Part 7
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!