin, you taste the
cool sea depths and feel yourself nourished as if with some vital
principle.
It is no wonder that under the glare of the midsummer sun people
forsake the arid uplands and the vast, heat scorched plains of the
interior and find renewed life and vitality on the borders of the
Atlantic seaboard. The sea in the beginning was the mother of all
life and we do not know what forms of future perfection she is now
nourishing as filmy protoplasm in her depths. She gives us cool
fogs to the reopening of our shrivelled pores and just by walking
along shore we are touched by this vivific principle which gives
such riotous life to all things. There is a saying among Eastern
Massachusetts farmer folk that if you will bathe three times in
the salt water during the summer you will not feel the cold of the
coming winter. Thus is the old myth revived and the modern
Achilles may find invulnerability beneath the Styx, nor need his
heel be left above the tide for his undoing. And the sea has more
than that to give us, more than physical well-being and
invulnerability to the arrows of the winter winds. Out of the
green depths come still the mysterious and the unknown and up over
the blue rim sail day by day argosies laden with romance. Thus it
has always been nor can the peopling of many lands and the finding
and exploring of all continents and islands check this. However it
may be with the cattle it is this which gives tang to our salt hay
and touches the reviving coolness of the spray and the east wind
with the rainbow magic of dreams.