Part 11
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.