Part 2
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.