Initial commitHEADmain

12 files changed, 8976 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/75895-0.txt b/75895-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..538337d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4169 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75895 ***
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                                  The
+                                 Great
+                                 Beach
+
+
+
+
+                          Books by John Hay:
+
+
+                           A PRIVATE HISTORY
+                                THE RUN
+                             NATURE’S YEAR
+                A SENSE OF NATURE (with Arline Strong)
+                            THE GREAT BEACH
+
+
+
+
+                                  The
+                                 Great
+                                 Beach
+
+                               JOHN HAY
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE
+
+
+                       Doubleday & Company, Inc.
+                         Garden City, New York
+                                 1963
+
+
+
+
+           Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-18198
+                     Copyright © 1963 by John Hay
+                          All Rights Reserved
+                Printed in the United States of America
+                             First Edition
+
+
+
+
+                       To Conrad and Mary Aiken
+                     Henry and Gertrude Kittredge
+
+
+
+
+                               Foreword
+
+
+I suppose that anyone writing another book about Cape Cod can be
+convicted of temerity, in the face of such predecessors as the
+three Henrys--Thoreau, Beston, and Kittredge--as well as Dr. Wyman
+Richardson. However, each to his own eye. I write about the Cape
+because of the circumstances of living there, long enough to have begun
+to learn a little about it; also, the coast is long and the sea will
+not stop with the outer beach. All Americans who not only love nature
+but stand in awe of it will be more and more hard put to explain their
+reasons, as we crowd our magnificent land and diminish it in proportion
+to the size of our demands. In _The Great Beach_ are some of my reasons.
+
+I am grateful to Dr. Alfred C. Redfield, Dr. John M. Zeigler, Mr.
+Joseph Chace, Dr. Loren C. Petry, Dr. Howard L. Sanders, and Dr. Ransom
+Somers for various assistance during the writing of this book, and hope
+they will not have any serious objections to the way I have used such
+information as they may have given me. This book also owes a great deal
+to the discerning and useful criticisms made by Richard K. Winslow, of
+Doubleday.
+
+
+
+
+                               Contents
+
+
+      _Foreword_                        vii
+
+      I--From a Distance                  1
+
+      II--An Unimagined Frontier          8
+
+      III--The Resources of the Sea      18
+
+      IV--A Rhythmic Shore               26
+
+      V--Dune Country                    35
+
+      VI--A Change in History            46
+
+      VII--Barren Grounds                56
+
+      VIII--A Landscape in Motion        63
+
+      IX--Who Owns the Beach?            76
+
+      X--Deer Week                       87
+
+      XI--Impermanence Takes Its Stand   93
+
+      XII--The Depths of Sight           99
+
+      XIII--The Flight of Birds         107
+
+      XIV--The Marsh                    116
+
+      XV--The Uses of Light             124
+
+
+
+
+                                  The
+                                 Great
+                                 Beach
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                            From a Distance
+
+
+The Pilgrims who reached Cape Cod in 1620 had heard of it before. It
+got its name in 1602 and had been touched on by European seamen at
+least a century before that, and so when the Pilgrims “... fell in with
+that land which is called Cape Cod; the which being made and certainly
+known to be it, they were not a little joyful.”
+
+Their coming had taken a long time, and they had passed over “a tedious
+and dreadful” sea; but as Bradford’s history relates it further: “...
+they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or
+refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to
+repair to, to seek for succor.”
+
+“And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of
+that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruell
+and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to
+search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous
+wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there
+might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up
+to ye top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country
+to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save
+upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in
+respect of outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand
+upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of
+woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked
+behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was
+now as a main barrier and gulf to separate them from the civil parts of
+the world.”
+
+Now, nearly 350 years later, that lone land reaching out into the
+mighty ocean seems to be full of the “solace and content with respect
+to outward objects” which the Pilgrims lacked. Roads, gas stations,
+shopping centers, and a continually increasing number of houses,
+proclaim it as human territory, another populated home ground from
+which we have to go far to be separated from civilization. The simple,
+raw existence which the Pilgrims not only endured but anticipated has
+been replaced by a world of goods, which is not to say that we do not
+have to have a fortitude of our own, made inevitable, in great measure,
+by the very abundance we have achieved.
+
+The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general outline
+as it is now, although the original woodland has been cut down, or
+burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees, much of the topsoil
+has eroded and blown away, and the shore line altered in the course
+of natural change. Superficially at least, it has been tamed, and in
+most areas the primal, unknown wildness is hard to imagine. The last
+thing you would expect to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a
+Cape Cod beach would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one,
+wilderness being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the
+effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both by
+its vastness and the difference between water and air, could answer the
+description, and also the sands that define its limits.
+
+Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the tip of the
+Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island is not undiscovered
+country. Many men have walked it. Planes skim over it in no time at
+all, and the beach buggies bruise it with impunity. Still, the marks we
+make on it are all erased in time. The sea and sand insist on their
+own art. The beach is in a continuous state of remaking and invites
+discovery. It was first called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David
+Thoreau. Otherwise it has been known for a long time as the Outer
+Beach, the Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now
+it forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park--in the process
+of establishment--and is therefore not owned by individuals, or the
+towns in which they reside, but by the people of the United States. It
+is under national protection and possession at the same time, so how we
+approach and treat its future is a very great responsibility, which is
+appropriate enough.
+
+The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to America
+before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most travelers it
+means the end of a highway, a place of summer sands. It is in fact one
+end of a whole continent of roads, of communications, of the vast and
+intricate business of human passage. In a sense it used to be the other
+way around. With all the known parts of the civilized world behind
+them, the Pilgrims found in this beach not an end but a beginning,
+whatever it might entail, and that of course, is why they went there.
+
+This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the “tedious
+and dreadful” highway of the sea--city dwellers, road, rocket, car, and
+plane makers that we are--to the extent that we too may find it again
+for the first time. The beach, lying by the sea and sea invested, is
+always ready for a new kind of attention in a new world. That is the
+nature of the place. Cape Cod itself, now and ultimately, is at the
+disposition of the sea rather than human enterprise.
+
+The Cape is a narrow peninsula, a little terminal arm jutting out in to
+the Atlantic, constructed of loose material left by the last glacier
+some 20,000 years ago. Its upper part, starting beyond High Head at
+Truro and forming the Provincetown hook, or hood, is of recent origin.
+It lacks the cliffs that stand over the beach from a mile or so north
+of Highland Light to as far as the Nauset Coast Guard Beach at Eastham,
+and for the most part has a history of deposition and accretion rather
+than removal. It was formed by storms, tides, and currents, piling
+in sand and other materials from the shore to the south, over bars
+and reefs of glacial debris. The sand is still packing up around Race
+Point, as it is also adding to the shore south of Nauset to the tip end
+of Monomoy Island, while storms take it away from other parts of the
+shore line. Within living memory a large island called Billinsgate, on
+which there was a lighthouse and at one time a “Try Yard” for whales,
+disappeared under the surface of Cape Cod Bay. It now appears as a
+shoal at low tide and is otherwise covered over by water, although the
+rocky lighthouse foundations still show above the surface in all but
+the highest tides. On the Bay side the shore line has been filled in in
+some areas, while it has receded in others, revealing for example, the
+bones of horses and cows in the bank at the head of a beach, which were
+once presumably, some distance behind it. Many a cottage owner after
+a storm has found his living-room floor with nothing below it but the
+tide.
+
+Over the centuries great changes have occurred in the nature and extent
+of marshlands, inlets, ponds, estuaries, and beaches. No year, or
+even month, goes by without some alteration in the shore line. These
+changes, not always obvious, sometimes violent and immediate, are
+not such as to threaten the physical existence of Cape Cod for many
+thousands of years to come, but they are of the kind that accentuate
+its close relationship to water and tides and weather. As the map
+makers are well aware, it is not a static piece of land. It moves.
+
+The trunk of the Cape starts out from the mainland and then that
+slender curving arm juts up and out into the water with a kind of brave
+assertion beyond the continental limits; but it is the shape and sweep
+of waves and sands, of molding and at the same time of pulling away
+that strikes you most about it, as if it were a conception to be made
+or discarded, standing out in its trial. The whole physical earth, in
+spite of its apparent constancies, its orbital speed, the speed of
+light, the regularity of the tides, the fine, exact balances to life,
+is subject to rhythmic change, or in a deeper sense, to re-creation.
+
+From 20,000 feet up, Cape Cod looks very much as it does on topographic
+maps, its heights and depths eliminated, a flat level land of sandy
+margins and wide green patches emerging out of the sea. In fact,
+with all its glacial lakes and ponds--between three and four hundred
+in number--its streams, marshes, bays, coves, and inlets, it might
+seem to consist as much of water as of earth. On a clear day at a
+lower altitude, skirting or passing over the shore line, you can see
+configurations of sand, the slopes and curves of the shoals, the white
+swirls and scallops under water made by currents and tides. The sea
+sparkles, and explodes with light where the sun strikes it directly.
+The spilling waves make small white accents along the shore. Tilting
+in the heights, you get a sense of mobility on a great scale. All the
+close, pressing impressions of locality are replaced by the roving of
+the waters, the islands of the mapped world floating there, the height
+and weight and emptiness of the sky.
+
+However far their ageless impunity may reach, the world’s argument
+is that Cape Cod and its Outer Beach are under human guidance,
+surveillance, and authority. Those who come there bring their own
+distance with them. If we are not yet world-minded, we are world
+engaged. This is not a cast-off, self-sufficient countryside any
+longer, and it has lost most, if not all, of the look of a bleak,
+cut-over, and yet habitable seaside land that it had in the nineteenth
+century, when the inhabitants still depended on the sea for their
+livelihood, when you could smell the fish and hear the sermons on its
+shores.
+
+An estimated 300,000 people visit the Cape during the summer, or even
+more, depending on the tides of economy and change, but after they
+have gone there are 80,000 year-round residents left, with more to be
+expected in the future. So, in spite of its stretches of comparatively
+uninhabited sands and its wooded areas, the Cape is caught up in the
+human scheme of things, and we can hardly avoid looking at it with
+modern eyes, for good or ill. We own it, and that is the way we are
+inclined to see it, not for its sake but ours. All roads lead to a Cape
+Cod beach, or to Los Angeles, or Yellowstone. Every place is invested
+with human importunity, and the crowd will tell you where you are.
+
+Drive down any of the great concrete highways of the nation in the
+heat of the summer along with thousands, or millions, through a
+landscape whose scale affected our ideas of size to begin with, and you
+realize that Americans have an affinity for distance--which is also
+a capacity for laying the distance bare. We have learned this from
+our continent. We have learned how to exploit, turning the native,
+active riches of a great land into passive objects of our will, and we
+have taken a greatness from it for our own. While we have transformed
+our surroundings, we ourselves have been transformed without being
+altogether aware of the debt we owe.
+
+Abstracted, in the summer months especially, to the terms of the
+contemporary world, some of Cape Cod’s more crowded areas have a
+familiar, continental look. They are covered with asphalt, cars,
+motels, cheap housing, shops full of grotesque souvenirs with no
+relation to the place they serve, and they amount, when you come right
+down to it, to receiving grounds for power, made by a conquering
+civilization. Will it be the same on the moon? The great scale is in
+us, the effort and the risk of desolation.
+
+The beach’s openness is nearly filled with bodies, lying everywhere,
+or sitting, talking, absorbing the sun, or dashing suddenly into the
+relatively cold water, shouting, jumping, and splashing there, and
+then returning, flesh in warmth and radiance, performing the blessed
+ritual of doing nothing.
+
+This hot surface, this wide open brilliance of sand, water, and sky
+is a summertime release for those in want. We claim it, and fill it
+with human demands; and yet it keeps its distance, resisting our bland
+assumption of authority.
+
+Clouds like heaps of spun silk float up across the sky. The low waves
+splash along the sands, very lightly to the ear. Surfcasting rods are
+lodged in the sand, leaning out toward the water. Offshore, a white
+tern rises fluttering after a dive into the water, and a herring gull,
+large and deliberate by contrast, beats low over the surface. Behind
+all the crowd and the voices, hanging over like the intense and heavy
+sun, is a stillness, a suspension. Perhaps it is the soul of summer,
+that gives a provision of relief for those in want; and if we wait and
+watch there might be more to this beach and sea than what we came for.
+Waiting, in fact, seems to be its essence, since it gives no answer to
+what it is, being a wide, surface brightness, a tidal beat, a sounding
+whose monumental depths are concealed, suggesting too, that we might
+wait for it forever and know nothing.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                        An Unimagined Frontier
+
+
+One afternoon in the middle of June I set off from Race Point at
+Provincetown, carrying a pack and sleeping bag, with Nauset Light Beach
+in Eastham, twenty-five miles away, as my destination, and my purpose
+simply to be on the beach, to see it and feel it for whatever it turned
+out to be, since most of my previous visits had been of the sporadic
+hop, skip, and jump kind to which our automotivated lives seem to lead
+us.
+
+The summer turmoil was not yet in full voice but the barkers were there
+on behalf of beach-buggy tours over the dunes, and a sight-seeing
+plane flew by; cars drew up and droned away, and families staggered
+up from the beach with their load of towels, shoes, bags, or portable
+radios. The beach did not contain quite the great wealth of paper,
+cans, bottles, and general garbage that it would later on, in July and
+August, but one of the first things to catch my eye as I lunged down on
+to the sands was an electric-light bulb floating in the water, a can of
+shaving soap, the remains of a rubber doll, and a great scattering of
+sliced onions--probably thrown off a fishing boat.
+
+The air was dancing with heat. The sun seemed to have the power to
+glare through all things. With the exception of a camper’s tent on the
+upper part of the beach, and a few isolated gray shacks perched on
+dune tops behind it, there was nothing ahead but the wide belt of sand
+curving around one unseen corner after another with the flat easing
+and stretching sea beside me. Two boys waved to me from where they were
+perched high up on a dune, and I waved back.
+
+Then I heard an insistent, protesting bird note behind me, and a piping
+plover flew past. It was very pale, and sand colored, being a wild
+personification of the place it lived in. It suddenly volplaned down
+the slope of the beach ahead of me, fluttering, half disappearing in
+holes made by human feet, side-winged, edged away, still fluttering,
+in the direction of the shore line, and when it reached the water,
+satisfied, evidently, that it had led me far enough, it flew back.
+These birds nest on the beach above the high-tide line, and like a
+number of other species, try to lead intruders away when they come too
+close to their eggs and young.
+
+With high, grating cries, terns flew over the beach and low over the
+water, occasionally plummeting in after fish. Among the larger species,
+principally common terns, there were some least terns--a tiny, dainty
+version of the “sea swallow,” chasing each other back and forth. They
+have the graceful, sharply defined bodies and deep wingbeat of the
+other terns, but in their littleness and excitability they seem to show
+a kind of baby anger.
+
+Also there were tree swallows gathering and perching on the hot,
+glittering sand, and on smooth gray driftwood just below the dunes. It
+was a band of them, adults, and young hatched during the early spring,
+chittering and shining with their brilliant blue-green backs and white
+bellies.
+
+It seemed to me that out of these birds--my unwilling or indifferent
+companions--came a protest, the protest of a desert in its beauty, an
+ancient sea land claiming its rarity, with these rare inhabitants, each
+with its definition and assertion, each having the color and precision
+of life and place, out of an unknown depth of devising.
+
+Behind the beach at Provincetown and Truro are eight square miles of
+dunes, making a great series of dips and pockets, innumerable smooth
+scourings, hollows within wide hollows. Standing below their rims are
+hills, mounds, and cones, chiseled by the wind, sometimes flattened
+on the top like mesas. These dunes give an effect of motion, rolling,
+dipping, roving, dropping down and curving up like sea surfaces
+offshore. When I climbed the bank to see them I heard the clear,
+accomplished notes of a song sparrow. There were banks of rugosa roses
+in bloom, with white or pink flowers sending off a lovely scent, and
+the dunes were patched with the new green of beach grass, bayberry, and
+beach plum, many of the shrubs looking clipped and rounded, held down
+by wind and salt spray. The purple and pink flowers of the beach pea,
+with purselike petals, were in bloom too, contrasting with dusty miller
+with leaf surfaces like felt, a soft, clear grayish-green. Down at the
+bottom of the hollows the light and wind catching heads of bunch grass,
+pinkish and brown, waved continually; and the open sandy slopes were
+swept as by a free hand with curving lines and striations.
+
+A mile or so at sea, over the serene flatness of the waters, a fishing
+boat moved very slowly by. I started down the beach again, following
+another swallow that was twisting and dipping in leafy flight along the
+upper edge of the beach. On the tide line slippery green sea lettuce
+began to glimmer as if it had an inner fire, reflecting the evening
+sun. I stopped somewhere a mile or two north of Highland Light in
+Truro, built a small fire of driftwood to heat up a can of food, and
+watched a bar appearing above the water as the tide ebbed. Low white
+waves conflicted and ran across a dome of sand, occasionally bursting
+up like hidden geysers.
+
+The terns were still crying and diving as the sun’s metal light,
+slanting along the shore, began to turn a soft yellow, to spread and
+bloom. They hurried back and forth, as if to make use of the time left
+them, and fell sharply like stones into the shimmering road of light
+that led across the water.
+
+Where I live on the upper Cape, that part of it which lies between the
+Cape Cod canal and Orleans, the land heads out directly to the sea,
+toward the east from the continental west. Cape Cod Bay lies to the
+north and Nantucket Sound to the south. The arm of the lower Cape turns
+in the Orleans area and heads up on a north-south axis, the head of
+it, or hand if you like, curving around so that the sandy barrens in
+the Provincetown area are oriented in an east to west direction again.
+I am used to looking toward Kansas to see the setting sun, and from
+the curving shore line at Truro I had the illusion that it was setting
+in the north and that when it rose the next morning it appeared to be
+located not very far from where it set, a matter of ninety or a hundred
+degrees. In fact it does set closer to the north at this time of year,
+and along the flat ocean horizon this becomes more clear to the eye, as
+well as its relative position at dawn and its arc during the day. On
+the open beach in spring and summer you are not only at the sun’s mercy
+in a real sense, but you are also under wider skies. In the comparative
+isolation of the beach, which is convex, slanting steeply toward the
+water, and therefore hides its distances, I felt reoriented, turned
+out and around through no effort of my own, and faced in many possible
+directions.
+
+Shortly before sundown a beach buggy, curtains at its windows and a
+dory attached, lumbered slowly down some preordained ruts in the sand,
+and then a smaller one passed by at the top of the low dunes behind me.
+Fishing poles were slung along the outside of both machines. It was
+getting to be a good time to cast for striped bass.
+
+I sat on the sands and listened to the sonorous heave and splash of
+low waves. The sun, like a colossal red balloon filled with water, was
+sinking in to the horizon. It swelled, flattened, and disappeared with
+a final rapidity, leaving a foaming, fiery band behind it. I suddenly
+heard the wild, trembling cry of a loon behind me, and then saw it fly
+over, heading north. The wind grew cool, after a hot day when the light
+shone on metallic, glittering slow waters, and sharp, pointed beach
+grasses clicked together, while I watched the darkness falling around
+me.
+
+A small seaplane flew by at low altitude, parallel to the shore. A
+sliver of a moon appeared and then a star; and then single lights began
+to shine on the horizon, while from the direction of Highland Light an
+arm of light shot up and swung around. A fishing boat passed slowly by
+with a light at its masthead and two--port and starboard--at its stern.
+A few night-flying moths fluttered near me. The sky began to be massive
+with its stars. I thought of night’s legitimacies now appearing, the
+natural claim of all these single lights on darkness, and then, making
+my bed in a hollow just above the beach, I lowered down into infinity,
+waking up at about one o’clock in the morning to the sound of shouting,
+a strange direct interruption to the night. It was the loud implacable
+voice of the human animal, something very wild in itself, filling the
+emptiness.
+
+“For Chrisake bring her higher up! I can’t have her dig in that way.”
+The tide had come in and someone was having trouble maneuvering his
+beach buggy along the thin strip of sand now available.
+
+The light of dawn opened my eyes again before the sun showed red on
+the horizon, and I first saw the tiny drops of dew on tips and stems
+of beach grass that surrounded me. A sparrow sang, and then, somewhere
+behind the dunes, a prairie warbler with sweet notes on an ascending
+scale.
+
+When I started walking again I caught sight of a young fox. Its fur
+was still soft and woolly and its gait had a cub’s limpness where it
+moved along the upper edge of the beach. I wished the young one well,
+though I suspected it might have an uncomfortable life. In spite of
+an excessive population of rabbits, and their role in keeping it down,
+foxes have not been too highly regarded on the Cape. In recent years
+they seem to have been a skinny and somewhat dilapidated bunch for the
+most part, suffering from parasitic skin diseases, and ticks in season.
+I once saw a fox out on an asphalt road sliding along on his chin and
+side, shoving and dragging himself in such a frantic way that I began
+to feel very itchy myself. I have heard them referred to in scornful
+way as “spoilers,” fond of scavenging and rolling in dead meat. In
+other words, they are smelly, diseased and, to add another epithet
+“tricky,” not to be trusted.
+
+Yet this cub exploring an early morning on the sands had a future,
+however limited, and I remembered the lively trot of foxes when they
+are in good health, and their intelligence and curiosity, and simply
+their right to whatever special joys they might inherit.
+
+I carried a pair of field glasses with me, along with the somewhat
+thoughtlessly assembled equipment I wore on my back and which seemed
+increasingly heavy as time went on. When not too conscious of my burden
+I would use the glasses to bring an inland or offshore bird closer
+to me. I noticed five eider ducks across the troughs of the waves, a
+remnant of the thousands that winter off the Cape along with such other
+sea birds as brant, Canada geese, scoters, mergansers, old squaws,
+and various members of the auk family. I passed a dead gannet lying
+on the sand. It had been badly oiled, reminding me of the hazards of
+jettisoned tanker or freighter oil to all these water birds which land
+on the sea to rest or feed.
+
+There were a number of kingbirds on the dune rims, and they kept
+dropping down over the beach in their special way, to hover with fast
+wingbeat and flutter after flying insects. I heard the grating call of
+redwings, indicating marshy areas inland of the beach, but the cliffs
+above began to increase until they were 100 to 150 feet high or more,
+and the sun was so fierce that I had little interest in trying to scale
+them to see what was on the other side.
+
+I plodded on, noticing very little after a while, my attention blunted,
+reduced to seeing that one foot got in front of the other. The more
+level upper parts of the beach provided fairly good walking, but the
+sand was soft, and to relieve my aching muscles I would then angle
+down to the water’s edge where it was firmer, and there I was obliged
+to walk with one leg below the other because of the inclination of the
+beach. So I would return to the upper beach again and push ahead. I
+walked on, very hot and slow, seeing no one for miles until I came up
+to a group of bathers below a road and parking lot giving access to the
+beach, of the kind that are scattered along its reaches; and there I
+refilled my canteen at a cottage and went on.
+
+I found that if I rested too long during this hike I had little desire
+to go on again, so I confined myself to an army “break” of ten minutes
+every hour. Renewed walking unlimbered me a little and the wind off the
+water cooled my sweating skin. I listened to the sound of the waves.
+In addition to their rhythmic plunge and splash, their breathing, they
+clashed occasionally with a sound like the breaking of heavy glass, the
+falling of timber, or a load of bricks.
+
+I passed what was left of two shipwrecks during the day, a reminder of
+the dangers that still face ships along this coast with its fogs, its
+shifting winds, its storms, the hidden, treacherous offshore bars. The
+sands often reveal the timbers of old ships. One day their ribs, sodden
+and dark, barnacle encrusted, may reach up out of oblivion, and not
+long after that the water buries them under tons of sand. From them a
+local history calls out for recognition. Thousands of ships over three
+centuries wrecked on shoals, engulfed by violent seas, men with the
+dark of doom in them, to drown or to survive, and only a few timbers
+left to declare the ultimate dangers and their terror.
+
+I was not in Death Valley, or on a raft at sea. My walk was not
+unusually long, and I could leave the beach if I had to, but the
+enormity of the area filled me more and more. It had so much in it that
+was without recourse. Its emptiness, the great tidal range beyond it
+and through it, the raw heartbeat of the waves, the implacable sun,
+established the kind of isolation and helplessness in me which the
+commerce and community of our lives tries so hard to disguise. Even the
+birds, I began to think, were more secure than I. They had their strong
+bright threads of cognizance to the areas they came to, the water, the
+sands, the marsh. They were fixed in entity and grace, eating what was
+theirs by evolution to be eaten, using land and air in the ways that
+had come to them, knowing this place and all places like it in terms of
+its bounds and boundlessness, meeting its naked eye in the ways they
+had been sent to do.
+
+I started off in the morning admiring the brilliance of the sun, the
+small shadows from the dunes and across the beach, through driftwood,
+isolated beach plants and tidal wrack, with the wide flooding of light
+ahead and the variation in reflected light across the sea. I felt the
+sea moving quietly beside me. The waves heaved and sighed and spray was
+tossed lightly above the sand. Everything was continuous, untroubled,
+and deliberate; but as the day wore on the sun became my enemy, and
+I had very little rage or resource in me to fight it with. I was not
+fitted to environmental stability, like a bird, or fox or fish. I found
+myself in an area of whose reaches I had never been wholly aware, and
+in me there was no mastery. The sun was not only hostile. It was an
+ultimate, an impossibility; and the waters beside me began to deepen
+from their pleasant daytime sparkle and freshness into an incalculable
+realm which I had hardly entered. I was touching on an unimagined
+frontier.
+
+I spent my second night on the beach a few miles from Nauset Light
+where I left it the following morning. It was in the South Wellfleet
+area, and as I started to sleep on the sand a little above the
+high-tide line, I remembered that this was about the same place where
+a fishing boat had been wrecked two years before and two men drowned.
+I had seen the boat, with its cargo of fish, and some of the men’s
+clothing strewn along the shore, and I had heard a little about the
+depths of their ordeal. Their story haunted me; and then I began to
+feel that I might be caught by the tide while I was asleep. There were
+only about twelve feet between the bottom of a steep cliff and the
+high-tide line. I would soon be lying on a narrow shelf at the sea’s
+edge. So as the vague thought of being engulfed began to invade me,
+I took up my pack and sleeping bag again, retraced my steps down the
+beach, and found a way to the top of the cliff, where I spent the night
+in another hollow.
+
+The light of dawn, lifting quickly out of the sea, flooding into the
+range of low-lying land, woke me up again, and it signaled to the
+birds, who started singing in all the thickets and heath around me with
+a sweet, high, shrill intensity, a kind of automatic worship; and after
+a while they quieted down again.
+
+Little dirt roads dropped back from headlands through green slopes
+covered with bearberry and patches of yellow-flowered Hudsonia, or
+“poverty grass,” and there were hollows dipping back inland, and woods
+of stunted pitch pine. From the top of the cliff I watched the sun
+starting to send light running across the blue table of the sea, making
+it glitter and move. The intensity of light and heat began to grow
+steadily as I walked down the beach again for the last stretch toward
+Nauset.
+
+The beach is not so very far from where I live, or for that matter
+where anyone lives on the Cape. It is a few miles down the road, beyond
+the trees; and yet when I came back from my walk I felt as if I had
+been at enormous remove from my surroundings, caught out where I might
+have feared to be. The long line of sand and surf, the intensity of the
+sun, the cover of stars had come close enough to put me in council with
+that which had no answers. I was in awe of nature; and I understood
+that the sun and sea could be our implacable enemies. It was in this
+context that I saw our human world as subject to a stature that it
+never made.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                       The Resources of the Sea
+
+
+Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color, shadows, sound,
+substance, novelty in great detail, invade the smallest areas. One
+flower may attract many species of insects, brilliantly patterned
+and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating, gathering pollen, in
+any number of arresting ways, and the growth of plants around you,
+the shape of leaves, the general stir of things comes running like a
+carnival.
+
+On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling, moving
+slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of the green
+surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead; the wind
+flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an occasional dead skate
+or dogfish comes to your attention as you walk on. A black crow pecks
+at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling flits by. You notice a finger sponge
+attached to a large mussel or a sea scallop, broken loose and washed
+in from offshore beds, and that seems to be all, in a relatively empty
+world; but between these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a
+bird or bird track, a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space.
+
+The sea and its shores are still not caught, still relatively immune to
+human claims. Fill them with knowledge and with crowds and they still
+escape us, outrunning us like the sunlight on the water. Specifically,
+this age which is able to measure everything but mystery, might tell
+you just how capacious the oceans are. They comprise two thirds of the
+earth’s surface; they have a close relationship to the atmosphere and
+are in large measure responsible for our weather; and we know, with the
+assurance of conquerors, that if all else fails we may be able to save
+the human race from dying of thirst and starvation by extracting water
+and food from them, providing our atomic wastes do not prohibit it. We
+are also learning how to mine the ocean floors for their minerals, how
+to harness the tides, and how to use their depths for concealment.
+
+Oceanography is one of the great modern sciences and it has revealed
+mountains, rifts, plains, and canyons on a scale that would astonish us
+if we saw them on earth, as it has also brought us more knowledge of
+marine animals at all depths. It has made great contributions to the
+restless modern mind. How can we look at the sea without at some time
+thinking of our earth’s submerged geology, gigantic, uneroded by wind,
+sun, or rain, in calm waters inhabited by strange aquatic lives?
+
+Strange is still the word for them. No amount of assessment of the
+sea’s contents quite translates them for us. What, for example, is a
+fish? What is that flat creature the skate lying there on the sand,
+with its tough hide and the small slit of a mouth on the same side as
+its belly?
+
+There is an aquarium at Woods Hole with a collection of many of the
+kinds of fish that inhabit the waters off Cape Cod. They seem foreign,
+weird, almost unexampled when you see them in their captured state. I
+saw a woman standing in front of one of the windows looking at some
+toadfish, little fat animals with great mouths, squat, with round-edged
+fleshy fins that gave the appearance of warts and knobs, expertly
+camouflaged in varied patterns so that they can at once sink in and
+become a part of the bottom: “Oh!” she cried. “Horrible!”
+
+All the others there become more than the term “fish” when you see
+them suspended behind glass, floating in their own world of water,
+strangers in the perfection of their own remoteness. Their dull jaws
+open and close as they breathe. Their filmy, diaphanous fins wave
+lightly and loosely. Their flicking eyes pass you by, with a kind of
+self-enclosed abstractness, a stiffness, as if they had not seen you
+at all, and no doubt the blurred human form means very little to them.
+The glass separates the world of water from the world of air. Their
+bodies curve deliberately and slowly, and then suddenly switch into an
+unsuspected quickness, while we tourists shove and crowd and gawk from
+our unbridgeable distance.
+
+At other windows the rays and skates, with fins fused to bodies like
+wafers, wave through the water. Bottom fish suddenly disappear in
+puffs of sand. The lean, long sand shark, primitive, tough, swims with
+infinite smoothness back and forth, an expression of coldness, an
+incarnate simplicity.
+
+They are all unknown, not of our race, and giving the unknown the old
+credit of fear, they _are_ horrible, monsters in their realm, with
+intercommunications, receptions, that we are unable to touch.
+
+An aquarium is a luxury. Most of the fish we see are dead, a boatload
+of wet, cold, slippery white and gray flounder, cod, or haddock just
+come into port, or dying, like a striped bass caught by a fisherman
+casting off the beach--flipping on the sands with all its cool
+brightness still alive, a slippery, lucent sea green. The color loss is
+quick as a fish dies, leaving the rippling shades of its great medium
+behind.
+
+The world of ocean color comes inland in the spring with the alewives
+that migrate from salt water up inlets, streams, and estuaries on both
+sides of Cape Cod. They are silver, like the sea they come from, with
+backs of gray green, and in a shallow stream they seem to reflect the
+colors of the season, having in fact the ability to change the pigment
+in their skin so as to blend with their surroundings. They mouth the
+water and stare forward with their big eyes, running upstream with the
+unswerving directness of their need to reproduce--which gives us at
+least one reassuring alliance with them!--and being of a fairly large
+size compared with most fresh-water fish, they have a look of marine
+capacities, a fast-schooling fish made for water masses, great sweeping
+currents, and tides.
+
+Even the alewives, which migrate by the hundred thousands, are only
+suggestive of the far running but hidden nature of the oceanic depths.
+Most of us, failing a glass-bottom boat or a glass-sided submarine,
+have to stand on the beach and take in the vast motions of the sea
+surface with only the vaguest idea of what is happening below.
+Sometimes it looks like a bowl of dazzling, dashing light, and at
+others a gray, monotonous range under a raw wind with white-groined
+waves constantly moving across its distances. The sea takes all the
+light and air, the storms, clouds, moon, and stars, in endless, various
+reflections over its watery reaches, with a monumental acceptance.
+
+Are there not a thousand ways to describe the sea which in their sum
+amount to inscrutability? How can you translate its abundance even by
+counting so many thousands of protozoa in a drop of water? Who can
+fathom the range of appetite it contains, the ferocity of the life its
+amplitude allows?
+
+One day in early fall I traveled from the Cape with a party of people
+in a chartered boat, heading for an area some ten or fifteen miles
+out. The offshore breezes coasted over smooth, sun-bright waters that
+carried some of the land’s litter with them, sticks, leaves, petals,
+and even butterflies. At one point a dragonfly skimmed past us; and
+silky seeds of milkweed and dandelions went sailing and twisting by to
+land eventually where they could never take root. Farther out, oceanic
+birds like jaegers, shearwaters, and phalaropes began to appear. When
+we were plowing out across the open ocean with its short-crested waves
+we came upon a broad path of waters which were foaming and flashing
+and leaping, a white windrow of fish flipping violently above the
+surface, lasting perhaps a mile or more. Evidently we had come upon an
+area that was rich in plankton, attracting many small fish, attacked in
+turn by larger ones. What we were seeing was part of the classic food
+chain that leads, in terms of size, from microscopic plants and animals
+to whales. The sea was splitting its sides with riches, and a kind of
+savagery that most of us hardly dare admit, although as a race we are
+not so far removed from it ourselves.
+
+As the glass on the aquarium window separates the spectator from the
+world of the fish, so the long nearly unbroken line of the Outer Beach
+stands between us and the vast, alien reaches of the North Atlantic.
+It is not _our_ natural environment, and so we can legitimately call
+it treacherous, sullen, cold, and grim, and even in its hours of
+brilliance and warmth it seems to lead us off in no terms we can call
+familiar. It is full of fickle changes, fogs, and storms, unpredictable
+shifts in mood. We are still unable to set forth on the open ocean
+without the skill of a sailor or the protection that a technical
+civilization affords us.
+
+Yet our neighbor the sea provides the amplitude and even, being still
+relatively unaffected by human ownership, the regenerative power of
+what is both dangerous and undiscovered in the universe. All its shores
+are washed by a capacity. If it is constant in peril for us, and for
+its own voracious inhabitants, it is also beneficent as a medium
+for life. Those tidal rhythms, watery colors, and reflections are
+translated into living organisms whose uncounted numbers are assured by
+their vast and relatively temperate home.
+
+We only see a small part of those numbers, at least consciously,
+since sea water may be swarming with invisible life, but during
+spring, summer, and early fall, the sea’s bounty often reveals itself.
+Countless moon jellies for example, pulse through waters inland of the
+sea during the springtime or in Cape Cod Bay, where I have seen comb
+jellies in great profusion during late summer. Watching them, it is
+not only their primitive, brainless nature, or their numbers, that has
+seemed incredible to me, but their approximation to their environment.
+
+It has been estimated that jellyfish are 95 per cent water. Dried out,
+they resolve into almost nothing. How could such evanescent creatures
+be predators, killing and ingesting living organisms? When you see such
+transparent flower-animals it is even difficult to believe that they
+have the nerves and muscles to be able to pulse through the water;
+but their chemical balance, their physical responses have a direct
+relationship with the sea water, whose salts are in them. Salt water is
+a liquid medium for life, a blood that circulates through the creatures
+of the sea. So close is the association of the sea and its lives,
+though each species has its unique kind of locomotion, respiration,
+aggression, its own way of feeding and being food, joining in the
+employment of energy, that it is almost tempting to inquire whether the
+sea does not have an organic nature of its own. I will not get very far
+by suggesting that a medium and environment “knows” anything beyond
+what all nature knows, but this primal “mother” great provider and
+provided, has its own deep rights in the realm of being.
+
+In summer and into fall you can see thousands of small fish schooling
+in the shallow tidal edges of Cape Cod Bay, moving slowly until
+approached, when those closest to you swing forward, or run, rush,
+and circle as need be, the whole crowd sometimes escaping with a
+simultaneous, sideward sweep. They are all spontaneity, life on the
+run, endowed with limited attributes from the point of a “higher
+animal” but of strict extravagance in form and action, born of ocean
+waters. They suggest the incomparable, swimming out of range.
+
+There is something of this suggestion in many specific aspects of
+animal, or even plant, life in the sea. In a sense their fascination
+lies in what has not yet been discovered about them, but just as much,
+from the average human point of view, in the way their actions are
+those of the sea rather than the land to which we are accustomed. In
+fact all of us are obliged to make surface discoveries a great deal
+of the time, even with respect to what is around us, or even inside
+us, like fishermen following the seasonal movement of fish, sometimes
+predictable but often hidden and unreliable, or students who chase
+after migratory birds in planes. So the sight of grunions wiggling in
+California sands, depositing and fertilizing their eggs, bound to a
+complex interrelationship of spring tides and the moon, still excites
+our curiosity, being a phenomenon that is not fully understood, taking
+place in a proximate but different world.
+
+Migrant fish, like the alewives, may return not only during the same
+season each year but very close to the same day as a run of the year
+before. Perhaps the cycles involving sea and climate average out very
+accurately, but it is too complex a phenomenon to say that it goes like
+clockwork. Tides are measurable but constantly changing in time and
+amplitude. Environmental conditions in sea water are various and the
+seas coordinate relationship to the atmosphere is an elaborate one.
+Rhythmic response in an organism may be simple and spontaneous--like a
+fucus, or rockweed, only ready to spawn after a period of exposure at
+low tide--and it will have its causes, but the causes themselves are
+greatly complex in nature.
+
+The sea’s discovery will not be made by factory ships that process
+their huge catches of fish, by killer submarines chasing after whales,
+or by mining equipment. We can physically affect its life with our
+one-sided power, but it will remain protean and indifferent and we will
+go on imagining our conquest of it.
+
+On this overdiscovered and overexploited earth the sea remains a
+wilderness, a resource not of goods but of what is rich and wild. That
+which we have been unable to use up, or harry to extinction, has
+the power to renew. The sea is a positive mystery. I hear the surf’s
+continual breathing in the distance; I see the stars that literally
+cover the sky over the beach on a winter’s night like white animal
+plankton in the spring waters; and I realize that I know no more about
+them than I know about myself. The depths are still ahead, with the
+fear and the temptation that the undiscovered arouses in us.
+
+All of us are drawn to the sea’s edge as to a fire. Its vast reaches
+roll and heave in the light. There is an incalculable weight of waters
+withheld just beyond us, a roaming kept in check. What an exalting
+thing it is to see those waters dancing with silver castings from the
+moon! Even in our careless, civilized state, drinking beer, watching
+driftwood burn, or absorbing the sun and one another, in no way
+obligated to the kind of cold suffering or exile which sea and seashore
+have meant to men in the past, there is something in us that wants this
+brilliance, this barren waste.
+
+The sheeted surfaces blown over by all winds rove on with their freight
+of light during the day, constantly changing, sometimes black, purple,
+and gray under pigeon-silver skies, with hazy, soft horizons, sometimes
+silver scudding with gold, or blue, green, and white in all shades; and
+always the tidal balance, the surf’s fall and drag at the sand’s edge,
+whatever the season.
+
+During the autumn and winter months the cliffs hang their shadows over
+the beach very early in the afternoon, cold darkness moving toward an
+iridescent surf that reflects the last light of the sun. The sunset
+shows curly salmon and fiery orange streaks on the other side of the
+vast flat table that often runs with sea ducks at this time of year;
+and then, singly, the stars begin to shoot up their spears and arrows,
+alignments for eternal navigation.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                           A Rhythmic Shore
+
+
+On the beach it might be said that there is no such thing as decline
+and decay, although in a physical sense drastic change is obvious,
+from year to year and even from minute to minute. In a northern forest
+where the trees have been left to grow for many years, I have sensed
+the presence of a great establishment, something silent and absolutely
+personal, a society of trees with its own strong relationship to the
+sun, to the roaring winter winds and snows, to dry years and wet,
+using the earth-bound materials of growth, decay, and old age as
+provisions for indefinite residence. These tree communities culminate
+in “climax” formations, dominated by particular varieties of trees such
+as maple and beech, or spruce and fir, to progress no further until
+some great interference, such as a lumbering operation, or climatic
+change--an increase or decrease in average temperatures over a period
+of years--may start a community succession all over again.
+
+On the other hand, the beach and its cliffs that stand as buffers
+against the sea never allow much in terms of residential time, except
+to societies that can adapt themselves to living between the wet sand
+grains, minute plants, and animals; and beach hoppers that burrow
+in on the upper parts of the beach, or other crustaceans that sink
+into the sand and out again as the waves go up and back, reacting
+simultaneously. It is a terribly exacting place to live in. Life is
+short. Disturbance is always to be expected, and the more so in the
+course of a storm, which may change the whole physical character of the
+beach itself.
+
+While I was walking on the beach I rented a small summer cottage in the
+South Wellfleet area during the late autumn and early winter months, so
+as to be able to spend nights as well as days by the sea, and I paid it
+sporadic visits when I could. I remember one night when the sea showed
+me just how candidly elemental and violent it could be. A northeast
+storm had been making up all day. Off the Provincetown area, where the
+waters are protected by Peaked Hill Bar--extending from Race Point to
+High Head, some thousands of feet offshore and parallel to it--the sea
+though gray and choppy, was relatively calm, while the wind blew hard.
+I could see several fishing boats on the horizon. They were surrounded
+by clouds of gulls. The sky was not totally overcast to begin with but
+full of handsome blue-gray clouds that sailed across the air like great
+round slates. Farther south the gray Atlantic foamed and rocked ahead,
+and the green surf came in dashing with spume and spray, pouring an
+angry froth on the shore. Finally the sky closed in completely.
+
+By nightfall, water driven by air filled earth and sky. A little ship’s
+bell on the porch outside kept tinkling, and the wind rained blows on
+the house. The walls thudded as if they were being struck by rocks.
+Rain pelted the windows and the cold knifed in between the door and the
+sill. The sea was putting on a profound and concentrated roar. I went
+out and fought the wind as far as the top of the bank above the beach.
+Beyond and below that it was almost impossible to stand. A mountainous
+milky surf was seething, overturning, and piling in. Fury was riding
+high. The wind belted houses, shrubs, and scanty trees. The beach
+grasses were tossed, bent down, and released. Rain slashed and whipped
+wildly everywhere and it seemed that all the natural power and danger
+in the world had been let loose. When day broke majestic breakers were
+booming and pounding down the beach as the north wind drove long lines
+of spray across their heads.
+
+This is the kind of storm, not infrequent between September and
+May, that flings down ladders reaching to the beach, undermines or
+tears away the asphalt parking lots, throws wharf pilings and great
+ocean-drifting timbers around as if they were matchsticks, and leaves
+them strewn on the sands. It also tears away tremendous amounts of
+material from the cliffs, as well as straightening or leveling out the
+contours of the beach. The cliffs are eroded by storm action primarily,
+not by the tides; but after a series of storms uncovers a part of the
+beach, displacing great volumes of sand, sections of the cliff may come
+down by gravity slippage, because they are not supported underneath,
+and high tides may help the process.
+
+The extent of cliff erosion is very variable, and in so far as storms
+are concerned, depends on their degree of intensity. Offshore bars and
+shoals protect the beach from the action of the sea to some extent.
+When they are breached during storms, the result is a greatly increased
+cutting away of the beach sands and erosion of the cliffs. When bars
+reform and build up again the beach slowly recovers its former volume,
+though what the cliffs lose, of course, they cannot regain.
+
+The estimate given for the average rate of cliff erosion along the
+Outer Cape is from two to four feet a year. I have heard of one family
+who have had to move their cottage back three times during the past
+forty years, a period in which the cliff, so it was estimated, may
+have receded nearly 200 feet in that area; and their house lot was
+not extensive enough for any more moves. Most residents or returned
+visitors can remember some change in the topography of the cliffs over
+the years. Not long after the end of World War II, when I came to live
+on Cape Cod, there were still the remnants of the old twin lighthouses
+above Nauset Light Beach, in the form of a curved brick base at the top
+of the cliff. As time went by it was undermined, then started to slide
+down, reached the base of the cliff to be completely buried by sand,
+but was uncovered again some years afterward. In South Wellfleet water
+pipes still project over the cliff, indicating the presence of summer
+cottages some forty or fifty years ago.
+
+Changes in the beach are more immediate, and not likely to be so
+irretrievable, but even there it is possible to see its fluctuations
+over the years. There is a great rock off Nauset Light Beach that used
+to stand high and clear at low tide some years ago, but it has been
+undercut and filled around with sand and recently only its top was
+showing.
+
+This is not a level, stable, protected kind of beach. It is steep,
+full of long shoulders and curves, and fluctuates in outline not only
+as a result of storms but with each tide and even with every wave,
+making new bays, curves, shallow hills, and hollows; but the beach is
+an interbalanced system. All its materials come from offshore or the
+erosion of the cliffs. Wave action removes the cliff material, and
+currents moving parallel to the shore take it both north and south:
+there being a neutral point around Cahoon’s Hollow, halfway between
+Highland Light and South Wellfleet, although its location is dependent
+on the angle at which the waves come in along the shore. Half the cliff
+material moves north to build up the hood at Provincetown, and half
+moves south to be deposited along the sandspits from Nauset to Monomoy.
+
+A study made by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, under the
+direction of John M. Zeigler, points out that the north and south ends
+of the Cape terminate in fairly deep water, 205 feet off Race Point
+and about fifty feet off Monomoy, and that: “It seems unlikely that
+material is moved to the Outer Cape from deep water, either from north
+and south, or by littoral drifting from any other part of the New
+England coast. Drifted detritus would be trapped or obstructed many
+times before it could reach the beaches of the Outer Cape.”
+
+During the course of the same study beach profiles were measured for
+several years and it was found that the sands were constantly changing
+in elevation, all the way from several tenths of a foot in one place
+during a mere ten minutes to a ten-foot loss in another during a period
+of two days. The average change per tide was about four tenths of a
+foot and sometimes went up to a foot.
+
+The beach has a kind of rhythmic beat, up and down. If its changes were
+translated into visual, continuous motion on a screen you might see it
+dipping, rising, and undulating like the waves at sea. Turbulence and
+change are not outside a frame of order. Loss is balanced by gain, so
+that the sand which is taken from one part is added to another, and
+though the relative volume of the beach is greatly reduced it may be
+restored in a year or so to more or less its original size.
+
+Zeigler’s report, incidentally, makes the observation that the beaches
+“become very steep and full in summer and are quite variable in winter,
+spring and fall,” characteristics governed by the “sea state” during
+those seasons. Sea state, if I understand the term correctly, refers to
+the offshore characteristics of the sea surface, the height, length,
+and steepness of its waves, and their velocity, all governed by the
+wind in its many different phases. The waves that cut the beach away
+during fall, winter, and early spring are characterized by their
+steepness. On the other hand the summer waves that build up the beach,
+although they may be the same height as cutting waves, are not steep,
+the long swells that you see offshore in the warm months being typical
+of this kind.
+
+From Nauset Coast Guard Beach to Highland Light the cliffs range
+between 60 and 170 feet in height, and they are made of the stones,
+boulders, sands, gravels, and clays of what geologists up to now have
+called an “inter-lobate moraine,” meaning the mixed glacial material
+built up as a ridge along the sides of two moving lobes of ice--in this
+case two lateral moraines joined as one.
+
+A new study by Dr. John Zeigler, which accompanied his work on beach
+erosion, puts forth another theory for this area which is that the
+ridge was already there before the glacier came. It caused the
+glacier to split into two lobes and the material it left behind was
+fluvioglacial outwash, there being no real glacial till such as makes
+up a moraine before Nauset. A carbon dating taken in this lower Cape
+region puts its age at 20,700 years.
+
+The Upper Cape, from Orleans to the canal, is a true terminal moraine,
+having material that was pushed ahead of the glacier and left behind
+when it melted north. It is characterized by uneven hilly country full
+of rocks and stones merging with a slanting sandy surface on the south
+which formed the outwash plain.
+
+The cliffs may only be eroded in substantial amounts during storms,
+but to a slight extent they are always eroding. In some sections,
+especially during hot and dry weather, there falls a continuous stream
+of pebbles and granular sand, made a rich reddish-brown by iron
+compounds, looking in the strong light like a broad rain of precious
+metals, treasure chests broken open. In other places sheets of fine
+sand pour down in miniature Niagaras, or flow and fly ahead along the
+cliffs before the wind, having the look under slanting winter sunlight
+of light smoke from many fires.
+
+Chunks and fragments of clay are loosened by the weather from their
+beds in the cliffs and are often washed by heavy rains so that a gray
+liquid flows and fans out for some feet across the sands. Occasionally
+boulders will loosen and tumble down. In fact small stones are
+constantly falling, rolling erratically part way down the beach and
+leaving their tracks behind them. The cliffs are the prime source of
+the beach’s materials and a repository of the ages that preceded it.
+They have a proud and vulnerable role in a context where everything is
+subject to displacement and removal.
+
+Taking an average of three feet a year, the Outer Beach may have
+required 1760 years to erode a mile in width, even though that is one
+of those general figures which may mean nothing so far as detailed
+geological history is concerned. In any case, not only cottages and
+lighthouses have gone their way but also such topographical features as
+marshes and ponds, with all the frogs, fish, and plants that belonged
+to them. On the cliff tops and very close to the edge, there are many
+glacial kettle holes, now dried up, but once full of water instead of
+sand, so numerous in some areas as to make one uninterrupted dip and
+rise after another. On the Nauset Coast Guard Beach, where the cliffs
+have ended and are replaced by a long sandspit protecting the Nauset
+marshes behind it, there is good evidence, jutting out on the beach, of
+a former kettle hole, showing a fine dark sediment composed of organic
+material which once lay under beds of peat.
+
+The cliffs’ glacial material, in whatever form they were left on Cape
+Cod some 20,000 years ago, was part of the land’s erosion, of geology’s
+rising and falling history, for countless years before that. Since
+then it has been constantly exposed, loosened, easily eroded and ready
+for the taking, by winds, tides, and waves, but all of it was changing
+and movable in terms of the great stretches of earth time. Many of its
+stones and boulders were being wind and waterworn, cracked by frost and
+heat, long before they were plucked from hills and ledges, transported
+and left by the glacier to give the Cape its present form. Now they are
+being broken out and rolled down to be worn again. Like the tides, they
+are part of a balance, a flow, and containment, that is prodigious in
+its reach.
+
+The cliffs erode; the surf churns the sand; currents carry away the
+sand and other cliff debris; storms cause the sea to break in across
+sandspits and bars, so that they change constantly in shape and
+position. There is a magnitude of effect involved at this meeting place
+of sea and land. It is a magnitude that stretches between a sand grain
+which may be less than a millimeter in diameter to storms whose force
+makes man-made explosions of nuclear energy minuscule by comparison.
+
+Sand is perhaps the apex and symbol of the whole process in which the
+existence of the beach is involved. It is moved and shifted grain by
+grain in the displacement of its masses, lifted by waves, carried by
+currents, and set down again. Sand in the evolution of the beach is not
+a static material but an agent of dynamic energy, following out the
+motion of water and air, itself their product.
+
+Sand grains, which are of great age, have been worn down from rock
+and the mineral grains that make it up, to particles, largely of
+quartz, with some feldspar, that are sufficiently durable not to be
+reduced to the consistency of mud. The wind which moves the waves and
+is the ultimate cause of all beach movement, also may have a more
+important effect than water in abrasing and rounding out a sand grain.
+The action of grain against grain is more abrasive in the air than
+in water, which acts as a cushion. In any case a sand grain made of
+quartz reaches a nearly irreducible size after a long period of time.
+It might eventually be reduced to powder, but it is now protected by
+the grains next to it because of its small size and the film of water
+surrounding it. This water, held there by adsorption, is what makes it
+possible for tiny animals like nematodes and copepods to exist in such
+an environment.
+
+Pick up a handful of moist sand and it is heavy and relatively
+cohesive. Through a hand lens you can see the grains fall off in pearly
+clumps. On the other hand, dry sand is blown down the beach in its
+separate grains like rice, and sorted on different levels according to
+its weight and size. Each sparkling grain is an entity unto itself. It
+is easily lifted and moved by the energy of waves and currents and at
+the same time heavy enough in the mass to give beaches their malleable
+stability.
+
+A sand grain is a product of earth, with beauty, quality, and dynamic
+character, shining clear in eternal process. Sand has the strength
+and resilience needed to hold up against the violent tonnage of the
+waves, and at the same time to share in their employment. It is always
+being remolded into new shapes by the art of wind and sea, shifting
+restlessly, moving from age to age. What we call the inanimate not
+only has its weights and measures but also a wonderful proportion with
+relation to the forces that send it on. It has a going out that is as
+rhythmic in its way and as full of viable light as the migration of
+organic lives.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                             Dune Country
+
+
+Sand dunes, as distinct from sandspits, or the banks at the head of
+the beach, are found in a few restricted areas on the Cape, but their
+two primary locations are the Provincetown hook and at Sandy Neck
+in Barnstable, on the Bay side. Inland of the beach, far enough not
+to be exposed to the constant wash of the tides or to flooding seas
+during storms, the dunes have forms and motions of their own. They
+were originally produced by the wind, and it is the wind that reshapes
+them, blows over their shoulders and down their slopes, making mounds
+and ripples on their surfaces, and also undoes them and makes new ones
+again.
+
+The Provincetown dunes, which I had passed by on my June hike down
+the beach, represent an exposed region of several miles in extent,
+uninhabited for the most part except for a few gray beach houses
+perched on the dunes overlooking the sea. They are continually being
+added to by sand which the dry northwest wind picks up along the shore
+and blows inland. Because of its dryness, this wind also has the
+greatest effect in moving the dunes. Damper winds causing moisture on
+grains of sand, make them more resistant to being moved.
+
+Much of the region is held down by low vegetation. Its sandy reaches
+are patched everywhere by Hudsonia, or beach heather, pitch pines kept
+down almost flat on the ground by wind and salt spray, and its slopes
+and hummocks kept intact by beach grass; but in other areas, and they
+are extensive, the dunes have broken loose and roam like the waves of
+the open ocean, with great crests and long, deep troughs. They look as
+if they should have a slow, massive momentum of their own, but they are
+moved by the wind, migrating in a west to east direction at the rate
+of some ten to fifteen feet a year, creating a considerable problem
+at the point where they skirt the highway across from the town of
+Provincetown. On the far end of Pilgrim Lake high dunes loom over the
+highway and are continually drifting down on to it, hardly deterred by
+snow fences and the planting of beach grass, so that the sand has to be
+cleared off frequently.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It is a young country, even compared with the rest of the Cape, which,
+in geologic terms at least, is by no means an ancient land. It is
+postglacial and is made of material brought along the shore and added
+to a reef of glacial debris. It begins where the glacial material of
+the lower Cape ends, easily seen where the cliff at “High Head” breaks
+off above Pilgrim Lake, and then it stretches and curves out very close
+to sea level. Samples of material taken in the area showed a carbon
+dating of 5000 years, comparatively recent times. Also there seems to
+be good reason for believing that much of the dune country was broken
+free and set to wandering by the hand of man.
+
+Between the dunes and Provincetown there are a number of ponds, marshy
+areas, and woodlands, including some good-sized stands of beech and
+oak. These woods must have been considerably more extensive at one
+time. In the dunes that now hang over them there are remnants, tree
+trunks, and stubs protruding through the sand; and there is at least
+one part of the dunes that seems to show evidence of a wood fire that
+took up a big area, though when it occurred is not clear to me.
+
+Thoreau wrote about the dead stubs of submerged forests projecting
+above the surface of the sand in the “desert,” as he called it, and
+of numerous little pools in the sand filled with fresh water “... all
+that was left, probably of a pond or swamp.” He may have exaggerated
+these pools as an indication of former ponds or marshland. They are
+located a little above the water level which extends everywhere under
+the dunes, and so are likely to be found at the bottom of the dune
+troughs, or hollows between the dunes. Some of these pools, or fairly
+long and narrow stretches of shallow water, may stay in much the same
+place over a long period of time if the levels where they are located
+are at least partially held down by vegetation. They are filled up by
+rain water during fall and spring and then dry out during the summer
+months, but where the dunes migrate before the wind, they also travel
+behind one dune and before the next; and they are seldom deep enough to
+develop typical swamp vegetation.
+
+Thoreau tramped the area in 1849, and two hundred years earlier the
+dune area on the town side of the “Hook” and possibly further must
+have been much more circumscribed and held back. The early inhabitants
+cut down all the trees they could find, for firewood; “try works” for
+melting whale blubber; boats, houses, and salt works (in the days when
+salt was produced by boiling sea water instead of the later refinement
+of using solar heat to evaporate it).
+
+Blowing sand became a threat to Provincetown and its harbor early in
+its history. In his _Cape Cod; its people and their history_, Henry
+Kittredge describes the war declared by the people of the town against
+almost every stick, living or dead, that surrounded them.
+
+“When the Mayflower band arrived,” he writes, “the sand hills to the
+north were for the most part held stationary by trees and shrubs. But
+from the earliest times the inhabitants, following the example of
+visiting fishermen, fell upon the trees until the sand lay bare, a prey
+to the four winds of heaven. The captains of fishing schooners were
+allowed to take sand ballast from these hills, and not content with
+this, the citizens turned their cattle loose to graze on what clumps of
+vegetation still struggled for existence on the denuded hills, with the
+result that the grass was demolished as fast as it grew. The sand was
+free to blow down upon the unprotected village with every northwester,
+threatening even to bury the houses.”
+
+ The danger attracted the attention of the Colonial Government as
+ early as 1714, when an act was passed to preserve the trees. In
+ 1727, Provincetown was incorporated, and a dozen years later another
+ act forbade the pasturing of cattle on the sand hills. The Court
+ might as well have forbidden the winds to blow or the sun to shine.
+ Provincetowners cared nothing for laws, and continued to cut wood and
+ turn cattle loose for the next hundred years; in short, until the
+ danger, instead of threatening, actually arrived. The sand buried
+ a house or two, and was advancing toward the town, salt works, and
+ harbor at the rate of fifty rods a year along a four-and-a-half-mile
+ front. In 1825, another commission was sent to study the situation
+ and suggest remedies. This time they found the citizens so frightened
+ by the marching sand that they were ready at last to obey the laws.
+ They planted beach grass on the barren dunes, kept their cattle in the
+ pound, and stopped cutting down young pine trees. Thus was the sand
+ anchored and the town saved.
+
+Pilgrim Lake is what is left of East Harbor, an extension of the main
+harbor of Provincetown that ended in marshes separated by a narrow
+strip of beach on the outer shore. The sea was a constant threat to
+this barrier and the people of Provincetown were afraid that it would
+eventually break through and start sending tons of sand into their
+valuable harbor, eventually making it unusable. A dike, 1400 feet
+long and seventy-five feet wide was finally completed in 1869, cutting
+across the mouth of East Harbor at the entrance to Provincetown Harbor,
+so that both houses and fishing industry were no longer threatened with
+burial; but the dunes, though held in some control, have continued to
+blow.
+
+There is a small hill called Mt. Gilboa on one side of the highway at
+Provincetown, facing another Biblical peak called Mt. Ararat on the
+other, and if you climb it you can overlook the harbor and the roofs
+of the town, as well as the dunes and sea in the other direction.
+(Provincetown, incidentally, consists of a belt of houses narrowly
+strung along the inner shore with its streets directly oriented toward
+the harbor, appropriate to a people whose trade and thoughts were
+toward the sea. This is also true of the houses, which were built
+longitudinally, parallel to the streets.) In the fall, clam diggers
+bend down over dark flats at low tide between stretching fingers of
+water. Dories are stranded in the mud, or move gently on low water.
+Beyond them are the curving, stockadelike enclosures of the fish weirs,
+and draggers move in to the mouth of the harbor out of the bay. The
+sunlight fires the sandy faces of the long, low cliffs that extend down
+the inner shore of the Cape.
+
+The town, which is so thick and crowded with cars during the summer
+months, a host to the cities, teeming with talk and color, a variety
+of human shapes, sizes, and exclamations, so reclaimed that you can
+hardly conceive of its austere past, becomes diminished again to a mere
+cluster of houses, a tenuous edge on water and sand. On the far-going
+Atlantic side, the dunes billow and toss. The Ararats are everywhere,
+peaks, crowns, domes held down by yellow beach grass on the mounds and
+hillocks from which the slopes dive down.
+
+As the world’s dunes go, these may not be of major size and extent. On
+the other hand they have been measured at heights between sixty and
+eighty feet, and at times dune ridges may have reached elevations up
+to 100 feet. Also, their scale is such, leading from one open face to
+another, that human figures climbing a steep side across an intervening
+slope of no great distance seem tiny. The walls keep looming up and
+the valleys dip between, so that the whole landscape is full of a wide
+motion.
+
+In all this bare largesse of sand, the texture is clean and clear.
+Shadows move over it like loving hands. The wind’s touch in turn has
+made grooves, grains, and ribs on the surface. In some areas the black
+mineral magnetite joins with garnet to make blackish-purple ripples
+in the sand, or irregular masses, or little brushstroke feathers and
+clouds. Everything shows clearly, from human footprints and the long
+ruts made by beach buggies, to mice or rabbit tracks. And I suppose
+that in the summer--if you pounce in time--you can see insects leaving
+their traces, like dune grasshoppers, colored and grained like sand,
+or a spider that buries down in the sand, thus avoiding extreme
+temperatures; or even a toad. I once found a Fowler’s toad quite far
+out on the beach where it must have wandered away from the dunes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A stick that drops down from one of those shrubs so besieged by wind
+and sand waggles down a dune making a fine tracery, or what looks like
+a stamping of birds when it is lodged in one place and blown back and
+forth. An oak leaf merely blown for a slight distance down the sand
+makes a track, with all its lobe ends imprinted like a long tassel or
+thin strands of separate strings. Except for the beach-buggy tracks,
+that follow one route fairly consistently, and may be visible for
+months at a time, and the beach grasses, continually renewing their
+precise circles on the sand, most of these tracks soon disappear.
+There is a constant moving of sand particles, a sweeping over by the
+wind. The open dunes are trackless areas where tracks take on great
+significance.
+
+During winter days when the northwest wind blows with fury along the
+exposed shores of the Cape, it may be too uncomfortable to stay in
+the dunes for any length of time. You gasp in the polar air and hide
+your face from the stinging sand. Each sand grain is lifted and sent
+with the speed of a projectile along the surface of the dunes. Given a
+little shelter from which to watch you could see the dunes change shape
+in an afternoon, or an hour. It is on days like this that they migrate
+like waves, with long slopes on their upwind sides, steep ones on their
+lee.
+
+On their bright and stable days, the long dune shoulders at the top of
+each rise tilt you up, body and vision, into the dizzy heights of a
+sky graded from cobalt to indigo, the way the scale of things in the
+landscape goes from sand grains to rocking seas without distraction.
+The dunes almost seem to ask for a long-distance running from both men
+and clouds. They are a place of flying, falling, and tumbling, shaping
+the motion of what comes to them, asking for an approach that soars.
+
+Also, they have their secrets, their ground-level associations. In
+October the beach-grass heads are loaded with yellow seeds. Where
+the plants are clumped together, providing protection from the wind,
+nests of seed gather on the leeward side, visited by birds that leave
+many little tracks and sometimes a feather or two. Mice also leave
+their dimpled trails, circling around the beach grass, traveling
+across bare sand for short distances before they disappear. There is
+a special delicacy in the visits of birds and mice. I had the fancy,
+following these small trails, of watching mice under the moon, with all
+their scuttling, nibbling, and investigating, so that some of their
+excitement, their fidgety life dance might be translated for me. I even
+thought it might help bring me down from a world too heavy with size to
+a neater reality.
+
+Startled by a little crash of twigs and leaves, I saw a rabbit darting
+up a dune slope. It bobbed to the top and stayed motionless for a few
+seconds in a bayberry thicket until I followed it to find what might
+be the meeting place of a whole tribe of rabbits, if I could judge by
+the amount of tracks and pellets of dung there were, all on the rim of
+a small bowl held together by the bayberries with a small scrub oak
+coming up from its base. These semiprotected hollows are quite typical
+of the dunes. There are also small woods of pitch pines, thickly
+carpeted with needles, where the tree roots can get some moisture
+at the bottom of a valley between the dunes. Scrub-sized oak, pine,
+sometimes bayberry, beach plum, or wild cherry, hold down many hollows,
+with the help of beach grass on the shoulders around them.
+
+The beach grass has had much deserved honor heaped upon it, in the
+proportion that it is able to live with the tons of sand that are
+also heaped upon it. It is perfectly adapted to being covered over by
+sand since it sends up stems which in turn root themselves, and then
+grows on, letting the old roots die. As a sand hill builds up, the
+beach grass is able to maintain itself in this fashion without being
+buried and to hold down the sand with a network of roots and stalks.
+It stabilizes such hills until the point where the wind may sweep
+so constantly around them as to expose them and cut away the sand,
+leaving the grass in splendid isolation with its outer roots hanging in
+mid-air. So beach grass and sand have a special collaboration which man
+does his best to encourage, especially after he has made rescue work
+necessary.
+
+The sand masses have great weight and volume and are stable in
+themselves but it is their surfaces that flow and shift with the wind,
+so that the whole region is remolded over periods of time. It is
+fascinating to sit in a valley between the dunes and reconstruct their
+curves, seeing how the sand has been swept down one side and blown up
+another, sent over a hill to make a new one on the other side, held for
+a long time and then broken loose to change its residence, motion, and
+stability joining to make those noble forms.
+
+The dunes may threaten man’s house, or road, or wood lot in immediate
+terms, but in themselves they are like distant monuments dedicated
+to natural force, perfect, calm, threatening or joining all that
+which lies ahead of them with equanimity. Time and its lapses seem
+immaterial, more so than the wind that shifts them. Now, or in years
+to come, a migrating dune will kill off a tree or a shrub and what
+does it matter? Can I care about what happens to one of a thousand
+scrub pines? I think not; but perhaps I can care about the event in the
+whole sequence of growth, change, and reshaping. Slow and statuesque,
+the dunes under the great air are another balance in process, like the
+beach beyond them.
+
+I think of some of the trees in the dunes and their struggle with the
+winds and the encroaching sands, and I am unable to shed tears over
+something that is unable to cry, but sometimes the word desperation
+comes to me, when I see evidence of their long efforts to hold on. You
+will see a dying cherry tree that has sent shoot after shoot, trunk
+after trunk, all over the side of a dune or sand hill that is being
+worn away, and they are full of the contortions of struggle--arrested,
+like the statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling with the snakes,
+but real enough. Or another hummock or small dune, where a beach plum
+or bayberry may not have enough purchase left, has a mass of twisted
+branches and twigs strewn down its sides, the wreckage of a genuine
+defeat.
+
+On the north edge of Provincetown the migrant dunes skirt the woods
+and thickets on their borders like icebergs, clean-rounded, immense
+shoulders of satiny sand slipping by trees: shad, bayberry, beach plum,
+red maple, oak, or pine. Because of the stable nature of sand, except
+when it is blown, they stay where they are, great suspended masses,
+their progress only measured at intervals, leaving evidence of trees
+that are buried, or about to be buried, behind them.
+
+I am indebted to Dr. Loren C. Petry for pointing out to me that some
+trees are able to grow in the same way as beach grass, while they are
+being covered with sand. Pines will die when they are only partially
+buried, but this is not true, for example, of cottonwoods whose
+branches send down roots soon after they are buried, and so maintain
+their water and mineral supply. He has seen fifty-foot specimens of
+this tree--along the southeast side of Lake Michigan--of which some
+forty feet were buried, with the remaining ten feet growing vigorously.
+
+The trees in the wooded areas bordering the dunes, particularly the
+pines, look as if they were covered with a soft whitish powder. It
+is caused by the very fine sand grains dusted over their leaves and
+needles by the wind, and during the winter this can be seen for miles
+down the Cape, well south of High Head.
+
+Almost all the trees here have a temporary existence, holding on as
+well as they can, fighting for light, food, and moisture. Even if
+there used to be more woodland than there is now--and the evidence is
+good--there is nothing about this narrow area, stretching into the sea,
+made by the sea in collaboration with the wind, that looks settled. The
+word stabilized can be applied to a dune and in a sense to anything
+that remains rooted, anchored, or in place for a certain length of
+time, but in this case the word balance might be better. Motion, either
+latent or in view, is in equilibrium throughout this rare place, half
+desert, occasionally wooded, full of gardenlike patches of low growth
+standing out in their variety of color and shade, seeming to move like
+the clouds. There are shadows everywhere, made by low twigs, needles,
+or grasses, the slightest thing lying across the sand, in sketchy
+rhythmic patterns tossed by the wind, while the greater shadows made by
+the high dune outlines are shifting steadily with the time of day.
+
+Aside from mice, rabbits, skunks, toads, insects, and the indigenous
+plants, this seems a place for nomads, and the birds that are free to
+forage, like a dark pigeon hawk that swoops across on its hunt for
+prey, or an occasional marsh hawk, breast feathers gleaming in the
+sunlight, its shadow passing across a dune wall. Little flocks of birds
+burst here and there through the thickets, like chickadees, myrtle
+warblers, or juncos that move around on the ground pecking for seed. In
+their fall migration many of the juncos, or “snowbirds,” reach Cape Cod
+by a long, over-the-water route, and flocks that arrive on the Outer
+Beach begin to move up into the dunes in a search for fresh water,
+perennial pilgrims.
+
+I sat on the top of a high dune one afternoon and watched a beach buggy
+swaying and swinging up in my direction along a track that led from the
+shore. It droned up and careened by me, plowing and slipping through
+the sands, and away down a long slope it went on the dunes’ free forms,
+cutting across the shadows that were spearheading toward the sea. Then
+I heard children’s voices in the distance coming over quite clear
+and shrill, falling off at intervals before the wind. The slopes and
+valleys stretched with pure travel in between. It was the kind of place
+where all views and associations keep on, across a shifting range. It
+lacked fixed ways, decided roads. Only packed in by the open ocean and
+the long reaches of time, the roving dunes made a continually majestic
+statement which no amount of cans, broken glass, or human footprints
+could erase.
+
+Off on the end, the edge, past the cities and the suburbs, the fixed
+house lots, the fields, and plains that make a patchwork of an entire
+nation, here is a country let go, barren, down to an essential minimum,
+but tossing and flowing with its own momentum in an envious proximity
+to the sea. It is the first and last land in America.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                          A Change in History
+
+
+The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say fairly well because
+I do not see how it is possible to recapture the deep complexities of
+what was present and now is past, although there is enough past left
+in us to provide great confusion about the times we have to face.
+Many tourists run after “charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are
+slight enough to admit that they have very little to do with the dark
+realities of three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from
+great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We are in no
+need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight in the heavens
+we have created for ourselves. We look on the earth’s great flowing
+beauties with an inclined eye. For all its “conquest of nature,”
+perhaps because of it, our civilization has a tenuous hold on the
+waters and lands it occupies. We are in danger of being overlords, not
+obligated to what we rule.
+
+We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in for fish
+chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily invited in
+because we are tired and out of our way. There is no time for that, and
+besides there are too many of us.
+
+The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape Cod is now
+subject to a population spreading out as a result of the tremendous
+growth of cities and towns. It is predicted that the number of winter
+residents will increase by forty or fifty thousand in the next twenty
+years, and the summer visitors to the Great Beach may pass all bounds
+eventually. As the speed of transition has been increased between one
+era and another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing.
+When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an investment,
+as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or something too
+priceless to let go. There are always other places to move to. Each man
+used to be his own nomad, now nomadism is supplied to all of us by the
+mechanics and riches of society. During the tourist season the average
+length of visit per person has been estimated at three days, enough
+time to sense the breadth of things if not the circumstances.
+
+If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites,
+Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open beauties it still
+displays, even with the National Park, which has saved a great deal of
+it from the seemingly unalterable army of bulldozers in the nick of
+time.
+
+The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over woodland
+and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human foresight at any time,
+with or without the bulldozers. In that respect we have not changed,
+though we are not as dependent on the locality we live in as we used to
+be. Food and resources come from afar. Still, all places, regardless of
+the human adventure, have their underlying tides, their own measured
+and perhaps measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in
+subtle ways. We continue to be affected by what we can neither
+transform nor avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have
+no barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here
+still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while ghosts
+of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.
+
+The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period of my own, was
+filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the cliff above the beach, a
+majority unoccupied but with a house here and there showing a little
+more substance to it, the evidence of a year-round resident. With some
+exceptions, they were bare in appearance and devoid of individuality.
+No uncommon effort had been made to give them much distinction. In
+the winter and fall they lost whatever color by human association
+they might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed,
+pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of exposed wood,
+and since they were not in Florida they could not borrow any youth
+from the sunshine. Their spirit was old before they were built, and in
+that respect indigenous to the seashore. The bare coast and the gray
+waters seemed to hold them in contempt, or at least indifference, and
+they became as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of
+pretension, whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape
+with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their own little plots
+of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia and scrub oak,
+joining the general economy of the landscape, no blowing leaves and
+limbs above them, no spreading lawns around. Whoever might live in
+them after the mild, money-making season could be gripped by the real
+weather without interference.
+
+Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in antiques,
+even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is no alternative if
+we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there ever be such a thing as
+an antique rocket? But there is still a flow of age, a distant sense of
+things that it is possible to find, hanging like mist over an inlet,
+booming like the sea over the far side of a hill.
+
+You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas, a single-track
+road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon or a stage, during
+the years when it took two days to get to Boston and the sea route was
+the preferred one. Even with the jet planes droning overhead and the
+cars grinding gears in the distance and the about-to-break sound of
+the future in the sky somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as
+the outline of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half
+one afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last
+there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth
+century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented, washed
+out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost with definition.
+
+In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the houses were
+located here and there along the old highway, or dotted around in
+sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the wintertime you are very
+likely to meet no one, since there are comparatively few year-round
+residents. Once the place was full of local need, local talk, or
+tragedy. What wrecks now occur along the treacherous offshore bars can
+usually be taken care of by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the
+area quickly in a jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was
+no radar for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication
+with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the wrecks
+that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer lifeboat
+crews composed of men from neighboring houses, with a boat kept ready
+in a hollow above the beach, ready to be launched out to the rescue, in
+terrible seas that were a common part of existence.
+
+In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns had between
+three and four hundred sailing ships between them and a majority of
+their men went out to sea. In a great storm occurring in October of
+1841 the town of Truro lost fifty-seven men, being already burdened
+with a large population of widows, and on the day after the storm
+nearly a hundred bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most
+of them were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were
+making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast gale
+screaming and the sea sweeping their decks.
+
+The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy have been
+responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks in the past, and
+taking the measure of the storms that strike the coast, it is hard to
+see how there could have been as many survivors as there were, even
+with the gallantry and local experience of the amateur lifesavers. Many
+ships ran aground too far offshore to be reached, and were pounded to
+pieces. The death-dealing power of the offshore sea in these storms
+seems unparalleled. The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche.
+It chews and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away
+so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming waters
+plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of unapproachable
+violence.
+
+Many of the lights that welcomed sailors, or warned them off, are now
+gone from the headlands and from houses along the shore that no longer
+have to worry about their men any more than they have to worry about
+themselves. The mackerel fleets are no longer thick on the horizon.
+The wharves are gone that used to take in the mackerel at Wellfleet
+on the Bay side. No one eats salt mackerel any more that I know of. I
+have a friend who spent his boyhood in New York State who was given
+salt mackerel to eat on Sunday mornings. It had been soaked in milk
+overnight, having been taken out of a “kentle,” which was a small
+wooden keg, the top wider than the base, about a quarter of a barrel
+in size. His observation was that it was much too salty a dish for his
+taste.
+
+The talkers at the livery stable, the central store, or the barbershop
+are also gone, as well as the sea captains who retired at the age of
+forty-five or fifty to become big men in their communities. The horses,
+truck gardens, fish heads, rum and rum runners are gone too, and what
+old men still whittle boats for the tourists on the beach? The ancient
+marvels who used to gather Cape Cod moss on their backs, telling
+hilarious stories about chicken stealing, cow “dressing” (manure),
+boundary disputes, occasional romantic murders, and hard days at sea no
+longer seem to be available for reference. What a lot of solid objects
+seem to have gone from the world!
+
+Perhaps I have left history behind too soon, saying, in effect: “Choose
+what age you like. You may find yourself in another.” Perhaps it is no
+fault of mine.
+
+During my autumn and winter walks I did find a lasting pleasure in
+recognizing old things, reconstructing neighborliness, even from a
+distance, learning to see the silence--the growth and shape of things,
+the riches of “slow time.” The ponds especially, in the Wellfleet and
+South Truro regions, protected by the woods around them and the land
+leading up to the cliffs above the beach, were clear and deep and
+seemed to reflect quiet habitation over a long time. The water lapped
+on sandy shores in the sweet, airy winter stillness, broken by the
+loud, bright braying of blue jays. Coon tracks were sharply etched on
+the shallow margins where they had gone fishing for fresh-water mussels
+that left meandering traces on the pond bottom. On the far ends in the
+shadows there were occasional ducks, like blue-winged teal, mallards,
+or scaups.
+
+At Gull Pond in Wellfleet one January day there were scarfs of ice
+along the shore, and out in the center herring gulls flew up and
+settled down on open water where a light cold wind broke across the
+surface. Wavelets were continually pushing and jostling broken ice so
+that it made a high singing, almost bell-like sound.
+
+Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen leaves
+to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or oaks still carrying
+dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike note of a nuthatch as it
+was rounding the scaly plated trunk of a pitch pine. Pale light moved
+through the woods and across the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle
+mossy roads, their tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a
+special Cape proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic,
+or the herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that
+suddenly showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated by any
+century but its own.
+
+Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming in, and to
+hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the length of the beach.
+The sound held and it took away, a monumental assurance of power past
+all the roughness and directness of the old life, its quiet suspension
+in the present, and the wrenching of the not-yet born.
+
+What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land, in the
+continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate change, the way
+the beach itself, or the dunes are changing, keeping a general state
+for a minute, or even a lifetime, but quite beyond catching. Its
+history is water.
+
+Water created it in the first place. When the last enormous glacier
+melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble out in the
+sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins, gullies, the
+“kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs, or still holding
+water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad and narrow runs with
+outlets to the sea. At one time Cape Cod must have been streaming with
+water like a whale’s back when it rises to the surface. Now many of
+the original streams, rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried
+out, but without too much imagination you can fill the landscape with
+water all over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction,
+make it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant
+and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire
+peninsula that does not suggest this.
+
+It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from the
+motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying, pushing,
+grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water in the deep,
+still ponds; water in the underground darkness; in the gentle seaward
+running streams; in the tidal estuaries and marshes lowering or
+flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy gales full of the howling
+emptiness of the winter sea, when the cold metal of the wind pounds
+on your back and cuts at your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen
+sands of the beach where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and
+churning with impersonal passion.
+
+Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring weather, of
+the same exposures. Only our terms are not the same. Some years ago I
+stood on the high hills of North Truro late one afternoon, watching the
+suns red path shining and moving across the wide waters of the bay,
+thinking of sea surfaces moving over the round earth to its poles,
+and the poverty of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates,
+everywhere exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were so
+bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in hollows
+or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They glittered like
+so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come from Provincetown and
+seen a dragger unloading its fish, and the fishermen cutting them up
+with red, raw-meat hands. The wind was shipping up the water. The gulls
+were crying over the racing, lathered shore.
+
+It came to me that what had brought me here had not so much to do with
+a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches in their simple New
+England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing, old wrecks, driftwood,
+or fish weirs, real as it was in me, but a great new outwardness, a
+universal human event. Each man undergoes a series of changes during
+his lifetime in a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of
+the world. He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust,
+the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry
+that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination and
+measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a Cape Cod
+term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning far from your home
+base, with very few old promises behind to sustain me. I had to come to
+terms with an age without age, a locality without location, perhaps a
+divinity in fires of no precedent or name. Above all I was required to
+change, to face in new directions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On my way home I
+saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and inlet, its broad wings
+spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched straight behind it, with
+feet curled up stiffly, head and neck crooked back. Then it landed
+in shallow water. Its wings folded and it stood straight up, with a
+surprising, statuesque height and gaze, the long neck and head above
+a flock of ducks that were swimming and feeding near by, assuming
+the kind of composure special to a race of herons that would serve
+indefinitely. The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving
+grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors over
+the entire marsh.
+
+All the measured lights and shadows of day and night, the tides of the
+sea and the tides of the season, the response and joint association of
+all life’s components in that place stayed much the same as they had
+ever been, in spite of the way we hurled in our roads and relocated
+ourselves without rest. Its natural order was still there for old
+expectation to seize upon; though in terms of accumulated knowledge
+and wants it was more complex than it had ever been, and would have to
+endure a human association that was itself on the waters of change,
+holding hard to the mechanics of its coming. Cape Cod had suddenly lost
+a slow, accumulative history, perhaps in a matter of twenty years,
+and would be treated like the rest of the world--as it happened, as
+it would come about under human auspices. Our problem, one of many,
+might be this: how could we reconcile universal commitment with the
+inviolable nature of a single place?
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                            Barren Grounds
+
+
+The oceanic landscape reaches across the round earth, over a curved
+horizon, and that may be one reason why men keep returning to it. The
+sea attracts the experience of distance. There is still some vicarious
+adventure to standing on a cliff, breathing the far-ranging air and
+imagining ships hidden by mists on the horizon, or unknown lands beyond
+that, or even remembering lands once visited. Over there is where the
+great passages of history have gone by.
+
+As recently as fifty or sixty years ago, man and sea were involved in a
+more personal alliance on Cape Cod, and its seamen once voyaged around
+the world. At the same time there were some local inhabitants who
+considered it a major expedition to go from one side of the Cape to the
+other. The fishing, shipbuilding, and voyages to foreign lands that was
+more characteristic of the Cape before the Civil War than after it gave
+what might have been a too narrow community, concentrated only on its
+own affairs, a healthy connection with the rest of the world.
+
+Since the Second World War Cape Cod has been filled with relative
+outsiders, many of whom have been transported, not necessarily through
+any fault or wish of their own, to stations around the globe. A place
+that once went out for its sustenance now waits for the world to come
+to it.
+
+One of the few people I met during my off-season walks on the beach
+turned out to be a man who had retired from the city. The open air may
+have been conducive to revelation, because he told me a great deal
+about his life during the ten or fifteen minutes I talked to him.
+It turned out that the place where we stood had some significance
+in his own history. He looked out to sea from the edge of the cliff
+and pointed out over the water to show me the general region where
+transports used to gather during the First World War on their way
+overseas. He had been on a Navy escort vessel.
+
+“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war, small
+business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size and
+circumstances of the men and societies he had met and fought and
+endured. Through a life-long experience of waste--or waste space--and
+all his tired compliance with authority and anger against it, he had
+saved room in him for voyages. He told me that he had come to live near
+the sea so that he could walk along the cliffs and the beach whenever
+he wanted to, and to look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a
+relatively free command view of destiny.
+
+After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out for several
+miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within the boundaries of
+the National Seashore Park, and one day, when the beach grass takes
+hold of its denuded areas, it will no longer be recognizable as a
+military reservation, but when I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet
+had just been formally disbanded. Although it was completely deserted,
+its buildings and some of its installations were still intact. It had
+been an antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast
+which was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents
+speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which made
+the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and for several
+years after the war ended fishermen used to protest that their boats
+were in the line of fire.
+
+The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain. It was on
+these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo Marconi built his
+wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic message in
+January of 1903. The year before, he had built an elaborate structure
+with twenty masts, and this had blown down in a heavy onshore wind.
+The successful message, which took the form of an exchange between
+Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from
+only four masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is
+typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted waves that
+crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On the day I walked
+through nearly sixty years later there was nothing left of what he had
+constructed but a few fallen bricks on the face of the cliff.
+
+Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet lookout towers
+and firing range were still more or less intact, and the place only
+lacked occupation to make it come alive again. The public had been kept
+out of the area for many years, but now I could walk in on a winter’s
+afternoon and not meet a soul. I passed a sign saying: MILITARY
+RESERVATION NO TRESPASSING, not without vague qualms, and memories of
+my own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of “Halt!” to
+ring out.
+
+“Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses to
+some ghost of past authority.
+
+There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that fell on bare
+gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks. Bareness was
+something the Army brought to all its posts, so that a bunch of grass
+was considered unnecessary, or tended for dear life. The Army city,
+once a humming, purposeful anonymity, was now completely silent and
+alone, but for me it still kept some of the power of its restrictions,
+arousing old apprehensions--that tightening of the stomach at facing
+some new unknown. The bare white barracks were still intact, and
+the power lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or
+latrines. There were off-limits signs on empty streets.
+
+I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order, with its
+own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the feelings of
+frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered the routine,
+the rote-mindedness which often passed for efficiency, the utter
+helplessness that many soldiers felt during wartime, and were obliged
+to accept, about being part of something huge, anonymous, even
+reckless and uncalculated, an ignorance of which they themselves were
+ignorant and to which they had not been invited. I also remembered the
+unassuming friendships you could make in the Army, the directness with
+which men accepted each other.
+
+A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the ground. They
+were interruptions of a nature that did not concern me very much as
+a draftee in an Army camp, although--more than most--we were exposed
+to the wide nights and their stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn,
+and the extremes of heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to
+Army life that allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted
+and oversimplified--he was not his own agent--and at the same time he
+acted for the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him,
+equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands. When he
+protested, he was protesting against the passage of all the nights on
+all the waters.
+
+I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after dark saying he
+had something of great importance he had to speak to me about. We went
+out and talked in the company street, standing on the sandy grounds
+between the buildings, conscious of a towering night with flashing
+stars. He talked desperately, on and on, about the life he had been
+planning before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the
+girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about the job
+which had now been denied him, the business he was going to establish,
+and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business was it of the President of the
+United States to start a war and send him into it?
+
+It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate
+for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach grass that
+holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for the sea to roam
+on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall and the sands to shift
+and blow. It is inevitable, at one time or another, that each of us
+should stand on these barren grounds. The gloom of the sea puts all
+other darkness and gloom in jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable.
+It carries light over the earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is
+overbearing and restless and at the same time as strict and balanced
+as its tides. Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because
+then it stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns
+us, the desert without illusion.
+
+Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of the cliff
+for several miles. Watchers could look out from their transversing
+positions over the coastline and the sea and signal the accuracy of
+the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile targets over the water.
+I climbed two of the towers that still had ladders. They were in fair
+condition, but clearly not too long for this world of wind and spray,
+of ice, rain, and snow, and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows
+were broken, the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors,
+with boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and
+broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered how many young
+men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this lookout over the dark
+sea. Some of those on duty had left their names behind, probably after
+the war was over, judging by the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and
+they also left the names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls,
+or would-be girls, the signs of need in wastes of order.
+
+Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact, with empty
+cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground outside. A strand of
+barbed wire made a little clanging sound of unused warning as I brushed
+by it. Toward the far end of the reservation, on the Eastham side,
+I passed another off-limits sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags
+located in a little hollow on the very edge of the cliff; they were
+beginning to slide down the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking
+down on the beach where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only
+sentinels, facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how
+many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at a faster
+rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal weight of one
+war had gone, but the knowledge and power it let loose had sent us on,
+committing us to our human ends in the most inclusive and at the same
+time isolated sense, universally vulnerable.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The wind sent dark clouds of ruffled waters along the sea surfaces,
+surfaces that tilted and flew, stretching away and disappearing, and
+the sky light, feather gray in the rain, reflected everywhere. The long
+surf line sounded with the crash and rattle of stones. The vast flow
+went on unhindered, restless and controlled, delivering and holding
+back, a nay and yea sayer at the same time, passing all experiments,
+accepting all possibility without a care. How could the sea do anything
+about reassuring mankind as to whether or not we would survive our own
+acts and commitments? Did man make war, or did war make him? Perhaps we
+love the sea for its denial of us.
+
+Sitting on the sandbag, I thought of the GI who had last been there,
+manning a gun now replaced by missiles and rockets--bothered perhaps
+by the cold, penetrating wind, feeling useless, waiting for his
+discharge from the Army, wishing he were somewhere else, not knowing
+beach grass from seaside goldenrod, or one gull from another, but
+knowing the sea, with its one sound.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                         A Landscape in Motion
+
+
+There are a number of elevations on the Cape from which it is possible
+to see both sides, getting above intervening houses, trees, or hills.
+On the same Wellfleet Plain where Camp Wellfleet was located the
+moraine tilts all the way down from the cliff above the Outer Beach to
+the shores of the bay, and reaches of land and water come into view
+from all directions. One plane leads to another by easy transitions.
+The cliff tops shine in the wind above the steady pouring sound of
+the waves and the dancing of molten gold and silver on the sea. Beach
+grasses glitter. The land ahead is full of coarse scrub oak and green
+patches of bayberry moving toward dark green woods of pitch pine and
+clusters of houses, reaching the sheltered shores of the bay beyond
+them, with salt marshes, gold and red; water-shining, brown tidal
+flats, and a rim of blue water on the distant horizon.
+
+It is a stunted land, not overhospitable to life by the looks of it,
+although flocks of chickadees bounce gaily through the scrub as if
+giving it their free acknowledgment. As the autumn progresses the reds
+change to brown, plants darken or die down, shrubs lose their leaves,
+and the grasses bleach. In all seasons it is a place of low growth,
+ready in its hardy way to receive what the wind and sun can send it.
+The sky is very wide overhead. You can see from one tidal area to
+another--almost from one climate to another--standing on the bare
+ground. In scale the view approximates what you can see from high in
+the air.
+
+A plane shows you a much wider panorama, while diminishing the land,
+eliminating the size of locality and local things. It takes you high
+enough to see the curve of the earth, the concrete highways like
+ribbons across the country, the thin lines of roads and streets, the
+checkered fields, patches of lakes, and sprawling cities. A jet plane
+cuts across time. You can run after the sun as it falls on the other
+side of the world and almost catch it, following the mountain shadows
+over America, and since you pass time in that sense, not able to go
+faster than the speed of light, but crossing the rhythmic stations of
+earth and sun, I have felt it as a longer journey than that involved in
+a car or train. What might ordinarily take days is reduced to hours,
+but when we landed I have felt the days in me as much as the hours.
+We bypass the clock. We go from low to high, bridging a gap between
+the individual and the universe, leaving earth’s confinements for
+indefinite space, but local time is still inside us.
+
+On the ground, obviously enough, you limit the horizon by the extent of
+your vision, and the horizon in turn limits you, but land and water are
+held by their relationships to space and to each other. Apparently all
+climatic cycles are world-wide; and the immediate, local weather is in
+part dependent on the weather behind and ahead of it. In the same way
+the only limit to the landscape is the globe itself. Its reaches go out
+of sight, if not of universal measure.
+
+This seaside country often gives you the feeling that the sky is the
+limit. One opening beyond the trees, another mile revealed, and the
+earth and sea from the top of a dune, the world you stand on, may
+become exalted in its scope. Perhaps people climb hills and mountains
+not only to get to the top, or as an activity in its own right--reasons
+often given in answer to questions that may be of no great value--but
+to join the range of the world, to be up and outward bound, and above
+all to have a sense of the unities in and beyond them. A greater
+landscape means a new communion.
+
+I once climbed a small mountain in Maine with a group of Sea Scouts.
+We stopped just below its summit, where there was a bowl surrounded
+by rocky heights and slopes and holding clear, cold water, the size
+of a small pond. The boys stripped and went in swimming, and all
+their excited yelling as they jumped in and out of the water resolved
+along the rock faces and deep crevices into echoes that rang and
+choired--heard from above--like _Te Deums_ in a cathedral. And far down
+and around for hundreds of miles were the houseless mountains flaming
+with color.
+
+One of the boys asked: “How many acres do you think there are?”
+
+For all its matter-of-factness, his question brought us in touch with
+massive distance, an over-all light and wind above the great carpets
+of color, a landscape running with power, having a latent silence, a
+prodigious weight and matter.
+
+Mountains or seashore make for revelation. So on this sandy, tilting
+peninsula sight can keep on going. On one side the head-on majesty
+of cliffs, beach, and open sea, and on the other, calm low headlands
+facing sheltered waters, two different environments, with the west wind
+blowing over and the clouds flaring and shifting in the sky. You are in
+the lap of the waters, the balance of the tides, and in the arms of the
+weather.
+
+Each patch of ground, varying in the degree to which it is receptive to
+organic life, is a complexity of substance and influence. The weather
+that circulates over it, and in terms of light, relative moisture, and
+varying temperatures invests it too, has its seasonal constancies but
+it is always in a state of change. Cape Cod feels much of the time as
+if it were two-thirds wind, and people with touchy nerves might well
+think they were being pushed by it in directions they were unable to go.
+
+The Cape has a maritime climate, somewhat milder than the mainland.
+There is no use exaggerating its mildness since it can feel as cold
+or colder than the rest of New England when the northwest wind takes
+its uninterrupted course through the ribs of the land and sears its
+way along the shore, but, in general, annual temperatures are slightly
+higher. In central and western Massachusetts, in New Hampshire,
+Vermont, and New York State, the average number of days between the
+first severe, killing frost in the autumn and the last one in the
+spring has been estimated at 180-210. For Cape Cod, on the other hand,
+this is 120-150, the same that prevails in a thin coastal belt south of
+the Cape to Virginia and North Carolina where it widens and starts west
+across Tennessee.
+
+The waters to the south, in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound, have a
+higher annual temperature than the waters of the open Atlantic along
+the Outer Beach and in Cape Cod Bay, a southern extension of the Gulf
+of Maine. On the other hand the waters north of Cape Cod, though cooler
+during the summer, tend to be warmer during the winter, because of the
+depths of the Gulf of Maine and their heat-carrying capacity. Cape Cod
+Bay, and Buzzards Bay have more sea ice than any equal area on the
+coast of the United States with the exception of Alaska. Sustained
+cold during January and February often results in weeks of pack ice
+stretching off into the Bay as far as the eye can see, at least from
+the level of the shore. This extra touch of the Arctic off the Cape is
+due mainly to a combination of cold winter winds from the continent and
+shallow water.
+
+The difference in average water temperatures between one side of the
+Cape and the other may have its effects on the local weather. During
+the fall especially, when cold air moves over the waters of Nantucket
+Sound they may be covered with fog, whereas it can be bright and clear
+over the Bay, only a few miles distant. The normal kind of fog occurs
+when warm, moisture-laden air moves over cool or cold water, and is
+quite common in spring and summer. When a cold, dry air mass, on the
+other hand, moves over warmer waters it may result in what is called
+“Arctic sea smoke” a kind of wispy, steamy fog in turbulent, rolling
+air, rising to ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the water.
+
+During the winter Cape Cod is also subject to rapid changes in
+temperature depending on whether the wind comes from the northwest,
+with cold, dry, continental air, or from east and south off the ocean,
+the latter being seldom below the freezing point.
+
+The tip at Provincetown has much the same temperature as the sea island
+of Nantucket. On the other hand the town of Barnstable on the lower
+Cape may have an average summer temperature which is slightly warmer
+than Provincetown and a colder temperature in winter, since it is that
+many miles closer to the interior. I have driven down the coast from
+Boston several times during snowstorms when an area as close to the
+Cape as Plymouth was completely covered with snow; and as I drove south
+the storms turned to heavy flakes of wet snow on the near side of the
+Cape Cod canal and then to rain as I went on.
+
+The sea’s capacity to store up solar energy means that it exercises a
+moderating influence on the Cape, which is warmer during the winter
+than the mainland and cooler during the summer. Also, there are
+less thunderstorms on Cape Cod during the summer months than on the
+mainland, and the annual rainfall is likely to be lower because there
+is less showery precipitation, although local residents might be
+justified in thinking that water was on them much of the year in one
+form or another, as fog, salt spray, rain, or humidity.
+
+The late fall and winter is often characterized by cold, raw windy
+days, with the temperature just above freezing or at the freezing
+point, and the air is loaded with moisture from the sea and sometimes
+smells of it. During heavy storms the wind drives the salt spray
+inland with great force, depositing coats of salt on houses, telegraph
+poles, and wires.
+
+During the winter the Cape seems at times to be caught and tossed
+between the weather of the sea and that of the continent, but in
+general the principal air masses during fall and winter come from
+inland and in summer from the southwest. Winds from the north and west
+usually bring in continental polar air, which is dry and cold, though
+it may also arise in part from pacific maritime air. The source regions
+for many of the storms of early spring and early fall are the Gulf of
+Mexico and the Caribbean. Most of the severe spring storms, sometimes
+coming after a fairly mild winter, are the so-called “coastwise
+southeasters” which blow up the coast from off the Carolinas rather
+than from the west. They can result in blizzards because their coastal,
+maritime air if drawn into a low from the continent is cold enough to
+make snow.
+
+Such simple generalities and fact sampling is not to suggest, like the
+Chamber of Commerce, that more people ought to come to Cape Cod, but
+that it is a land like all others, which is influenced by the forces
+beyond it. It is no more gripped, pulled, and let go by the weather
+than most other areas. In fact its temperature made it a good place for
+the first English settlers to find. Think of the Middle West in July,
+or January, for extremes! Yet Cape Cod has a special place in the wind,
+an outside hold on the roaming of the seas and the advent of the air.
+
+The tides that rise and fall along this ocean-going spit of land are
+just as varied in their way as the weather, but more predictable. They
+accentuate the difference between one part of the Cape and another,
+and they are responsible for some of its physical characteristics.
+Great tidal ranges on the north side expose wide salt flats at low tide
+and allow the development of broad areas of salt marsh in sheltered
+embayments, whereas along the shores of Nantucket and Vineyard sounds,
+where tide ranges are much smaller, the marshes and more exposed flats
+are less extensive.
+
+In Cape Cod Bay and eastward to the coast of Maine the average tide
+rises and falls about nine feet, but in Nantucket and Vineyard sounds
+the range is up to four feet at the most, being as little as two feet
+off Woods Hole and in some of the salt ponds. The time of high water
+varies also. It occurs four hours later on the north side of the Cape
+than at Buzzards Bay.
+
+The Outer Beach is an area of transition so far as the tides are
+concerned, and their range drops steadily from nine feet at Race Point
+to four feet at the end of Monomoy. These diverse tides, all along the
+shores of the Cape, are a product of its very shape, and of the coast
+from which it juts out, astride the submerged continental shelf, whose
+shallow water also affects them.
+
+It is the nature of waves--and a tide is a wave of a special kind--to
+move more slowly in crossing shallow water, rising at the same time to
+a greater height. Waves expend the energy of their motion when they
+increase in height, an effect which can be observed as they heap up
+before breaking as surf on the beach. So the tidal wave moves in from
+far offshore starting with relatively low ranges, some two or three
+feet at Sable Island off Nova Scotia, with similar readings in Bermuda
+and the Bahamas; but when it reaches the outer coast of the Cape it is
+augmented. To the southwest of the Cape the increase is only moderate,
+the figure for the entrance to Buzzards Bay being three and one half
+feet; but moving north it gets much higher. To reach the shores of the
+great embayment of the Gulf of Maine, formed where the coastline drops
+away north and east of the Cape, the ocean’s tidal wave must first
+cross the shallow waters of George’s Banks, a passage that requires
+more than three hours (which explains the later time of high water in
+the Bay). In the process the tidal height increases to the nine-foot
+figure, a reading which is true of Provincetown, Plymouth, and on up
+to the coast of Maine.
+
+So the Cape lies between two tidal systems, created and separated by
+its geography. On the south side, incidentally, there is a complex
+pattern of tidal movement caused by the fact that both systems meet.
+Tidal waves enter the sounds between the Cape and the islands of
+Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from two directions and pass each
+other. The combined effect of this “interference” results in rapid
+changes in the time and height of the tide between Monomoy and Woods
+Hole. Off Nobska Point one tidal wave movement is high, while the other
+passing it is low. Their interference results in the smallest range of
+tide (one and a half feet) to be found along the south shore. A similar
+minimum tidal range occurs off the southeast corner of Nantucket.
+
+I am neither a trained scientist nor an accomplished sailor. I am
+inclined to use facts for unfactual ends and do not have enough
+knowledge of the wind not to be tipped over at any time, but if you
+feel complexity and admire mathematics while in a state of comparative
+ignorance then perhaps you have some claims on knowing. Most of us have
+had a hand in observing the weather or gauging the levels of the tide.
+Weather guessing or complaining is second nature, and on the beach, or
+by means of the pilings on the wharf, you can guess the tidal range
+quite easily or judge whether the tides are in or out. On some level
+below that we have air and tides in us that know the energies of earth
+from past acquaintance, but we are much too ready to mistrust these
+depths and to let other authorities do our work for us. Perhaps our
+natural senses are becoming atrophied. In any case, we do not seem to
+be sure whether it is the energy of the head or of the heart that we
+should use for our purposes. But put yourself in the middle of the
+weather and within the reach of the tides and they sometimes begin to
+roam in concert in as many ways and to the incalculable extent that you
+have responses stemming from your brain. All the distant swelling and
+swinging, the synchronization and intermoving of the waters, becomes
+as real and immediate as the repositioning of the sun and the changing
+of its shadows. The over-all wind; the light that shines on the beach
+grass, moves over the pebbled ground, and sparkles the sea, or turns it
+into a blazing white cauldron; the knowledge of cold massive depths in
+one place, warm shallows in another, come into feeling as both unified
+and infinitely complex. I may fail at mathematics but be an unconscious
+mathematician, judging galaxies by the ways of light before my eyes.
+
+At my feet, as I sit on the sandy ground on the cliff top, there is a
+hole made by a spider, neatly defined at the top by a little rim of
+grasses. Rabbit dung lies here and there. There are a broken puffball,
+dried leaves, and seeds; and the wind has blown so constantly over the
+level and open parts of the ground as to take away loose sand and leave
+a surface of pebbles, which are more or less stable, while mounds and
+hillocks are held together by shrubs and grasses. These are evidence
+of a poor community, holding down as best it can, though it is open to
+migrants and migration all the same.
+
+What lies underfoot changes in a few hundred yards toward vegetation
+which is a little more protected, and less exposed to violent light
+and dessicating wind, with low oaks and pitch pines, wood floors,
+with a certain amount of decaying litter, graduating upward in the
+quantity of organic life, but the open, exposed, diminished look of
+this environment also suggests its inherent mobility with all the other
+component parts of this running world, taking original light and shadow
+from the vast sky.
+
+The crow with its ragged wings banking away over the tree-tops, the
+rabbit hopping into a thicket, the fish that school unseen in the salt
+waters, the man who watches, are all manifestations of a complexity
+of association and alliance that stops on no single shore. Like our
+restrictions with respect to the horizon, we only see, we only live,
+a fraction of the possibilities allowed in so great a range; and being
+restricted, we oversimplify, cutting life and land down to size ... a
+poverty that makes for poverty.
+
+I hear the steady pouring sound of the depths behind me and I see and
+feel them rising and falling, taking their inexorable passage around
+the Cape. The wind whistles through and like the in and out of breath
+lifts and subsides. Field crickets trill monotonously and faintly
+in competition with the wind. Crows call. Seeds blow along the bare
+ground. A winged seed flies by, next year’s fruition if it lands, this
+year’s providing, perhaps destined to skim out over the surface of the
+sea. A flock of snow buntings swings back and forth, twittering high in
+the air. Gulls circle in the distance above a garbage dump hidden by
+the trees.
+
+In this landscape, here and out of sight, is a mutuality of response,
+through the sea with its thousands of miles of variety constantly in
+motion, and the land besieged by the sea, with dry and infertile soil,
+but in a web of tides and climatic influence that keeps its character
+actively in tune. Like the buntings, or a flock of sanderlings
+spinning, sun reflecting, diving through the heights above the shore,
+the opportunity of grace and power is always waiting for its use,
+and nothing that lives and participates can be called insignificant,
+from the cricket to the crow. Diversity is the rule, and each form is
+exceptional in its employment.
+
+Through any part of the earth there is a placement, the appropriate
+condition for plants, animals, the soil, and its constituents, to
+maintain themselves. The optimum is that there shall be full use within
+any given range of opportunity. The more diversified a living community
+is the more healthy it is, not only in numbers, but in complex
+relationships. Even a “poor” seaside environment proves this by the
+very demands it makes for survival. The plants that adapt themselves
+to it do so by means both various and precise. Even sand grains have a
+relationship to each other in the rhythmic order of wind and waves.
+The life that comes to these shores, winging in, trying to take hold,
+blown out, taking semipermanent residence, has its own affinity for
+place, an organic knowledge of its own part in the physical world. It
+belongs to an innumerable company with exacting tasks.
+
+Each life proves the need of all others. In a miraculous way, as each
+natural form is miraculous, the single is also manifold. The rabbit,
+as it nibbles grass, calls in the hawk. The spider is related, in its
+reproduction and survival, to the insect it eats. The soil requires
+microbes to break it down. The growth of plants is directed toward
+capturing the energy of the sun. Life calls life in the context of
+earth, water, and sky.
+
+Throughout the wide landscape are a succession of environments, with
+communities adapting to constant change, characterized by so much
+mutual attraction and repulsion, so many delicate balances, such a
+variety of response to influence inside and out that there is hardly a
+stopping point for attention. We study particular environments so as to
+predict and understand the behavior of animals, the reaction in plants
+to variations in the intensity of light, or to relative moisture, or to
+the chemical constituents of the soil. Each place has its character,
+its complexity, and bounds.
+
+But environment is more a characteristic of range than a separation in
+its own right. All migration says so. The division between a pond and
+its surrounding woodland is fairly distinct. A pond is an entity unto
+itself. So is the division between salt water and fresh. But the frog
+that lays its eggs in a pond may travel through the woods during the
+summer. The salmon, the alewife, and the shad reproduce in fresh water
+and grow up in the sea. Eels do the opposite.
+
+In a sense each area has its representative, like the water birds,
+from petrels that spend most of their lives over the open ocean, to
+fresh-water ducks dabbling among the reeds. There are herons adapted
+to spear fishing in the shallows; terns that dive for fish in surface
+waters; others that swim after them under the water. Some of the
+adaptations are so precise that if the particular food supply of a
+species is endangered, so is existence of the bird itself.
+
+On the other hand the very distinctness of each species, sharp-billed,
+webfooted, with gliders’ or divers’ wings, seems to impart range to
+countless others, those which exist and have existed, those which
+may develop in a vast and unknown future. The difference, the space,
+between a gannet and a dovekie, a great blue heron and a frigate bird,
+proves all the depths of opportunity.
+
+As I look out on the waters to east and west, to north and south,
+I either see or envisage banks of fog far offshore, warm summer
+squalls, biting cold air, torrents of brilliance in the sky, leaping
+and ponderous deliberation in the waves. Warm air meets me from the
+Bahamas, cold air from the Arctic, and the migrants pass me as they
+travel in between. This earth, regardless of man’s construction of it,
+is always re-relating its contexts, playing out new themes ahead.
+
+In this distance, near to far, there is force, and its limits, a
+counterbalancing as well as intermingling in the land, weather, and
+tides, and in almost hidden terms the concurrent response of countless
+inhabitants: the seed makers and dispensers, the hole diggers, the
+fliers, scuttlers, and divers, those that swim, crawl, or walk. They
+take part in range after range of consumption and growth, of trials and
+failures, with endless patience, sudden quickness, flows of energy,
+going through death and the travel-round of reproduction. They are
+dancers in a realm that knows where all its leadings are.
+
+There are dynamic secrets underfoot. Lives dawn of which we are
+entirely unaware. Can we bring ourselves down to their great
+participation, waiting through dawns, attending the sun, hiding under
+the reality of wind and storm, where obedience means praise? Here
+is that universal guarantee of novelty and increase which we try so
+narrowly to imitate, substituting our simplicity for its complexity,
+our distressed communality for its balanced crowds, our greed and
+invention for its terrible provenance. Lord have mercy on us!
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                          Who Owns the Beach?
+
+
+In the “off” and empty season, after the tides had erased all signs of
+a hundred thousand human feet, it was hard to believe that the beach
+could be owned or claimed by any one. It took on the air’s cold or
+warmth, receiving, passing things on, from one day and seasonal mood
+to another, not as on the land with its plant and animal reactions and
+obstructions, the hiding; shadowing; coming forth intermittently; but
+in bold and naked sight, reducing weather to its single qualities.
+
+One day the Cape would be sunny and comparatively warm, and on the
+next in would come the authentic northern wind, the polar air, roaring
+and sweeping around with fierce abandon, riotously hard and cold,
+freezing the ground, cutting at a man, diving on him with an icy
+weight. The winter wind is so definite when it comes, overwhelming a
+fairly moderate climate, where roses often bloom late into the fall
+and hollies grow, as to make you think of icebergs, sliding down from
+the north unexpectedly to stand hundreds of feet overhead. The sky,
+threatening snow, writhes and purls up with gray clouds spreading
+fanwise like auroras, and in the evening the sun goes down with a
+coppery band on the horizon overhung by a bank of steely-blue clouds as
+menacing as a shark.
+
+And the great beach received what came to it, retaining its primal
+right to a deeper breath and regularity, a harsh “poverty-stricken”
+environment where man has no lease worth the paper. It did seem utterly
+deserted, although the herring gulls and blackbacks flew up steeply
+over the wind-buffeted waves, then banked and glided away, and draggers
+occasionally moved parallel to the beach bucking the choppy seas, their
+lines out astern. The wind threw stinging clouds of sand ahead of it.
+Except for the fishermen and the gulls, it was an abandoned world,
+glistening wide and cold, lost to importance and sense so far as human
+society was concerned. For man there is no force quite so inclusive as
+his own.
+
+Since the beach is comparatively empty and isolated during fall and
+winter, the sight of life on its sands may seem as rare as a rider
+approaching you across the desert. I remember what an extraordinary
+thing it seemed one afternoon to see a tiny red crab moving very slowly
+along, high-legged over the bare slopes of the beach. I identified it
+later as a species of spider crab. Green crabs, rock crabs, calico
+crabs, and others are common along the protected shores of the Cape,
+but out on this stretch of beach they are rarities. This baby, with
+its beak, antennae, and eyes backed and covered by a knobbed and spiky
+shell, seemed like an exotic from another world, which in fact it was,
+having been flung in by the surf from rocks and seaweed forests in the
+waters beyond it. It not only added to the beach, but to me, since it
+made me realize that these sands were only shelving off into further
+dimensions. The beach is a repository of freight, wreckage, and lives
+from foreign lands.
+
+This also happens occasionally on land. We all know that the sea is
+out there, that the wind swirls over us, and the storms carry more
+traffic than planes, but strangers sometimes appear as if to prove that
+no place is what it seems to be. One spring a vermillion flycatcher
+suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. I saw it in its exciting
+tropical gaiety as it flew down next to a shining patch of spring rain
+on an asphalt road. It is a native of Texas and New Mexico. Black
+or turkey buzzards ride the great airs of spring and sometimes fly
+northward, wheeling unexpectedly overhead. In November of 1962 I saw a
+black stork, _Ciconia nigra_, which had somehow managed to make it all
+the way across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps managing to stop for rests
+in such areas as Greenland and Newfoundland. It landed near the Coast
+Guard Station, now National Seashore Park headquarters, at Eastham, in
+an exhausted state, to be picked up by the Audubon Society and later
+transported to the warmer climate of Florida.
+
+The black stork breeds from Central Europe to Korea and China, and it
+winters in Africa after a long round of migratory journeys. Its advent
+was greeted with a certain amount of mild curiosity and even some jokes
+in the local paper, one of which had to do with its liking for Cape
+Cod scallops on its arrival. What better reason for coming here! (The
+truth is that like other newly captured birds, it had to be force-fed.)
+In any case it was a rare event, joining Cape Cod with Africa, and to
+see it was equivalent to seeing an antelope on Route 6. With large
+strong wings, attenuated red legs, a long, stout pinkish bill, red
+around the eyes, it waited in captivity with what seemed to be an air
+of great sadness, transplanted as it was, taken in to a gray, cold land
+without any sound but engines, human voices, and the wind, without any
+greenery but the thin-needled pines; and it roosted silently, twitching
+occasionally in its inactive unused state, an unwilling, unwitting
+Marco Polo in New England.
+
+This is a narrow place, restricted by nature and by men, but foreign
+lives still fly to it like sparks in the air, and the sea beyond it
+takes things on their way with more room than analogy is yet aware of.
+What the sea sends in, like a dead skate, a starfish, horse mussel, or
+finger sponge, seems perfectly familiar as fish, marine, background
+animals, but they are also genuine primitives, remote not only from
+human physiology and complete understanding but from that part of the
+earth’s surface that we inhabit. In fact many of the hints of marine
+life that are either brought up along the beach, or that appear in
+offshore waters, like a whale or a dolphin, have a theatricality, an
+off-stage hint of a wealth of other acts, tricks, and forms still to be
+seen. The simple, primal watery element has embodiments of use which
+are comprehensible and have been studied for a long time, but these
+are endowed with physical natures and capabilities that might make an
+air-breathing, earth-bound human quite envious.
+
+During a violent coastal storm, with winds up to seventy and eighty
+miles an hour, an exhausted harbor porpoise was cast up on a bay beach
+recently, and there it died. I confess I had never seen one out of
+water or even close to me before. For all the pictures I had seen, and
+all I had read, nothing prepared me for such perfection. Its round
+body, four to five feet long, was butt-ended at its head, in which
+there were small eyes, and small teeth in the jaws. It had just as much
+of the quality of flow as a raindrop, and at the same time was a solid
+packing of energy. Its skin graded down from the jet black of its back
+and upper sides through streaks of gray like rain along the sea down
+to a white belly, and without scales, it had a thick, smooth satiny
+polish like ebony or horn, perhaps reminiscent of synthetic rubber or
+plastic but of an organic texture which neither of those products could
+equal. The porpoise had a single fin on its back and a tail that could
+strike vertically for power and thrust. Its body was fairly heavy,
+weighing about a hundred pounds, but everything of speed and liquidity
+and dashing, leaping strength was reflected there. It lay on the upper
+part of the beach, conspicuous among the long piles of storm litter,
+the logs, pieces of broken dories, and thick seaweed, spectacular in
+its simplicity, a black and white that made me think of breaking waves
+in the night sea. I saw it curve over the surfaces of the water with
+consummate grace, slide away, and disappear.
+
+“Where did you ever see more of nothing?” I was once asked as I looked
+out over endless dry Texas plains billowing like waves. Nothing or
+everything. Who knows? Who knows what the emptiness leads to or
+contains? The beach lies open. Its sands and rattling stones lead back
+through ages of weathering and change and are at the same time part of
+the wide give and take of the present.
+
+The tiny spider crab, though isolated on the beach, was also a link
+with a teeming offshore existence, which hid in shadowy worlds of kelp
+and rockweed, or floated and roamed by with a free energy that was in
+complete denial of our tightening fall and winter world. Backed by a
+cliff, walking on sands shadowed and cold, faced by the churning waves,
+it is hard to believe in a life so rich. There are no rocky shores
+revealed at low tide and streaming with weed to prove the temperate
+fertility of the sea. The beach is a transition zone between one
+environment and another, but except in those areas where the cliffs are
+reduced to low sand hills, protecting a marsh or estuary behind them,
+the transition is a sharp one, the sands dipping from the inconstant
+sky to the constancy of salt water.
+
+Along those stretches of beach where the sea has taken stones and
+boulders and deposited them offshore, storms sometimes bring in fairly
+large quantities of seaweed, which need beds of stone for their
+attachment. The fucus or rockweed, the laminaria or kelp, and some of
+the “red” algae like Irish moss which are among the more common kinds
+found along the beach, have no roots, since the plants take all their
+nourishment from the sea water that surrounds them, but are anchored by
+holdfasts, stubby structures which in the laminaria may look like the
+exposed, above-ground roots of some tropical trees, and in the fucus
+a round expansion of the tissues at its base, which is strongly and
+tightly sealed to the surface of rocks and stones.
+
+Everything about these weeds, with divided, narrow, or tapering fronds
+to resist being torn by the waves, with bladders serving as floats,
+with gelatinous surfaces, with hollow stems, are eloquent of the nature
+of salt water, its ebb and flow, its depths, its capacious circulation.
+The seaweeds found on the beach, black, thin, dried out, or fresh and
+slippery, olive green, brown, or red, having been torn loose by a
+storm, start growing beyond the violent action of the surf, and grow
+for the most part to a depth of some forty or fifty feet. Different
+varieties like different depths, but since they are not free floating
+unless torn loose they are not found beyond the point where rays of
+sunlight, necessary for manufacturing food, cannot reach them.
+
+Over and beyond them, in surface waters where the light penetrates
+before being absorbed, is a vegetation, varying in abundance according
+to place and season, but of incredible numbers over all, the one-celled
+microscopic organisms that are the basic food of all the seas. The
+seaweeds are simple and primitive in structure compared with much of
+the plant life on land, the more hazardous, contrary environment, and
+the members of the phytoplankton (the planktonic plants), even more so,
+although the diatoms, which form a large part of it, show a variety
+of outer form. Each diatom has a skeleton, made largely of silica, an
+outer shell hard enough to resist easy dissolution when the plant dies.
+It is formed like a pillbox, or a casket, or it is shaped like a quill,
+a ribbon, or rod, or it is joined with others in beads and chains.
+Each is minute, an etched, crystalline perfection, and each is lost
+in other billions, which we might only see on occasion as a green or
+greenish-brown stain across the water.
+
+The shells of dead diatoms rain down through the water and form thick
+deposits on the floor of the sea. The cliffs above the beach are full
+of them. Cities have been built on their fossilized shells. In their
+number the diatoms balance the magnitude of the sea. In size they are
+basic to the existence of the minuscule animals of the zooplankton that
+feed upon them, and are eaten by larger animals in turn. A diatom’s
+delicacy and sparkling beauty as it reflects the light could indicate
+that universal productivity must start with a jewel, and perhaps end
+with it too.
+
+That which is minute, like the diatoms, or cells, which are the basic
+structure of life, is a clue to the significance of things, leading
+from the simple to the complex and multifarious, but finally rounding
+us back to where we started. A man himself is the unique single cell
+with its own nature. Each life has its irreducible quality. I have been
+told that if you look at a diatom through an electronic microscope,
+from one increased magnification to another, you can see all its
+protuberances and layers disappear, and finally a sparkling crystalline
+form is revealed, like a cosmic surprise.
+
+I suppose it is part of my fate as a large and clumsy animal of the
+mammalian order, crashing through the underbrush, knocking down trees,
+and displacing earth’s other inhabitants, to miss a great deal, at
+least with my unassisted eyes. To learn about some new form of life
+which I may have been passing by for years is often something of a
+redemption. I can then say that we have not yet been so run down by our
+own traffic that we have lost the capacity to see.
+
+Not long ago a colony of bryozoans was pointed out to me, at least the
+gelatinous crusts of the compartments in which they lived, like little
+tufts and fringes attached to the fronds of seaweed cast up on the
+beach. They are tiny colonial animals that make cups and compartments
+joined together in branching stems, from which they send out little
+crowns of delicate, filamentous tentacles waving in the water. There
+are three thousand marine species of them, growing in different forms,
+and having different surfaces for their attachment. I had thought
+previously that the little pale-colored, branched tufts were a part of
+the seaweed. Now another small marvel had appeared on my horizon.
+
+The beach was empty where I walked, except for bird tracks, tidal
+wrack, driftwood, bits of shell, or a finger sponge in evidence of
+the life alongside it, and depending on the warmth and receptivity to
+life that the season held, excepting also whatever microscopic animals
+might be crawling over wet surfaces around the sand grains. Again,
+emptiness, or poverty, is always qualified. After all the copepods, the
+nematodes or thread worms, and other groups unseen or unknown to me
+might be underfoot in vast numbers; and as I continued on there was no
+counting the number of little holes in the sand made by beach fleas or
+sand hoppers. As the autumn deepened I supposed they were unoccupied
+and deserted, since these beach dwellers, as I had heard it, should
+have been tucked away in their burrows by this time, with the door shut
+above their heads, waiting for March and April to bring a warm sun
+which could tease them out of dormancy. But one bright morning in the
+middle of November I saw a great many of them hard at work.
+
+At first I noticed thousands of little mounds on the surface of the
+sand in a strip some six to fifteen feet wide along the upper part
+of the beach, following in general the outlines of the previous high
+tide. Where a log or shelving bank was in the way, these mounds, and
+the many holes accompanying them, about knitting-needle size, were
+concentrated on the seaward side. I noticed that shore birds had
+attempted to pluck the occupants from their holes and had reached down
+two to three inches. I scooped out the sand where a hole was, spread
+it around, and revealed a little animal not over a half inch long,
+with two large eyes covering the sides of its narrow head. The eyes
+were not only conspicuous, they were also startlingly white; and the
+sand-hopper’s body flattened on both sides, was a mother-of-pearl,
+somewhat translucent. This odd creature, one of a family in the order
+of amphipods, is called _Talorchestia megalopthalma_, a title that
+gives special credit to its eyes.
+
+I put my pale-moon animal back in its hole, but to be held and thrust
+against its own volition apparently immobilized it, so I let it go free
+down the sands. After a second or two it made a few big and seemingly
+crazy hops--on sidelong springs like a toy--down a line of mounds and
+holes, popped into a hole and promptly disappeared.
+
+I noticed that little spouts and bursts of sand were coming from many
+of these holes and with a little patience I could see some of the
+hoppers coming up as if to look around, as is customary with gophers
+and chipmunks, and then turning around and going back down again. What
+they were doing of course was a major job of digging, passing the sand
+up from one pair of legs to another and throwing it out the hole with
+a jerk. There was hardly time or inclination to pause and look around
+the far horizon. It was work that had to be done unceasingly, between
+tides and between seasons. Perhaps, if tomorrow brought consistently
+freezing temperatures, they might not appear again in any great numbers
+until spring; but their usual daily round meant frenzied feeding at
+low tide and after dark when no winged predators were around, followed
+by another return to the upper beach and another furiously energetic
+period of digging homes for themselves. Terrestrial animals, which
+might drown after a period of immersion, and yet bound on this strip of
+sand to the tides, they had a more legitimate claim to the beach than
+most of us.
+
+Looking down at them, or in on their busyness, I had an extraordinary
+Gulliverlike feeling of encroaching on a world to which I did not
+belong. It was one kind of an eye looking at another without any sense
+of whether it was seen in turn or not, in a dichotomy of function,
+race, size, and place. It took the beach out of my possession. This was
+a place of other-world connections at which I could hardly guess. Do
+we need to wait for the men from Mars?
+
+These are extravagant animals, with their grandiose if relatively blind
+eyes, with their feats of digging, their hunger dance. In a sense they
+have a very narrow range, between upper and lower tide, between one
+season and the next, between feeding and digging on their strip of
+sand, between hiding and emerging, and their life span is short; but
+what a use they make of it!
+
+_Talorchestia megalopthalma_ is now on my life list, as the “birders”
+put it, a pearly prodigy of moon leaps that may, for all I know, be the
+beach’s foremost citizen.
+
+I also caught a glimpse of another little animal as I turned over a
+piece of driftwood. It had numerous legs (seven pairs in all, I have
+learned), and a flattened body, though slightly rounded on top, and
+oval in shape, reminding me of a pill bug or sow bug, one of my most
+familiar landed neighbors, which can be found under almost any boulder
+or log that provides shade and moisture. The marine, or beached member
+of the family I met, was grayish white in color, and apparently had the
+same preference for moisture--if not too much, since it evidently lived
+at the high-tide line, and was “terrestrial” like the sand hoppers.
+Some of these isopods swim in the open sea, others live in shallow
+water, or at the low-tide line, and most are scavengers, feeding on
+dead animal matter.
+
+All these and countless others are symptomatic of a tidal range, an
+ebb and flow that extends between sea and land in terms of millions
+of years of emergence and adaptation. In them the two worlds find
+their division and also their meeting and intercommunication. Their
+characteristic areas, their “life zones,” from the tropics to the
+poles, all require extremes of risk and of the struggle to survive it.
+In one place or another they dance to the inexorable measure of things,
+limited in what they do but exceptional in their way of doing it.
+
+On this beach, so unique, so well defined, and at the same time so
+widely involved, every upward surge of the waves and every bubbling
+retreat sinking through the sand, every range of tide, from the new
+moon to the old, every storm, every change in the season, every day and
+every night, is embodied in existence.
+
+I would think it presumptuous of me to claim any more on behalf of a
+bug or myself than we could in our honest natures fulfill, but faced by
+the shining tides of life, I am sure we have great things to do.
+
+My translations are on this beach. I am still a part of its measure,
+and when I forget those overwhelming controls that human power insists
+on, and all the artificiality men use to overcome their natural
+limitations, I begin to partake in this miraculous context. It is a
+cold beach, a bitter sea. Covered with cold, the sands impersonally
+receive the shadows moving over them tall and wide, gradually shifting
+and easing over slopes and shoulders toward the surf with its continual
+lunge, its pull and push, displacing the pale light that stands over
+the beach and gives it a hard winter brightness. The waves pour and
+foam and bubble up the beach and recede with a rainlike glistening and
+seething that sinks in, leaving dark stains behind. The middle part of
+the beach shows long thin lines like scars where the last tides came,
+part of the never ending drawing and erasing on this tablet of the
+sea’s art. It is all clean, and naked, defined, and at the same time
+rhythmically boundless, providing everything that comes to it with an
+inexhaustible dimension. It needs another language, and at the same
+time no language could really encompass it. In this bold breath and
+silence moving up, scene shifting, always starting again, there are
+decisions of sun and waves, of wind and light, that leave me with a
+true silence, a great room to fill, though it is in my blood and veins,
+the roots of me to feel, and any companion whom I meet must be in an
+ancient earth sense completely new, with a freshness made of a million
+years.
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+                               Deer Week
+
+
+The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were loaded with
+whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking up and down
+offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside from the two men that I
+could see in the boat, the shore was a world unoccupied, bright, wide,
+and cold, one about which the mass of us might care or know very little.
+
+On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the bay, black
+ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers rode the choppy
+waters. The bay also ran hard with whitecaps; and the wind with a bare
+fury roared head on at empty summer houses facing the north, and drove
+across headlands glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes
+in its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking and
+shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought the whole north
+with it and the gulls that hung there or rose steeply into it, were
+allied with its violence in a way that was hard to understand.
+
+Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of human
+preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in December, and the
+pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of guns like the hard slamming
+of doors, and down the highway at least every other car was loaded with
+hunters dressed in red, and on nearly every sandy side road several
+cars were parked. Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff
+looking out to sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in
+that direction.
+
+Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent
+patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out of their cars
+like spectators at a football game, they seemed as covered with neon
+lighting as a city street. In fact many of them do come from cities
+to the north and south of the Cape, which can now be reached in much
+faster time than used to be the case, and they follow the same pattern
+as many of the summer tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who
+live away from streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The
+lookouts stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars
+across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the woods where
+I live. The guns resound from all points of the compass.
+
+Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game birds.
+One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning from a hunting
+expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless. One man had managed to
+shoot a partridge on the way, but he ruefully admitted that someone had
+stolen it from the back of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started
+straggling back, while guns were still going off in what seemed a
+completely indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion.
+
+“Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great
+cheerfulness.
+
+I was helping one of the hunters extricate his station wagon from a
+muddy hole, and by that time I had a feeling that, like many other
+human enterprises, hunting was a communal affair which might turn out
+one way or another, but like a battle, had no certain outcome. It was
+clear, in any case, that very few of these men had much of an idea
+about the habits of the animals they were hunting. Some species of
+ducks, for example, feed more readily after sundown and so are more
+easily found, and more vulnerable. A half century ago, the population
+of wild fowl was probably less safe than it is now. A yellowlegs,
+flying up out of a marsh in late autumn, did not have much of a chance
+to start south. Some local hunter was waiting in anticipation, someone
+who probably knew the marshes and the shore as his ancestors had known
+them.
+
+If the hunters had an unlimited season on this narrow peninsula, Cape
+Cod would be in a state of siege the year around, regardless of what
+happened to the ducks, partridge, quail, or deer. We have the universal
+problem of room and numbers. After all, the human population is
+increasing at a faster rate than most birds. Perhaps our populatedness
+results in less concern for the rest of life simply through lack of
+association with it. Do we know what we are shooting at? Hunters who
+blast away into flocks of eiders or Canada geese, leaving many of them
+wounded, unable to retrieve the rest because they are too far out in
+the water, are not doing anything but getting rid of their feelings,
+which are not necessarily worth cherishing.
+
+The deer population may not decline because of hunting. Their numbers,
+their balance between starvation and survival depends largely on the
+kind of country they live in, on its vegetation. Cape Cod is only a
+half mile in width in some parts of it, seven or eight in others, but
+down the middle of it there is a wide belt of low growth, of tangles,
+shrubs, and low, cut-over woodland which provides good forage for deer
+and good concealment, even with the human armies in their midst.
+
+Hunting deer is thought of as an American heritage, our birthright,
+part of the Thanksgiving celebration, handed down from fathers to sons.
+Since deer are one of those species, unlike their predators the wolf
+and the mountain lion, that have managed to live abundantly in the
+presence of man, so much so that they sometimes require “weeding” to
+save them from starvation, hunting them is as legitimate as it ever
+was, provided the hunting is controlled; but we no longer need them as
+we did.
+
+Having left the age behind when venison was our essential meat,
+we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed deer. In
+some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters. They are
+directly influenced by human civilization. In turn, civilization is
+dependent on them to the extent that they provide the basis for a
+multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is our hunter’s right
+that deer should exist, but we are not the hunters that we used to be.
+What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline, clothing, ammunition, whiskey?
+
+The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be more to
+our advantage than any claims we make on them. They are afraid of man
+and keep their distant beauty from him. The heritage _they_ keep is
+wildness, which still has the power to arouse fear in us, and sometimes
+pity, as we may pity all life, including our own, that is cut short or
+broken by the inexorable laws of the universe.
+
+On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and the
+sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some distance ahead
+of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two cars had just roared by
+with hunters in them, before she made her appearance. She seemed either
+wounded or exhausted, going very slowly, pulling her hindquarters
+stiffly behind her. When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew
+up and she went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only
+moderate speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs under
+the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men, who turned up
+their car heaters and sped away.
+
+Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked, and a
+hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass. I could see
+the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore road, waiting
+with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind, getting in and out
+of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,” sounded across
+the way. After a while a number of them began to hurry ahead, almost
+tumbling as they ran, to converge on a deer which had apparently run
+to the bottom of a hollow. They surrounded the hollow on all sides,
+many men standing on their car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether
+there was actually a deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to
+escape, I never learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood
+for comfort.
+
+The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the sea, not
+too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat--a very rough
+trade on that day for common flesh and blood--rocked forward through
+the waves. After a while the darkness began to fall, with a thin smoky
+yellow and pink band on the western horizon and a new blanket of gray
+clouds mounting overhead, so that all of us began to turn in under the
+cold breath of night.
+
+I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every minute
+of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through the countless
+years of earthly inheritance and change, how we became so overmastering
+in our numbers and needs, so divorced from the exactions of nature?
+Shall we meet up only with ourselves?
+
+Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains, and
+their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even those who abuse a
+hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion, are trying to keep in
+contact with a natural mortality which our world denies. Perhaps we
+need help from other animals besides the human one.
+
+Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood,
+marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach with its
+perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone and lifted
+each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and sand. The gulls
+hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky. Even the boat had
+a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so with feathers, logs, or
+purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but swept and washed into a
+mutual keeping by the air and the tidal presence of the sea. I asked
+it to show us light and life which was our undiscovered own to help us
+through our mutual violence and upheavals, our narrow days.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                     Impermanence Takes Its Stand
+
+
+Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually, and the beach
+loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the plants and trees work
+so hard to hold on in their shifting ground that they never reach a
+climax state. They are pioneers. Such a place is open, as all earth’s
+shores must be, to drifters, like the black stork.
+
+The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up in great
+numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm, could come in
+from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, Maine, or Nova
+Scotia, depending on how it was transported, by ships or by the sea
+itself. Years ago, sailing ships traveling along the Outer Cape with
+cargoes of lumber chained to their decks might encounter heavy seas and
+be in serious danger of grounding on the shoals, in which case they
+would occasionally jettison the cargo, which would land up and down
+the beaches, to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the
+“moon-cussers.” Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or
+studding, it supplied many a family with material for their houses. I
+can think of at least one house which is largely constructed of it.
+
+Or as it happened not so many years ago, a log jam in a Maine river
+broke the boom and the logs went careening and dipping down to the sea,
+a great many landing after a while on the Outer Beach. Huge trunks of
+trees sometimes appear, carried in by the sea. I have found cherry,
+red and white pine, cedar, spruce, beech, and even some canoe birch
+with the bark still on it, a tree not indigenous to the Cape. Mahogany
+and walnut have been found at times, and a few years ago the cross
+section of a tree was discovered near Eastham that turned out to be a
+very hard and heavy wood from Brazil, probably fallen off a ship. Parts
+of dories, or larger vessels, broken oars; buoys of all colors and
+shapes, glass floats from lobster pots, branches, logs; boards of many
+different sizes and lengths, wharf pilings and planks, and dunnage,
+timbers used in stowing ship’s cargoes, cases of scotch, always, in
+my sad experience, without the scotch; crates from vessels of all the
+world, South American, Russian, Japanese, French, and most of the
+nations you can name; all these and more have been carried by the sea,
+sometimes for twenty or thirty years, until they were finally landed on
+the beach. It is wood for the fire, a house, a shack, or a table, and
+material for any curious scavenger, on behalf of aesthetics, science,
+or history.
+
+The driftwood is a migrant, to move again soon, unless it is taken
+off the beach, burned in a fire, or lodged and buried deep above the
+high-tide line. It may serve temporarily as a place where seaweed and
+other litter gathers, or where crustaceans might congregate. The birds,
+if it is an accessible clump of branches fingering over the sands,
+rather than a log or heavy timber, may peck through it after such tiny
+animals, their tracks making a delicate tracery running under it and
+arrowing away. Driftwood migrates like the sand and the birds. It is
+another aspect of the surf’s swing and draw, its dragging out, its
+removal and its deposition, part of the constant remolding of this
+shore.
+
+On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon, everything
+goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only rule. As it does
+everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across from one direction of
+the compass or another, streaming with light and moisture, lifts up,
+lifts you to it, and with long low swoops, sudden breaths and seething,
+it whisks the waters of the marshes and inlets, rounds their brown
+shoulders, races through trees and over cliffs clean through across the
+sea. The land under it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes,
+also waves as they do.
+
+The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though
+vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard,
+look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light,
+the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and
+beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the
+winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This
+is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers.
+There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above
+the pouring of the surf.
+
+Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of
+huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips
+to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held
+by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog
+cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves.
+Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia,
+“beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has
+golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die,
+flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them.
+Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold
+on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away,
+though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in
+some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost
+luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.
+
+Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with
+burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at
+the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when
+building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and
+half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.
+
+The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping back
+as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just above the beach
+its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost denuded of vegetation,
+deep cups with drops below them sheer down to the beach. I have seen
+the remnants of house foundations in such hollows, or a creosoted pole
+or two sticking up above the surface of the sand, not too old by the
+look of them, proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be.
+Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry, or
+in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain finality, giving
+a free, waving look to the surface of things. On the other hand this
+vegetation is definite enough. There is no fragility to it. It is
+scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth may be held down but it
+also gives the landscape a symmetry and economy; it does not give the
+impression of being hit or miss at all but very definite and sure of
+its place, as sure as wind-struck, salt-sprayed plants can be. Each
+plant stays rooted from place to place through this sandy earth, being
+adapted to intense light, drought, and constant winds, holding on
+hard against being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move
+into new areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in
+on newly deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in
+which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the plants
+formerly rooted there.
+
+So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance,
+temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes made by
+the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to be hummocks
+or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock may be held down
+by beach grass and have a core of bayberry bushes with only an inch
+or two of leaves and branches sticking out at the tops. Beach grass,
+bayberry, seaside goldenrod live in close if embattled communities, at
+least with respect to the wind. These plants and others may all join in
+holding such hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded
+clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around them.
+
+There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way, ericoides and
+tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,” but the name is
+usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more common of the two.
+They are not always easy to tell apart. The ericoides, sometimes
+called golden heather, has tiny spinelike leaves that stand out fairly
+distinctly from the stem and each other and it is a plant that stays
+green for a much longer time during fall and winter. The tomentosa is
+densely tufted, downy, softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or
+bluish green, being subject to winter kill more readily than the other
+species. On Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried,
+and used for fuel.
+
+The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely
+dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face
+of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A
+“succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large
+fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought
+conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has
+to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest
+of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil
+needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots
+fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted
+like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment,
+where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod
+at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period,
+remaining ever since.
+
+Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault
+made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the
+ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic
+weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape
+trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment
+more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water,
+but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill
+their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat
+on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground,
+each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit
+it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the
+thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of
+reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which
+taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success
+in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is
+allied to all life’s insistence on success.
+
+We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly
+the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like
+bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea
+stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its
+tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as
+they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result
+of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment
+in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+                          The Depths of Sight
+
+
+Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter,
+to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths
+suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of
+quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all
+the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted,
+barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of
+the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and
+the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and
+primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be
+so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at
+their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I
+suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part
+in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity.
+
+It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make
+sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book
+or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of
+closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass.
+Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull
+and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with
+the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once
+for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had
+for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to
+be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are
+not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a
+misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a
+sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its
+lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other
+animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may
+have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing
+across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not,
+and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The
+strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth,
+result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from
+self-knowledge.
+
+That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human
+civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of
+our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work
+for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as
+if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific
+purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As
+likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off
+at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow.
+And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response
+to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the
+sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies
+in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the
+effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it
+seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a
+herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by
+intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected
+with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why
+leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape
+mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.
+
+One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were
+congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As
+soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they
+took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and
+they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and
+the surf line.
+
+Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming
+just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though
+the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was
+on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head
+first, over and down, slipping under the water.
+
+On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of
+good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First
+one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through
+field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up
+at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind.
+The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming
+up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping
+through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing
+animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less
+numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of
+these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a
+great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact
+with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an
+electric communication made between one far pole and another.
+
+Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very special way,
+but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and reception, and in
+animals without consciousness and means of assessment this may mean
+more than automatic reaction to light. I think of a crowd of newly
+hatched minnows like tiny slivers of glass, running up and quivering
+through the water. The most definite thing about them is their large
+black eyes, contrasted with a bodily transparency so fragile as to
+seem past fragility, an artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of
+universal actions that might have their matrix in a dream. Those large
+eyes are the eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an
+alliance with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual
+attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration in a
+man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new to life.
+
+Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are looking
+at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses there is a
+watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a lightning and at
+the same time a listlessness there is in them, in their hurrying ways
+through currents of fluid light, and their suspension in its stillness!
+Many of them only last for a day or a few minutes before disappearing
+as a food for other animals, in the mercurial depths of water allied
+with life, this intoxicant, this terror.
+
+My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains this
+landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own eye and its
+own depth to find. The expression of water, sand, and sky leads vision
+beyond itself.
+
+One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low over
+the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the same time
+illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard light of a
+fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or so away down the
+shore. I kept walking toward them with the illusion that the boat was
+moored close to the beach, but after a couple of miles the lights were
+still receding and I turned back. The tide was close in and sheets
+of foam pitched in and dragged back with a sound of rattling stones
+but in gentle rhythm. It was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could
+detect little strikes of light, the curling over and stirring of white
+and silver. Up through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared
+intermittently, riding above the water. The beach was covered with
+soft airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood
+of ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was
+out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond the
+atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away and joined with
+fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation, a familiar place
+turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I might sense all sorts of far
+nerve ends tingling out of the night behind the mist. We receive very
+little of what reaches us out of this tribal universe, whose messages
+light through us unseen and unheard until we, as individuals, are
+turned to the dust of the sky.
+
+Night or day, the sea and sea beach offer their changing spaces of
+light. One afternoon in January, halfway between hours of warmth
+and hours of cold, rain and snow, morning and evening, the sea off
+Nauset was racing green, spray tossing off the tops of the waves that
+simultaneously paused, curved up, and broke down in thunder. The whole
+sky was full of cloud featherings borne over before the wind and along
+the horizon out to sea were colors of lavender and gray, and pale-green
+openings like caves. The wide, steep beach was full of gloss, with
+a roll and fire of its own, and above it fringing the edge of the
+sandbanks the beach grass curved out and waved. I felt a resonance in
+the beach, a tremendously heavy and vibrant tone, the tonnage of sand
+and surf in harmony along with a low moan from the sea’s lungs.
+
+Small flocks of black ducks quivered over the water and then flew in
+to Nauset marsh. Then the heavier Canada geese beat in with stalwart
+wings, to thin out from their V formation to a long line as they
+wheeled in low against the wind and then regathered as they settled
+down on the marsh.
+
+Blackback gulls glided low across the outer line of the surf and
+sometimes their shadows appeared on the curving wall of a wave. Herring
+gulls soared in the heights and then beat forward on sinewy wings like
+flounders pulsing and beating through the water.
+
+One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which it had found on
+the marsh and dropped it from high in the air. Then the bird retrieved
+its food and tried again, taking a chance on whether or not it would
+strike some boulders and break, since this is a haphazard and not a
+very knowledgeable game with the gulls. They pick up the habit from
+each other, by example rather than inheritance. Sometimes it works and
+just as often it does not.
+
+The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the clouds
+ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand were waggling
+back and forth in the wind. There was a swish of milky surf up the
+beach. Over the uncountable numbers of sand grains, each with its own
+size, shape, and color was a clean radiance, even a magic. Because in
+this realm of wide, majestic use, of continual advent, each offering
+was still of a proportion perfect for its moment in time. Each single
+action, the silhouette of the straw-colored grasses curving before the
+wind, or a gull shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the
+light, was of such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they
+were magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they had
+life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not subject to
+lessening or degradation in this world of nature.
+
+Like the lights that appear under the mist, or over the open barrens of
+the sea at night, like St. Elmo’s fire on the _Pequod_’s mast, there
+are electric tricks playing on the horizon, perhaps at all times,
+since there seems to be no end to light’s action over the waters with
+the sky’s depth behind it. As I walked up the beach there was a radiant
+white patch hanging up in the soft, scudding overcast, not in the sun’s
+direction--reflected off the water perhaps--but having a wild aura of
+its own. It gave me a feeling of communication with something which
+had a right to awe. We may have passed the primitive stage, but the
+primitive respect for what was beyond human control and the magic used
+to propitiate it or bring it to play may still have their sources. The
+light and its manifestations is still too quick for the eye, or for the
+facts.
+
+Science itself goes on proving that there is no infinite exactitude
+and that many things can only be explained in terms of probability.
+The fact that nothing is stopped by our constant search for a simple
+solution to life is what keeps science in business. The search into
+the nature of cells finds them full of inner whirlings, the motion
+of countless component parts, of a universal restlessness. They are
+structurally fantastic and each kind is manifestly different. Our
+voyage toward the invisible is unending. The molecule or the jellyfish,
+seen through one human lens or another, retain their share of the
+marvelous. And if we marvel, we are still capable of learning.
+
+A radiance above me, a changing freshness in the air, between warm and
+cold, a shudder of wings over the beach, another language of unexplored
+dimensions, life expressions understood in terms of sight and spirit,
+and still to be learned--the nonhuman advents that pass the limits of a
+man. There is a common realm of action and perception, whose boundaries
+we may never reach, where men can be more grateful for their belonging
+than their isolation. It is part of the changing state of inanimate
+things, the response of lesser forms of life to the construction and
+motion of the world that invades them and which they invade, and it is
+acted out by the mind. The tidal waves run through us all. To see as
+men see and merely to react like a moon snail or a horseshoe crab to
+the difference between light and dark are two representative actions in
+the same vast realm of response.
+
+Do men belabor the special nature of consciousness too much, as if it
+were some kind of A-1 badge that separated mankind from the rest of
+animate creation? Consciousness must be infinitely more mysterious,
+more connective, than any attributes we may assign it of personal
+distinction.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                          The Flight of Birds
+
+
+The appearance of migratory birds in fall and spring, or simply their
+constant activity, suggests their range. The ability that a gull
+displays in the turmoil of the air is enough to bring other winds to
+these shores, to make you realize that the beach joins the long shore
+line between Cape Cod and Florida, that the waters to the north of us
+move on toward Labrador and Baffin Bay. Their wings are allied to the
+circulation of the North Atlantic. New England is not so far from the
+Arctic Circle, and when the auks, the old squaws, or the buntings come
+down to Cape Cod in the autumn they bring the proof with them.
+
+We have had an appalling record this side of the Atlantic, of
+decimating the population of sea birds, which are more vulnerable than
+other species because of their nesting habits, on islands or rocky
+foreshores. The great auk has gone, and the puffins reduced to small
+numbers. If we were able to kill them all off, either on purpose or
+through lack of responsibility, what little island people it would make
+us!
+
+The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting black
+and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and rocky headlands
+where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the cast of deep and icy
+waters. One June day, when the beach at Race Point was glaring with
+light, and all the winter leavings, like the twisted dead stalks of
+dusty miller, were being replaced by a freshness in the shine and
+scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or little auk, on the beach a few
+yards away from the water. It is a very small bird, though conspicuous
+enough with its penguinlike stance, its black and white plumage, and
+though it was in full view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When
+I approached, this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away
+from me down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of
+sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since most
+dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a “nonbreeding
+straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more temperate waters not
+locked in ice like their home feeding grounds. Over a period of years
+and at unpredictable times, there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds
+are blown inland by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places:
+ponds, back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping
+centers. Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease,
+if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided they
+survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a number of
+them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod highway.
+
+The dovekies are messengers from the north. The way the gulls use the
+wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into it, hovering,
+then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing skill of other birds
+that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics of the open sea.
+They are masters of the art of air as no plane can ever be. I remember
+watching some fulmars in the wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the
+great blue-green waves in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They
+glided between the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless
+deliberation, and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned.
+Back and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings
+and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no
+excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my lungs,
+my admiration.
+
+In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity
+reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights the
+constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of red-backed
+sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and sun-reflecting
+at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness set going in them
+which must carry them a long way. They are long-distance migrants
+flitting from one end of the earth, one shore line to the next, and
+judging by their actions it is hard to believe that they could ever
+rest. Searching for crustaceans or sand worms along the beach, they
+run on flickering black legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing
+in syncopation. When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it
+piles in and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick,
+automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back they seem
+to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying.
+
+Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the beach and
+then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a tide bird faster
+than the tides, where there is no following it. This bird is quick and
+sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation.
+
+Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I take
+most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness in them,
+skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam. The white in their
+plumage is so pure, snow paths between markings of black and cinnamon,
+like briers and weed stalks, with suggestions of greenish gray when the
+sun shines on them. They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions
+of the musk ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at
+the least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or
+along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking
+away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches of the
+world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty and its
+freedom.
+
+They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such tiny
+creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always flocking
+and scattering out from one rise and level to the next. To me, the
+fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows, sanderlings, gulls,
+horned larks, and many other visitors to seaside lands is their trait
+of invisibility. It is not only their whiteness--they look almost
+entirely white seen from underneath, appearing and disappearing like
+clouds--and a plumage which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass
+stalks, dune shadows, on the bare ground--but their actions. With a
+motion reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the
+goldfinches have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top
+or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing,
+a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of tinkling
+bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing and then burst
+in gentle snow flights across the ground, through one opening, one neat
+run, one clean escape to another. They turn the invisible into reality.
+They have a continual lift, the agitation inherent in all life. They
+fly up ahead of me as sparks out of the unseen rest and center of
+things.
+
+Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which appears
+irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for rodents and
+occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl. I remember seeing
+a mounted specimen when I was a boy and thinking it was the most
+desirable thing on earth to own, and since I never did own one, the
+snowy owl stayed intangible and magnificent in my mind; and the first
+live one I ever saw did nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They
+migrate to beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing
+elevations as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they can
+survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting season,
+watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence of prey.
+The one I saw was way down the south end of North Beach, that stretch
+of Nauset beach which ends at the straits separating it from Monomoy.
+It was perched on a hummock, and at first was nearly indistinguishable
+from the top of a white picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of
+white marble marker, rounded at the top, which you might see on a
+roadside in Vermont. We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and
+when it flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white
+and flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light
+and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted calmly
+on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us out of fierce
+yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we turned and came at
+it from another direction its head almost swiveled all the way around,
+looking at us from over its back. It kept its place in center stage.
+
+Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters. During
+October and November especially they can be seen shuttling back and
+forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach. Some feed, principally
+on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham and along other shallow
+shores and inlets, but the majority--an estimated 500,000--spend the
+winter over the shoals between Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to,
+as they fly low over the water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and
+of good design--the red-brown females, and males patterned in black
+and white--as a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you
+can see them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a
+half a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a
+suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown.
+
+By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes show up
+like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into December the
+gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying singly for the most
+part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped wings reflecting
+the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their grand manner down, from
+fifty feet or more in the air, hard and bold into the water, sending up
+jets of spray.
+
+Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water in your
+hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally wide ebb and
+flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all earth’s shadows wave
+across its seas, and yet this is the precise route of the birds, their
+direction and their home. They know its guidelines inwardly. For us,
+who put so much emphasis on outward instruments, this can be almost
+impossible to understand.
+
+Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at home
+together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate ways.
+Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though the latter can’t
+dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to chance, to disease,
+to going astray and meeting with mishaps when confronted by the
+freakishness and violence of the weather. Many a duck or sea bird,
+caught on a lee shore or in a marshy inlet during a great storm may
+be unable to rise into the wind and is exhausted or swept away and
+seriously injured while trying. Life and death, joy and disaster, go
+wing to wing. Birds have less capacity to deceive themselves than we,
+being unable to avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its
+protective power.
+
+I had similar thoughts in mind one day in November during a violent
+coastal storm while watching some gulls, ringed-bill and herring,
+together with a few shore birds, that were gathered at the head of an
+inlet along a relatively sheltered part of the Bay. The Outer Beach
+was of a violence that day which could hardly be approached, either on
+foot or in contemplation. Even here the storm winds were relentless,
+hard and cold, flicking and driving the sands along the shore, whipping
+the marsh waters behind it into a froth. Sanderlings made short, low,
+flying hops back and forth, but were unable to do their usual free
+hurrying and basket-swinging flights along the shore. The gulls stood
+in shallow water facing the wind, water that was being whipped and
+lashed, and sometimes they would drop down sideways a little before the
+wind’s force, thrown slightly off balance, acting like a man who has
+been cut across the face. Taking to the air just above the ground they
+would find difficulty in maneuvering and were forced back, sometimes
+fifty feet or more, to continue standing where they dropped back to the
+ground; but even in this they showed a certain supple power, a control
+aware of its limits, the sinewy economy of wings lifted in the wind,
+the plain sky beauty of feathers gray and white. The storm was ending,
+although the water was still being whiplashed into foam. The light was
+very cold and the sky line was heaped with sunset fires.
+
+Surely everything, everywhere, was vulnerable, and yet it was that bird
+closeness to such primal powers as might seem to us bitter, alien, and
+cruel--the gods of the north, of the waters and the winds--that gave
+them an essential balance, a rightful place. That great sky of theirs
+was unexplored. It came down to me that regardless of what he learns,
+there is so much for a man to go on asking.
+
+What can birds tell you, other than displaying those traits of
+aggression, or fear, or mutual attraction, which we may recognize
+when observing their behavior? We have a little fear in ourselves,
+when looking on, that we may go too far in mixing up our own traits
+and terms with theirs; but each will manage to keep his territory,
+untransgressed by the other, and each takes part in the high order of
+nature. Watching the birds, I have seen ceremony, ritual, love-making,
+display, all worthy of admiration by the most glittering of human
+cultures. The speech of men and the speech of birds do not divide us
+altogether. In silence is unity.
+
+Perhaps the most eloquent thing about birds is that which we will
+probably never learn to decipher. In his study of puffins, R. M.
+Lockeley refers to their “subtle, silent-gesture language.” That
+language is part of a still more silent order, the dark realm of
+existence where all their actions and necessities have their play.
+Approach with patience and with care.
+
+One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward Eastham,
+through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled very pungently
+in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting winds and the day
+as I walked full of weather changes, from an edge of cold to warmth
+and back again. An early sun began to be covered by pale-gray clouds
+and there was a mauve light over the sea. I caught sight of a little
+wren along the way, and there was a number of sparrows, both seen and
+heard--song, chipping, seaside, and probably others. It was a low,
+shifting thicket world full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic
+sound, rocking with light and air.
+
+I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy road, at
+times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk flying off ahead
+of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its long wings. Then I
+noticed another one roosting on a broken-off tree several hundred feet
+back of the cliff just outside a wood of pitch pines. The first one
+made off in that direction too, roosting not far from its companion on
+a dead stump, and they both stayed absolutely still, like falcons on
+an Egyptian frieze. I could hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the
+background.
+
+I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing ahead
+of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly killed, its breast
+bare of feathers and shining red like some rock wet with sea splash
+in the crimson path of the setting sun. What kind of a game led up to
+this? Could the two hawks, one tempting the jay by its distance, the
+other scaring it by its proximity, have managed to send it out into the
+open where it had no chance against their swift and effortless pursuit?
+I walked ahead for a short distance and then waited, watching through
+field glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a
+few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising again
+and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a little closer
+and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of an ancient poise,
+wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they never went back to the
+road until I had gone for good. The grace and tension, the space in
+that formal scene stayed with me for a long time.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIV
+
+                               The Marsh
+
+
+The Outer Beach is broken only at Nauset Inlet, where the tidal waters
+pour through an opening that has frequently changed its width and
+position, and at Chatham. The Chatham break leads in to the wide area
+of Chatham Harbor and Pleasant Bay. In both places, but more especially
+at Nauset, where the marshes and the inland shore behind them are
+protected by the beach and a sandspit some two and three-quarter
+miles in length, an unstable, but at the same time fairly constant
+equilibrium is attained between sea and land. It does not seem obvious
+that this should be so at all. The sandspit looks only too narrow and
+fragile, and at intervals it does show evidence that the sea has broken
+through. Driftwood logs lie on the cuts made between its hummocks,
+headed as they were when the sea subsided, after it had lifted them in
+toward the marsh.
+
+Except for the great volume of the beach itself, which is maintained
+in collaboration with the forces of the sea, it is hard at first to
+understand why the marsh should not be inundated. Why does that lord
+the sea not heave in and overwhelm this sandy barrier, flooding over
+the marshy flats and islands, and wash up permanently against the
+inland shore?
+
+The shoulders of the low cedar-studded land slope down to the edge
+of the marsh with a neat, trimmed look and neat houses, seemingly
+confident of being in residence indefinitely, although I have heard
+people who live there talking in ways that suggested they were not
+sure of it. Once see those stormy waters heaving and rushing over the
+sandspit and you cannot be sure of anything. Looking out at the sea,
+even from a fairly safe distance, you can find eternal balance and
+at the same time inundation and disaster. Now that the Outer Beach
+stretches past the miles of cliffs and is no longer backed up by them,
+becoming an outlying stretch of sand, its own “protective” power
+might seem much less clear. On the other hand, when was this beach in
+anything but a state of flux and change? There is protection in that,
+even if it is hard to define. The fact is that the relationship between
+the sea, the beach, and the sandspit, the marsh and inland shore, has
+been maintained for ages in the past and probably ages to come. In
+general the volume of sand that is packed along the shore balances what
+is removed from it, but only in general, for the time being, because
+erosion takes place consistently over the years and during its course
+more sand is removed than delivered. Also a standing equilibrium
+is kept between this deposition and taking away of sand and the
+conditions offshore: the currents, drift, wave height and direction,
+the changing shoals and bars. All these states and forces are involved
+in an extremely complex kind of order, and it is certainly broken
+and rearranged all the time. A season may show it, or the records of
+history. In fact, changes occur from day to day.
+
+When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605 he sailed
+into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old records, the inlet
+was about halfway down the sandspit behind the beach. Since then it
+apparently has moved about a mile south, but its entrances have changed
+now and then, with long periods of relative stability in between, which
+might be broken at any time and then followed by some new arrangement
+of forces.
+
+In his _Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States_,
+Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit, or
+“beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been pushed back
+a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the early seventeenth
+century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging by early charts,
+of where it is now, and took the form of a long narrow island some
+twelve miles in length “with several small islands north of it and
+outlets to the ocean at either end--the northern one at Eastham and
+the southern lying between the end of this beach ridge and the Chatham
+shore.”
+
+“In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse on Minot’s
+Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans water at Nauset,
+and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near the entrance filled partially
+with shifting sands.”
+
+The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits literally
+broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex in 1957.
+Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of coastal charts shows that
+Nauset Inlet opened hard against the cliffs on the south side from
+1856 (the first good chart available to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941
+show that in a single year a spit grew from south to north against the
+littoral drift and shifted the inlet a mile to the north.”
+
+For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted in two
+entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently. Other
+temporary break-throughs can be seen along the spit, varying from 150
+feet to a few yards across, extending down its length until it joins
+a broad, high stretch--almost a long mount--of sand which ends at the
+present inlet, with North Beach on the other side. This sand is subject
+to storm flooding and to winds, to being removed and added to, recut
+and carved by the waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach
+grass is not able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five
+hundred pairs of terns have nested there, and are protected.
+
+The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply toward
+the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where the channel of
+the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both sides keep changing
+their lengths and relative position. The sea builds high shoals off and
+around the incoming tidal channel during one season and it may level at
+least parts of them off in another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs
+and bottom of a boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank
+of the inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the
+winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank lay over it
+which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level.
+
+Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957, and afterwards
+in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing pattern. Shoals and
+separate spits began to drift, to join and separate, shift and
+intermingle in curling, curving folds, an interwaving and repositioning
+of sand materials that would seem to have no parallel in nature.
+
+The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at an average
+rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme erosion.
+This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs, and on the whole
+it is probably somewhat less here than there, although the marsh area
+is being very gradually diminished in extent. Its wide channels and
+bays, its marshy edges, islands, and flats, are held in the balance of
+great forces sweeping along the shore, or occasionally breaking through
+in violence. Although it absorbs and releases the tidal waters with
+ancient calm, it seems wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the
+complex, barely understood forces that build and break along the shore.
+
+The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for centuries
+have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes, and the black
+ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under the wide light of
+dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open water and stirred the matted
+grass. Like the tides that flood in and fall, like the marsh grasses
+that grow and wave, then die down and take on their matted winter
+look, or the marine animals that swim in through the tidal channel and
+go out again to sea, it is a place of flight and motion. The local
+animals, crabs, clams, mussels, snails, the salt-water minnows in the
+ditches, the marsh snails, and numerous others, must go through their
+cycles of growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife
+relationships, but the over-all feeling that I have had about the
+marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated to
+migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any enclosed
+stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated look of
+the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the Bay shore, but it is an
+isolation bound to the open waters of the sea which run through it and
+sometimes threaten its borders.
+
+After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh plants and
+grasses darken. In November the marshes are still russet, umber, and
+yellow green, but by January they are dark brown with reddish tawny
+tones in matted grasses having the coarse texture of a deer’s coat.
+The saltwort plants, so fresh and green and full of salt juices in the
+summer, have turned dry and white, curled over at their tips so that
+they have the look of singed wool.
+
+When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to stretch far
+off toward the shore and the channels between them are partly hidden.
+Nauset from the landward side, on the other hand, looks as if it were
+mostly composed of water, especially at high tide. It is both a good
+country for low-grass lovers like sparrows and those that ride its
+watery lanes and lakes like ducks and geese.
+
+Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass for
+short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I have flushed
+a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh. Horned larks peck in the
+dunes, tripping forward with a stamping motion of their legs, and then
+stop, to stand with a backward slant to their bodies. They fly up
+suddenly with shrill lisping cries; and all the while the deep quacking
+of black ducks sounds from far out in the middle of the marsh. There
+are always gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise
+on the wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes
+wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse,
+guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way out and
+their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for gannets.
+
+Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin heads and
+bills straight forward so that in flight they become throbbing arrows
+sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the hummocks of the spit facing
+the marsh while flock after flock of Canada geese flew in overhead,
+bugling as they came, close enough so that I could hear the fine high
+whistling of their wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through
+their feathers. Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in
+the marsh, along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks
+stray back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A black
+duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to spin as it flies up
+high and fast and changes direction, like a weathervane.
+
+Quivering, soaring, swinging flights set out over the wide marsh, and
+the bird fleets ride the waters. The goldeneyes follow one another
+bobbing along in a channel, along with mergansers and occasional
+buffleheads, whose white heads or sides suddenly shine out as they
+round a corner. A rush and glide of water shows brightly in the
+distance when an eider plows quickly forward. The Canada geese feed
+over the marsh or on the borders of its channels and ditches, honking
+low, the sentinel ganders with their proud heads and necks showing
+above the grassy levels around them. One afternoon when I was walking
+across the coarse cover of the marsh--which seemed to stretch far off
+like the pampas, with its indefinite sky and a wide-spread travel of
+birds--I caught sight of a deer running up behind me, some fifty yards
+away. It was a doe, with a dun-colored winter coat; and seeing me, she
+swerved suddenly and headed out toward the middle of the marsh. The
+waters of January are bitterly cold, but the doe swam a wide channel
+to get to a small island in the middle, and there she stayed, shaking
+and scratching now and then, stirring around in an area that became
+more and more circumscribed as the tide began to rise and the waters
+widened. I left her a couple of hours later in the gathering dusk, a
+dark, distant little figure, hunched up far out on the marsh. Deer can
+swim for several miles, even in icy waters, so she undoubtedly swam
+back after I was safely out of the way, perhaps after dark when the
+tide started to go down again. Still, I was troubled by what I had
+caused, and I came back early next morning to reassure myself that she
+was gone.
+
+When night comes on, the dark flat marsh has a look of absolute
+secrecy. The cold winter wind completes its isolation. A few last birds
+may fly up over it, or twist and cry in the wind and then drop down and
+disappear. What quick movements, starts, flicking actions, what flight
+there may be left is at last hidden, downed completely, and the wind
+and surf sounds wash out all else.
+
+There is secrecy and at the same time a desolation in the marsh,
+the desolation of life pared down to absolute essentials. It offers
+no luxury but motion in its tidal context, an absolute minimum of
+redundance. It is a spare unity, even with all its life and light, and
+the colors that play over it throughout the years, a whole which only
+accepts those parts which are necessary to it. This marsh is on its
+own, with ancient standards of simplicity. To find fulfillment in them
+would be luxury indeed. The lights begin to go on in the houses that
+stand over its inner shore, as evening advances. A plane drones in the
+sky. The marsh’s flat, wind-blown darkness is alone, and seems to say
+that all life is received by those bare standards, that we are all
+helplessly interdependent and obligated to tides that none of us can
+turn.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XV
+
+                           The Uses of Light
+
+
+In the face of what it offers, I have said very little about the great
+beach. In some respects it is indefinable even as a geographical
+entity, in spite of the fact that it represents a range of sandy
+shore line that extends for thousands of miles to the south of it. It
+fluctuates so, and it is so closely associated with the sea in that
+respect, that the term “transition zone,” while generally appropriate,
+seems a little misleading. It is made of land materials but it is
+not exactly a land boundary. Cape Cod, whose Outer Shore it defines,
+is as narrow and exposed as a spit or shoal by comparison with the
+continent behind it. In any case, the beach in its grand exposure, its
+instability, seems closer to the sea than land, and that may be the
+reason why many visitors, bound to the inland world of human claims,
+have often expressed the feeling that it looks untouched.
+
+Small white waves on the sea surfaces beyond the beach may scud like
+birds while surf and sand are resplendent in green and silver; or an
+evening wind from the north blows over sandbanks and beach grasses,
+coming on in hesitant rushes, the gray waters conflicting over
+shark-gray shoals, and clouds standing off over the sea. Sometimes the
+surf strikes and hisses like snakes curling along the sand. Sometimes
+it rises up with green-marbled surfaces, roaring and falling with
+ponderous formality. Beach and sea are always involved in mutual storms
+and plays of light, mutual readjustments beyond our control.
+
+The beach is naked, malleable, ready to move and be moved. It is
+invested with the vast balance of the oceanic tides. It is part of the
+systems of wind and weather. It is a receiving ground for light. For
+these and countless other reasons it is a power, with an expression
+made up of all its communicant and communicating energies, their
+substance, and formality. It sweeps on in a long curving line that
+is a definition not only of a bound but a horizon, a sea, and a sky.
+It expresses growth and the stunting of growth, destruction and its
+holding back, the violent storm, the offshore summer swell, the heat
+and cold. Many languages, heard or unheard by human ears are in it, and
+much that is unknown to us. Its long roving ways invite a man to the
+space in which life is shaped and perpetuated, invite him, in a sense,
+to where he is unable to go, where nothing is promised; but it is human
+perception and realization that it brings out, not security, a man’s
+coming at the size of the natural realm with its unceasing winds, where
+the birds fly in with a grace and concordance that he will find he
+knows, by virtue of a primal inheritance.
+
+Life has particular, even narrow, definitions, like those distinct
+levels of the beach to which different species are adapted. Plants and
+animals that live in the sand, on the cliff tops, or on the ocean floor
+beyond the surf, have been responding in the same way for millions of
+years. All this is well known to natural science. In fact, to make too
+many ignorant and loose generalities about it is probably an offense
+to the circumstances; but together with precise conditions goes a vast
+scope, a space, and a speed like the overworld racing of the ocean
+tide. The beach and its sands, the waves that cut them away or build
+them up, its long roaming, and its give and take with respect to the
+sea, involves a balance that cannot be separated from the globe itself,
+with an age and a future where time is nearly lost. Seaweed, crabs,
+shells, fish, or birds are all ancient, exact, and well defined. (It
+may take hundreds of thousands of years to change the shape of a head
+or a claw.) They are also part of a motion which is not changed into
+a machine by being called perpetual. In any case, each form, through
+the countless passages of light and dark, was endowed with a joyful
+resistance to finality.
+
+Within the shifting landscape of the sea beach all action, each
+affinity, and each response, seems controlled and at the same time
+free and exemplary. The elements agree in making the junctures of
+light unparalleled. Here are the eternal crossways of tides, wind, and
+sunlight, full of an indefinite potentiality that comes more clear to
+human eyes because of their lack of obstruction. I think of one area
+in particular which combines this wide range of view with conflict and
+meeting more than most. Where the great beach has its last break at
+Chatham, before the long sandy island, or sandspit, of Monomoy, the
+tide races through and behind it into Chatham Harbor, and toward the
+west it flows between Morris Island and Monomoy into Nantucket Sound.
+There is so much intermingling of currents and tides, so many effects
+of sky light and clouds and direct sunlight spreading over this area,
+together with sea smells and varying winds, as to give it an effect of
+constant remaking and realliance. From the Morris Island shore the surf
+shows up in the distance above the long low barrier of the Outer Beach
+like a mirage of waves and when the north wind flings back spray on
+their crests they might be great dolphins plunging forward through the
+sea. The cloud masses shift and change, tall in the spring or autumn
+sky, over sand and long stretches of green and blue water.
+
+Morris Island’s sandy, wind-punished shores are full of dead oak and
+pine, the oak still standing in many places stripped of its bark,
+a slick stonelike gray, and the ground is covered with a tangle of
+thickets and beach-grass perimeters all leading to a rim of salt-marsh
+grasses that joins with sandbars and tidal flats beyond. Through spring
+and summer and during the early fall when the shore birds have not yet
+migrated, shoals and bars and flats are covered at low or half tide
+not only with shifting light over shallow waters but a silvery crying.
+Wind, foghorns, gulls screaming, shore birds piping, sometimes the
+faint or bell-like notes of inland birds, planes, perhaps an occasional
+ship’s bell heard or imagined, all sound through the seasons.
+
+During the winter the channels provide some shelter and feeding grounds
+for ducks and of course the gulls station themselves here and fly up at
+all times. This point where the tides turn a corner is a contrast in
+force and influence. There is the rolling and tossing of the open ocean
+not far away; local waters are agitated by the wind, colored by sun and
+sky, and always running in or out along the shore; there is a tidal rip
+in one area where currents meet; a great rushing tidal stream at one
+place, calm, easing waters in another. Within the framework of tides
+and storms water changes the shape and volume of the sand as it does
+along the Outer Shore. There is a holding, a circling as the Atlantic
+waters meet and turn. The earth seems to toss with all their rhythmic
+interplay. Flying or flying sounds are in the hands of oceanic light
+and surprise. There is a special tension in things that responds to a
+great order and sway.
+
+Whatever animals come here to subsist, or migrate through, have an
+alliance with this energy, a tidal intensity of their own, taking part
+in all the contrasts and conflicts of the environment. During the late
+spring for example, you walk from a relative silence on the Morris
+Island shore to wide breath and sound a hundred yards away. When the
+birds are nesting leafy tangles and trees collaborate with them in
+their concealment. Singing has died down. There are only occasional
+calls from small birds half-hidden in the leaves, flying from one
+protected spot to another, and now and then the nestlings make squeaky
+or rasping little cries in the demands of hunger, but just beyond them
+the sky is open and bright with action, and there is no need to hide.
+
+In spring and summer the terns are in constant bright evidence over the
+open water and the sands. The woodpeckers and the sparrows stay with
+trees or grasses; the terns are birds of the ocean airs and long white
+shores, their complement and grace. Thousands of terns nest at Tern
+Island, on the shore of Chatham Harbor, and through the summer months
+and early fall there are always a great many off Morris Island and
+Monomoy, diving for fish. They are sharply made, lithe fliers with a
+nervous excitability that is peculiar to them. Flocks will hover over a
+stretch of tidal water where schools of small fish are running and they
+will fairly batter the water, making a loud sound like paddle wheels
+as they cover it with points of spray. Hundreds, crying harshly, hover
+some five or six feet up, dropping and rising continually. Many of them
+dip forward with wings folded slightly, but others, a little higher
+up, make steeper dives, hovering against the wind, their wings beating
+hard, to drop, twisting slightly, and then dive with wings back and
+head down, sharply and precisely. I have thought that terns seldom miss
+when they have a fish in sight, but during this kind of mass fishing,
+particularly when they dip forward as if to pick the fish up and try
+again, it does look like a matter of trial and error. Also, depending
+on the season, there may be a number of immature birds in the flock
+that are not as skillful as their elders.
+
+The terns are expert performers in every way. They are small and light
+with strong, angled wings that can carry them over thousands of miles.
+They have range, persistence, a bright balance that carries them
+through the mighty and punishing wilderness in which they live. At the
+same time, that lovely harsh crying excellence in the form of a tern is
+fragile, even ephemeral. Terns, in the early period of their lives at
+least, are expendable, like fish. Common terns especially have large
+breeding colonies that are extremely vulnerable to human encroachment
+as well as rats, cats, dogs, skunks, and other marauders, and they
+definitely need protection. Their existence as a race is hazardous
+under the best of conditions. The sandy islands or peninsulas which
+they use for nesting sites may be flooded by storm tides in the spring,
+destroying thousands of eggs or young birds. An adult tern might live
+to between fifteen and twenty years of age, although their annual
+mortality is 23 per cent, and their chance of reaching adulthood is
+fairly slim, tern mortality in the first year being about 92 per cent.
+
+The hard statistics make short lives of many species, while the sun and
+sea keep their steady and infinite relationship. There is a quality
+of sacrifice in all life. Nothing is spared in its duration, and at
+the same time in the uniqueness of its making, as the fires burn. The
+results of evolution may seem haphazard in many respects, and the
+processes of nature to involve enormous waste; but natural continuity
+holds all things in high honor, through the fine balances of life and
+death. The forms of fish or tern, with their own transmutations of
+energy, are as excellent as they are perishable.
+
+The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling calm during
+the burning days of summer and early fall. They lift into marshy shores
+and over sandy flats, and then subside. Sometimes the fog comes on in
+the afternoon and the deep foghorn groans through sheets of silver
+under the wind, a low curtain moving on and parting slightly here and
+there, the sunlight showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over
+the flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly
+with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward. Small
+fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There is an
+over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional “huh, huh”
+from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts with the breath
+of wind over water.
+
+Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing gulls
+with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk, stand off in
+the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed plovers run hurriedly
+forward over the sands and through the shallows. A yellowlegs, tall
+and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes along an edge of the shore.
+Black-bellied plovers, big-headed, short-billed, stocky by comparison,
+trot through the waters, standing up straight at intervals, while the
+yellowlegs suddenly races back and forth on its hunt for food, turning
+back on its shadow. These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed,
+crying out, the black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own.
+
+Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling fogs;
+burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds over the rim of
+the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and pink and pearly
+across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly glittering diamonds over
+the water. Light and water and wings flow in and flow past, the motion
+of ages, all actions being synchronized, as the hovering and diving
+of the tern is synchronized with the fish it catches, part of the
+indefinite combinations of things in a universe of motion. Over these
+waters and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops,
+and starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at
+all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed or
+merely moving at random.
+
+They are all elements in a great exchange--this ardor and play of one
+instant in time, an instant that is equal in importance to all others.
+I stand here at the apex of one day. Here out of a thousand years is
+another advent, another chance for action, another use for sight, in
+the beautiful agreement of all contrary, separate, and divided things.
+
+I remember one evening at Morris Island in the latter part of August,
+with the day beginning to fall and the surf’s dull roar sounding from
+the sands of the great beach, a beach behind me, still beyond me,
+still in a sense not walked. The tide started to ebb, flicking lightly
+against the shore, lapsing with the evening as if the sea had an easy
+courtesy of its own, and with the smoky sunset low on the western sky,
+the waters moved out over gray sands. There was a perfect symmetry to
+the evening. Terns flew over, light, airy, floating with a swallow’s
+beat, but deep, sure, and strong. Little sanderlings and red-backed
+sandpipers, half-seen in the dusk, ran through reflections in the
+shallow waters at the edge of the tide, part of its coolness and flow,
+the little waves in banked rows rippling. The birds tripped forward and
+dipped to the mirrored salmon, copper and crystal in these waters, in
+a communication. The terns trilled harshly and sometimes their bodies
+trembled as they beat up against the light wind and changed position.
+A single herring gull stood still on a hummock at the tide’s edge like
+an Indian in a ritualistic acceptance of darkness coming on. The order
+of change and constancy began to take light’s fire and warmth and its
+colors away, in the graduated motion of the sky, along with all flying
+elements like the terns, like thought, and the unimagined combinations
+of being. The wavelets edged out. The sanderlings started to flit off
+and disappear. Finally there was no turning back the authority of night.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes
+
+ Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+
+ Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
+
+ Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75895 ***
diff --git a/75895-h/75895-h.htm b/75895-h/75895-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2201df2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/75895-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,4790 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      The Great Beach | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+    h1,h2 {
+    text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .51em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: .49em;
+}
+
+hr {
+    width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    margin-left: 33.5%;
+    margin-right: 33.5%;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.tb   {width: 45%; margin-left: 27.5%; margin-right: 27.5%;}
+hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;}
+@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} }
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
+h2.nobreak  {page-break-before: avoid;}
+
+table {
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    border-collapse: collapse;
+}
+
+table.autotable    { border-collapse: collapse; }
+table.autotable td { padding: 0.25em; }
+
+
+.tdl      {text-align: left;}
+.tdr      {text-align: right;}
+.tdc      {text-align: center;}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: small;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    font-variant: normal;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.blockquot {
+    margin-left: 5%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+.center   {text-align: center;}
+
+.centerbold {text-align: center; font-weight: bold;}
+
+.allsmcap {font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;}
+
+img {
+    max-width: 100%;
+    height: auto;
+}
+img.w100 {width: 100%;}
+
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+    page-break-inside: avoid;
+    max-width: 100%;
+}
+
+.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
+    color: black;
+    font-size:small;
+    padding:0.5em;
+    margin-bottom:5em;
+    font-family:sans-serif, serif;
+}
+
+.illowp40 {width: 40%;}
+.illowp45 {width: 45%;}
+.illowp48 {width: 48%;}
+.illowp94 {width: 94%;}
+
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75895 ***</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</span></p>
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="i000_frontis" style="max-width: 153.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i000_frontis.jpg" alt="Sand dune and beach">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The<br>
+Great<br>
+Beach
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Books_by_John_Hay">Books by John Hay:</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="allsmcap">A PRIVATE HISTORY</span><br>
+<span class="allsmcap">THE RUN</span><br>
+<span class="allsmcap">NATURE’S YEAR</span><br>
+<span class="allsmcap">A SENSE OF NATURE</span> (with Arline Strong)<br>
+<span class="allsmcap">THE GREAT BEACH</span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</span></p>
+
+<h1>The<br>
+Great<br>
+Beach</h1>
+
+<p class="centerbold">JOHN HAY</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">Doubleday &amp; Company, Inc.<br>
+Garden City, New York<br>
+1963
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-18198<br>
+Copyright © 1963 by John Hay<br>
+All Rights Reserved<br>
+Printed in the United States of America<br>
+First Edition
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">To Conrad and Mary Aiken<br>
+Henry and Gertrude Kittredge
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</span></p><h2 class="nobreak" id="Foreword">Foreword</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>I suppose that anyone writing another book about Cape
+Cod can be convicted of temerity, in the face of such predecessors
+as the three Henrys—Thoreau, Beston, and Kittredge—as well as
+Dr. Wyman Richardson. However, each to his own eye. I write
+about the Cape because of the circumstances of living there, long
+enough to have begun to learn a little about it; also, the coast is
+long and the sea will not stop with the outer beach. All Americans
+who not only love nature but stand in awe of it will be
+more and more hard put to explain their reasons, as we crowd
+our magnificent land and diminish it in proportion to the size
+of our demands. In <i>The Great Beach</i> are some of my reasons.</p>
+
+<p>I am grateful to Dr. Alfred C. Redfield, Dr. John M. Zeigler,
+Mr. Joseph Chace, Dr. Loren C. Petry, Dr. Howard L. Sanders,
+and Dr. Ransom Somers for various assistance during the writing
+of this book, and hope they will not have any serious objections
+to the way I have used such information as they may have given
+me. This book also owes a great deal to the discerning and
+useful criticisms made by Richard K. Winslow, of Doubleday.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Contents">Contents</h2>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdc">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><i><a href="#Foreword">Foreword</a></i></td>
+<td class="tdr">vii</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">I</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#I">From a Distance</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">1</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">II</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#II">An Unimagined Frontier</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">8</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">III</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#III">The Resources of the Sea</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">18</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IV</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#IV">A Rhythmic Shore</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">26</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">V</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#V">Dune Country</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">35</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VI</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#VI">A Change in History</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">46</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VII</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#VII">Barren Grounds</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">56</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VIII</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#VIII">A Landscape in Motion</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">63</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IX</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#IX">Who Owns the Beach?</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">76</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">X</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#X">Deer Week</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">87</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XI</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#XI">Impermanence Takes Its Stand</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">93</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XII</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#XII">The Depths of Sight</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">99</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIII</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#XIII">The Flight of Birds</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">107</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIV</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#XIV">The Marsh</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">116</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XV</td>
+<td class="tdc">--</td>
+<td class="tdl"><a href="#XV">The Uses of Light</a></td>
+<td class="tdr">124</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</span></p>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The<br>
+Great<br>
+Beach
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">From a Distance</p>
+
+
+<p>The Pilgrims who reached Cape Cod in 1620 had heard
+of it before. It got its name in 1602 and had been touched on by
+European seamen at least a century before that, and so when
+the Pilgrims “... fell in with that land which is called Cape
+Cod; the which being made and certainly known to be it, they
+were not a little joyful.”</p>
+
+<p>Their coming had taken a long time, and they had passed over
+“a tedious and dreadful” sea; but as Bradford’s history relates it
+further: “... they now had no friends to welcome them, nor
+inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no
+houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”</p>
+
+<p>“And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye
+winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and
+subject to cruell and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known
+places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what
+could they see but a hideous wilderness, full of wild beasts and
+wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they
+knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to ye top of
+Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to
+feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes
+(save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or
+content in respect of outward objects. For summer being done,
+all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>
+whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild
+and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty
+ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main barrier
+and gulf to separate them from the civil parts of the world.”</p>
+
+<p>Now, nearly 350 years later, that lone land reaching out into
+the mighty ocean seems to be full of the “solace and content with
+respect to outward objects” which the Pilgrims lacked. Roads,
+gas stations, shopping centers, and a continually increasing number
+of houses, proclaim it as human territory, another populated
+home ground from which we have to go far to be separated from
+civilization. The simple, raw existence which the Pilgrims not
+only endured but anticipated has been replaced by a world of
+goods, which is not to say that we do not have to have a fortitude
+of our own, made inevitable, in great measure, by the very abundance
+we have achieved.</p>
+
+<p>The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general
+outline as it is now, although the original woodland has been
+cut down, or burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees,
+much of the topsoil has eroded and blown away, and the shore
+line altered in the course of natural change. Superficially at
+least, it has been tamed, and in most areas the primal, unknown
+wildness is hard to imagine. The last thing you would expect
+to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a Cape Cod beach
+would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one, wilderness
+being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the
+effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both
+by its vastness and the difference between water and air, could
+answer the description, and also the sands that define its limits.</p>
+
+<p>Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the
+tip of the Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island
+is not undiscovered country. Many men have walked it. Planes
+skim over it in no time at all, and the beach buggies bruise it
+with impunity. Still, the marks we make on it are all erased in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
+time. The sea and sand insist on their own art. The beach is in
+a continuous state of remaking and invites discovery. It was first
+called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David Thoreau. Otherwise
+it has been known for a long time as the Outer Beach, the
+Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now it
+forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park—in the
+process of establishment—and is therefore not owned by individuals,
+or the towns in which they reside, but by the people of the
+United States. It is under national protection and possession at
+the same time, so how we approach and treat its future is a very
+great responsibility, which is appropriate enough.</p>
+
+<p>The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to
+America before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most
+travelers it means the end of a highway, a place of summer
+sands. It is in fact one end of a whole continent of roads, of
+communications, of the vast and intricate business of human
+passage. In a sense it used to be the other way around. With all
+the known parts of the civilized world behind them, the Pilgrims
+found in this beach not an end but a beginning, whatever it
+might entail, and that of course, is why they went there.</p>
+
+<p>This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the
+“tedious and dreadful” highway of the sea—city dwellers, road,
+rocket, car, and plane makers that we are—to the extent that we
+too may find it again for the first time. The beach, lying by the
+sea and sea invested, is always ready for a new kind of attention
+in a new world. That is the nature of the place. Cape Cod itself,
+now and ultimately, is at the disposition of the sea rather than
+human enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>The Cape is a narrow peninsula, a little terminal arm jutting
+out in to the Atlantic, constructed of loose material left by the
+last glacier some 20,000 years ago. Its upper part, starting beyond
+High Head at Truro and forming the Provincetown hook,
+or hood, is of recent origin. It lacks the cliffs that stand over the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
+beach from a mile or so north of Highland Light to as far as the
+Nauset Coast Guard Beach at Eastham, and for the most part
+has a history of deposition and accretion rather than removal.
+It was formed by storms, tides, and currents, piling in sand and
+other materials from the shore to the south, over bars and reefs
+of glacial debris. The sand is still packing up around Race Point,
+as it is also adding to the shore south of Nauset to the tip end of
+Monomoy Island, while storms take it away from other parts of
+the shore line. Within living memory a large island called Billinsgate,
+on which there was a lighthouse and at one time a “Try
+Yard” for whales, disappeared under the surface of Cape Cod
+Bay. It now appears as a shoal at low tide and is otherwise covered
+over by water, although the rocky lighthouse foundations
+still show above the surface in all but the highest tides. On the
+Bay side the shore line has been filled in in some areas, while
+it has receded in others, revealing for example, the bones of
+horses and cows in the bank at the head of a beach, which were
+once presumably, some distance behind it. Many a cottage owner
+after a storm has found his living-room floor with nothing below
+it but the tide.</p>
+
+<p>Over the centuries great changes have occurred in the nature
+and extent of marshlands, inlets, ponds, estuaries, and beaches.
+No year, or even month, goes by without some alteration in the
+shore line. These changes, not always obvious, sometimes violent
+and immediate, are not such as to threaten the physical existence
+of Cape Cod for many thousands of years to come, but they are
+of the kind that accentuate its close relationship to water and
+tides and weather. As the map makers are well aware, it is not a
+static piece of land. It moves.</p>
+
+<p>The trunk of the Cape starts out from the mainland and then
+that slender curving arm juts up and out into the water with a
+kind of brave assertion beyond the continental limits; but it is
+the shape and sweep of waves and sands, of molding and at the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
+same time of pulling away that strikes you most about it, as if it
+were a conception to be made or discarded, standing out in its
+trial. The whole physical earth, in spite of its apparent constancies,
+its orbital speed, the speed of light, the regularity of
+the tides, the fine, exact balances to life, is subject to rhythmic
+change, or in a deeper sense, to re-creation.</p>
+
+<p>From 20,000 feet up, Cape Cod looks very much as it does
+on topographic maps, its heights and depths eliminated, a flat
+level land of sandy margins and wide green patches emerging
+out of the sea. In fact, with all its glacial lakes and ponds—between
+three and four hundred in number—its streams, marshes,
+bays, coves, and inlets, it might seem to consist as much of water
+as of earth. On a clear day at a lower altitude, skirting or passing
+over the shore line, you can see configurations of sand, the slopes
+and curves of the shoals, the white swirls and scallops under
+water made by currents and tides. The sea sparkles, and explodes
+with light where the sun strikes it directly. The spilling
+waves make small white accents along the shore. Tilting in the
+heights, you get a sense of mobility on a great scale. All the
+close, pressing impressions of locality are replaced by the roving
+of the waters, the islands of the mapped world floating there,
+the height and weight and emptiness of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>However far their ageless impunity may reach, the world’s
+argument is that Cape Cod and its Outer Beach are under human
+guidance, surveillance, and authority. Those who come
+there bring their own distance with them. If we are not yet
+world-minded, we are world engaged. This is not a cast-off, self-sufficient
+countryside any longer, and it has lost most, if not all,
+of the look of a bleak, cut-over, and yet habitable seaside land
+that it had in the nineteenth century, when the inhabitants still
+depended on the sea for their livelihood, when you could smell
+the fish and hear the sermons on its shores.</p>
+
+<p>An estimated 300,000 people visit the Cape during the summer,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>
+or even more, depending on the tides of economy and
+change, but after they have gone there are 80,000 year-round
+residents left, with more to be expected in the future. So, in spite
+of its stretches of comparatively uninhabited sands and its
+wooded areas, the Cape is caught up in the human scheme of
+things, and we can hardly avoid looking at it with modern eyes,
+for good or ill. We own it, and that is the way we are inclined
+to see it, not for its sake but ours. All roads lead to a Cape Cod
+beach, or to Los Angeles, or Yellowstone. Every place is invested
+with human importunity, and the crowd will tell you where you
+are.</p>
+
+<p>Drive down any of the great concrete highways of the nation
+in the heat of the summer along with thousands, or millions,
+through a landscape whose scale affected our ideas of size to
+begin with, and you realize that Americans have an affinity for
+distance—which is also a capacity for laying the distance bare.
+We have learned this from our continent. We have learned how
+to exploit, turning the native, active riches of a great land into
+passive objects of our will, and we have taken a greatness from
+it for our own. While we have transformed our surroundings, we
+ourselves have been transformed without being altogether aware
+of the debt we owe.</p>
+
+<p>Abstracted, in the summer months especially, to the terms of
+the contemporary world, some of Cape Cod’s more crowded areas
+have a familiar, continental look. They are covered with asphalt,
+cars, motels, cheap housing, shops full of grotesque souvenirs
+with no relation to the place they serve, and they amount, when
+you come right down to it, to receiving grounds for power, made
+by a conquering civilization. Will it be the same on the moon?
+The great scale is in us, the effort and the risk of desolation.</p>
+
+<p>The beach’s openness is nearly filled with bodies, lying everywhere,
+or sitting, talking, absorbing the sun, or dashing suddenly
+into the relatively cold water, shouting, jumping, and splashing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
+there, and then returning, flesh in warmth and radiance, performing
+the blessed ritual of doing nothing.</p>
+
+<p>This hot surface, this wide open brilliance of sand, water,
+and sky is a summertime release for those in want. We claim
+it, and fill it with human demands; and yet it keeps its distance,
+resisting our bland assumption of authority.</p>
+
+<p>Clouds like heaps of spun silk float up across the sky. The
+low waves splash along the sands, very lightly to the ear. Surfcasting
+rods are lodged in the sand, leaning out toward the
+water. Offshore, a white tern rises fluttering after a dive into
+the water, and a herring gull, large and deliberate by contrast,
+beats low over the surface. Behind all the crowd and the voices,
+hanging over like the intense and heavy sun, is a stillness, a
+suspension. Perhaps it is the soul of summer, that gives a provision
+of relief for those in want; and if we wait and watch
+there might be more to this beach and sea than what we came
+for. Waiting, in fact, seems to be its essence, since it gives no
+answer to what it is, being a wide, surface brightness, a tidal
+beat, a sounding whose monumental depths are concealed, suggesting
+too, that we might wait for it forever and know nothing.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">An Unimagined Frontier</p>
+
+
+<p>One afternoon in the middle of June I set off from Race
+Point at Provincetown, carrying a pack and sleeping bag, with
+Nauset Light Beach in Eastham, twenty-five miles away, as my
+destination, and my purpose simply to be on the beach, to see
+it and feel it for whatever it turned out to be, since most of my
+previous visits had been of the sporadic hop, skip, and jump kind
+to which our automotivated lives seem to lead us.</p>
+
+<p>The summer turmoil was not yet in full voice but the barkers
+were there on behalf of beach-buggy tours over the dunes, and
+a sight-seeing plane flew by; cars drew up and droned away,
+and families staggered up from the beach with their load of
+towels, shoes, bags, or portable radios. The beach did not contain
+quite the great wealth of paper, cans, bottles, and general garbage
+that it would later on, in July and August, but one of the
+first things to catch my eye as I lunged down on to the sands
+was an electric-light bulb floating in the water, a can of shaving
+soap, the remains of a rubber doll, and a great scattering of sliced
+onions—probably thrown off a fishing boat.</p>
+
+<p>The air was dancing with heat. The sun seemed to have
+the power to glare through all things. With the exception of a
+camper’s tent on the upper part of the beach, and a few isolated
+gray shacks perched on dune tops behind it, there was nothing
+ahead but the wide belt of sand curving around one unseen corner<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
+after another with the flat easing and stretching sea beside
+me. Two boys waved to me from where they were perched high
+up on a dune, and I waved back.</p>
+
+<p>Then I heard an insistent, protesting bird note behind me,
+and a piping plover flew past. It was very pale, and sand colored,
+being a wild personification of the place it lived in. It suddenly
+volplaned down the slope of the beach ahead of me, fluttering,
+half disappearing in holes made by human feet, side-winged,
+edged away, still fluttering, in the direction of the shore line,
+and when it reached the water, satisfied, evidently, that it had
+led me far enough, it flew back. These birds nest on the beach
+above the high-tide line, and like a number of other species, try
+to lead intruders away when they come too close to their eggs
+and young.</p>
+
+<p>With high, grating cries, terns flew over the beach and low
+over the water, occasionally plummeting in after fish. Among
+the larger species, principally common terns, there were some
+least terns—a tiny, dainty version of the “sea swallow,” chasing
+each other back and forth. They have the graceful, sharply defined
+bodies and deep wingbeat of the other terns, but in their
+littleness and excitability they seem to show a kind of baby anger.</p>
+
+<p>Also there were tree swallows gathering and perching on the
+hot, glittering sand, and on smooth gray driftwood just below
+the dunes. It was a band of them, adults, and young hatched
+during the early spring, chittering and shining with their brilliant
+blue-green backs and white bellies.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to me that out of these birds—my unwilling or indifferent
+companions—came a protest, the protest of a desert
+in its beauty, an ancient sea land claiming its rarity, with these
+rare inhabitants, each with its definition and assertion, each
+having the color and precision of life and place, out of an unknown
+depth of devising.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the beach at Provincetown and Truro are eight square<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>
+miles of dunes, making a great series of dips and pockets, innumerable
+smooth scourings, hollows within wide hollows.
+Standing below their rims are hills, mounds, and cones, chiseled
+by the wind, sometimes flattened on the top like mesas. These
+dunes give an effect of motion, rolling, dipping, roving, dropping
+down and curving up like sea surfaces offshore. When I
+climbed the bank to see them I heard the clear, accomplished
+notes of a song sparrow. There were banks of rugosa roses in
+bloom, with white or pink flowers sending off a lovely scent, and
+the dunes were patched with the new green of beach grass, bayberry,
+and beach plum, many of the shrubs looking clipped and
+rounded, held down by wind and salt spray. The purple and
+pink flowers of the beach pea, with purselike petals, were in
+bloom too, contrasting with dusty miller with leaf surfaces like
+felt, a soft, clear grayish-green. Down at the bottom of the hollows
+the light and wind catching heads of bunch grass, pinkish
+and brown, waved continually; and the open sandy slopes were
+swept as by a free hand with curving lines and striations.</p>
+
+<p>A mile or so at sea, over the serene flatness of the waters, a
+fishing boat moved very slowly by. I started down the beach
+again, following another swallow that was twisting and dipping
+in leafy flight along the upper edge of the beach. On the tide
+line slippery green sea lettuce began to glimmer as if it had an
+inner fire, reflecting the evening sun. I stopped somewhere a
+mile or two north of Highland Light in Truro, built a small fire
+of driftwood to heat up a can of food, and watched a bar appearing
+above the water as the tide ebbed. Low white waves conflicted
+and ran across a dome of sand, occasionally bursting up like
+hidden geysers.</p>
+
+<p>The terns were still crying and diving as the sun’s metal
+light, slanting along the shore, began to turn a soft yellow, to
+spread and bloom. They hurried back and forth, as if to make<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>
+use of the time left them, and fell sharply like stones into the
+shimmering road of light that led across the water.</p>
+
+<p>Where I live on the upper Cape, that part of it which lies
+between the Cape Cod canal and Orleans, the land heads out
+directly to the sea, toward the east from the continental west.
+Cape Cod Bay lies to the north and Nantucket Sound to the
+south. The arm of the lower Cape turns in the Orleans area and
+heads up on a north-south axis, the head of it, or hand if you
+like, curving around so that the sandy barrens in the Provincetown
+area are oriented in an east to west direction again. I am
+used to looking toward Kansas to see the setting sun, and from
+the curving shore line at Truro I had the illusion that it was
+setting in the north and that when it rose the next morning it
+appeared to be located not very far from where it set, a matter
+of ninety or a hundred degrees. In fact it does set closer to the
+north at this time of year, and along the flat ocean horizon this
+becomes more clear to the eye, as well as its relative position at
+dawn and its arc during the day. On the open beach in spring
+and summer you are not only at the sun’s mercy in a real sense,
+but you are also under wider skies. In the comparative isolation
+of the beach, which is convex, slanting steeply toward the water,
+and therefore hides its distances, I felt reoriented, turned out
+and around through no effort of my own, and faced in many
+possible directions.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly before sundown a beach buggy, curtains at its windows
+and a dory attached, lumbered slowly down some preordained
+ruts in the sand, and then a smaller one passed by at the
+top of the low dunes behind me. Fishing poles were slung along
+the outside of both machines. It was getting to be a good time
+to cast for striped bass.</p>
+
+<p>I sat on the sands and listened to the sonorous heave and
+splash of low waves. The sun, like a colossal red balloon filled
+with water, was sinking in to the horizon. It swelled, flattened,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+and disappeared with a final rapidity, leaving a foaming, fiery
+band behind it. I suddenly heard the wild, trembling cry of a
+loon behind me, and then saw it fly over, heading north. The
+wind grew cool, after a hot day when the light shone on metallic,
+glittering slow waters, and sharp, pointed beach grasses clicked
+together, while I watched the darkness falling around me.</p>
+
+<p>A small seaplane flew by at low altitude, parallel to the shore.
+A sliver of a moon appeared and then a star; and then single
+lights began to shine on the horizon, while from the direction
+of Highland Light an arm of light shot up and swung around.
+A fishing boat passed slowly by with a light at its masthead and
+two—port and starboard—at its stern. A few night-flying moths
+fluttered near me. The sky began to be massive with its stars. I
+thought of night’s legitimacies now appearing, the natural claim
+of all these single lights on darkness, and then, making my bed
+in a hollow just above the beach, I lowered down into infinity,
+waking up at about one o’clock in the morning to the sound
+of shouting, a strange direct interruption to the night. It was
+the loud implacable voice of the human animal, something very
+wild in itself, filling the emptiness.</p>
+
+<p>“For Chrisake bring her higher up! I can’t have her dig in
+that way.” The tide had come in and someone was having trouble
+maneuvering his beach buggy along the thin strip of sand
+now available.</p>
+
+<p>The light of dawn opened my eyes again before the sun showed
+red on the horizon, and I first saw the tiny drops of dew on tips
+and stems of beach grass that surrounded me. A sparrow sang, and
+then, somewhere behind the dunes, a prairie warbler with sweet
+notes on an ascending scale.</p>
+
+<p>When I started walking again I caught sight of a young fox.
+Its fur was still soft and woolly and its gait had a cub’s limpness
+where it moved along the upper edge of the beach. I wished the
+young one well, though I suspected it might have an uncomfortable
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>life. In spite of an excessive population of rabbits, and their
+role in keeping it down, foxes have not been too highly regarded
+on the Cape. In recent years they seem to have been a skinny
+and somewhat dilapidated bunch for the most part, suffering
+from parasitic skin diseases, and ticks in season. I once saw a
+fox out on an asphalt road sliding along on his chin and side,
+shoving and dragging himself in such a frantic way that I began
+to feel very itchy myself. I have heard them referred to in scornful
+way as “spoilers,” fond of scavenging and rolling in dead meat.
+In other words, they are smelly, diseased and, to add another
+epithet “tricky,” not to be trusted.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this cub exploring an early morning on the sands had a
+future, however limited, and I remembered the lively trot of
+foxes when they are in good health, and their intelligence and
+curiosity, and simply their right to whatever special joys they
+might inherit.</p>
+
+<p>I carried a pair of field glasses with me, along with the somewhat
+thoughtlessly assembled equipment I wore on my back and
+which seemed increasingly heavy as time went on. When not too
+conscious of my burden I would use the glasses to bring an inland
+or offshore bird closer to me. I noticed five eider ducks across
+the troughs of the waves, a remnant of the thousands that winter
+off the Cape along with such other sea birds as brant, Canada
+geese, scoters, mergansers, old squaws, and various members of
+the auk family. I passed a dead gannet lying on the sand. It had
+been badly oiled, reminding me of the hazards of jettisoned
+tanker or freighter oil to all these water birds which land on
+the sea to rest or feed.</p>
+
+<p>There were a number of kingbirds on the dune rims, and they
+kept dropping down over the beach in their special way, to
+hover with fast wingbeat and flutter after flying insects. I heard
+the grating call of redwings, indicating marshy areas inland of
+the beach, but the cliffs above began to increase until they were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
+100 to 150 feet high or more, and the sun was so fierce that I
+had little interest in trying to scale them to see what was on the
+other side.</p>
+
+<p>I plodded on, noticing very little after a while, my attention
+blunted, reduced to seeing that one foot got in front of the other.
+The more level upper parts of the beach provided fairly good
+walking, but the sand was soft, and to relieve my aching muscles
+I would then angle down to the water’s edge where it was firmer,
+and there I was obliged to walk with one leg below the other
+because of the inclination of the beach. So I would return to the
+upper beach again and push ahead. I walked on, very hot and
+slow, seeing no one for miles until I came up to a group of
+bathers below a road and parking lot giving access to the beach,
+of the kind that are scattered along its reaches; and there I refilled
+my canteen at a cottage and went on.</p>
+
+<p>I found that if I rested too long during this hike I had little
+desire to go on again, so I confined myself to an army “break”
+of ten minutes every hour. Renewed walking unlimbered me a
+little and the wind off the water cooled my sweating skin. I
+listened to the sound of the waves. In addition to their rhythmic
+plunge and splash, their breathing, they clashed occasionally
+with a sound like the breaking of heavy glass, the falling of timber,
+or a load of bricks.</p>
+
+<p>I passed what was left of two shipwrecks during the day, a
+reminder of the dangers that still face ships along this coast
+with its fogs, its shifting winds, its storms, the hidden, treacherous
+offshore bars. The sands often reveal the timbers of old ships.
+One day their ribs, sodden and dark, barnacle encrusted, may
+reach up out of oblivion, and not long after that the water buries
+them under tons of sand. From them a local history calls out for
+recognition. Thousands of ships over three centuries wrecked
+on shoals, engulfed by violent seas, men with the dark of doom<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+in them, to drown or to survive, and only a few timbers left to
+declare the ultimate dangers and their terror.</p>
+
+<p>I was not in Death Valley, or on a raft at sea. My walk was
+not unusually long, and I could leave the beach if I had to, but
+the enormity of the area filled me more and more. It had so
+much in it that was without recourse. Its emptiness, the great
+tidal range beyond it and through it, the raw heartbeat of the
+waves, the implacable sun, established the kind of isolation and
+helplessness in me which the commerce and community of our
+lives tries so hard to disguise. Even the birds, I began to think,
+were more secure than I. They had their strong bright threads of
+cognizance to the areas they came to, the water, the sands, the
+marsh. They were fixed in entity and grace, eating what was
+theirs by evolution to be eaten, using land and air in the ways
+that had come to them, knowing this place and all places like it
+in terms of its bounds and boundlessness, meeting its naked eye
+in the ways they had been sent to do.</p>
+
+<p>I started off in the morning admiring the brilliance of the sun,
+the small shadows from the dunes and across the beach, through
+driftwood, isolated beach plants and tidal wrack, with the wide
+flooding of light ahead and the variation in reflected light across
+the sea. I felt the sea moving quietly beside me. The waves
+heaved and sighed and spray was tossed lightly above the sand.
+Everything was continuous, untroubled, and deliberate; but as
+the day wore on the sun became my enemy, and I had very little
+rage or resource in me to fight it with. I was not fitted to environmental
+stability, like a bird, or fox or fish. I found myself in
+an area of whose reaches I had never been wholly aware, and
+in me there was no mastery. The sun was not only hostile. It was
+an ultimate, an impossibility; and the waters beside me began
+to deepen from their pleasant daytime sparkle and freshness
+into an incalculable realm which I had hardly entered. I was
+touching on an unimagined frontier.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
+
+<p>I spent my second night on the beach a few miles from Nauset
+Light where I left it the following morning. It was in the
+South Wellfleet area, and as I started to sleep on the sand a little
+above the high-tide line, I remembered that this was about the
+same place where a fishing boat had been wrecked two years
+before and two men drowned. I had seen the boat, with its cargo
+of fish, and some of the men’s clothing strewn along the shore,
+and I had heard a little about the depths of their ordeal. Their
+story haunted me; and then I began to feel that I might be
+caught by the tide while I was asleep. There were only about
+twelve feet between the bottom of a steep cliff and the high-tide
+line. I would soon be lying on a narrow shelf at the sea’s
+edge. So as the vague thought of being engulfed began to invade
+me, I took up my pack and sleeping bag again, retraced
+my steps down the beach, and found a way to the top of the
+cliff, where I spent the night in another hollow.</p>
+
+<p>The light of dawn, lifting quickly out of the sea, flooding into
+the range of low-lying land, woke me up again, and it signaled
+to the birds, who started singing in all the thickets and heath
+around me with a sweet, high, shrill intensity, a kind of automatic
+worship; and after a while they quieted down again.</p>
+
+<p>Little dirt roads dropped back from headlands through green
+slopes covered with bearberry and patches of yellow-flowered
+Hudsonia, or “poverty grass,” and there were hollows dipping
+back inland, and woods of stunted pitch pine. From the top of
+the cliff I watched the sun starting to send light running across
+the blue table of the sea, making it glitter and move. The intensity
+of light and heat began to grow steadily as I walked down
+the beach again for the last stretch toward Nauset.</p>
+
+<p>The beach is not so very far from where I live, or for that
+matter where anyone lives on the Cape. It is a few miles down
+the road, beyond the trees; and yet when I came back from my
+walk I felt as if I had been at enormous remove from my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+surroundings, caught out where I might have feared to be. The long
+line of sand and surf, the intensity of the sun, the cover of stars
+had come close enough to put me in council with that which had
+no answers. I was in awe of nature; and I understood that the
+sun and sea could be our implacable enemies. It was in this
+context that I saw our human world as subject to a stature that
+it never made.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The Resources of the Sea</p>
+
+
+<p>Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color,
+shadows, sound, substance, novelty in great detail, invade the
+smallest areas. One flower may attract many species of insects,
+brilliantly patterned and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating,
+gathering pollen, in any number of arresting ways, and the
+growth of plants around you, the shape of leaves, the general
+stir of things comes running like a carnival.</p>
+
+<p>On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling,
+moving slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of
+the green surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead;
+the wind flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an
+occasional dead skate or dogfish comes to your attention as you
+walk on. A black crow pecks at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling
+flits by. You notice a finger sponge attached to a large mussel or
+a sea scallop, broken loose and washed in from offshore beds, and
+that seems to be all, in a relatively empty world; but between
+these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a bird or bird track,
+a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space.</p>
+
+<p>The sea and its shores are still not caught, still relatively immune
+to human claims. Fill them with knowledge and with
+crowds and they still escape us, outrunning us like the sunlight
+on the water. Specifically, this age which is able to measure
+everything but mystery, might tell you just how capacious the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+oceans are. They comprise two thirds of the earth’s surface; they
+have a close relationship to the atmosphere and are in large
+measure responsible for our weather; and we know, with the
+assurance of conquerors, that if all else fails we may be able to
+save the human race from dying of thirst and starvation by extracting
+water and food from them, providing our atomic wastes
+do not prohibit it. We are also learning how to mine the ocean
+floors for their minerals, how to harness the tides, and how to
+use their depths for concealment.</p>
+
+<p>Oceanography is one of the great modern sciences and it has
+revealed mountains, rifts, plains, and canyons on a scale that
+would astonish us if we saw them on earth, as it has also brought
+us more knowledge of marine animals at all depths. It has made
+great contributions to the restless modern mind. How can we
+look at the sea without at some time thinking of our earth’s
+submerged geology, gigantic, uneroded by wind, sun, or rain, in
+calm waters inhabited by strange aquatic lives?</p>
+
+<p>Strange is still the word for them. No amount of assessment
+of the sea’s contents quite translates them for us. What, for example,
+is a fish? What is that flat creature the skate lying there
+on the sand, with its tough hide and the small slit of a mouth on
+the same side as its belly?</p>
+
+<p>There is an aquarium at Woods Hole with a collection of
+many of the kinds of fish that inhabit the waters off Cape Cod.
+They seem foreign, weird, almost unexampled when you see
+them in their captured state. I saw a woman standing in front
+of one of the windows looking at some toadfish, little fat animals
+with great mouths, squat, with round-edged fleshy fins that gave
+the appearance of warts and knobs, expertly camouflaged in
+varied patterns so that they can at once sink in and become a
+part of the bottom: “Oh!” she cried. “Horrible!”</p>
+
+<p>All the others there become more than the term “fish” when
+you see them suspended behind glass, floating in their own world<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
+of water, strangers in the perfection of their own remoteness.
+Their dull jaws open and close as they breathe. Their filmy,
+diaphanous fins wave lightly and loosely. Their flicking eyes
+pass you by, with a kind of self-enclosed abstractness, a stiffness,
+as if they had not seen you at all, and no doubt the blurred
+human form means very little to them. The glass separates the
+world of water from the world of air. Their bodies curve deliberately
+and slowly, and then suddenly switch into an unsuspected
+quickness, while we tourists shove and crowd and gawk
+from our unbridgeable distance.</p>
+
+<p>At other windows the rays and skates, with fins fused to
+bodies like wafers, wave through the water. Bottom fish suddenly
+disappear in puffs of sand. The lean, long sand shark,
+primitive, tough, swims with infinite smoothness back and forth,
+an expression of coldness, an incarnate simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>They are all unknown, not of our race, and giving the unknown
+the old credit of fear, they <i>are</i> horrible, monsters in their
+realm, with intercommunications, receptions, that we are unable
+to touch.</p>
+
+<p>An aquarium is a luxury. Most of the fish we see are dead, a
+boatload of wet, cold, slippery white and gray flounder, cod,
+or haddock just come into port, or dying, like a striped bass
+caught by a fisherman casting off the beach—flipping on the
+sands with all its cool brightness still alive, a slippery, lucent
+sea green. The color loss is quick as a fish dies, leaving the rippling
+shades of its great medium behind.</p>
+
+<p>The world of ocean color comes inland in the spring with
+the alewives that migrate from salt water up inlets, streams,
+and estuaries on both sides of Cape Cod. They are silver, like
+the sea they come from, with backs of gray green, and in a
+shallow stream they seem to reflect the colors of the season,
+having in fact the ability to change the pigment in their skin so as
+to blend with their surroundings. They mouth the water and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
+stare forward with their big eyes, running upstream with the
+unswerving directness of their need to reproduce—which gives
+us at least one reassuring alliance with them!—and being of
+a fairly large size compared with most fresh-water fish, they
+have a look of marine capacities, a fast-schooling fish made for
+water masses, great sweeping currents, and tides.</p>
+
+<p>Even the alewives, which migrate by the hundred thousands,
+are only suggestive of the far running but hidden nature of
+the oceanic depths. Most of us, failing a glass-bottom boat or
+a glass-sided submarine, have to stand on the beach and take in
+the vast motions of the sea surface with only the vaguest idea
+of what is happening below. Sometimes it looks like a bowl of
+dazzling, dashing light, and at others a gray, monotonous range
+under a raw wind with white-groined waves constantly moving
+across its distances. The sea takes all the light and air, the
+storms, clouds, moon, and stars, in endless, various reflections
+over its watery reaches, with a monumental acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>Are there not a thousand ways to describe the sea which in
+their sum amount to inscrutability? How can you translate its
+abundance even by counting so many thousands of protozoa in
+a drop of water? Who can fathom the range of appetite it contains,
+the ferocity of the life its amplitude allows?</p>
+
+<p>One day in early fall I traveled from the Cape with a party
+of people in a chartered boat, heading for an area some ten
+or fifteen miles out. The offshore breezes coasted over
+smooth, sun-bright waters that carried some of the land’s litter
+with them, sticks, leaves, petals, and even butterflies. At one
+point a dragonfly skimmed past us; and silky seeds of milkweed
+and dandelions went sailing and twisting by to land eventually
+where they could never take root. Farther out, oceanic birds like
+jaegers, shearwaters, and phalaropes began to appear. When
+we were plowing out across the open ocean with its short-crested
+waves we came upon a broad path of waters which were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+foaming and flashing and leaping, a white windrow of fish
+flipping violently above the surface, lasting perhaps a mile or
+more. Evidently we had come upon an area that was rich in
+plankton, attracting many small fish, attacked in turn by larger
+ones. What we were seeing was part of the classic food chain
+that leads, in terms of size, from microscopic plants and animals
+to whales. The sea was splitting its sides with riches, and a kind
+of savagery that most of us hardly dare admit, although as a race
+we are not so far removed from it ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>As the glass on the aquarium window separates the spectator
+from the world of the fish, so the long nearly unbroken line
+of the Outer Beach stands between us and the vast, alien reaches
+of the North Atlantic. It is not <i>our</i> natural environment, and so
+we can legitimately call it treacherous, sullen, cold, and grim,
+and even in its hours of brilliance and warmth it seems to lead
+us off in no terms we can call familiar. It is full of fickle changes,
+fogs, and storms, unpredictable shifts in mood. We are still
+unable to set forth on the open ocean without the skill of a
+sailor or the protection that a technical civilization affords us.</p>
+
+<p>Yet our neighbor the sea provides the amplitude and even,
+being still relatively unaffected by human ownership, the regenerative
+power of what is both dangerous and undiscovered
+in the universe. All its shores are washed by a capacity. If it is
+constant in peril for us, and for its own voracious inhabitants,
+it is also beneficent as a medium for life. Those tidal rhythms,
+watery colors, and reflections are translated into living organisms
+whose uncounted numbers are assured by their vast and relatively
+temperate home.</p>
+
+<p>We only see a small part of those numbers, at least consciously,
+since sea water may be swarming with invisible life, but during
+spring, summer, and early fall, the sea’s bounty often reveals
+itself. Countless moon jellies for example, pulse through waters
+inland of the sea during the springtime or in Cape Cod Bay,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+where I have seen comb jellies in great profusion during late
+summer. Watching them, it is not only their primitive, brainless
+nature, or their numbers, that has seemed incredible to me,
+but their approximation to their environment.</p>
+
+<p>It has been estimated that jellyfish are 95 per cent water.
+Dried out, they resolve into almost nothing. How could such
+evanescent creatures be predators, killing and ingesting living
+organisms? When you see such transparent flower-animals it is
+even difficult to believe that they have the nerves and muscles to
+be able to pulse through the water; but their chemical balance,
+their physical responses have a direct relationship with the sea
+water, whose salts are in them. Salt water is a liquid medium for
+life, a blood that circulates through the creatures of the sea. So
+close is the association of the sea and its lives, though each
+species has its unique kind of locomotion, respiration, aggression,
+its own way of feeding and being food, joining in the
+employment of energy, that it is almost tempting to inquire
+whether the sea does not have an organic nature of its own. I
+will not get very far by suggesting that a medium and environment
+“knows” anything beyond what all nature knows, but this
+primal “mother” great provider and provided, has its own deep
+rights in the realm of being.</p>
+
+<p>In summer and into fall you can see thousands of small fish
+schooling in the shallow tidal edges of Cape Cod Bay, moving
+slowly until approached, when those closest to you swing forward,
+or run, rush, and circle as need be, the whole crowd sometimes
+escaping with a simultaneous, sideward sweep. They are
+all spontaneity, life on the run, endowed with limited attributes
+from the point of a “higher animal” but of strict extravagance
+in form and action, born of ocean waters. They suggest the incomparable,
+swimming out of range.</p>
+
+<p>There is something of this suggestion in many specific aspects
+of animal, or even plant, life in the sea. In a sense their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+fascination lies in what has not yet been discovered about them,
+but just as much, from the average human point of view, in the
+way their actions are those of the sea rather than the land to
+which we are accustomed. In fact all of us are obliged to make
+surface discoveries a great deal of the time, even with respect
+to what is around us, or even inside us, like fishermen following
+the seasonal movement of fish, sometimes predictable but often
+hidden and unreliable, or students who chase after migratory
+birds in planes. So the sight of grunions wiggling in California
+sands, depositing and fertilizing their eggs, bound to a complex
+interrelationship of spring tides and the moon, still excites our
+curiosity, being a phenomenon that is not fully understood,
+taking place in a proximate but different world.</p>
+
+<p>Migrant fish, like the alewives, may return not only during
+the same season each year but very close to the same day as a
+run of the year before. Perhaps the cycles involving sea and
+climate average out very accurately, but it is too complex a
+phenomenon to say that it goes like clockwork. Tides are measurable
+but constantly changing in time and amplitude. Environmental
+conditions in sea water are various and the seas coordinate
+relationship to the atmosphere is an elaborate one.
+Rhythmic response in an organism may be simple and spontaneous—like
+a fucus, or rockweed, only ready to spawn after
+a period of exposure at low tide—and it will have its causes, but
+the causes themselves are greatly complex in nature.</p>
+
+<p>The sea’s discovery will not be made by factory ships that
+process their huge catches of fish, by killer submarines chasing
+after whales, or by mining equipment. We can physically affect
+its life with our one-sided power, but it will remain protean and
+indifferent and we will go on imagining our conquest of it.</p>
+
+<p>On this overdiscovered and overexploited earth the sea remains
+a wilderness, a resource not of goods but of what is rich
+and wild. That which we have been unable to use up, or harry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+to extinction, has the power to renew. The sea is a positive
+mystery. I hear the surf’s continual breathing in the distance;
+I see the stars that literally cover the sky over the beach on a
+winter’s night like white animal plankton in the spring waters;
+and I realize that I know no more about them than I know about
+myself. The depths are still ahead, with the fear and the temptation
+that the undiscovered arouses in us.</p>
+
+<p>All of us are drawn to the sea’s edge as to a fire. Its vast
+reaches roll and heave in the light. There is an incalculable
+weight of waters withheld just beyond us, a roaming kept in
+check. What an exalting thing it is to see those waters dancing
+with silver castings from the moon! Even in our careless, civilized
+state, drinking beer, watching driftwood burn, or absorbing the
+sun and one another, in no way obligated to the kind of cold
+suffering or exile which sea and seashore have meant to men
+in the past, there is something in us that wants this brilliance,
+this barren waste.</p>
+
+<p>The sheeted surfaces blown over by all winds rove on with
+their freight of light during the day, constantly changing, sometimes
+black, purple, and gray under pigeon-silver skies, with
+hazy, soft horizons, sometimes silver scudding with gold, or blue,
+green, and white in all shades; and always the tidal balance, the
+surf’s fall and drag at the sand’s edge, whatever the season.</p>
+
+<p>During the autumn and winter months the cliffs hang their
+shadows over the beach very early in the afternoon, cold darkness
+moving toward an iridescent surf that reflects the last
+light of the sun. The sunset shows curly salmon and fiery orange
+streaks on the other side of the vast flat table that often runs with
+sea ducks at this time of year; and then, singly, the stars begin
+to shoot up their spears and arrows, alignments for eternal
+navigation.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">A Rhythmic Shore</p>
+
+
+<p>On the beach it might be said that there is no such
+thing as decline and decay, although in a physical sense drastic
+change is obvious, from year to year and even from minute to
+minute. In a northern forest where the trees have been left to
+grow for many years, I have sensed the presence of a great
+establishment, something silent and absolutely personal, a society
+of trees with its own strong relationship to the sun, to the roaring
+winter winds and snows, to dry years and wet, using the earth-bound
+materials of growth, decay, and old age as provisions for
+indefinite residence. These tree communities culminate in “climax”
+formations, dominated by particular varieties of trees such
+as maple and beech, or spruce and fir, to progress no further
+until some great interference, such as a lumbering operation,
+or climatic change—an increase or decrease in average temperatures
+over a period of years—may start a community succession
+all over again.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the beach and its cliffs that stand as
+buffers against the sea never allow much in terms of residential
+time, except to societies that can adapt themselves to living
+between the wet sand grains, minute plants, and animals; and
+beach hoppers that burrow in on the upper parts of the beach, or
+other crustaceans that sink into the sand and out again as the
+waves go up and back, reacting simultaneously. It is a terribly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+exacting place to live in. Life is short. Disturbance is always to
+be expected, and the more so in the course of a storm, which
+may change the whole physical character of the beach itself.</p>
+
+<p>While I was walking on the beach I rented a small summer
+cottage in the South Wellfleet area during the late autumn and
+early winter months, so as to be able to spend nights as well
+as days by the sea, and I paid it sporadic visits when I could.
+I remember one night when the sea showed me just how candidly
+elemental and violent it could be. A northeast storm had
+been making up all day. Off the Provincetown area, where
+the waters are protected by Peaked Hill Bar—extending from
+Race Point to High Head, some thousands of feet offshore and
+parallel to it—the sea though gray and choppy, was relatively
+calm, while the wind blew hard. I could see several fishing
+boats on the horizon. They were surrounded by clouds of gulls.
+The sky was not totally overcast to begin with but full of handsome
+blue-gray clouds that sailed across the air like great round
+slates. Farther south the gray Atlantic foamed and rocked ahead,
+and the green surf came in dashing with spume and spray, pouring
+an angry froth on the shore. Finally the sky closed in
+completely.</p>
+
+<p>By nightfall, water driven by air filled earth and sky. A little
+ship’s bell on the porch outside kept tinkling, and the wind
+rained blows on the house. The walls thudded as if they were
+being struck by rocks. Rain pelted the windows and the cold
+knifed in between the door and the sill. The sea was putting on
+a profound and concentrated roar. I went out and fought the
+wind as far as the top of the bank above the beach. Beyond and
+below that it was almost impossible to stand. A mountainous
+milky surf was seething, overturning, and piling in. Fury was
+riding high. The wind belted houses, shrubs, and scanty trees.
+The beach grasses were tossed, bent down, and released. Rain
+slashed and whipped wildly everywhere and it seemed that all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+the natural power and danger in the world had been let loose.
+When day broke majestic breakers were booming and pounding
+down the beach as the north wind drove long lines of spray
+across their heads.</p>
+
+<p>This is the kind of storm, not infrequent between September
+and May, that flings down ladders reaching to the beach, undermines
+or tears away the asphalt parking lots, throws wharf
+pilings and great ocean-drifting timbers around as if they were
+matchsticks, and leaves them strewn on the sands. It also tears
+away tremendous amounts of material from the cliffs, as well as
+straightening or leveling out the contours of the beach. The
+cliffs are eroded by storm action primarily, not by the tides;
+but after a series of storms uncovers a part of the beach, displacing
+great volumes of sand, sections of the cliff may come
+down by gravity slippage, because they are not supported underneath,
+and high tides may help the process.</p>
+
+<p>The extent of cliff erosion is very variable, and in so far as
+storms are concerned, depends on their degree of intensity. Offshore
+bars and shoals protect the beach from the action of the
+sea to some extent. When they are breached during storms, the
+result is a greatly increased cutting away of the beach sands
+and erosion of the cliffs. When bars reform and build up again
+the beach slowly recovers its former volume, though what the
+cliffs lose, of course, they cannot regain.</p>
+
+<p>The estimate given for the average rate of cliff erosion along
+the Outer Cape is from two to four feet a year. I have heard of
+one family who have had to move their cottage back three times
+during the past forty years, a period in which the cliff, so it was
+estimated, may have receded nearly 200 feet in that area; and
+their house lot was not extensive enough for any more moves.
+Most residents or returned visitors can remember some change
+in the topography of the cliffs over the years. Not long after
+the end of World War II, when I came to live on Cape Cod, there<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+were still the remnants of the old twin lighthouses above Nauset
+Light Beach, in the form of a curved brick base at the top of
+the cliff. As time went by it was undermined, then started to
+slide down, reached the base of the cliff to be completely buried
+by sand, but was uncovered again some years afterward. In South
+Wellfleet water pipes still project over the cliff, indicating the
+presence of summer cottages some forty or fifty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Changes in the beach are more immediate, and not likely to
+be so irretrievable, but even there it is possible to see its fluctuations
+over the years. There is a great rock off Nauset Light
+Beach that used to stand high and clear at low tide some years
+ago, but it has been undercut and filled around with sand and
+recently only its top was showing.</p>
+
+<p>This is not a level, stable, protected kind of beach. It is steep,
+full of long shoulders and curves, and fluctuates in outline not
+only as a result of storms but with each tide and even with every
+wave, making new bays, curves, shallow hills, and hollows; but
+the beach is an interbalanced system. All its materials come from
+offshore or the erosion of the cliffs. Wave action removes the
+cliff material, and currents moving parallel to the shore take it
+both north and south: there being a neutral point around
+Cahoon’s Hollow, halfway between Highland Light and South
+Wellfleet, although its location is dependent on the angle at
+which the waves come in along the shore. Half the cliff material
+moves north to build up the hood at Provincetown, and half
+moves south to be deposited along the sandspits from Nauset to
+Monomoy.</p>
+
+<p>A study made by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
+under the direction of John M. Zeigler, points out that the
+north and south ends of the Cape terminate in fairly deep
+water, 205 feet off Race Point and about fifty feet off Monomoy,
+and that: “It seems unlikely that material is moved to the Outer
+Cape from deep water, either from north and south, or by littoral<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+drifting from any other part of the New England coast.
+Drifted detritus would be trapped or obstructed many times
+before it could reach the beaches of the Outer Cape.”</p>
+
+<p>During the course of the same study beach profiles were measured
+for several years and it was found that the sands were constantly
+changing in elevation, all the way from several tenths
+of a foot in one place during a mere ten minutes to a ten-foot
+loss in another during a period of two days. The average change
+per tide was about four tenths of a foot and sometimes went up
+to a foot.</p>
+
+<p>The beach has a kind of rhythmic beat, up and down. If its
+changes were translated into visual, continuous motion on a
+screen you might see it dipping, rising, and undulating like the
+waves at sea. Turbulence and change are not outside a frame of
+order. Loss is balanced by gain, so that the sand which is taken
+from one part is added to another, and though the relative
+volume of the beach is greatly reduced it may be restored in a
+year or so to more or less its original size.</p>
+
+<p>Zeigler’s report, incidentally, makes the observation that the
+beaches “become very steep and full in summer and are quite
+variable in winter, spring and fall,” characteristics governed by
+the “sea state” during those seasons. Sea state, if I understand the
+term correctly, refers to the offshore characteristics of the sea
+surface, the height, length, and steepness of its waves, and their
+velocity, all governed by the wind in its many different phases.
+The waves that cut the beach away during fall, winter, and
+early spring are characterized by their steepness. On the other
+hand the summer waves that build up the beach, although they
+may be the same height as cutting waves, are not steep, the long
+swells that you see offshore in the warm months being typical
+of this kind.</p>
+
+<p>From Nauset Coast Guard Beach to Highland Light the cliffs
+range between 60 and 170 feet in height, and they are made of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+the stones, boulders, sands, gravels, and clays of what geologists
+up to now have called an “inter-lobate moraine,” meaning the
+mixed glacial material built up as a ridge along the sides of two
+moving lobes of ice—in this case two lateral moraines joined as
+one.</p>
+
+<p>A new study by Dr. John Zeigler, which accompanied his work
+on beach erosion, puts forth another theory for this area which
+is that the ridge was already there before the glacier came. It
+caused the glacier to split into two lobes and the material it
+left behind was fluvioglacial outwash, there being no real glacial
+till such as makes up a moraine before Nauset. A carbon dating
+taken in this lower Cape region puts its age at 20,700 years.</p>
+
+<p>The Upper Cape, from Orleans to the canal, is a true terminal
+moraine, having material that was pushed ahead of the glacier
+and left behind when it melted north. It is characterized by
+uneven hilly country full of rocks and stones merging with a
+slanting sandy surface on the south which formed the outwash
+plain.</p>
+
+<p>The cliffs may only be eroded in substantial amounts during
+storms, but to a slight extent they are always eroding. In some
+sections, especially during hot and dry weather, there falls a
+continuous stream of pebbles and granular sand, made a rich
+reddish-brown by iron compounds, looking in the strong light
+like a broad rain of precious metals, treasure chests broken open.
+In other places sheets of fine sand pour down in miniature
+Niagaras, or flow and fly ahead along the cliffs before the wind,
+having the look under slanting winter sunlight of light smoke
+from many fires.</p>
+
+<p>Chunks and fragments of clay are loosened by the weather
+from their beds in the cliffs and are often washed by heavy
+rains so that a gray liquid flows and fans out for some feet across
+the sands. Occasionally boulders will loosen and tumble down.
+In fact small stones are constantly falling, rolling erratically part<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+way down the beach and leaving their tracks behind them. The
+cliffs are the prime source of the beach’s materials and a repository
+of the ages that preceded it. They have a proud and
+vulnerable role in a context where everything is subject to displacement
+and removal.</p>
+
+<p>Taking an average of three feet a year, the Outer Beach may
+have required 1760 years to erode a mile in width, even though
+that is one of those general figures which may mean nothing so
+far as detailed geological history is concerned. In any case, not
+only cottages and lighthouses have gone their way but also such
+topographical features as marshes and ponds, with all the frogs,
+fish, and plants that belonged to them. On the cliff tops and very
+close to the edge, there are many glacial kettle holes, now dried
+up, but once full of water instead of sand, so numerous in some
+areas as to make one uninterrupted dip and rise after another.
+On the Nauset Coast Guard Beach, where the cliffs have ended
+and are replaced by a long sandspit protecting the Nauset
+marshes behind it, there is good evidence, jutting out on the
+beach, of a former kettle hole, showing a fine dark sediment
+composed of organic material which once lay under beds of peat.</p>
+
+<p>The cliffs’ glacial material, in whatever form they were left
+on Cape Cod some 20,000 years ago, was part of the land’s
+erosion, of geology’s rising and falling history, for countless years
+before that. Since then it has been constantly exposed, loosened,
+easily eroded and ready for the taking, by winds, tides, and
+waves, but all of it was changing and movable in terms of the
+great stretches of earth time. Many of its stones and boulders
+were being wind and waterworn, cracked by frost and heat,
+long before they were plucked from hills and ledges, transported
+and left by the glacier to give the Cape its present form. Now
+they are being broken out and rolled down to be worn again.
+Like the tides, they are part of a balance, a flow, and containment,
+that is prodigious in its reach.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p>
+
+<p>The cliffs erode; the surf churns the sand; currents carry away
+the sand and other cliff debris; storms cause the sea to break
+in across sandspits and bars, so that they change constantly in
+shape and position. There is a magnitude of effect involved at
+this meeting place of sea and land. It is a magnitude that
+stretches between a sand grain which may be less than a millimeter
+in diameter to storms whose force makes man-made explosions
+of nuclear energy minuscule by comparison.</p>
+
+<p>Sand is perhaps the apex and symbol of the whole process
+in which the existence of the beach is involved. It is moved and
+shifted grain by grain in the displacement of its masses, lifted
+by waves, carried by currents, and set down again. Sand in the
+evolution of the beach is not a static material but an agent of
+dynamic energy, following out the motion of water and air,
+itself their product.</p>
+
+<p>Sand grains, which are of great age, have been worn down
+from rock and the mineral grains that make it up, to particles,
+largely of quartz, with some feldspar, that are sufficiently durable
+not to be reduced to the consistency of mud. The wind which
+moves the waves and is the ultimate cause of all beach movement,
+also may have a more important effect than water in
+abrasing and rounding out a sand grain. The action of grain
+against grain is more abrasive in the air than in water, which
+acts as a cushion. In any case a sand grain made of quartz reaches
+a nearly irreducible size after a long period of time. It might
+eventually be reduced to powder, but it is now protected by
+the grains next to it because of its small size and the film of
+water surrounding it. This water, held there by adsorption, is
+what makes it possible for tiny animals like nematodes and
+copepods to exist in such an environment.</p>
+
+<p>Pick up a handful of moist sand and it is heavy and relatively
+cohesive. Through a hand lens you can see the grains fall off
+in pearly clumps. On the other hand, dry sand is blown down<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+the beach in its separate grains like rice, and sorted on different
+levels according to its weight and size. Each sparkling grain
+is an entity unto itself. It is easily lifted and moved by the energy
+of waves and currents and at the same time heavy enough in
+the mass to give beaches their malleable stability.</p>
+
+<p>A sand grain is a product of earth, with beauty, quality, and
+dynamic character, shining clear in eternal process. Sand has
+the strength and resilience needed to hold up against the violent
+tonnage of the waves, and at the same time to share in their
+employment. It is always being remolded into new shapes by
+the art of wind and sea, shifting restlessly, moving from age to
+age. What we call the inanimate not only has its weights and
+measures but also a wonderful proportion with relation to the
+forces that send it on. It has a going out that is as rhythmic in
+its way and as full of viable light as the migration of organic
+lives.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">Dune Country</p>
+
+
+<p>Sand dunes, as distinct from sandspits, or the banks at
+the head of the beach, are found in a few restricted areas on
+the Cape, but their two primary locations are the Provincetown
+hook and at Sandy Neck in Barnstable, on the Bay side. Inland
+of the beach, far enough not to be exposed to the constant wash
+of the tides or to flooding seas during storms, the dunes have
+forms and motions of their own. They were originally produced
+by the wind, and it is the wind that reshapes them, blows over
+their shoulders and down their slopes, making mounds and
+ripples on their surfaces, and also undoes them and makes new
+ones again.</p>
+
+<p>The Provincetown dunes, which I had passed by on my June
+hike down the beach, represent an exposed region of several
+miles in extent, uninhabited for the most part except for a few
+gray beach houses perched on the dunes overlooking the sea.
+They are continually being added to by sand which the dry
+northwest wind picks up along the shore and blows inland.
+Because of its dryness, this wind also has the greatest effect in
+moving the dunes. Damper winds causing moisture on grains
+of sand, make them more resistant to being moved.</p>
+
+<p>Much of the region is held down by low vegetation. Its sandy
+reaches are patched everywhere by Hudsonia, or beach heather,
+pitch pines kept down almost flat on the ground by wind and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+salt spray, and its slopes and hummocks kept intact by beach
+grass; but in other areas, and they are extensive, the dunes
+have broken loose and roam like the waves of the open ocean,
+with great crests and long, deep troughs. They look as if they
+should have a slow, massive momentum of their own, but they
+are moved by the wind, migrating in a west to east direction at
+the rate of some ten to fifteen feet a year, creating a considerable
+problem at the point where they skirt the highway across from
+the town of Provincetown. On the far end of Pilgrim Lake
+high dunes loom over the highway and are continually drifting
+down on to it, hardly deterred by snow fences and the planting
+of beach grass, so that the sand has to be cleared off frequently.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="i036" style="max-width: 106.8125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i036.png" alt="Sand dune with low vegetation">
+</figure>
+
+<p>It is a young country, even compared with the rest of the
+Cape, which, in geologic terms at least, is by no means an
+ancient land. It is postglacial and is made of material brought
+along the shore and added to a reef of glacial debris. It begins
+where the glacial material of the lower Cape ends, easily seen
+where the cliff at “High Head” breaks off above Pilgrim Lake,
+and then it stretches and curves out very close to sea level.
+Samples of material taken in the area showed a carbon dating
+of 5000 years, comparatively recent times. Also there seems to
+be good reason for believing that much of the dune country was
+broken free and set to wandering by the hand of man.</p>
+
+<p>Between the dunes and Provincetown there are a number of
+ponds, marshy areas, and woodlands, including some good-sized
+stands of beech and oak. These woods must have been considerably
+more extensive at one time. In the dunes that now hang
+over them there are remnants, tree trunks, and stubs protruding
+through the sand; and there is at least one part of the dunes
+that seems to show evidence of a wood fire that took up a big
+area, though when it occurred is not clear to me.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau wrote about the dead stubs of submerged forests
+projecting above the surface of the sand in the “desert,” as he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+called it, and of numerous little pools in the sand filled with
+fresh water “... all that was left, probably of a pond or swamp.”
+He may have exaggerated these pools as an indication of former
+ponds or marshland. They are located a little above the water
+level which extends everywhere under the dunes, and so are
+likely to be found at the bottom of the dune troughs, or hollows
+between the dunes. Some of these pools, or fairly long and narrow
+stretches of shallow water, may stay in much the same place
+over a long period of time if the levels where they are located
+are at least partially held down by vegetation. They are filled
+up by rain water during fall and spring and then dry out during
+the summer months, but where the dunes migrate before the
+wind, they also travel behind one dune and before the next;
+and they are seldom deep enough to develop typical swamp
+vegetation.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau tramped the area in 1849, and two hundred years
+earlier the dune area on the town side of the “Hook” and possibly
+further must have been much more circumscribed and held
+back. The early inhabitants cut down all the trees they could
+find, for firewood; “try works” for melting whale blubber; boats,
+houses, and salt works (in the days when salt was produced by
+boiling sea water instead of the later refinement of using solar
+heat to evaporate it).</p>
+
+<p>Blowing sand became a threat to Provincetown and its harbor
+early in its history. In his <cite>Cape Cod; its people and their history</cite>,
+Henry Kittredge describes the war declared by the people of
+the town against almost every stick, living or dead, that surrounded
+them.</p>
+
+<p>“When the Mayflower band arrived,” he writes, “the sand hills
+to the north were for the most part held stationary by trees and
+shrubs. But from the earliest times the inhabitants, following
+the example of visiting fishermen, fell upon the trees until the
+sand lay bare, a prey to the four winds of heaven. The captains<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+of fishing schooners were allowed to take sand ballast from these
+hills, and not content with this, the citizens turned their cattle
+loose to graze on what clumps of vegetation still struggled for
+existence on the denuded hills, with the result that the grass
+was demolished as fast as it grew. The sand was free to blow
+down upon the unprotected village with every northwester,
+threatening even to bury the houses.”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The danger attracted the attention of the Colonial Government
+as early as 1714, when an act was passed to preserve
+the trees. In 1727, Provincetown was incorporated, and a
+dozen years later another act forbade the pasturing of cattle
+on the sand hills. The Court might as well have forbidden
+the winds to blow or the sun to shine. Provincetowners cared
+nothing for laws, and continued to cut wood and turn cattle
+loose for the next hundred years; in short, until the danger,
+instead of threatening, actually arrived. The sand buried a
+house or two, and was advancing toward the town, salt works,
+and harbor at the rate of fifty rods a year along a four-and-a-half-mile
+front. In 1825, another commission was sent to study
+the situation and suggest remedies. This time they found the
+citizens so frightened by the marching sand that they were
+ready at last to obey the laws. They planted beach grass
+on the barren dunes, kept their cattle in the pound, and
+stopped cutting down young pine trees. Thus was the sand
+anchored and the town saved.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Pilgrim Lake is what is left of East Harbor, an extension of
+the main harbor of Provincetown that ended in marshes separated
+by a narrow strip of beach on the outer shore. The sea was
+a constant threat to this barrier and the people of Provincetown
+were afraid that it would eventually break through and start
+sending tons of sand into their valuable harbor, eventually making<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+it unusable. A dike, 1400 feet long and seventy-five feet
+wide was finally completed in 1869, cutting across the mouth
+of East Harbor at the entrance to Provincetown Harbor, so that
+both houses and fishing industry were no longer threatened with
+burial; but the dunes, though held in some control, have continued
+to blow.</p>
+
+<p>There is a small hill called Mt. Gilboa on one side of the
+highway at Provincetown, facing another Biblical peak called
+Mt. Ararat on the other, and if you climb it you can overlook the
+harbor and the roofs of the town, as well as the dunes and sea
+in the other direction. (Provincetown, incidentally, consists of
+a belt of houses narrowly strung along the inner shore with its
+streets directly oriented toward the harbor, appropriate to a people
+whose trade and thoughts were toward the sea. This is also true
+of the houses, which were built longitudinally, parallel to the
+streets.) In the fall, clam diggers bend down over dark flats
+at low tide between stretching fingers of water. Dories are
+stranded in the mud, or move gently on low water. Beyond them
+are the curving, stockadelike enclosures of the fish weirs, and
+draggers move in to the mouth of the harbor out of the bay.
+The sunlight fires the sandy faces of the long, low cliffs that extend
+down the inner shore of the Cape.</p>
+
+<p>The town, which is so thick and crowded with cars during
+the summer months, a host to the cities, teeming with talk and
+color, a variety of human shapes, sizes, and exclamations, so
+reclaimed that you can hardly conceive of its austere past, becomes
+diminished again to a mere cluster of houses, a tenuous
+edge on water and sand. On the far-going Atlantic side, the
+dunes billow and toss. The Ararats are everywhere, peaks,
+crowns, domes held down by yellow beach grass on the mounds
+and hillocks from which the slopes dive down.</p>
+
+<p>As the world’s dunes go, these may not be of major size and
+extent. On the other hand they have been measured at heights<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+between sixty and eighty feet, and at times dune ridges may
+have reached elevations up to 100 feet. Also, their scale is such,
+leading from one open face to another, that human figures climbing
+a steep side across an intervening slope of no great distance
+seem tiny. The walls keep looming up and the valleys dip between,
+so that the whole landscape is full of a wide motion.</p>
+
+<p>In all this bare largesse of sand, the texture is clean and clear.
+Shadows move over it like loving hands. The wind’s touch in
+turn has made grooves, grains, and ribs on the surface. In some
+areas the black mineral magnetite joins with garnet to make
+blackish-purple ripples in the sand, or irregular masses, or
+little brushstroke feathers and clouds. Everything shows clearly,
+from human footprints and the long ruts made by beach buggies,
+to mice or rabbit tracks. And I suppose that in the summer—if
+you pounce in time—you can see insects leaving their traces,
+like dune grasshoppers, colored and grained like sand, or a spider
+that buries down in the sand, thus avoiding extreme temperatures;
+or even a toad. I once found a Fowler’s toad quite far out
+on the beach where it must have wandered away from the dunes.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp40" id="i108" style="max-width: 105.8125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i108.png" alt="Beach grass in sand">
+</figure>
+
+<p>A stick that drops down from one of those shrubs so besieged
+by wind and sand waggles down a dune making a fine tracery,
+or what looks like a stamping of birds when it is lodged in one
+place and blown back and forth. An oak leaf merely blown for
+a slight distance down the sand makes a track, with all its lobe
+ends imprinted like a long tassel or thin strands of separate
+strings. Except for the beach-buggy tracks, that follow one route
+fairly consistently, and may be visible for months at a time, and
+the beach grasses, continually renewing their precise circles on
+the sand, most of these tracks soon disappear. There is a constant
+moving of sand particles, a sweeping over by the wind. The open
+dunes are trackless areas where tracks take on great significance.</p>
+
+<p>During winter days when the northwest wind blows with fury
+along the exposed shores of the Cape, it may be too uncomfortable<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+to stay in the dunes for any length of time. You gasp in
+the polar air and hide your face from the stinging sand. Each sand
+grain is lifted and sent with the speed of a projectile along
+the surface of the dunes. Given a little shelter from which to
+watch you could see the dunes change shape in an afternoon, or
+an hour. It is on days like this that they migrate like waves, with
+long slopes on their upwind sides, steep ones on their lee.</p>
+
+<p>On their bright and stable days, the long dune shoulders at
+the top of each rise tilt you up, body and vision, into the dizzy
+heights of a sky graded from cobalt to indigo, the way the scale
+of things in the landscape goes from sand grains to rocking seas
+without distraction. The dunes almost seem to ask for a long-distance
+running from both men and clouds. They are a place of
+flying, falling, and tumbling, shaping the motion of what comes
+to them, asking for an approach that soars.</p>
+
+<p>Also, they have their secrets, their ground-level associations.
+In October the beach-grass heads are loaded with yellow seeds.
+Where the plants are clumped together, providing protection
+from the wind, nests of seed gather on the leeward side, visited
+by birds that leave many little tracks and sometimes a feather
+or two. Mice also leave their dimpled trails, circling around the
+beach grass, traveling across bare sand for short distances before
+they disappear. There is a special delicacy in the visits of birds
+and mice. I had the fancy, following these small trails, of watching
+mice under the moon, with all their scuttling, nibbling, and
+investigating, so that some of their excitement, their fidgety life
+dance might be translated for me. I even thought it might help
+bring me down from a world too heavy with size to a neater
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>Startled by a little crash of twigs and leaves, I saw a rabbit
+darting up a dune slope. It bobbed to the top and stayed motionless
+for a few seconds in a bayberry thicket until I followed it
+to find what might be the meeting place of a whole tribe of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+rabbits, if I could judge by the amount of tracks and pellets
+of dung there were, all on the rim of a small bowl held together
+by the bayberries with a small scrub oak coming up from its
+base. These semiprotected hollows are quite typical of the dunes.
+There are also small woods of pitch pines, thickly carpeted
+with needles, where the tree roots can get some moisture at
+the bottom of a valley between the dunes. Scrub-sized oak, pine,
+sometimes bayberry, beach plum, or wild cherry, hold down
+many hollows, with the help of beach grass on the shoulders
+around them.</p>
+
+<p>The beach grass has had much deserved honor heaped upon
+it, in the proportion that it is able to live with the tons of sand
+that are also heaped upon it. It is perfectly adapted to being
+covered over by sand since it sends up stems which in turn root
+themselves, and then grows on, letting the old roots die. As a
+sand hill builds up, the beach grass is able to maintain itself in
+this fashion without being buried and to hold down the sand with
+a network of roots and stalks. It stabilizes such hills until the
+point where the wind may sweep so constantly around them as
+to expose them and cut away the sand, leaving the grass in
+splendid isolation with its outer roots hanging in mid-air. So
+beach grass and sand have a special collaboration which man
+does his best to encourage, especially after he has made rescue
+work necessary.</p>
+
+<p>The sand masses have great weight and volume and are stable
+in themselves but it is their surfaces that flow and shift with
+the wind, so that the whole region is remolded over periods of
+time. It is fascinating to sit in a valley between the dunes and
+reconstruct their curves, seeing how the sand has been swept
+down one side and blown up another, sent over a hill to make
+a new one on the other side, held for a long time and then
+broken loose to change its residence, motion, and stability joining
+to make those noble forms.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span></p>
+
+<p>The dunes may threaten man’s house, or road, or wood lot
+in immediate terms, but in themselves they are like distant
+monuments dedicated to natural force, perfect, calm, threatening
+or joining all that which lies ahead of them with equanimity.
+Time and its lapses seem immaterial, more so than the wind
+that shifts them. Now, or in years to come, a migrating dune
+will kill off a tree or a shrub and what does it matter? Can I
+care about what happens to one of a thousand scrub pines? I
+think not; but perhaps I can care about the event in the whole
+sequence of growth, change, and reshaping. Slow and statuesque,
+the dunes under the great air are another balance in process,
+like the beach beyond them.</p>
+
+<p>I think of some of the trees in the dunes and their struggle
+with the winds and the encroaching sands, and I am unable to
+shed tears over something that is unable to cry, but sometimes
+the word desperation comes to me, when I see evidence of their
+long efforts to hold on. You will see a dying cherry tree that
+has sent shoot after shoot, trunk after trunk, all over the side of
+a dune or sand hill that is being worn away, and they are full
+of the contortions of struggle—arrested, like the statue of Laocoön
+and his sons wrestling with the snakes, but real enough. Or
+another hummock or small dune, where a beach plum or bayberry
+may not have enough purchase left, has a mass of twisted
+branches and twigs strewn down its sides, the wreckage of a
+genuine defeat.</p>
+
+<p>On the north edge of Provincetown the migrant dunes skirt
+the woods and thickets on their borders like icebergs, clean-rounded,
+immense shoulders of satiny sand slipping by trees:
+shad, bayberry, beach plum, red maple, oak, or pine. Because
+of the stable nature of sand, except when it is blown, they stay
+where they are, great suspended masses, their progress only
+measured at intervals, leaving evidence of trees that are buried,
+or about to be buried, behind them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span></p>
+
+<p>I am indebted to Dr. Loren C. Petry for pointing out to me
+that some trees are able to grow in the same way as beach grass,
+while they are being covered with sand. Pines will die when
+they are only partially buried, but this is not true, for example,
+of cottonwoods whose branches send down roots soon after they
+are buried, and so maintain their water and mineral supply.
+He has seen fifty-foot specimens of this tree—along the southeast
+side of Lake Michigan—of which some forty feet were buried,
+with the remaining ten feet growing vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>The trees in the wooded areas bordering the dunes, particularly
+the pines, look as if they were covered with a soft whitish
+powder. It is caused by the very fine sand grains dusted over
+their leaves and needles by the wind, and during the winter
+this can be seen for miles down the Cape, well south of High
+Head.</p>
+
+<p>Almost all the trees here have a temporary existence, holding
+on as well as they can, fighting for light, food, and moisture.
+Even if there used to be more woodland than there is now—and
+the evidence is good—there is nothing about this narrow
+area, stretching into the sea, made by the sea in collaboration
+with the wind, that looks settled. The word stabilized can be
+applied to a dune and in a sense to anything that remains rooted,
+anchored, or in place for a certain length of time, but in this
+case the word balance might be better. Motion, either latent or
+in view, is in equilibrium throughout this rare place, half desert,
+occasionally wooded, full of gardenlike patches of low growth
+standing out in their variety of color and shade, seeming to
+move like the clouds. There are shadows everywhere, made by
+low twigs, needles, or grasses, the slightest thing lying across
+the sand, in sketchy rhythmic patterns tossed by the wind, while
+the greater shadows made by the high dune outlines are shifting
+steadily with the time of day.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from mice, rabbits, skunks, toads, insects, and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+indigenous plants, this seems a place for nomads, and the birds
+that are free to forage, like a dark pigeon hawk that swoops
+across on its hunt for prey, or an occasional marsh hawk, breast
+feathers gleaming in the sunlight, its shadow passing across a
+dune wall. Little flocks of birds burst here and there through
+the thickets, like chickadees, myrtle warblers, or juncos that
+move around on the ground pecking for seed. In their fall migration
+many of the juncos, or “snowbirds,” reach Cape Cod by a
+long, over-the-water route, and flocks that arrive on the Outer
+Beach begin to move up into the dunes in a search for fresh
+water, perennial pilgrims.</p>
+
+<p>I sat on the top of a high dune one afternoon and watched
+a beach buggy swaying and swinging up in my direction along
+a track that led from the shore. It droned up and careened by
+me, plowing and slipping through the sands, and away down
+a long slope it went on the dunes’ free forms, cutting across
+the shadows that were spearheading toward the sea. Then I
+heard children’s voices in the distance coming over quite clear
+and shrill, falling off at intervals before the wind. The slopes
+and valleys stretched with pure travel in between. It was the
+kind of place where all views and associations keep on, across
+a shifting range. It lacked fixed ways, decided roads. Only packed
+in by the open ocean and the long reaches of time, the roving
+dunes made a continually majestic statement which no amount
+of cans, broken glass, or human footprints could erase.</p>
+
+<p>Off on the end, the edge, past the cities and the suburbs, the
+fixed house lots, the fields, and plains that make a patchwork of
+an entire nation, here is a country let go, barren, down to an
+essential minimum, but tossing and flowing with its own momentum
+in an envious proximity to the sea. It is the first and
+last land in America.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">A Change in History</p>
+
+
+<p>The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say
+fairly well because I do not see how it is possible to recapture
+the deep complexities of what was present and now is past,
+although there is enough past left in us to provide great confusion
+about the times we have to face. Many tourists run after
+“charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are slight enough to
+admit that they have very little to do with the dark realities of
+three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from
+great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We
+are in no need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight
+in the heavens we have created for ourselves. We look on the
+earth’s great flowing beauties with an inclined eye. For all its
+“conquest of nature,” perhaps because of it, our civilization has
+a tenuous hold on the waters and lands it occupies. We are in
+danger of being overlords, not obligated to what we rule.</p>
+
+<p>We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in
+for fish chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily
+invited in because we are tired and out of our way. There is
+no time for that, and besides there are too many of us.</p>
+
+<p>The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape
+Cod is now subject to a population spreading out as a result
+of the tremendous growth of cities and towns. It is predicted
+that the number of winter residents will increase by forty or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+fifty thousand in the next twenty years, and the summer visitors
+to the Great Beach may pass all bounds eventually. As the
+speed of transition has been increased between one era and
+another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing.
+When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an
+investment, as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or
+something too priceless to let go. There are always other places
+to move to. Each man used to be his own nomad, now nomadism
+is supplied to all of us by the mechanics and riches of society.
+During the tourist season the average length of visit per person
+has been estimated at three days, enough time to sense the
+breadth of things if not the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites,
+Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open
+beauties it still displays, even with the National Park, which
+has saved a great deal of it from the seemingly unalterable army
+of bulldozers in the nick of time.</p>
+
+<p>The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over
+woodland and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human
+foresight at any time, with or without the bulldozers. In that
+respect we have not changed, though we are not as dependent on
+the locality we live in as we used to be. Food and resources come
+from afar. Still, all places, regardless of the human adventure,
+have their underlying tides, their own measured and perhaps
+measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in subtle ways.
+We continue to be affected by what we can neither transform nor
+avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have no
+barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here
+still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while
+ghosts of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.</p>
+
+<p>The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period
+of my own, was filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the
+cliff above the beach, a majority unoccupied but with a house<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
+here and there showing a little more substance to it, the evidence
+of a year-round resident. With some exceptions, they were bare
+in appearance and devoid of individuality. No uncommon effort
+had been made to give them much distinction. In the winter
+and fall they lost whatever color by human association they
+might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed,
+pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of
+exposed wood, and since they were not in Florida they could
+not borrow any youth from the sunshine. Their spirit was old
+before they were built, and in that respect indigenous to the
+seashore. The bare coast and the gray waters seemed to hold
+them in contempt, or at least indifference, and they became
+as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of pretension,
+whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape
+with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their
+own little plots of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia
+and scrub oak, joining the general economy of the landscape,
+no blowing leaves and limbs above them, no spreading
+lawns around. Whoever might live in them after the mild,
+money-making season could be gripped by the real weather without
+interference.</p>
+
+<p>Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in
+antiques, even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is
+no alternative if we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there
+ever be such a thing as an antique rocket? But there is still a
+flow of age, a distant sense of things that it is possible to find,
+hanging like mist over an inlet, booming like the sea over the
+far side of a hill.</p>
+
+<p>You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas,
+a single-track road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon
+or a stage, during the years when it took two days to get to
+Boston and the sea route was the preferred one. Even with
+the jet planes droning overhead and the cars grinding gears in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+distance and the about-to-break sound of the future in the sky
+somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as the outline
+of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half one
+afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last
+there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth
+century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented,
+washed out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost
+with definition.</p>
+
+<p>In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the
+houses were located here and there along the old highway, or
+dotted around in sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the
+wintertime you are very likely to meet no one, since there are
+comparatively few year-round residents. Once the place was full
+of local need, local talk, or tragedy. What wrecks now occur
+along the treacherous offshore bars can usually be taken care of
+by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the area quickly in a
+jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was no radar
+for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication
+with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the
+wrecks that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer
+lifeboat crews composed of men from neighboring houses,
+with a boat kept ready in a hollow above the beach, ready to
+be launched out to the rescue, in terrible seas that were a common
+part of existence.</p>
+
+<p>In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns
+had between three and four hundred sailing ships between
+them and a majority of their men went out to sea. In a great
+storm occurring in October of 1841 the town of Truro lost
+fifty-seven men, being already burdened with a large population
+of widows, and on the day after the storm nearly a hundred
+bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most of them
+were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
+making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast
+gale screaming and the sea sweeping their decks.</p>
+
+<p>The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy
+have been responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks
+in the past, and taking the measure of the storms that strike the
+coast, it is hard to see how there could have been as many survivors
+as there were, even with the gallantry and local experience
+of the amateur lifesavers. Many ships ran aground too far offshore
+to be reached, and were pounded to pieces. The death-dealing
+power of the offshore sea in these storms seems unparalleled.
+The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche. It chews
+and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away
+so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming
+waters plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of
+unapproachable violence.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the lights that welcomed sailors, or warned them off,
+are now gone from the headlands and from houses along the
+shore that no longer have to worry about their men any more
+than they have to worry about themselves. The mackerel fleets
+are no longer thick on the horizon. The wharves are gone that
+used to take in the mackerel at Wellfleet on the Bay side. No one
+eats salt mackerel any more that I know of. I have a friend who
+spent his boyhood in New York State who was given salt mackerel
+to eat on Sunday mornings. It had been soaked in milk overnight,
+having been taken out of a “kentle,” which was a small
+wooden keg, the top wider than the base, about a quarter of a
+barrel in size. His observation was that it was much too salty a
+dish for his taste.</p>
+
+<p>The talkers at the livery stable, the central store, or the barbershop
+are also gone, as well as the sea captains who retired at
+the age of forty-five or fifty to become big men in their communities.
+The horses, truck gardens, fish heads, rum and rum runners
+are gone too, and what old men still whittle boats for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+tourists on the beach? The ancient marvels who used to gather
+Cape Cod moss on their backs, telling hilarious stories about
+chicken stealing, cow “dressing” (manure), boundary disputes,
+occasional romantic murders, and hard days at sea no longer seem
+to be available for reference. What a lot of solid objects seem to
+have gone from the world!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I have left history behind too soon, saying, in effect:
+“Choose what age you like. You may find yourself in another.”
+Perhaps it is no fault of mine.</p>
+
+<p>During my autumn and winter walks I did find a lasting
+pleasure in recognizing old things, reconstructing neighborliness,
+even from a distance, learning to see the silence—the
+growth and shape of things, the riches of “slow time.” The ponds
+especially, in the Wellfleet and South Truro regions, protected
+by the woods around them and the land leading up to the cliffs
+above the beach, were clear and deep and seemed to reflect
+quiet habitation over a long time. The water lapped on sandy
+shores in the sweet, airy winter stillness, broken by the loud,
+bright braying of blue jays. Coon tracks were sharply etched
+on the shallow margins where they had gone fishing for fresh-water
+mussels that left meandering traces on the pond bottom.
+On the far ends in the shadows there were occasional ducks,
+like blue-winged teal, mallards, or scaups.</p>
+
+<p>At Gull Pond in Wellfleet one January day there were scarfs
+of ice along the shore, and out in the center herring gulls flew
+up and settled down on open water where a light cold wind
+broke across the surface. Wavelets were continually pushing and
+jostling broken ice so that it made a high singing, almost bell-like
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen
+leaves to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or
+oaks still carrying dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike
+note of a nuthatch as it was rounding the scaly plated trunk<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+of a pitch pine. Pale light moved through the woods and across
+the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle mossy roads, their
+tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a special Cape
+proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic, or the
+herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that suddenly
+showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated
+by any century but its own.</p>
+
+<p>Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming
+in, and to hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the
+length of the beach. The sound held and it took away, a monumental
+assurance of power past all the roughness and directness
+of the old life, its quiet suspension in the present, and the
+wrenching of the not-yet born.</p>
+
+<p>What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land,
+in the continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate
+change, the way the beach itself, or the dunes are changing,
+keeping a general state for a minute, or even a lifetime, but
+quite beyond catching. Its history is water.</p>
+
+<p>Water created it in the first place. When the last enormous
+glacier melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble
+out in the sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins,
+gullies, the “kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs,
+or still holding water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad
+and narrow runs with outlets to the sea. At one time Cape
+Cod must have been streaming with water like a whale’s back
+when it rises to the surface. Now many of the original streams,
+rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried out, but without
+too much imagination you can fill the landscape with water all
+over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction, make
+it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant
+and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire
+peninsula that does not suggest this.</p>
+
+<p>It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>
+the motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying,
+pushing, grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water
+in the deep, still ponds; water in the underground darkness;
+in the gentle seaward running streams; in the tidal estuaries
+and marshes lowering or flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy
+gales full of the howling emptiness of the winter sea, when
+the cold metal of the wind pounds on your back and cuts at
+your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen sands of the beach
+where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and churning
+with impersonal passion.</p>
+
+<p>Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring
+weather, of the same exposures. Only our terms are not the
+same. Some years ago I stood on the high hills of North Truro
+late one afternoon, watching the suns red path shining and
+moving across the wide waters of the bay, thinking of sea surfaces
+moving over the round earth to its poles, and the poverty
+of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates, everywhere
+exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were
+so bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in
+hollows or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They
+glittered like so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come
+from Provincetown and seen a dragger unloading its fish, and
+the fishermen cutting them up with red, raw-meat hands. The
+wind was shipping up the water. The gulls were crying over the
+racing, lathered shore.</p>
+
+<p>It came to me that what had brought me here had not so
+much to do with a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches
+in their simple New England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing,
+old wrecks, driftwood, or fish weirs, real as it was in
+me, but a great new outwardness, a universal human event.
+Each man undergoes a series of changes during his lifetime in
+a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of the world.
+He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry
+that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination
+and measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a
+Cape Cod term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning
+far from your home base, with very few old promises behind to
+sustain me. I had to come to terms with an age without age, a
+locality without location, perhaps a divinity in fires of no precedent
+or name. Above all I was required to change, to face in
+new directions.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On
+my way home I saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and
+inlet, its broad wings spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched
+straight behind it, with feet curled up stiffly, head and neck
+crooked back. Then it landed in shallow water. Its wings folded
+and it stood straight up, with a surprising, statuesque height
+and gaze, the long neck and head above a flock of ducks that
+were swimming and feeding near by, assuming the kind of
+composure special to a race of herons that would serve indefinitely.
+The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving
+grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors
+over the entire marsh.</p>
+
+<p>All the measured lights and shadows of day and night, the
+tides of the sea and the tides of the season, the response and joint
+association of all life’s components in that place stayed much
+the same as they had ever been, in spite of the way we hurled
+in our roads and relocated ourselves without rest. Its natural
+order was still there for old expectation to seize upon; though
+in terms of accumulated knowledge and wants it was more complex
+than it had ever been, and would have to endure a human
+association that was itself on the waters of change, holding
+hard to the mechanics of its coming. Cape Cod had suddenly lost
+a slow, accumulative history, perhaps in a matter of twenty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+years, and would be treated like the rest of the world—as it
+happened, as it would come about under human auspices. Our
+problem, one of many, might be this: how could we reconcile
+universal commitment with the inviolable nature of a single
+place?</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">Barren Grounds</p>
+
+
+<p>The oceanic landscape reaches across the round earth,
+over a curved horizon, and that may be one reason why men
+keep returning to it. The sea attracts the experience of distance.
+There is still some vicarious adventure to standing on a cliff,
+breathing the far-ranging air and imagining ships hidden by
+mists on the horizon, or unknown lands beyond that, or even
+remembering lands once visited. Over there is where the great
+passages of history have gone by.</p>
+
+<p>As recently as fifty or sixty years ago, man and sea were
+involved in a more personal alliance on Cape Cod, and its
+seamen once voyaged around the world. At the same time there
+were some local inhabitants who considered it a major expedition
+to go from one side of the Cape to the other. The fishing,
+shipbuilding, and voyages to foreign lands that was more characteristic
+of the Cape before the Civil War than after it gave
+what might have been a too narrow community, concentrated
+only on its own affairs, a healthy connection with the rest of
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>Since the Second World War Cape Cod has been filled with
+relative outsiders, many of whom have been transported, not
+necessarily through any fault or wish of their own, to stations
+around the globe. A place that once went out for its sustenance
+now waits for the world to come to it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span></p>
+
+<p>One of the few people I met during my off-season walks on
+the beach turned out to be a man who had retired from the city.
+The open air may have been conducive to revelation, because he
+told me a great deal about his life during the ten or fifteen minutes
+I talked to him. It turned out that the place where we stood
+had some significance in his own history. He looked out to sea
+from the edge of the cliff and pointed out over the water to show
+me the general region where transports used to gather during the
+First World War on their way overseas. He had been on a Navy
+escort vessel.</p>
+
+<p>“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war,
+small business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size
+and circumstances of the men and societies he had met and
+fought and endured. Through a life-long experience of waste—or
+waste space—and all his tired compliance with authority
+and anger against it, he had saved room in him for voyages. He
+told me that he had come to live near the sea so that he could walk
+along the cliffs and the beach whenever he wanted to, and to
+look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a relatively free command
+view of destiny.</p>
+
+<p>After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out
+for several miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within
+the boundaries of the National Seashore Park, and one day,
+when the beach grass takes hold of its denuded areas, it will
+no longer be recognizable as a military reservation, but when
+I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet had just been formally
+disbanded. Although it was completely deserted, its buildings
+and some of its installations were still intact. It had been an
+antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast which
+was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents
+speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which
+made the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
+for several years after the war ended fishermen used to protest
+that their boats were in the line of fire.</p>
+
+<p>The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain.
+It was on these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo
+Marconi built his wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic
+message in January of 1903. The year before, he had
+built an elaborate structure with twenty masts, and this had
+blown down in a heavy onshore wind. The successful message,
+which took the form of an exchange between Theodore Roosevelt
+and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from only four
+masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is
+typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted
+waves that crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On
+the day I walked through nearly sixty years later there was nothing
+left of what he had constructed but a few fallen bricks on
+the face of the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet
+lookout towers and firing range were still more or less intact,
+and the place only lacked occupation to make it come alive
+again. The public had been kept out of the area for many years,
+but now I could walk in on a winter’s afternoon and not meet
+a soul. I passed a sign saying: <span class="allsmcap">MILITARY RESERVATION NO
+TRESPASSING</span>, not without vague qualms, and memories of my
+own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of
+“Halt!” to ring out.</p>
+
+<p>“Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses
+to some ghost of past authority.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that
+fell on bare gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks.
+Bareness was something the Army brought to all its posts, so
+that a bunch of grass was considered unnecessary, or tended
+for dear life. The Army city, once a humming, purposeful anonymity,
+was now completely silent and alone, but for me it still<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+kept some of the power of its restrictions, arousing old apprehensions—that
+tightening of the stomach at facing some new unknown.
+The bare white barracks were still intact, and the power
+lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or latrines.
+There were off-limits signs on empty streets.</p>
+
+<p>I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order,
+with its own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the
+feelings of frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered
+the routine, the rote-mindedness which often passed
+for efficiency, the utter helplessness that many soldiers felt during
+wartime, and were obliged to accept, about being part of
+something huge, anonymous, even reckless and uncalculated,
+an ignorance of which they themselves were ignorant and to
+which they had not been invited. I also remembered the unassuming
+friendships you could make in the Army, the directness
+with which men accepted each other.</p>
+
+<p>A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the
+ground. They were interruptions of a nature that did not concern
+me very much as a draftee in an Army camp, although—more
+than most—we were exposed to the wide nights and their
+stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn, and the extremes of
+heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to Army life that
+allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted and oversimplified—he
+was not his own agent—and at the same time he acted for
+the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him,
+equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands.
+When he protested, he was protesting against the passage of
+all the nights on all the waters.</p>
+
+<p>I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after
+dark saying he had something of great importance he had to
+speak to me about. We went out and talked in the company
+street, standing on the sandy grounds between the buildings,
+conscious of a towering night with flashing stars. He talked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+desperately, on and on, about the life he had been planning
+before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the
+girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about
+the job which had now been denied him, the business he was
+going to establish, and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business
+was it of the President of the United States to start a war and
+send him into it?</p>
+
+<p>It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate
+for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach
+grass that holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for
+the sea to roam on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall
+and the sands to shift and blow. It is inevitable, at one time
+or another, that each of us should stand on these barren grounds.
+The gloom of the sea puts all other darkness and gloom in
+jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable. It carries light over the
+earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is overbearing and restless
+and at the same time as strict and balanced as its tides.
+Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because then it
+stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns
+us, the desert without illusion.</p>
+
+<p>Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of
+the cliff for several miles. Watchers could look out from their
+transversing positions over the coastline and the sea and signal
+the accuracy of the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile
+targets over the water. I climbed two of the towers that still
+had ladders. They were in fair condition, but clearly not too
+long for this world of wind and spray, of ice, rain, and snow,
+and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows were broken,
+the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors, with
+boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and
+broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered
+how many young men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this
+lookout over the dark sea. Some of those on duty had left their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+names behind, probably after the war was over, judging by
+the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and they also left the
+names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls, or would-be
+girls, the signs of need in wastes of order.</p>
+
+<p>Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact,
+with empty cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground
+outside. A strand of barbed wire made a little clanging sound
+of unused warning as I brushed by it. Toward the far end of
+the reservation, on the Eastham side, I passed another off-limits
+sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags located in a little hollow
+on the very edge of the cliff; they were beginning to slide down
+the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking down on the beach
+where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only sentinels,
+facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how
+many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at
+a faster rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal
+weight of one war had gone, but the knowledge and power it
+let loose had sent us on, committing us to our human ends in
+the most inclusive and at the same time isolated sense, universally
+vulnerable.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp40" id="i012" style="max-width: 102.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i012.png" alt="Blackback gull on the wing">
+</figure>
+
+<p>The wind sent dark clouds of ruffled waters along the sea surfaces,
+surfaces that tilted and flew, stretching away and disappearing,
+and the sky light, feather gray in the rain, reflected
+everywhere. The long surf line sounded with the crash and rattle
+of stones. The vast flow went on unhindered, restless and controlled,
+delivering and holding back, a nay and yea sayer at the
+same time, passing all experiments, accepting all possibility without
+a care. How could the sea do anything about reassuring mankind
+as to whether or not we would survive our own acts and
+commitments? Did man make war, or did war make him? Perhaps
+we love the sea for its denial of us.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting on the sandbag, I thought of the GI who had last been
+there, manning a gun now replaced by missiles and rockets—bothered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+perhaps by the cold, penetrating wind, feeling useless,
+waiting for his discharge from the Army, wishing he were somewhere
+else, not knowing beach grass from seaside goldenrod, or
+one gull from another, but knowing the sea, with its one sound.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">A Landscape in Motion</p>
+
+
+<p>There are a number of elevations on the Cape from which
+it is possible to see both sides, getting above intervening houses,
+trees, or hills. On the same Wellfleet Plain where Camp Wellfleet
+was located the moraine tilts all the way down from the
+cliff above the Outer Beach to the shores of the bay, and reaches
+of land and water come into view from all directions. One plane
+leads to another by easy transitions. The cliff tops shine in the
+wind above the steady pouring sound of the waves and the dancing
+of molten gold and silver on the sea. Beach grasses glitter. The
+land ahead is full of coarse scrub oak and green patches of bayberry
+moving toward dark green woods of pitch pine and clusters
+of houses, reaching the sheltered shores of the bay beyond
+them, with salt marshes, gold and red; water-shining, brown
+tidal flats, and a rim of blue water on the distant horizon.</p>
+
+<p>It is a stunted land, not overhospitable to life by the looks of
+it, although flocks of chickadees bounce gaily through the scrub
+as if giving it their free acknowledgment. As the autumn progresses
+the reds change to brown, plants darken or die down,
+shrubs lose their leaves, and the grasses bleach. In all seasons it
+is a place of low growth, ready in its hardy way to receive what
+the wind and sun can send it. The sky is very wide overhead.
+You can see from one tidal area to another—almost from one
+climate to another—standing on the bare ground. In scale the
+view approximates what you can see from high in the air.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span></p>
+
+<p>A plane shows you a much wider panorama, while diminishing
+the land, eliminating the size of locality and local things. It
+takes you high enough to see the curve of the earth, the concrete
+highways like ribbons across the country, the thin lines of roads
+and streets, the checkered fields, patches of lakes, and sprawling
+cities. A jet plane cuts across time. You can run after the sun
+as it falls on the other side of the world and almost catch it,
+following the mountain shadows over America, and since you
+pass time in that sense, not able to go faster than the speed of
+light, but crossing the rhythmic stations of earth and sun, I have
+felt it as a longer journey than that involved in a car or train.
+What might ordinarily take days is reduced to hours, but when
+we landed I have felt the days in me as much as the hours. We
+bypass the clock. We go from low to high, bridging a gap between
+the individual and the universe, leaving earth’s confinements
+for indefinite space, but local time is still inside us.</p>
+
+<p>On the ground, obviously enough, you limit the horizon by the
+extent of your vision, and the horizon in turn limits you, but
+land and water are held by their relationships to space and to
+each other. Apparently all climatic cycles are world-wide; and
+the immediate, local weather is in part dependent on the weather
+behind and ahead of it. In the same way the only limit to the
+landscape is the globe itself. Its reaches go out of sight, if not of
+universal measure.</p>
+
+<p>This seaside country often gives you the feeling that the sky
+is the limit. One opening beyond the trees, another mile revealed,
+and the earth and sea from the top of a dune, the world
+you stand on, may become exalted in its scope. Perhaps people
+climb hills and mountains not only to get to the top, or as an
+activity in its own right—reasons often given in answer to questions
+that may be of no great value—but to join the range of the
+world, to be up and outward bound, and above all to have a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
+sense of the unities in and beyond them. A greater landscape
+means a new communion.</p>
+
+<p>I once climbed a small mountain in Maine with a group of
+Sea Scouts. We stopped just below its summit, where there was a
+bowl surrounded by rocky heights and slopes and holding clear,
+cold water, the size of a small pond. The boys stripped and went
+in swimming, and all their excited yelling as they jumped in and
+out of the water resolved along the rock faces and deep crevices
+into echoes that rang and choired—heard from above—like <i>Te
+Deums</i> in a cathedral. And far down and around for hundreds
+of miles were the houseless mountains flaming with color.</p>
+
+<p>One of the boys asked: “How many acres do you think there
+are?”</p>
+
+<p>For all its matter-of-factness, his question brought us in touch
+with massive distance, an over-all light and wind above the great
+carpets of color, a landscape running with power, having a latent
+silence, a prodigious weight and matter.</p>
+
+<p>Mountains or seashore make for revelation. So on this sandy,
+tilting peninsula sight can keep on going. On one side the
+head-on majesty of cliffs, beach, and open sea, and on the other,
+calm low headlands facing sheltered waters, two different environments,
+with the west wind blowing over and the clouds
+flaring and shifting in the sky. You are in the lap of the waters,
+the balance of the tides, and in the arms of the weather.</p>
+
+<p>Each patch of ground, varying in the degree to which it is
+receptive to organic life, is a complexity of substance and influence.
+The weather that circulates over it, and in terms of
+light, relative moisture, and varying temperatures invests it too,
+has its seasonal constancies but it is always in a state of change.
+Cape Cod feels much of the time as if it were two-thirds wind,
+and people with touchy nerves might well think they were being
+pushed by it in directions they were unable to go.</p>
+
+<p>The Cape has a maritime climate, somewhat milder than the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
+mainland. There is no use exaggerating its mildness since it can
+feel as cold or colder than the rest of New England when the
+northwest wind takes its uninterrupted course through the ribs of
+the land and sears its way along the shore, but, in general, annual
+temperatures are slightly higher. In central and western
+Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York
+State, the average number of days between the first severe, killing
+frost in the autumn and the last one in the spring has been
+estimated at 180-210. For Cape Cod, on the other hand, this is
+120-150, the same that prevails in a thin coastal belt south of the
+Cape to Virginia and North Carolina where it widens and
+starts west across Tennessee.</p>
+
+<p>The waters to the south, in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket
+Sound, have a higher annual temperature than the waters of the
+open Atlantic along the Outer Beach and in Cape Cod Bay, a
+southern extension of the Gulf of Maine. On the other hand the
+waters north of Cape Cod, though cooler during the summer,
+tend to be warmer during the winter, because of the depths of
+the Gulf of Maine and their heat-carrying capacity. Cape Cod
+Bay, and Buzzards Bay have more sea ice than any equal area on
+the coast of the United States with the exception of Alaska. Sustained
+cold during January and February often results in weeks
+of pack ice stretching off into the Bay as far as the eye can see,
+at least from the level of the shore. This extra touch of the
+Arctic off the Cape is due mainly to a combination of cold
+winter winds from the continent and shallow water.</p>
+
+<p>The difference in average water temperatures between one
+side of the Cape and the other may have its effects on the local
+weather. During the fall especially, when cold air moves over
+the waters of Nantucket Sound they may be covered with fog,
+whereas it can be bright and clear over the Bay, only a few miles
+distant. The normal kind of fog occurs when warm, moisture-laden
+air moves over cool or cold water, and is quite common<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>
+in spring and summer. When a cold, dry air mass, on the other
+hand, moves over warmer waters it may result in what is called
+“Arctic sea smoke” a kind of wispy, steamy fog in turbulent,
+rolling air, rising to ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the
+water.</p>
+
+<p>During the winter Cape Cod is also subject to rapid changes
+in temperature depending on whether the wind comes from the
+northwest, with cold, dry, continental air, or from east and south
+off the ocean, the latter being seldom below the freezing point.</p>
+
+<p>The tip at Provincetown has much the same temperature as
+the sea island of Nantucket. On the other hand the town of
+Barnstable on the lower Cape may have an average summer
+temperature which is slightly warmer than Provincetown and a
+colder temperature in winter, since it is that many miles closer
+to the interior. I have driven down the coast from Boston several
+times during snowstorms when an area as close to the Cape as
+Plymouth was completely covered with snow; and as I drove
+south the storms turned to heavy flakes of wet snow on the near
+side of the Cape Cod canal and then to rain as I went on.</p>
+
+<p>The sea’s capacity to store up solar energy means that it exercises
+a moderating influence on the Cape, which is warmer
+during the winter than the mainland and cooler during the
+summer. Also, there are less thunderstorms on Cape Cod during
+the summer months than on the mainland, and the annual
+rainfall is likely to be lower because there is less showery precipitation,
+although local residents might be justified in thinking
+that water was on them much of the year in one form or another,
+as fog, salt spray, rain, or humidity.</p>
+
+<p>The late fall and winter is often characterized by cold, raw
+windy days, with the temperature just above freezing or at the
+freezing point, and the air is loaded with moisture from the sea
+and sometimes smells of it. During heavy storms the wind drives<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
+the salt spray inland with great force, depositing coats of salt
+on houses, telegraph poles, and wires.</p>
+
+<p>During the winter the Cape seems at times to be caught and
+tossed between the weather of the sea and that of the continent,
+but in general the principal air masses during fall and winter
+come from inland and in summer from the southwest. Winds
+from the north and west usually bring in continental polar air,
+which is dry and cold, though it may also arise in part from
+pacific maritime air. The source regions for many of the storms
+of early spring and early fall are the Gulf of Mexico and the
+Caribbean. Most of the severe spring storms, sometimes coming
+after a fairly mild winter, are the so-called “coastwise southeasters”
+which blow up the coast from off the Carolinas rather
+than from the west. They can result in blizzards because their
+coastal, maritime air if drawn into a low from the continent is
+cold enough to make snow.</p>
+
+<p>Such simple generalities and fact sampling is not to suggest,
+like the Chamber of Commerce, that more people ought to come
+to Cape Cod, but that it is a land like all others, which is influenced
+by the forces beyond it. It is no more gripped, pulled,
+and let go by the weather than most other areas. In fact its
+temperature made it a good place for the first English settlers to
+find. Think of the Middle West in July, or January, for extremes!
+Yet Cape Cod has a special place in the wind, an outside
+hold on the roaming of the seas and the advent of the air.</p>
+
+<p>The tides that rise and fall along this ocean-going spit of land
+are just as varied in their way as the weather, but more predictable.
+They accentuate the difference between one part of the
+Cape and another, and they are responsible for some of its physical
+characteristics. Great tidal ranges on the north side expose
+wide salt flats at low tide and allow the development of broad
+areas of salt marsh in sheltered embayments, whereas along the
+shores of Nantucket and Vineyard sounds, where tide ranges<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+are much smaller, the marshes and more exposed flats are less
+extensive.</p>
+
+<p>In Cape Cod Bay and eastward to the coast of Maine the
+average tide rises and falls about nine feet, but in Nantucket and
+Vineyard sounds the range is up to four feet at the most, being
+as little as two feet off Woods Hole and in some of the salt ponds.
+The time of high water varies also. It occurs four hours later on
+the north side of the Cape than at Buzzards Bay.</p>
+
+<p>The Outer Beach is an area of transition so far as the tides
+are concerned, and their range drops steadily from nine feet at
+Race Point to four feet at the end of Monomoy. These diverse
+tides, all along the shores of the Cape, are a product of its very
+shape, and of the coast from which it juts out, astride the submerged
+continental shelf, whose shallow water also affects them.</p>
+
+<p>It is the nature of waves—and a tide is a wave of a special
+kind—to move more slowly in crossing shallow water, rising at
+the same time to a greater height. Waves expend the energy of
+their motion when they increase in height, an effect which can
+be observed as they heap up before breaking as surf on the
+beach. So the tidal wave moves in from far offshore starting with
+relatively low ranges, some two or three feet at Sable Island off
+Nova Scotia, with similar readings in Bermuda and the Bahamas;
+but when it reaches the outer coast of the Cape it is
+augmented. To the southwest of the Cape the increase is only
+moderate, the figure for the entrance to Buzzards Bay being three
+and one half feet; but moving north it gets much higher. To
+reach the shores of the great embayment of the Gulf of Maine,
+formed where the coastline drops away north and east of the
+Cape, the ocean’s tidal wave must first cross the shallow waters of
+George’s Banks, a passage that requires more than three hours
+(which explains the later time of high water in the Bay). In the
+process the tidal height increases to the nine-foot figure, a reading<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+which is true of Provincetown, Plymouth, and on up to the
+coast of Maine.</p>
+
+<p>So the Cape lies between two tidal systems, created and separated
+by its geography. On the south side, incidentally, there is a
+complex pattern of tidal movement caused by the fact that both
+systems meet. Tidal waves enter the sounds between the Cape
+and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from two
+directions and pass each other. The combined effect of this “interference”
+results in rapid changes in the time and height of the
+tide between Monomoy and Woods Hole. Off Nobska Point one
+tidal wave movement is high, while the other passing it is low.
+Their interference results in the smallest range of tide (one and
+a half feet) to be found along the south shore. A similar minimum
+tidal range occurs off the southeast corner of Nantucket.</p>
+
+<p>I am neither a trained scientist nor an accomplished sailor.
+I am inclined to use facts for unfactual ends and do not have
+enough knowledge of the wind not to be tipped over at any
+time, but if you feel complexity and admire mathematics while
+in a state of comparative ignorance then perhaps you have some
+claims on knowing. Most of us have had a hand in observing the
+weather or gauging the levels of the tide. Weather guessing or
+complaining is second nature, and on the beach, or by means of
+the pilings on the wharf, you can guess the tidal range quite
+easily or judge whether the tides are in or out. On some level
+below that we have air and tides in us that know the energies
+of earth from past acquaintance, but we are much too ready to
+mistrust these depths and to let other authorities do our work
+for us. Perhaps our natural senses are becoming atrophied. In
+any case, we do not seem to be sure whether it is the energy
+of the head or of the heart that we should use for our purposes.
+But put yourself in the middle of the weather and within the
+reach of the tides and they sometimes begin to roam in concert
+in as many ways and to the incalculable extent that you have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+responses stemming from your brain. All the distant swelling
+and swinging, the synchronization and intermoving of the waters,
+becomes as real and immediate as the repositioning of the
+sun and the changing of its shadows. The over-all wind; the light
+that shines on the beach grass, moves over the pebbled ground,
+and sparkles the sea, or turns it into a blazing white cauldron;
+the knowledge of cold massive depths in one place, warm shallows
+in another, come into feeling as both unified and infinitely
+complex. I may fail at mathematics but be an unconscious mathematician,
+judging galaxies by the ways of light before my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>At my feet, as I sit on the sandy ground on the cliff top, there
+is a hole made by a spider, neatly defined at the top by a little
+rim of grasses. Rabbit dung lies here and there. There are a
+broken puffball, dried leaves, and seeds; and the wind has blown
+so constantly over the level and open parts of the ground as to
+take away loose sand and leave a surface of pebbles, which are
+more or less stable, while mounds and hillocks are held together
+by shrubs and grasses. These are evidence of a poor community,
+holding down as best it can, though it is open to migrants and
+migration all the same.</p>
+
+<p>What lies underfoot changes in a few hundred yards toward
+vegetation which is a little more protected, and less exposed to
+violent light and dessicating wind, with low oaks and pitch pines,
+wood floors, with a certain amount of decaying litter, graduating
+upward in the quantity of organic life, but the open, exposed,
+diminished look of this environment also suggests its inherent
+mobility with all the other component parts of this running
+world, taking original light and shadow from the vast sky.</p>
+
+<p>The crow with its ragged wings banking away over the tree-tops,
+the rabbit hopping into a thicket, the fish that school
+unseen in the salt waters, the man who watches, are all manifestations
+of a complexity of association and alliance that stops on
+no single shore. Like our restrictions with respect to the horizon,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
+we only see, we only live, a fraction of the possibilities allowed
+in so great a range; and being restricted, we oversimplify, cutting
+life and land down to size ... a poverty that makes for poverty.</p>
+
+<p>I hear the steady pouring sound of the depths behind me and
+I see and feel them rising and falling, taking their inexorable
+passage around the Cape. The wind whistles through and like
+the in and out of breath lifts and subsides. Field crickets trill
+monotonously and faintly in competition with the wind. Crows
+call. Seeds blow along the bare ground. A winged seed flies by,
+next year’s fruition if it lands, this year’s providing, perhaps
+destined to skim out over the surface of the sea. A flock of snow
+buntings swings back and forth, twittering high in the air. Gulls
+circle in the distance above a garbage dump hidden by the trees.</p>
+
+<p>In this landscape, here and out of sight, is a mutuality of response,
+through the sea with its thousands of miles of variety
+constantly in motion, and the land besieged by the sea, with
+dry and infertile soil, but in a web of tides and climatic influence
+that keeps its character actively in tune. Like the buntings,
+or a flock of sanderlings spinning, sun reflecting, diving
+through the heights above the shore, the opportunity of grace and
+power is always waiting for its use, and nothing that lives and
+participates can be called insignificant, from the cricket to the
+crow. Diversity is the rule, and each form is exceptional in its
+employment.</p>
+
+<p>Through any part of the earth there is a placement, the appropriate
+condition for plants, animals, the soil, and its constituents,
+to maintain themselves. The optimum is that there shall
+be full use within any given range of opportunity. The more
+diversified a living community is the more healthy it is, not only
+in numbers, but in complex relationships. Even a “poor” seaside
+environment proves this by the very demands it makes for survival.
+The plants that adapt themselves to it do so by means
+both various and precise. Even sand grains have a relationship<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+to each other in the rhythmic order of wind and waves. The life
+that comes to these shores, winging in, trying to take hold, blown
+out, taking semipermanent residence, has its own affinity for
+place, an organic knowledge of its own part in the physical
+world. It belongs to an innumerable company with exacting
+tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Each life proves the need of all others. In a miraculous way,
+as each natural form is miraculous, the single is also manifold.
+The rabbit, as it nibbles grass, calls in the hawk. The spider is
+related, in its reproduction and survival, to the insect it eats.
+The soil requires microbes to break it down. The growth of
+plants is directed toward capturing the energy of the sun. Life
+calls life in the context of earth, water, and sky.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the wide landscape are a succession of environments,
+with communities adapting to constant change, characterized
+by so much mutual attraction and repulsion, so many delicate
+balances, such a variety of response to influence inside and
+out that there is hardly a stopping point for attention. We study
+particular environments so as to predict and understand the
+behavior of animals, the reaction in plants to variations in the
+intensity of light, or to relative moisture, or to the chemical constituents
+of the soil. Each place has its character, its complexity,
+and bounds.</p>
+
+<p>But environment is more a characteristic of range than a separation
+in its own right. All migration says so. The division between
+a pond and its surrounding woodland is fairly distinct. A
+pond is an entity unto itself. So is the division between salt
+water and fresh. But the frog that lays its eggs in a pond may
+travel through the woods during the summer. The salmon, the
+alewife, and the shad reproduce in fresh water and grow up in
+the sea. Eels do the opposite.</p>
+
+<p>In a sense each area has its representative, like the water birds,
+from petrels that spend most of their lives over the open ocean,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+to fresh-water ducks dabbling among the reeds. There are herons
+adapted to spear fishing in the shallows; terns that dive for fish
+in surface waters; others that swim after them under the water.
+Some of the adaptations are so precise that if the particular food
+supply of a species is endangered, so is existence of the bird
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand the very distinctness of each species,
+sharp-billed, webfooted, with gliders’ or divers’ wings, seems to
+impart range to countless others, those which exist and have
+existed, those which may develop in a vast and unknown future.
+The difference, the space, between a gannet and a dovekie, a
+great blue heron and a frigate bird, proves all the depths of opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>As I look out on the waters to east and west, to north and
+south, I either see or envisage banks of fog far offshore, warm
+summer squalls, biting cold air, torrents of brilliance in the sky,
+leaping and ponderous deliberation in the waves. Warm air meets
+me from the Bahamas, cold air from the Arctic, and the migrants
+pass me as they travel in between. This earth, regardless of
+man’s construction of it, is always re-relating its contexts, playing
+out new themes ahead.</p>
+
+<p>In this distance, near to far, there is force, and its limits, a
+counterbalancing as well as intermingling in the land, weather,
+and tides, and in almost hidden terms the concurrent response
+of countless inhabitants: the seed makers and dispensers, the
+hole diggers, the fliers, scuttlers, and divers, those that swim,
+crawl, or walk. They take part in range after range of consumption
+and growth, of trials and failures, with endless patience,
+sudden quickness, flows of energy, going through death and the
+travel-round of reproduction. They are dancers in a realm that
+knows where all its leadings are.</p>
+
+<p>There are dynamic secrets underfoot. Lives dawn of which we
+are entirely unaware. Can we bring ourselves down to their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+great participation, waiting through dawns, attending the sun,
+hiding under the reality of wind and storm, where obedience
+means praise? Here is that universal guarantee of novelty and
+increase which we try so narrowly to imitate, substituting our
+simplicity for its complexity, our distressed communality for its
+balanced crowds, our greed and invention for its terrible provenance.
+Lord have mercy on us!</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">Who Owns the Beach?</p>
+
+
+<p>In the “off” and empty season, after the tides had erased
+all signs of a hundred thousand human feet, it was hard to believe
+that the beach could be owned or claimed by any one. It
+took on the air’s cold or warmth, receiving, passing things on,
+from one day and seasonal mood to another, not as on the land
+with its plant and animal reactions and obstructions, the hiding;
+shadowing; coming forth intermittently; but in bold and naked
+sight, reducing weather to its single qualities.</p>
+
+<p>One day the Cape would be sunny and comparatively warm,
+and on the next in would come the authentic northern wind,
+the polar air, roaring and sweeping around with fierce abandon,
+riotously hard and cold, freezing the ground, cutting at a man,
+diving on him with an icy weight. The winter wind is so definite
+when it comes, overwhelming a fairly moderate climate, where
+roses often bloom late into the fall and hollies grow, as to make
+you think of icebergs, sliding down from the north unexpectedly
+to stand hundreds of feet overhead. The sky, threatening snow,
+writhes and purls up with gray clouds spreading fanwise like
+auroras, and in the evening the sun goes down with a coppery
+band on the horizon overhung by a bank of steely-blue clouds as
+menacing as a shark.</p>
+
+<p>And the great beach received what came to it, retaining its
+primal right to a deeper breath and regularity, a harsh “poverty-stricken”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+environment where man has no lease worth the paper.
+It did seem utterly deserted, although the herring gulls and blackbacks
+flew up steeply over the wind-buffeted waves, then banked
+and glided away, and draggers occasionally moved parallel to the
+beach bucking the choppy seas, their lines out astern. The
+wind threw stinging clouds of sand ahead of it. Except for the
+fishermen and the gulls, it was an abandoned world, glistening
+wide and cold, lost to importance and sense so far as human society
+was concerned. For man there is no force quite so inclusive
+as his own.</p>
+
+<p>Since the beach is comparatively empty and isolated during
+fall and winter, the sight of life on its sands may seem as rare
+as a rider approaching you across the desert. I remember what
+an extraordinary thing it seemed one afternoon to see a tiny red
+crab moving very slowly along, high-legged over the bare slopes
+of the beach. I identified it later as a species of spider crab. Green
+crabs, rock crabs, calico crabs, and others are common along the
+protected shores of the Cape, but out on this stretch of beach
+they are rarities. This baby, with its beak, antennae, and eyes
+backed and covered by a knobbed and spiky shell, seemed like
+an exotic from another world, which in fact it was, having been
+flung in by the surf from rocks and seaweed forests in the waters
+beyond it. It not only added to the beach, but to me, since it
+made me realize that these sands were only shelving off into
+further dimensions. The beach is a repository of freight, wreckage,
+and lives from foreign lands.</p>
+
+<p>This also happens occasionally on land. We all know that the
+sea is out there, that the wind swirls over us, and the storms
+carry more traffic than planes, but strangers sometimes appear as
+if to prove that no place is what it seems to be. One spring a
+vermillion flycatcher suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. I
+saw it in its exciting tropical gaiety as it flew down next to a
+shining patch of spring rain on an asphalt road. It is a native of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+Texas and New Mexico. Black or turkey buzzards ride the great
+airs of spring and sometimes fly northward, wheeling unexpectedly
+overhead. In November of 1962 I saw a black stork, <i>Ciconia
+nigra</i>, which had somehow managed to make it all the way
+across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps managing to stop for rests in
+such areas as Greenland and Newfoundland. It landed near the
+Coast Guard Station, now National Seashore Park headquarters,
+at Eastham, in an exhausted state, to be picked up by the Audubon
+Society and later transported to the warmer climate of
+Florida.</p>
+
+<p>The black stork breeds from Central Europe to Korea and
+China, and it winters in Africa after a long round of migratory
+journeys. Its advent was greeted with a certain amount of mild
+curiosity and even some jokes in the local paper, one of which
+had to do with its liking for Cape Cod scallops on its arrival.
+What better reason for coming here! (The truth is that like other
+newly captured birds, it had to be force-fed.) In any case it
+was a rare event, joining Cape Cod with Africa, and to see it was
+equivalent to seeing an antelope on Route 6. With large strong
+wings, attenuated red legs, a long, stout pinkish bill, red around
+the eyes, it waited in captivity with what seemed to be an air
+of great sadness, transplanted as it was, taken in to a gray, cold
+land without any sound but engines, human voices, and the
+wind, without any greenery but the thin-needled pines; and it
+roosted silently, twitching occasionally in its inactive unused
+state, an unwilling, unwitting Marco Polo in New England.</p>
+
+<p>This is a narrow place, restricted by nature and by men, but
+foreign lives still fly to it like sparks in the air, and the sea beyond
+it takes things on their way with more room than analogy
+is yet aware of. What the sea sends in, like a dead skate, a starfish,
+horse mussel, or finger sponge, seems perfectly familiar as
+fish, marine, background animals, but they are also genuine
+primitives, remote not only from human physiology and complete<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+understanding but from that part of the earth’s surface that we
+inhabit. In fact many of the hints of marine life that are either
+brought up along the beach, or that appear in offshore waters,
+like a whale or a dolphin, have a theatricality, an off-stage hint
+of a wealth of other acts, tricks, and forms still to be seen. The
+simple, primal watery element has embodiments of use which
+are comprehensible and have been studied for a long time, but
+these are endowed with physical natures and capabilities that
+might make an air-breathing, earth-bound human quite envious.</p>
+
+<p>During a violent coastal storm, with winds up to seventy and
+eighty miles an hour, an exhausted harbor porpoise was cast
+up on a bay beach recently, and there it died. I confess I had
+never seen one out of water or even close to me before. For all
+the pictures I had seen, and all I had read, nothing prepared
+me for such perfection. Its round body, four to five feet long,
+was butt-ended at its head, in which there were small eyes, and
+small teeth in the jaws. It had just as much of the quality of
+flow as a raindrop, and at the same time was a solid packing of
+energy. Its skin graded down from the jet black of its back and
+upper sides through streaks of gray like rain along the sea down
+to a white belly, and without scales, it had a thick, smooth satiny
+polish like ebony or horn, perhaps reminiscent of synthetic rubber
+or plastic but of an organic texture which neither of those
+products could equal. The porpoise had a single fin on its back
+and a tail that could strike vertically for power and thrust. Its
+body was fairly heavy, weighing about a hundred pounds, but
+everything of speed and liquidity and dashing, leaping strength
+was reflected there. It lay on the upper part of the beach, conspicuous
+among the long piles of storm litter, the logs, pieces of
+broken dories, and thick seaweed, spectacular in its simplicity,
+a black and white that made me think of breaking waves in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
+night sea. I saw it curve over the surfaces of the water with
+consummate grace, slide away, and disappear.</p>
+
+<p>“Where did you ever see more of nothing?” I was once asked as
+I looked out over endless dry Texas plains billowing like waves.
+Nothing or everything. Who knows? Who knows what the emptiness
+leads to or contains? The beach lies open. Its sands and
+rattling stones lead back through ages of weathering and change
+and are at the same time part of the wide give and take of the
+present.</p>
+
+<p>The tiny spider crab, though isolated on the beach, was also
+a link with a teeming offshore existence, which hid in shadowy
+worlds of kelp and rockweed, or floated and roamed by with a
+free energy that was in complete denial of our tightening fall
+and winter world. Backed by a cliff, walking on sands shadowed
+and cold, faced by the churning waves, it is hard to believe in a
+life so rich. There are no rocky shores revealed at low tide and
+streaming with weed to prove the temperate fertility of the sea.
+The beach is a transition zone between one environment and
+another, but except in those areas where the cliffs are reduced
+to low sand hills, protecting a marsh or estuary behind them, the
+transition is a sharp one, the sands dipping from the inconstant
+sky to the constancy of salt water.</p>
+
+<p>Along those stretches of beach where the sea has taken stones
+and boulders and deposited them offshore, storms sometimes
+bring in fairly large quantities of seaweed, which need beds of
+stone for their attachment. The fucus or rockweed, the laminaria
+or kelp, and some of the “red” algae like Irish moss which are
+among the more common kinds found along the beach, have no
+roots, since the plants take all their nourishment from the sea
+water that surrounds them, but are anchored by holdfasts,
+stubby structures which in the laminaria may look like the exposed,
+above-ground roots of some tropical trees, and in the fucus<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
+a round expansion of the tissues at its base, which is strongly
+and tightly sealed to the surface of rocks and stones.</p>
+
+<p>Everything about these weeds, with divided, narrow, or tapering
+fronds to resist being torn by the waves, with bladders
+serving as floats, with gelatinous surfaces, with hollow stems, are
+eloquent of the nature of salt water, its ebb and flow, its depths,
+its capacious circulation. The seaweeds found on the beach,
+black, thin, dried out, or fresh and slippery, olive green, brown, or
+red, having been torn loose by a storm, start growing beyond the
+violent action of the surf, and grow for the most part to a depth
+of some forty or fifty feet. Different varieties like different depths,
+but since they are not free floating unless torn loose they are
+not found beyond the point where rays of sunlight, necessary
+for manufacturing food, cannot reach them.</p>
+
+<p>Over and beyond them, in surface waters where the light
+penetrates before being absorbed, is a vegetation, varying in
+abundance according to place and season, but of incredible numbers
+over all, the one-celled microscopic organisms that are the
+basic food of all the seas. The seaweeds are simple and primitive
+in structure compared with much of the plant life on land, the
+more hazardous, contrary environment, and the members of
+the phytoplankton (the planktonic plants), even more so, although
+the diatoms, which form a large part of it, show a variety
+of outer form. Each diatom has a skeleton, made largely of silica,
+an outer shell hard enough to resist easy dissolution when the
+plant dies. It is formed like a pillbox, or a casket, or it is shaped
+like a quill, a ribbon, or rod, or it is joined with others in beads
+and chains. Each is minute, an etched, crystalline perfection,
+and each is lost in other billions, which we might only see on
+occasion as a green or greenish-brown stain across the water.</p>
+
+<p>The shells of dead diatoms rain down through the water and
+form thick deposits on the floor of the sea. The cliffs above the
+beach are full of them. Cities have been built on their fossilized<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+shells. In their number the diatoms balance the magnitude of
+the sea. In size they are basic to the existence of the minuscule
+animals of the zooplankton that feed upon them, and are eaten
+by larger animals in turn. A diatom’s delicacy and sparkling
+beauty as it reflects the light could indicate that universal productivity
+must start with a jewel, and perhaps end with it too.</p>
+
+<p>That which is minute, like the diatoms, or cells, which are
+the basic structure of life, is a clue to the significance of things,
+leading from the simple to the complex and multifarious, but
+finally rounding us back to where we started. A man himself is
+the unique single cell with its own nature. Each life has its
+irreducible quality. I have been told that if you look at a diatom
+through an electronic microscope, from one increased magnification
+to another, you can see all its protuberances and layers
+disappear, and finally a sparkling crystalline form is revealed,
+like a cosmic surprise.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose it is part of my fate as a large and clumsy animal
+of the mammalian order, crashing through the underbrush,
+knocking down trees, and displacing earth’s other inhabitants, to
+miss a great deal, at least with my unassisted eyes. To learn about
+some new form of life which I may have been passing by for
+years is often something of a redemption. I can then say that
+we have not yet been so run down by our own traffic that we
+have lost the capacity to see.</p>
+
+<p>Not long ago a colony of bryozoans was pointed out to me,
+at least the gelatinous crusts of the compartments in which they
+lived, like little tufts and fringes attached to the fronds of seaweed
+cast up on the beach. They are tiny colonial animals that
+make cups and compartments joined together in branching
+stems, from which they send out little crowns of delicate, filamentous
+tentacles waving in the water. There are three thousand
+marine species of them, growing in different forms, and having
+different surfaces for their attachment. I had thought previously<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+that the little pale-colored, branched tufts were a part of the seaweed.
+Now another small marvel had appeared on my horizon.</p>
+
+<p>The beach was empty where I walked, except for bird tracks,
+tidal wrack, driftwood, bits of shell, or a finger sponge in evidence
+of the life alongside it, and depending on the warmth and
+receptivity to life that the season held, excepting also whatever
+microscopic animals might be crawling over wet surfaces around
+the sand grains. Again, emptiness, or poverty, is always qualified.
+After all the copepods, the nematodes or thread worms,
+and other groups unseen or unknown to me might be underfoot
+in vast numbers; and as I continued on there was no counting
+the number of little holes in the sand made by beach fleas or
+sand hoppers. As the autumn deepened I supposed they were
+unoccupied and deserted, since these beach dwellers, as I had
+heard it, should have been tucked away in their burrows by this
+time, with the door shut above their heads, waiting for March
+and April to bring a warm sun which could tease them out of
+dormancy. But one bright morning in the middle of November
+I saw a great many of them hard at work.</p>
+
+<p>At first I noticed thousands of little mounds on the surface of
+the sand in a strip some six to fifteen feet wide along the upper
+part of the beach, following in general the outlines of the previous
+high tide. Where a log or shelving bank was in the way,
+these mounds, and the many holes accompanying them, about
+knitting-needle size, were concentrated on the seaward side. I
+noticed that shore birds had attempted to pluck the occupants
+from their holes and had reached down two to three inches. I
+scooped out the sand where a hole was, spread it around, and
+revealed a little animal not over a half inch long, with two large
+eyes covering the sides of its narrow head. The eyes were not
+only conspicuous, they were also startlingly white; and the
+sand-hopper’s body flattened on both sides, was a mother-of-pearl,
+somewhat translucent. This odd creature, one of a family in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+the order of amphipods, is called <i>Talorchestia megalopthalma</i>, a
+title that gives special credit to its eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I put my pale-moon animal back in its hole, but to be held and
+thrust against its own volition apparently immobilized it, so I let
+it go free down the sands. After a second or two it made a few
+big and seemingly crazy hops—on sidelong springs like a toy—down
+a line of mounds and holes, popped into a hole and
+promptly disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>I noticed that little spouts and bursts of sand were coming
+from many of these holes and with a little patience I could see
+some of the hoppers coming up as if to look around, as is customary
+with gophers and chipmunks, and then turning around
+and going back down again. What they were doing of course was
+a major job of digging, passing the sand up from one pair of
+legs to another and throwing it out the hole with a jerk. There
+was hardly time or inclination to pause and look around the far
+horizon. It was work that had to be done unceasingly, between
+tides and between seasons. Perhaps, if tomorrow brought consistently
+freezing temperatures, they might not appear again in
+any great numbers until spring; but their usual daily round meant
+frenzied feeding at low tide and after dark when no winged
+predators were around, followed by another return to the upper
+beach and another furiously energetic period of digging homes
+for themselves. Terrestrial animals, which might drown after a
+period of immersion, and yet bound on this strip of sand to the
+tides, they had a more legitimate claim to the beach than most of
+us.</p>
+
+<p>Looking down at them, or in on their busyness, I had an extraordinary
+Gulliverlike feeling of encroaching on a world to
+which I did not belong. It was one kind of an eye looking at
+another without any sense of whether it was seen in turn or not,
+in a dichotomy of function, race, size, and place. It took the
+beach out of my possession. This was a place of other-world<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
+connections at which I could hardly guess. Do we need to wait for
+the men from Mars?</p>
+
+<p>These are extravagant animals, with their grandiose if relatively
+blind eyes, with their feats of digging, their hunger
+dance. In a sense they have a very narrow range, between upper
+and lower tide, between one season and the next, between feeding
+and digging on their strip of sand, between hiding and emerging,
+and their life span is short; but what a use they make of it!</p>
+
+<p><i>Talorchestia megalopthalma</i> is now on my life list, as the
+“birders” put it, a pearly prodigy of moon leaps that may, for all I
+know, be the beach’s foremost citizen.</p>
+
+<p>I also caught a glimpse of another little animal as I turned
+over a piece of driftwood. It had numerous legs (seven pairs in
+all, I have learned), and a flattened body, though slightly rounded
+on top, and oval in shape, reminding me of a pill bug or sow
+bug, one of my most familiar landed neighbors, which can be
+found under almost any boulder or log that provides shade and
+moisture. The marine, or beached member of the family I met,
+was grayish white in color, and apparently had the same preference
+for moisture—if not too much, since it evidently lived at
+the high-tide line, and was “terrestrial” like the sand hoppers.
+Some of these isopods swim in the open sea, others live in shallow
+water, or at the low-tide line, and most are scavengers, feeding on
+dead animal matter.</p>
+
+<p>All these and countless others are symptomatic of a tidal
+range, an ebb and flow that extends between sea and land in
+terms of millions of years of emergence and adaptation. In them
+the two worlds find their division and also their meeting and
+intercommunication. Their characteristic areas, their “life zones,”
+from the tropics to the poles, all require extremes of risk
+and of the struggle to survive it. In one place or another they
+dance to the inexorable measure of things, limited in what they
+do but exceptional in their way of doing it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span></p>
+
+<p>On this beach, so unique, so well defined, and at the same
+time so widely involved, every upward surge of the waves and
+every bubbling retreat sinking through the sand, every range of
+tide, from the new moon to the old, every storm, every change in
+the season, every day and every night, is embodied in existence.</p>
+
+<p>I would think it presumptuous of me to claim any more on
+behalf of a bug or myself than we could in our honest natures
+fulfill, but faced by the shining tides of life, I am sure we have
+great things to do.</p>
+
+<p>My translations are on this beach. I am still a part of its
+measure, and when I forget those overwhelming controls that
+human power insists on, and all the artificiality men use to
+overcome their natural limitations, I begin to partake in this
+miraculous context. It is a cold beach, a bitter sea. Covered with
+cold, the sands impersonally receive the shadows moving over
+them tall and wide, gradually shifting and easing over slopes
+and shoulders toward the surf with its continual lunge, its pull
+and push, displacing the pale light that stands over the beach and
+gives it a hard winter brightness. The waves pour and foam
+and bubble up the beach and recede with a rainlike glistening
+and seething that sinks in, leaving dark stains behind. The middle
+part of the beach shows long thin lines like scars where the
+last tides came, part of the never ending drawing and erasing on
+this tablet of the sea’s art. It is all clean, and naked, defined,
+and at the same time rhythmically boundless, providing everything
+that comes to it with an inexhaustible dimension. It needs
+another language, and at the same time no language could really
+encompass it. In this bold breath and silence moving up, scene
+shifting, always starting again, there are decisions of sun and
+waves, of wind and light, that leave me with a true silence, a
+great room to fill, though it is in my blood and veins, the roots of
+me to feel, and any companion whom I meet must be in an
+ancient earth sense completely new, with a freshness made of a
+million years.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">Deer Week</p>
+
+
+<p>The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were
+loaded with whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking
+up and down offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside
+from the two men that I could see in the boat, the shore was a
+world unoccupied, bright, wide, and cold, one about which the
+mass of us might care or know very little.</p>
+
+<p>On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the
+bay, black ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers
+rode the choppy waters. The bay also ran hard with
+whitecaps; and the wind with a bare fury roared head on at
+empty summer houses facing the north, and drove across headlands
+glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes in
+its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking
+and shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought
+the whole north with it and the gulls that hung there or rose
+steeply into it, were allied with its violence in a way that was
+hard to understand.</p>
+
+<p>Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of
+human preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in
+December, and the pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of
+guns like the hard slamming of doors, and down the highway
+at least every other car was loaded with hunters dressed in red,
+and on nearly every sandy side road several cars were parked.
+Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff looking out to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
+sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in that
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent
+patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out
+of their cars like spectators at a football game, they seemed as
+covered with neon lighting as a city street. In fact many of them
+do come from cities to the north and south of the Cape, which
+can now be reached in much faster time than used to be the
+case, and they follow the same pattern as many of the summer
+tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who live away from
+streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The lookouts
+stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars
+across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the
+woods where I live. The guns resound from all points of the
+compass.</p>
+
+<p>Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game
+birds. One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning
+from a hunting expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless.
+One man had managed to shoot a partridge on the way, but
+he ruefully admitted that someone had stolen it from the back
+of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started straggling back,
+while guns were still going off in what seemed a completely
+indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion.</p>
+
+<p>“Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great
+cheerfulness.</p>
+
+<p>I was helping one of the hunters extricate his station wagon
+from a muddy hole, and by that time I had a feeling that, like
+many other human enterprises, hunting was a communal affair
+which might turn out one way or another, but like a battle, had
+no certain outcome. It was clear, in any case, that very few of
+these men had much of an idea about the habits of the animals
+they were hunting. Some species of ducks, for example, feed
+more readily after sundown and so are more easily found, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+more vulnerable. A half century ago, the population of wild
+fowl was probably less safe than it is now. A yellowlegs, flying
+up out of a marsh in late autumn, did not have much of a
+chance to start south. Some local hunter was waiting in anticipation,
+someone who probably knew the marshes and the shore
+as his ancestors had known them.</p>
+
+<p>If the hunters had an unlimited season on this narrow peninsula,
+Cape Cod would be in a state of siege the year around,
+regardless of what happened to the ducks, partridge, quail, or
+deer. We have the universal problem of room and numbers. After
+all, the human population is increasing at a faster rate than
+most birds. Perhaps our populatedness results in less concern for
+the rest of life simply through lack of association with it. Do we
+know what we are shooting at? Hunters who blast away into
+flocks of eiders or Canada geese, leaving many of them wounded,
+unable to retrieve the rest because they are too far out in the
+water, are not doing anything but getting rid of their feelings,
+which are not necessarily worth cherishing.</p>
+
+<p>The deer population may not decline because of hunting.
+Their numbers, their balance between starvation and survival
+depends largely on the kind of country they live in, on its vegetation.
+Cape Cod is only a half mile in width in some parts of
+it, seven or eight in others, but down the middle of it there is
+a wide belt of low growth, of tangles, shrubs, and low, cut-over
+woodland which provides good forage for deer and good concealment,
+even with the human armies in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>Hunting deer is thought of as an American heritage, our birthright,
+part of the Thanksgiving celebration, handed down from
+fathers to sons. Since deer are one of those species, unlike their
+predators the wolf and the mountain lion, that have managed
+to live abundantly in the presence of man, so much so that they
+sometimes require “weeding” to save them from starvation, hunting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+them is as legitimate as it ever was, provided the hunting is
+controlled; but we no longer need them as we did.</p>
+
+<p>Having left the age behind when venison was our essential
+meat, we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed
+deer. In some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters.
+They are directly influenced by human civilization. In turn,
+civilization is dependent on them to the extent that they provide
+the basis for a multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is
+our hunter’s right that deer should exist, but we are not the
+hunters that we used to be. What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline,
+clothing, ammunition, whiskey?</p>
+
+<p>The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be
+more to our advantage than any claims we make on them. They
+are afraid of man and keep their distant beauty from him. The
+heritage <i>they</i> keep is wildness, which still has the power to
+arouse fear in us, and sometimes pity, as we may pity all life,
+including our own, that is cut short or broken by the inexorable
+laws of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and
+the sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some
+distance ahead of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two
+cars had just roared by with hunters in them, before she made
+her appearance. She seemed either wounded or exhausted, going
+very slowly, pulling her hindquarters stiffly behind her.
+When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew up and she
+went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only moderate
+speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs
+under the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men,
+who turned up their car heaters and sped away.</p>
+
+<p>Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked,
+and a hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass.
+I could see the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore
+road, waiting with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+getting in and out of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,”
+sounded across the way. After a while a number of them began
+to hurry ahead, almost tumbling as they ran, to converge on a
+deer which had apparently run to the bottom of a hollow. They
+surrounded the hollow on all sides, many men standing on their
+car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether there was actually a
+deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to escape, I never
+learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood for
+comfort.</p>
+
+<p>The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the
+sea, not too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat—a
+very rough trade on that day for common flesh and blood—rocked
+forward through the waves. After a while the darkness began to
+fall, with a thin smoky yellow and pink band on the western
+horizon and a new blanket of gray clouds mounting overhead,
+so that all of us began to turn in under the cold breath of night.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every
+minute of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through
+the countless years of earthly inheritance and change, how we
+became so overmastering in our numbers and needs, so divorced
+from the exactions of nature? Shall we meet up only with ourselves?</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains,
+and their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even
+those who abuse a hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion,
+are trying to keep in contact with a natural mortality
+which our world denies. Perhaps we need help from other animals
+besides the human one.</p>
+
+<p>Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood,
+marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach
+with its perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone
+and lifted each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and
+sand. The gulls hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
+Even the boat had a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so
+with feathers, logs, or purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but
+swept and washed into a mutual keeping by the air and the tidal
+presence of the sea. I asked it to show us light and life which
+was our undiscovered own to help us through our mutual violence
+and upheavals, our narrow days.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">Impermanence Takes Its Stand</p>
+
+
+<p>Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually,
+and the beach loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the
+plants and trees work so hard to hold on in their shifting ground
+that they never reach a climax state. They are pioneers. Such a
+place is open, as all earth’s shores must be, to drifters, like the
+black stork.</p>
+
+<p>The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up
+in great numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm,
+could come in from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts,
+Maine, or Nova Scotia, depending on how it was transported,
+by ships or by the sea itself. Years ago, sailing ships
+traveling along the Outer Cape with cargoes of lumber chained to
+their decks might encounter heavy seas and be in serious danger
+of grounding on the shoals, in which case they would occasionally
+jettison the cargo, which would land up and down the beaches,
+to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the “moon-cussers.”
+Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or
+studding, it supplied many a family with material for their
+houses. I can think of at least one house which is largely constructed
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>Or as it happened not so many years ago, a log jam in a Maine
+river broke the boom and the logs went careening and dipping
+down to the sea, a great many landing after a while on the Outer<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
+Beach. Huge trunks of trees sometimes appear, carried in by the
+sea. I have found cherry, red and white pine, cedar, spruce,
+beech, and even some canoe birch with the bark still on it, a tree
+not indigenous to the Cape. Mahogany and walnut have been
+found at times, and a few years ago the cross section of a tree
+was discovered near Eastham that turned out to be a very hard
+and heavy wood from Brazil, probably fallen off a ship. Parts of
+dories, or larger vessels, broken oars; buoys of all colors and
+shapes, glass floats from lobster pots, branches, logs; boards of
+many different sizes and lengths, wharf pilings and planks, and
+dunnage, timbers used in stowing ship’s cargoes, cases of scotch,
+always, in my sad experience, without the scotch; crates from
+vessels of all the world, South American, Russian, Japanese,
+French, and most of the nations you can name; all these and
+more have been carried by the sea, sometimes for twenty or
+thirty years, until they were finally landed on the beach. It is
+wood for the fire, a house, a shack, or a table, and material for
+any curious scavenger, on behalf of aesthetics, science, or history.</p>
+
+<p>The driftwood is a migrant, to move again soon, unless it is
+taken off the beach, burned in a fire, or lodged and buried deep
+above the high-tide line. It may serve temporarily as a place where
+seaweed and other litter gathers, or where crustaceans might
+congregate. The birds, if it is an accessible clump of branches
+fingering over the sands, rather than a log or heavy timber, may
+peck through it after such tiny animals, their tracks making a
+delicate tracery running under it and arrowing away. Driftwood
+migrates like the sand and the birds. It is another aspect of
+the surf’s swing and draw, its dragging out, its removal and its
+deposition, part of the constant remolding of this shore.</p>
+
+<p>On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon,
+everything goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only
+rule. As it does everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across
+from one direction of the compass or another, streaming with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
+light and moisture, lifts up, lifts you to it, and with long low
+swoops, sudden breaths and seething, it whisks the waters of the
+marshes and inlets, rounds their brown shoulders, races through
+trees and over cliffs clean through across the sea. The land under
+it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes, also waves
+as they do.</p>
+
+<p>The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and
+hills, though vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot
+and yard by yard, look unrelievedly intense and bold. They
+glisten under the open light, the open draws of the sky. There are
+miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and beach-plum thickets shining
+as if they were wet with light, or, in the winter months, purple,
+maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This is where the
+fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers. There is
+a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above
+the pouring of the surf.</p>
+
+<p>Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide
+patches of huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous
+red tips to their branches in the fall, and in other areas
+the ground is held by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of
+shining bearberry, or hog cranberry, green and purple with
+bright-red berries under their leaves. Wide patches and hollows
+of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia, “beach heath” or
+“beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has golden yellow
+flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die, flowers,
+incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them. Sometimes
+they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to
+hold on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and
+blow away, though in point of fact each of these fragments can
+lodge again in some other area. In the grayest of weather this
+lichen seems almost luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.</p>
+
+<p>Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees
+with burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
+dead at the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until
+recently when building was curbed by the National Park, new
+clumps of cottages and half-finished roads appearing all the time
+in new areas.</p>
+
+<p>The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping
+back as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just
+above the beach its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost
+denuded of vegetation, deep cups with drops below them sheer
+down to the beach. I have seen the remnants of house foundations
+in such hollows, or a creosoted pole or two sticking up
+above the surface of the sand, not too old by the look of them,
+proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be.
+Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry,
+or in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain
+finality, giving a free, waving look to the surface of things. On
+the other hand this vegetation is definite enough. There is no
+fragility to it. It is scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth
+may be held down but it also gives the landscape a symmetry
+and economy; it does not give the impression of being hit or
+miss at all but very definite and sure of its place, as sure as wind-struck,
+salt-sprayed plants can be. Each plant stays rooted from
+place to place through this sandy earth, being adapted to intense
+light, drought, and constant winds, holding on hard against
+being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move into new
+areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in on newly
+deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in
+which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the
+plants formerly rooted there.</p>
+
+<p>So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance,
+temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes
+made by the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to
+be hummocks or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock
+may be held down by beach grass and have a core of bayberry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
+bushes with only an inch or two of leaves and branches
+sticking out at the tops. Beach grass, bayberry, seaside goldenrod
+live in close if embattled communities, at least with respect to
+the wind. These plants and others may all join in holding such
+hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded
+clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around
+them.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way,
+ericoides and tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,”
+but the name is usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more
+common of the two. They are not always easy to tell apart. The
+ericoides, sometimes called golden heather, has tiny spinelike
+leaves that stand out fairly distinctly from the stem and each
+other and it is a plant that stays green for a much longer time
+during fall and winter. The tomentosa is densely tufted, downy,
+softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or bluish green, being
+subject to winter kill more readily than the other species. On
+Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried, and
+used for fuel.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely
+dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface
+in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so
+readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other
+hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation
+to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the
+term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall
+is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected
+and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not
+adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get
+moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass,
+probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions
+were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining
+ever since.</p>
+
+<p>Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault
+made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that
+hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce
+sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction.
+Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show
+the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than
+most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little
+farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their
+leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat
+on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp40" id="i084" style="max-width: 102.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i084.png" alt="Scrub trees on the dunes">
+</figure>
+<p>Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the
+ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to
+visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly
+through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction
+lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore,
+of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less
+formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its
+limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success.</p>
+
+<p>We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and
+certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing
+in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare
+ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is
+also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny
+scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a
+resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human
+knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation,
+artfully finished and well related to the world.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The Depths of Sight</p>
+
+
+<p>Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I
+might enter, to follow further than I know? There are so many
+unfinished depths suggested by the surface of things. A wet,
+white and gray pebble of quartz has the kind of grain that leads
+off to snow and rain and all the watery and windy associations of
+earth history. A feather, fitted, barbuled, light and strong, holding
+the air, refracting the rays of the sun and using them for its
+colors, has the horizon’s curve and the graces of the sky. The
+bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and primitive tale about
+the salt water and its animation. We should not be so impressed
+by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at their
+face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape
+I suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever
+takes part in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our
+own capacity.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might
+make sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t
+write a book or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a
+special kind of closeness to truths of nature which we might only
+see through a glass. Their very distance from us seems to prove
+it. Look at a herring gull and you see an animal with less intelligence
+than a goat, but with the same ungiving topaz eyes. I
+kept a female brown thrasher once for a week or two and there<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
+was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had for me but a constant
+glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to be deciphered otherwise.
+Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are not even
+revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a
+misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom
+like a sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and
+crevices. Its lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless
+colored water. Other animals, other societies, receive natural
+messages in ways that may have no more excitement in them
+than the reflection of a cloud passing across the surface of a pond,
+and still they may know what we do not, and the place they
+live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The strict, close
+relationships in the world of life, the life of earth, result in
+sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from self-knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks.
+Human civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the
+“produce” of our dumps during the wintertime, when it would
+otherwise have to work for a living. When a gull is standing
+around on the beach looking as if it were doing nothing, and we
+ask why, imagining the same specific purposes we think we ourselves
+pursue, we might be disappointed. As likely as not, the
+gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off at some stimulus—hunger,
+another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow. And yet it
+is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response to the
+currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the sun’s
+appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies
+in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the
+effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least
+it seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration.
+So in a herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much
+qualified by intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly
+connected with the world of light. When birds and animals<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+react to me, and why leave out any man or child, even if it is
+only in answer to an “escape mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.</p>
+
+<p>One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback,
+were congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along
+the cliff. As soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow
+over the beach, they took wing, even though I was at least a
+quarter of a mile away, and they rose in one heavy flock and
+beat slowly away down the sands and the surf line.</p>
+
+<p>Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon
+swimming just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and
+alert as though the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at
+the masthead, was on a constant lookout. When it saw me it
+glanced wildly and ducked head first, over and down, slipping
+under the water.</p>
+
+<p>On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor
+seals of good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the
+beach. First one dark head appeared above the water and then as
+I watched through field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes
+suddenly looked up at me, and the seal dove, followed by another
+one a few yards behind. The two swam through green rolling
+waters parallel to the beach, coming up every half minute or so,
+their swimming forms like shadows slipping through the sea.
+The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing animals, have
+suffered great persecution by man and are much less numerous
+in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of these
+two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a
+great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some
+contact with them, as I did with the birds—the mutual life
+touched on, an electric communication made between one far
+pole and another.</p>
+
+<p>Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very
+special way, but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
+reception, and in animals without consciousness and means of
+assessment this may mean more than automatic reaction to light.
+I think of a crowd of newly hatched minnows like tiny slivers of
+glass, running up and quivering through the water. The most
+definite thing about them is their large black eyes, contrasted
+with a bodily transparency so fragile as to seem past fragility, an
+artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of universal actions that
+might have their matrix in a dream. Those large eyes are the
+eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an alliance
+with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual
+attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration
+in a man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new
+to life.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are
+looking at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses
+there is a watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a
+lightning and at the same time a listlessness there is in them,
+in their hurrying ways through currents of fluid light, and their
+suspension in its stillness! Many of them only last for a day or a
+few minutes before disappearing as a food for other animals, in
+the mercurial depths of water allied with life, this intoxicant,
+this terror.</p>
+
+<p>My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains
+this landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own
+eye and its own depth to find. The expression of water, sand,
+and sky leads vision beyond itself.</p>
+
+<p>One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low
+over the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the
+same time illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard
+light of a fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or
+so away down the shore. I kept walking toward them with the
+illusion that the boat was moored close to the beach, but after a
+couple of miles the lights were still receding and I turned back.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+The tide was close in and sheets of foam pitched in and dragged
+back with a sound of rattling stones but in gentle rhythm. It
+was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could detect little strikes
+of light, the curling over and stirring of white and silver. Up
+through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared intermittently,
+riding above the water. The beach was covered with soft
+airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood of
+ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was
+out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond
+the atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away
+and joined with fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation,
+a familiar place turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I
+might sense all sorts of far nerve ends tingling out of the night
+behind the mist. We receive very little of what reaches us out
+of this tribal universe, whose messages light through us unseen
+and unheard until we, as individuals, are turned to the dust of
+the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Night or day, the sea and sea beach offer their changing
+spaces of light. One afternoon in January, halfway between hours
+of warmth and hours of cold, rain and snow, morning and evening,
+the sea off Nauset was racing green, spray tossing off the
+tops of the waves that simultaneously paused, curved up, and
+broke down in thunder. The whole sky was full of cloud featherings
+borne over before the wind and along the horizon out to
+sea were colors of lavender and gray, and pale-green openings
+like caves. The wide, steep beach was full of gloss, with a roll
+and fire of its own, and above it fringing the edge of the sandbanks
+the beach grass curved out and waved. I felt a resonance
+in the beach, a tremendously heavy and vibrant tone, the tonnage
+of sand and surf in harmony along with a low moan from
+the sea’s lungs.</p>
+
+<p>Small flocks of black ducks quivered over the water and then
+flew in to Nauset marsh. Then the heavier Canada geese beat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
+in with stalwart wings, to thin out from their V formation to a
+long line as they wheeled in low against the wind and then
+regathered as they settled down on the marsh.</p>
+
+<p>Blackback gulls glided low across the outer line of the surf
+and sometimes their shadows appeared on the curving wall of a
+wave. Herring gulls soared in the heights and then beat forward
+on sinewy wings like flounders pulsing and beating through the
+water.</p>
+
+<p>One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which
+it had found on the marsh and dropped it from high in the air.
+Then the bird retrieved its food and tried again, taking a chance
+on whether or not it would strike some boulders and break, since
+this is a haphazard and not a very knowledgeable game with the
+gulls. They pick up the habit from each other, by example rather
+than inheritance. Sometimes it works and just as often it does
+not.</p>
+
+<p>The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the
+clouds ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand
+were waggling back and forth in the wind. There was a swish
+of milky surf up the beach. Over the uncountable numbers of
+sand grains, each with its own size, shape, and color was a clean
+radiance, even a magic. Because in this realm of wide, majestic
+use, of continual advent, each offering was still of a proportion
+perfect for its moment in time. Each single action, the silhouette
+of the straw-colored grasses curving before the wind, or a gull
+shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the light, was of
+such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they were
+magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they
+had life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not
+subject to lessening or degradation in this world of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Like the lights that appear under the mist, or over the open
+barrens of the sea at night, like St. Elmo’s fire on the <i>Pequod</i>’s
+mast, there are electric tricks playing on the horizon, perhaps at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>
+all times, since there seems to be no end to light’s action over
+the waters with the sky’s depth behind it. As I walked up the
+beach there was a radiant white patch hanging up in the soft,
+scudding overcast, not in the sun’s direction—reflected off the
+water perhaps—but having a wild aura of its own. It gave me a
+feeling of communication with something which had a right to
+awe. We may have passed the primitive stage, but the primitive
+respect for what was beyond human control and the magic used
+to propitiate it or bring it to play may still have their sources.
+The light and its manifestations is still too quick for the eye, or
+for the facts.</p>
+
+<p>Science itself goes on proving that there is no infinite exactitude
+and that many things can only be explained in terms of
+probability. The fact that nothing is stopped by our constant
+search for a simple solution to life is what keeps science in business.
+The search into the nature of cells finds them full of inner
+whirlings, the motion of countless component parts, of a universal
+restlessness. They are structurally fantastic and each kind is manifestly
+different. Our voyage toward the invisible is unending.
+The molecule or the jellyfish, seen through one human lens or
+another, retain their share of the marvelous. And if we marvel,
+we are still capable of learning.</p>
+
+<p>A radiance above me, a changing freshness in the air, between
+warm and cold, a shudder of wings over the beach, another language
+of unexplored dimensions, life expressions understood in
+terms of sight and spirit, and still to be learned—the nonhuman
+advents that pass the limits of a man. There is a common realm
+of action and perception, whose boundaries we may never reach,
+where men can be more grateful for their belonging than their
+isolation. It is part of the changing state of inanimate things,
+the response of lesser forms of life to the construction and motion
+of the world that invades them and which they invade, and
+it is acted out by the mind. The tidal waves run through us all.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
+To see as men see and merely to react like a moon snail or a
+horseshoe crab to the difference between light and dark are two
+representative actions in the same vast realm of response.</p>
+
+<p>Do men belabor the special nature of consciousness too much,
+as if it were some kind of A-1 badge that separated mankind
+from the rest of animate creation? Consciousness must be infinitely
+more mysterious, more connective, than any attributes
+we may assign it of personal distinction.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The Flight of Birds</p>
+
+
+<p>The appearance of migratory birds in fall and spring, or
+simply their constant activity, suggests their range. The ability
+that a gull displays in the turmoil of the air is enough to bring
+other winds to these shores, to make you realize that the beach
+joins the long shore line between Cape Cod and Florida, that the
+waters to the north of us move on toward Labrador and Baffin
+Bay. Their wings are allied to the circulation of the North Atlantic.
+New England is not so far from the Arctic Circle, and
+when the auks, the old squaws, or the buntings come down to
+Cape Cod in the autumn they bring the proof with them.</p>
+
+<p>We have had an appalling record this side of the Atlantic,
+of decimating the population of sea birds, which are more vulnerable
+than other species because of their nesting habits, on
+islands or rocky foreshores. The great auk has gone, and the puffins
+reduced to small numbers. If we were able to kill them all
+off, either on purpose or through lack of responsibility, what
+little island people it would make us!</p>
+
+<p>The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting
+black and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and
+rocky headlands where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the
+cast of deep and icy waters. One June day, when the beach at
+Race Point was glaring with light, and all the winter leavings,
+like the twisted dead stalks of dusty miller, were being replaced<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>
+by a freshness in the shine and scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or
+little auk, on the beach a few yards away from the water. It is a
+very small bird, though conspicuous enough with its penguinlike
+stance, its black and white plumage, and though it was in full
+view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When I approached,
+this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away from me
+down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of
+sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since
+most dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a
+“nonbreeding straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more
+temperate waters not locked in ice like their home feeding
+grounds. Over a period of years and at unpredictable times,
+there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds are blown inland
+by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places: ponds,
+back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping centers.
+Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease,
+if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided
+they survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a
+number of them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod
+highway.</p>
+
+<p>The dovekies are messengers from the north. The way the
+gulls use the wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into
+it, hovering, then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing
+skill of other birds that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics
+of the open sea. They are masters of the art of air as no
+plane can ever be. I remember watching some fulmars in the
+wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the great blue-green waves
+in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They glided between
+the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless deliberation,
+and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned. Back
+and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings
+and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span>
+excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my
+lungs, my admiration.</p>
+
+<p>In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity
+reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights
+the constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of
+red-backed sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and
+sun-reflecting at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness
+set going in them which must carry them a long way. They
+are long-distance migrants flitting from one end of the earth,
+one shore line to the next, and judging by their actions it is hard
+to believe that they could ever rest. Searching for crustaceans
+or sand worms along the beach, they run on flickering black
+legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing in syncopation.
+When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it piles in
+and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick,
+automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back
+they seem to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the
+beach and then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a
+tide bird faster than the tides, where there is no following it. This
+bird is quick and sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I
+take most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness
+in them, skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam.
+The white in their plumage is so pure, snow paths between
+markings of black and cinnamon, like briers and weed stalks,
+with suggestions of greenish gray when the sun shines on them.
+They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions of the musk
+ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at the
+least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or
+along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking
+away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
+of the world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty
+and its freedom.</p>
+
+<p>They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such
+tiny creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always
+flocking and scattering out from one rise and level to the next.
+To me, the fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows,
+sanderlings, gulls, horned larks, and many other visitors to
+seaside lands is their trait of invisibility. It is not only their
+whiteness—they look almost entirely white seen from underneath,
+appearing and disappearing like clouds—and a plumage
+which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass stalks, dune shadows,
+on the bare ground—but their actions. With a motion
+reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the goldfinches
+have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top
+or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing,
+a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of
+tinkling bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing
+and then burst in gentle snow flights across the ground, through
+one opening, one neat run, one clean escape to another. They
+turn the invisible into reality. They have a continual lift, the
+agitation inherent in all life. They fly up ahead of me as sparks
+out of the unseen rest and center of things.</p>
+
+<p>Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which
+appears irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for
+rodents and occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl.
+I remember seeing a mounted specimen when I was a boy
+and thinking it was the most desirable thing on earth to own,
+and since I never did own one, the snowy owl stayed intangible
+and magnificent in my mind; and the first live one I ever saw did
+nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They migrate to
+beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing elevations
+as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they
+can survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
+season, watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence
+of prey. The one I saw was way down the south end of North
+Beach, that stretch of Nauset beach which ends at the straits
+separating it from Monomoy. It was perched on a hummock, and
+at first was nearly indistinguishable from the top of a white
+picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of white marble marker,
+rounded at the top, which you might see on a roadside in Vermont.
+We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and when it
+flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white and
+flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light
+and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted
+calmly on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us
+out of fierce yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we
+turned and came at it from another direction its head almost
+swiveled all the way around, looking at us from over its back. It
+kept its place in center stage.</p>
+
+<p>Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters.
+During October and November especially they can be seen shuttling
+back and forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach.
+Some feed, principally on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham
+and along other shallow shores and inlets, but the majority—an
+estimated 500,000—spend the winter over the shoals between
+Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to, as they fly low over the
+water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and of good design—the
+red-brown females, and males patterned in black and white—as
+a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you can see
+them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a half
+a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a
+suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown.</p>
+
+<p>By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes
+show up like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into
+December the gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying
+singly for the most part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>
+wings reflecting the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their
+grand manner down, from fifty feet or more in the air, hard and
+bold into the water, sending up jets of spray.</p>
+
+<p>Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water
+in your hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally
+wide ebb and flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all
+earth’s shadows wave across its seas, and yet this is the precise
+route of the birds, their direction and their home. They know its
+guidelines inwardly. For us, who put so much emphasis on outward
+instruments, this can be almost impossible to understand.</p>
+
+<p>Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at
+home together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate
+ways. Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though
+the latter can’t dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to
+chance, to disease, to going astray and meeting with mishaps
+when confronted by the freakishness and violence of the weather.
+Many a duck or sea bird, caught on a lee shore or in a marshy
+inlet during a great storm may be unable to rise into the wind
+and is exhausted or swept away and seriously injured while trying.
+Life and death, joy and disaster, go wing to wing. Birds
+have less capacity to deceive themselves than we, being unable to
+avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its protective
+power.</p>
+
+<p>I had similar thoughts in mind one day in November during a
+violent coastal storm while watching some gulls, ringed-bill and
+herring, together with a few shore birds, that were gathered at
+the head of an inlet along a relatively sheltered part of the Bay.
+The Outer Beach was of a violence that day which could hardly
+be approached, either on foot or in contemplation. Even here the
+storm winds were relentless, hard and cold, flicking and driving
+the sands along the shore, whipping the marsh waters behind it
+into a froth. Sanderlings made short, low, flying hops back and
+forth, but were unable to do their usual free hurrying and basket-swinging<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
+flights along the shore. The gulls stood in shallow water
+facing the wind, water that was being whipped and lashed, and
+sometimes they would drop down sideways a little before the
+wind’s force, thrown slightly off balance, acting like a man who
+has been cut across the face. Taking to the air just above the
+ground they would find difficulty in maneuvering and were
+forced back, sometimes fifty feet or more, to continue standing
+where they dropped back to the ground; but even in this they
+showed a certain supple power, a control aware of its limits,
+the sinewy economy of wings lifted in the wind, the plain sky
+beauty of feathers gray and white. The storm was ending, although
+the water was still being whiplashed into foam. The light
+was very cold and the sky line was heaped with sunset fires.</p>
+
+<p>Surely everything, everywhere, was vulnerable, and yet it was
+that bird closeness to such primal powers as might seem to us
+bitter, alien, and cruel—the gods of the north, of the waters and
+the winds—that gave them an essential balance, a rightful place.
+That great sky of theirs was unexplored. It came down to me
+that regardless of what he learns, there is so much for a man to
+go on asking.</p>
+
+<p>What can birds tell you, other than displaying those traits of
+aggression, or fear, or mutual attraction, which we may recognize
+when observing their behavior? We have a little fear in
+ourselves, when looking on, that we may go too far in mixing up
+our own traits and terms with theirs; but each will manage to
+keep his territory, untransgressed by the other, and each takes
+part in the high order of nature. Watching the birds, I have seen
+ceremony, ritual, love-making, display, all worthy of admiration
+by the most glittering of human cultures. The speech of men and
+the speech of birds do not divide us altogether. In silence is unity.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most eloquent thing about birds is that which
+we will probably never learn to decipher. In his study of puffins,
+R. M. Lockeley refers to their “subtle, silent-gesture language.”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
+That language is part of a still more silent order, the dark realm
+of existence where all their actions and necessities have their
+play. Approach with patience and with care.</p>
+
+<p>One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward
+Eastham, through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled
+very pungently in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting
+winds and the day as I walked full of weather changes, from
+an edge of cold to warmth and back again. An early sun began to
+be covered by pale-gray clouds and there was a mauve light over
+the sea. I caught sight of a little wren along the way, and there
+was a number of sparrows, both seen and heard—song, chipping,
+seaside, and probably others. It was a low, shifting thicket world
+full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic sound, rocking
+with light and air.</p>
+
+<p>I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy
+road, at times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk
+flying off ahead of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its
+long wings. Then I noticed another one roosting on a broken-off
+tree several hundred feet back of the cliff just outside a wood
+of pitch pines. The first one made off in that direction too, roosting
+not far from its companion on a dead stump, and they both
+stayed absolutely still, like falcons on an Egyptian frieze. I could
+hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the background.</p>
+
+<p>I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing
+ahead of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly
+killed, its breast bare of feathers and shining red like some rock
+wet with sea splash in the crimson path of the setting sun. What
+kind of a game led up to this? Could the two hawks, one tempting
+the jay by its distance, the other scaring it by its proximity,
+have managed to send it out into the open where it had no
+chance against their swift and effortless pursuit? I walked ahead
+for a short distance and then waited, watching through field
+glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>
+few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising
+again and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a
+little closer and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of
+an ancient poise, wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they
+never went back to the road until I had gone for good. The
+grace and tension, the space in that formal scene stayed with
+me for a long time.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The Marsh</p>
+
+
+<p>The Outer Beach is broken only at Nauset Inlet, where
+the tidal waters pour through an opening that has frequently
+changed its width and position, and at Chatham. The Chatham
+break leads in to the wide area of Chatham Harbor and Pleasant
+Bay. In both places, but more especially at Nauset, where the
+marshes and the inland shore behind them are protected by the
+beach and a sandspit some two and three-quarter miles in length,
+an unstable, but at the same time fairly constant equilibrium
+is attained between sea and land. It does not seem obvious that
+this should be so at all. The sandspit looks only too narrow and
+fragile, and at intervals it does show evidence that the sea has
+broken through. Driftwood logs lie on the cuts made between its
+hummocks, headed as they were when the sea subsided, after
+it had lifted them in toward the marsh.</p>
+
+<p>Except for the great volume of the beach itself, which is maintained
+in collaboration with the forces of the sea, it is hard at
+first to understand why the marsh should not be inundated. Why
+does that lord the sea not heave in and overwhelm this sandy
+barrier, flooding over the marshy flats and islands, and wash up
+permanently against the inland shore?</p>
+
+<p>The shoulders of the low cedar-studded land slope down to
+the edge of the marsh with a neat, trimmed look and neat
+houses, seemingly confident of being in residence indefinitely,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>
+although I have heard people who live there talking in ways that
+suggested they were not sure of it. Once see those stormy waters
+heaving and rushing over the sandspit and you cannot be sure
+of anything. Looking out at the sea, even from a fairly safe distance,
+you can find eternal balance and at the same time inundation
+and disaster. Now that the Outer Beach stretches past the
+miles of cliffs and is no longer backed up by them, becoming
+an outlying stretch of sand, its own “protective” power might
+seem much less clear. On the other hand, when was this beach
+in anything but a state of flux and change? There is protection
+in that, even if it is hard to define. The fact is that the relationship
+between the sea, the beach, and the sandspit, the marsh and
+inland shore, has been maintained for ages in the past and probably
+ages to come. In general the volume of sand that is packed
+along the shore balances what is removed from it, but only in
+general, for the time being, because erosion takes place consistently
+over the years and during its course more sand is removed
+than delivered. Also a standing equilibrium is kept between
+this deposition and taking away of sand and the conditions offshore:
+the currents, drift, wave height and direction, the changing
+shoals and bars. All these states and forces are involved in
+an extremely complex kind of order, and it is certainly broken
+and rearranged all the time. A season may show it, or the records
+of history. In fact, changes occur from day to day.</p>
+
+<p>When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605
+he sailed into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old
+records, the inlet was about halfway down the sandspit behind
+the beach. Since then it apparently has moved about a mile
+south, but its entrances have changed now and then, with long
+periods of relative stability in between, which might be broken
+at any time and then followed by some new arrangement of
+forces.</p>
+
+<p>In his <cite>Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States</cite>,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
+Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit,
+or “beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been
+pushed back a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the
+early seventeenth century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging
+by early charts, of where it is now, and took the form of a
+long narrow island some twelve miles in length “with several
+small islands north of it and outlets to the ocean at either end—the
+northern one at Eastham and the southern lying between the
+end of this beach ridge and the Chatham shore.”</p>
+
+<p>“In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse
+on Minot’s Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans
+water at Nauset, and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near
+the entrance filled partially with shifting sands.”</p>
+
+<p>The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits
+literally broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex
+in 1957. Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of
+coastal charts shows that Nauset Inlet opened hard against the
+cliffs on the south side from 1856 (the first good chart available
+to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941 show that in a single year a
+spit grew from south to north against the littoral drift and shifted
+the inlet a mile to the north.”</p>
+
+<p>For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted
+in two entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently.
+Other temporary break-throughs can be seen along the
+spit, varying from 150 feet to a few yards across, extending down
+its length until it joins a broad, high stretch—almost a long mount—of
+sand which ends at the present inlet, with North Beach on
+the other side. This sand is subject to storm flooding and to
+winds, to being removed and added to, recut and carved by the
+waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach grass is not
+able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five hundred pairs
+of terns have nested there, and are protected.</p>
+
+<p>The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
+toward the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where
+the channel of the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both
+sides keep changing their lengths and relative position. The sea
+builds high shoals off and around the incoming tidal channel
+during one season and it may level at least parts of them off in
+another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs and bottom of a
+boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank of the
+inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the
+winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank
+lay over it which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level.</p>
+
+<p>Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957,
+and afterwards in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing
+pattern. Shoals and separate spits began to drift, to join and
+separate, shift and intermingle in curling, curving folds, an
+interwaving and repositioning of sand materials that would seem
+to have no parallel in nature.</p>
+
+<p>The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at
+an average rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme
+erosion. This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs,
+and on the whole it is probably somewhat less here than there,
+although the marsh area is being very gradually diminished in
+extent. Its wide channels and bays, its marshy edges, islands, and
+flats, are held in the balance of great forces sweeping along the
+shore, or occasionally breaking through in violence. Although it
+absorbs and releases the tidal waters with ancient calm, it seems
+wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the complex, barely
+understood forces that build and break along the shore.</p>
+
+<p>The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for
+centuries have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes,
+and the black ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under
+the wide light of dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open
+water and stirred the matted grass. Like the tides that flood in and
+fall, like the marsh grasses that grow and wave, then die down<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
+and take on their matted winter look, or the marine animals that
+swim in through the tidal channel and go out again to sea, it is a
+place of flight and motion. The local animals, crabs, clams, mussels,
+snails, the salt-water minnows in the ditches, the marsh
+snails, and numerous others, must go through their cycles of
+growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife relationships,
+but the over-all feeling that I have had about the
+marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated
+to migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any
+enclosed stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated
+look of the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the
+Bay shore, but it is an isolation bound to the open waters of the
+sea which run through it and sometimes threaten its borders.</p>
+
+<p>After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh
+plants and grasses darken. In November the marshes are still
+russet, umber, and yellow green, but by January they are dark
+brown with reddish tawny tones in matted grasses having the
+coarse texture of a deer’s coat. The saltwort plants, so fresh and
+green and full of salt juices in the summer, have turned dry and
+white, curled over at their tips so that they have the look of singed
+wool.</p>
+
+<p>When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to
+stretch far off toward the shore and the channels between them
+are partly hidden. Nauset from the landward side, on the other
+hand, looks as if it were mostly composed of water, especially
+at high tide. It is both a good country for low-grass lovers like
+sparrows and those that ride its watery lanes and lakes like
+ducks and geese.</p>
+
+<p>Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass
+for short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I
+have flushed a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh.
+Horned larks peck in the dunes, tripping forward with a stamping
+motion of their legs, and then stop, to stand with a backward<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
+slant to their bodies. They fly up suddenly with shrill lisping
+cries; and all the while the deep quacking of black ducks sounds
+from far out in the middle of the marsh. There are always
+gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise on the
+wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes
+wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse,
+guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way
+out and their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for
+gannets.</p>
+
+<p>Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin
+heads and bills straight forward so that in flight they become
+throbbing arrows sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the
+hummocks of the spit facing the marsh while flock after flock of
+Canada geese flew in overhead, bugling as they came, close
+enough so that I could hear the fine high whistling of their
+wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through their feathers.
+Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in the marsh,
+along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks stray
+back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A
+black duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to
+spin as it flies up high and fast and changes direction, like a
+weathervane.</p>
+
+<p>Quivering, soaring, swinging flights set out over the wide
+marsh, and the bird fleets ride the waters. The goldeneyes follow
+one another bobbing along in a channel, along with mergansers
+and occasional buffleheads, whose white heads or sides
+suddenly shine out as they round a corner. A rush and glide
+of water shows brightly in the distance when an eider plows
+quickly forward. The Canada geese feed over the marsh or on
+the borders of its channels and ditches, honking low, the sentinel
+ganders with their proud heads and necks showing above the
+grassy levels around them. One afternoon when I was walking
+across the coarse cover of the marsh—which seemed to stretch<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>
+far off like the pampas, with its indefinite sky and a wide-spread
+travel of birds—I caught sight of a deer running up behind
+me, some fifty yards away. It was a doe, with a dun-colored
+winter coat; and seeing me, she swerved suddenly and headed
+out toward the middle of the marsh. The waters of January
+are bitterly cold, but the doe swam a wide channel to get to a
+small island in the middle, and there she stayed, shaking and
+scratching now and then, stirring around in an area that became
+more and more circumscribed as the tide began to rise and
+the waters widened. I left her a couple of hours later in the
+gathering dusk, a dark, distant little figure, hunched up far out
+on the marsh. Deer can swim for several miles, even in icy
+waters, so she undoubtedly swam back after I was safely out of
+the way, perhaps after dark when the tide started to go down
+again. Still, I was troubled by what I had caused, and I came
+back early next morning to reassure myself that she was gone.</p>
+
+<p>When night comes on, the dark flat marsh has a look of absolute
+secrecy. The cold winter wind completes its isolation.
+A few last birds may fly up over it, or twist and cry in the wind
+and then drop down and disappear. What quick movements,
+starts, flicking actions, what flight there may be left is at last
+hidden, downed completely, and the wind and surf sounds wash
+out all else.</p>
+
+<p>There is secrecy and at the same time a desolation in the
+marsh, the desolation of life pared down to absolute essentials.
+It offers no luxury but motion in its tidal context, an absolute
+minimum of redundance. It is a spare unity, even with all its
+life and light, and the colors that play over it throughout the
+years, a whole which only accepts those parts which are necessary
+to it. This marsh is on its own, with ancient standards of
+simplicity. To find fulfillment in them would be luxury indeed.
+The lights begin to go on in the houses that stand over its inner
+shore, as evening advances. A plane drones in the sky. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
+marsh’s flat, wind-blown darkness is alone, and seems to say
+that all life is received by those bare standards, that we are all
+helplessly interdependent and obligated to tides that none of
+us can turn.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centerbold">The Uses of Light</p>
+
+
+<p>In the face of what it offers, I have said very little about
+the great beach. In some respects it is indefinable even as a
+geographical entity, in spite of the fact that it represents a range
+of sandy shore line that extends for thousands of miles to the
+south of it. It fluctuates so, and it is so closely associated with
+the sea in that respect, that the term “transition zone,” while
+generally appropriate, seems a little misleading. It is made of
+land materials but it is not exactly a land boundary. Cape Cod,
+whose Outer Shore it defines, is as narrow and exposed as a spit
+or shoal by comparison with the continent behind it. In any
+case, the beach in its grand exposure, its instability, seems closer
+to the sea than land, and that may be the reason why many
+visitors, bound to the inland world of human claims, have often
+expressed the feeling that it looks untouched.</p>
+
+<p>Small white waves on the sea surfaces beyond the beach may
+scud like birds while surf and sand are resplendent in green
+and silver; or an evening wind from the north blows over sandbanks
+and beach grasses, coming on in hesitant rushes, the gray
+waters conflicting over shark-gray shoals, and clouds standing
+off over the sea. Sometimes the surf strikes and hisses like
+snakes curling along the sand. Sometimes it rises up with green-marbled
+surfaces, roaring and falling with ponderous formality.
+Beach and sea are always involved in mutual storms and plays
+of light, mutual readjustments beyond our control.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span></p>
+
+<p>The beach is naked, malleable, ready to move and be moved.
+It is invested with the vast balance of the oceanic tides. It is
+part of the systems of wind and weather. It is a receiving ground
+for light. For these and countless other reasons it is a power,
+with an expression made up of all its communicant and communicating
+energies, their substance, and formality. It sweeps
+on in a long curving line that is a definition not only of a bound
+but a horizon, a sea, and a sky. It expresses growth and the
+stunting of growth, destruction and its holding back, the violent
+storm, the offshore summer swell, the heat and cold. Many
+languages, heard or unheard by human ears are in it, and much
+that is unknown to us. Its long roving ways invite a man to the
+space in which life is shaped and perpetuated, invite him, in
+a sense, to where he is unable to go, where nothing is promised;
+but it is human perception and realization that it brings out,
+not security, a man’s coming at the size of the natural realm with
+its unceasing winds, where the birds fly in with a grace and
+concordance that he will find he knows, by virtue of a primal
+inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>Life has particular, even narrow, definitions, like those distinct
+levels of the beach to which different species are adapted. Plants
+and animals that live in the sand, on the cliff tops, or on the ocean
+floor beyond the surf, have been responding in the same way
+for millions of years. All this is well known to natural science.
+In fact, to make too many ignorant and loose generalities about
+it is probably an offense to the circumstances; but together with
+precise conditions goes a vast scope, a space, and a speed like
+the overworld racing of the ocean tide. The beach and its sands,
+the waves that cut them away or build them up, its long roaming,
+and its give and take with respect to the sea, involves a balance
+that cannot be separated from the globe itself, with an age and
+a future where time is nearly lost. Seaweed, crabs, shells, fish,
+or birds are all ancient, exact, and well defined. (It may take<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>
+hundreds of thousands of years to change the shape of a head
+or a claw.) They are also part of a motion which is not changed
+into a machine by being called perpetual. In any case, each
+form, through the countless passages of light and dark, was
+endowed with a joyful resistance to finality.</p>
+
+<p>Within the shifting landscape of the sea beach all action,
+each affinity, and each response, seems controlled and at the
+same time free and exemplary. The elements agree in making
+the junctures of light unparalleled. Here are the eternal crossways
+of tides, wind, and sunlight, full of an indefinite potentiality
+that comes more clear to human eyes because of their lack of
+obstruction. I think of one area in particular which combines
+this wide range of view with conflict and meeting more than
+most. Where the great beach has its last break at Chatham, before
+the long sandy island, or sandspit, of Monomoy, the tide races
+through and behind it into Chatham Harbor, and toward the
+west it flows between Morris Island and Monomoy into Nantucket
+Sound. There is so much intermingling of currents and
+tides, so many effects of sky light and clouds and direct sunlight
+spreading over this area, together with sea smells and varying
+winds, as to give it an effect of constant remaking and realliance.
+From the Morris Island shore the surf shows up in the distance
+above the long low barrier of the Outer Beach like a mirage of
+waves and when the north wind flings back spray on their crests
+they might be great dolphins plunging forward through the sea.
+The cloud masses shift and change, tall in the spring or autumn
+sky, over sand and long stretches of green and blue water.</p>
+
+<p>Morris Island’s sandy, wind-punished shores are full of dead
+oak and pine, the oak still standing in many places stripped of
+its bark, a slick stonelike gray, and the ground is covered with a
+tangle of thickets and beach-grass perimeters all leading to
+a rim of salt-marsh grasses that joins with sandbars and tidal
+flats beyond. Through spring and summer and during the early<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span>
+fall when the shore birds have not yet migrated, shoals and
+bars and flats are covered at low or half tide not only with
+shifting light over shallow waters but a silvery crying. Wind,
+foghorns, gulls screaming, shore birds piping, sometimes the
+faint or bell-like notes of inland birds, planes, perhaps an occasional
+ship’s bell heard or imagined, all sound through the
+seasons.</p>
+
+<p>During the winter the channels provide some shelter and
+feeding grounds for ducks and of course the gulls station themselves
+here and fly up at all times. This point where the tides
+turn a corner is a contrast in force and influence. There is the
+rolling and tossing of the open ocean not far away; local waters
+are agitated by the wind, colored by sun and sky, and always
+running in or out along the shore; there is a tidal rip in one
+area where currents meet; a great rushing tidal stream at one
+place, calm, easing waters in another. Within the framework
+of tides and storms water changes the shape and volume of the
+sand as it does along the Outer Shore. There is a holding, a
+circling as the Atlantic waters meet and turn. The earth seems
+to toss with all their rhythmic interplay. Flying or flying sounds
+are in the hands of oceanic light and surprise. There is a special
+tension in things that responds to a great order and sway.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever animals come here to subsist, or migrate through,
+have an alliance with this energy, a tidal intensity of their own,
+taking part in all the contrasts and conflicts of the environment.
+During the late spring for example, you walk from a relative
+silence on the Morris Island shore to wide breath and sound
+a hundred yards away. When the birds are nesting leafy tangles
+and trees collaborate with them in their concealment. Singing
+has died down. There are only occasional calls from small birds
+half-hidden in the leaves, flying from one protected spot to another,
+and now and then the nestlings make squeaky or rasping
+little cries in the demands of hunger, but just beyond them the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>
+sky is open and bright with action, and there is no need to hide.</p>
+
+<p>In spring and summer the terns are in constant bright evidence
+over the open water and the sands. The woodpeckers and
+the sparrows stay with trees or grasses; the terns are birds of
+the ocean airs and long white shores, their complement and
+grace. Thousands of terns nest at Tern Island, on the shore of
+Chatham Harbor, and through the summer months and early
+fall there are always a great many off Morris Island and
+Monomoy, diving for fish. They are sharply made, lithe fliers
+with a nervous excitability that is peculiar to them. Flocks
+will hover over a stretch of tidal water where schools of small
+fish are running and they will fairly batter the water, making a
+loud sound like paddle wheels as they cover it with points of
+spray. Hundreds, crying harshly, hover some five or six feet
+up, dropping and rising continually. Many of them dip forward
+with wings folded slightly, but others, a little higher up, make
+steeper dives, hovering against the wind, their wings beating
+hard, to drop, twisting slightly, and then dive with wings back
+and head down, sharply and precisely. I have thought that terns
+seldom miss when they have a fish in sight, but during this
+kind of mass fishing, particularly when they dip forward as if
+to pick the fish up and try again, it does look like a matter of
+trial and error. Also, depending on the season, there may be a
+number of immature birds in the flock that are not as skillful
+as their elders.</p>
+
+<p>The terns are expert performers in every way. They are small
+and light with strong, angled wings that can carry them over
+thousands of miles. They have range, persistence, a bright balance
+that carries them through the mighty and punishing wilderness
+in which they live. At the same time, that lovely harsh
+crying excellence in the form of a tern is fragile, even ephemeral.
+Terns, in the early period of their lives at least, are expendable,
+like fish. Common terns especially have large breeding colonies<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>
+that are extremely vulnerable to human encroachment as well
+as rats, cats, dogs, skunks, and other marauders, and they definitely
+need protection. Their existence as a race is hazardous
+under the best of conditions. The sandy islands or peninsulas
+which they use for nesting sites may be flooded by storm tides
+in the spring, destroying thousands of eggs or young birds. An
+adult tern might live to between fifteen and twenty years of age,
+although their annual mortality is 23 per cent, and their
+chance of reaching adulthood is fairly slim, tern mortality in
+the first year being about 92 per cent.</p>
+
+<p>The hard statistics make short lives of many species, while
+the sun and sea keep their steady and infinite relationship.
+There is a quality of sacrifice in all life. Nothing is spared in
+its duration, and at the same time in the uniqueness of its
+making, as the fires burn. The results of evolution may seem
+haphazard in many respects, and the processes of nature to involve
+enormous waste; but natural continuity holds all things
+in high honor, through the fine balances of life and death. The
+forms of fish or tern, with their own transmutations of energy,
+are as excellent as they are perishable.</p>
+
+<p>The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling
+calm during the burning days of summer and early fall. They
+lift into marshy shores and over sandy flats, and then subside.
+Sometimes the fog comes on in the afternoon and the deep
+foghorn groans through sheets of silver under the wind, a low
+curtain moving on and parting slightly here and there, the sunlight
+showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over the
+flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly
+with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward.
+Small fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There
+is an over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional
+“huh, huh” from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts
+with the breath of wind over water.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span></p>
+
+<p>Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing
+gulls with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk,
+stand off in the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed
+plovers run hurriedly forward over the sands and through the
+shallows. A yellowlegs, tall and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes
+along an edge of the shore. Black-bellied plovers, big-headed,
+short-billed, stocky by comparison, trot through the waters, standing
+up straight at intervals, while the yellowlegs suddenly races
+back and forth on its hunt for food, turning back on its shadow.
+These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed, crying out, the
+black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own.</p>
+
+<p>Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling
+fogs; burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds
+over the rim of the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and
+pink and pearly across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly
+glittering diamonds over the water. Light and water and wings
+flow in and flow past, the motion of ages, all actions being
+synchronized, as the hovering and diving of the tern is synchronized
+with the fish it catches, part of the indefinite combinations
+of things in a universe of motion. Over these waters
+and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops, and
+starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at
+all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed
+or merely moving at random.</p>
+
+<p>They are all elements in a great exchange—this ardor and
+play of one instant in time, an instant that is equal in importance
+to all others. I stand here at the apex of one day. Here
+out of a thousand years is another advent, another chance for
+action, another use for sight, in the beautiful agreement of all
+contrary, separate, and divided things.</p>
+
+<p>I remember one evening at Morris Island in the latter part
+of August, with the day beginning to fall and the surf’s dull
+roar sounding from the sands of the great beach, a beach behind<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
+me, still beyond me, still in a sense not walked. The tide started
+to ebb, flicking lightly against the shore, lapsing with the
+evening as if the sea had an easy courtesy of its own, and with
+the smoky sunset low on the western sky, the waters moved out
+over gray sands. There was a perfect symmetry to the evening.
+Terns flew over, light, airy, floating with a swallow’s beat, but
+deep, sure, and strong. Little sanderlings and red-backed sandpipers,
+half-seen in the dusk, ran through reflections in the shallow
+waters at the edge of the tide, part of its coolness and flow,
+the little waves in banked rows rippling. The birds tripped
+forward and dipped to the mirrored salmon, copper and crystal
+in these waters, in a communication. The terns trilled harshly
+and sometimes their bodies trembled as they beat up against
+the light wind and changed position. A single herring gull stood
+still on a hummock at the tide’s edge like an Indian in a ritualistic
+acceptance of darkness coming on. The order of change
+and constancy began to take light’s fire and warmth and its
+colors away, in the graduated motion of the sky, along with all
+flying elements like the terns, like thought, and the unimagined
+combinations of being. The wavelets edged out. The sanderlings
+started to flit off and disappear. Finally there was no turning back
+the authority of night.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp94" id="i000_endpaper" style="max-width: 268.8125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/i000_endpaper.jpg" alt="Map of Cape Cod">
+</figure>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="centerbold"><b>Transcriber’s Notes</b></p>
+
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.</p>
+
+<p>Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75895 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/75895-h/images/cover.jpg b/75895-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5d6ad7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i000_endpaper.jpg b/75895-h/images/i000_endpaper.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d70655e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i000_endpaper.jpg
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i000_frontis.jpg b/75895-h/images/i000_frontis.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7fd504
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i000_frontis.jpg
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i012.png b/75895-h/images/i012.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d83fbd5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i012.png
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i036.png b/75895-h/images/i036.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9fe939c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i036.png
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i084.png b/75895-h/images/i084.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..92ec6f5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i084.png
diff --git a/75895-h/images/i108.png b/75895-h/images/i108.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb32d0a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75895-h/images/i108.png
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5dba15
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..207fe51
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #75895 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75895)