Part 6

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.