Part 8

_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.