Part 9
The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining ever since.
Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.
[Illustration]
Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success.
We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.
XII
The Depths of Sight
Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter, to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted, barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity.
It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass. Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not, and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth, result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from self-knowledge.
That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow. And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.
One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and the surf line.
Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head first, over and down, slipping under the water.
On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind. The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an electric communication made between one far pole and another.
Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very special way, but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and reception, and in animals without consciousness and means of assessment this may mean more than automatic reaction to light. I think of a crowd of newly hatched minnows like tiny slivers of glass, running up and quivering through the water. The most definite thing about them is their large black eyes, contrasted with a bodily transparency so fragile as to seem past fragility, an artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of universal actions that might have their matrix in a dream. Those large eyes are the eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an alliance with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration in a man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new to life.
Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are looking at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses there is a watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a lightning and at the same time a listlessness there is in them, in their hurrying ways through currents of fluid light, and their suspension in its stillness! Many of them only last for a day or a few minutes before disappearing as a food for other animals, in the mercurial depths of water allied with life, this intoxicant, this terror.
My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains this landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own eye and its own depth to find. The expression of water, sand, and sky leads vision beyond itself.
One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low over the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the same time illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard light of a fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or so away down the shore. I kept walking toward them with the illusion that the boat was moored close to the beach, but after a couple of miles the lights were still receding and I turned back. The tide was close in and sheets of foam pitched in and dragged back with a sound of rattling stones but in gentle rhythm. It was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could detect little strikes of light, the curling over and stirring of white and silver. Up through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared intermittently, riding above the water. The beach was covered with soft airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood of ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond the atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away and joined with fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation, a familiar place turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I might sense all sorts of far nerve ends tingling out of the night behind the mist. We receive very little of what reaches us out of this tribal universe, whose messages light through us unseen and unheard until we, as individuals, are turned to the dust of the sky.
Night or day, the sea and sea beach offer their changing spaces of light. One afternoon in January, halfway between hours of warmth and hours of cold, rain and snow, morning and evening, the sea off Nauset was racing green, spray tossing off the tops of the waves that simultaneously paused, curved up, and broke down in thunder. The whole sky was full of cloud featherings borne over before the wind and along the horizon out to sea were colors of lavender and gray, and pale-green openings like caves. The wide, steep beach was full of gloss, with a roll and fire of its own, and above it fringing the edge of the sandbanks the beach grass curved out and waved. I felt a resonance in the beach, a tremendously heavy and vibrant tone, the tonnage of sand and surf in harmony along with a low moan from the sea’s lungs.
Small flocks of black ducks quivered over the water and then flew in to Nauset marsh. Then the heavier Canada geese beat in with stalwart wings, to thin out from their V formation to a long line as they wheeled in low against the wind and then regathered as they settled down on the marsh.
Blackback gulls glided low across the outer line of the surf and sometimes their shadows appeared on the curving wall of a wave. Herring gulls soared in the heights and then beat forward on sinewy wings like flounders pulsing and beating through the water.
One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which it had found on the marsh and dropped it from high in the air. Then the bird retrieved its food and tried again, taking a chance on whether or not it would strike some boulders and break, since this is a haphazard and not a very knowledgeable game with the gulls. They pick up the habit from each other, by example rather than inheritance. Sometimes it works and just as often it does not.
The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the clouds ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand were waggling back and forth in the wind. There was a swish of milky surf up the beach. Over the uncountable numbers of sand grains, each with its own size, shape, and color was a clean radiance, even a magic. Because in this realm of wide, majestic use, of continual advent, each offering was still of a proportion perfect for its moment in time. Each single action, the silhouette of the straw-colored grasses curving before the wind, or a gull shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the light, was of such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they were magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they had life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not subject to lessening or degradation in this world of nature.
Like the lights that appear under the mist, or over the open barrens of the sea at night, like St. Elmo’s fire on the _Pequod_’s mast, there are electric tricks playing on the horizon, perhaps at all times, since there seems to be no end to light’s action over the waters with the sky’s depth behind it. As I walked up the beach there was a radiant white patch hanging up in the soft, scudding overcast, not in the sun’s direction--reflected off the water perhaps--but having a wild aura of its own. It gave me a feeling of communication with something which had a right to awe. We may have passed the primitive stage, but the primitive respect for what was beyond human control and the magic used to propitiate it or bring it to play may still have their sources. The light and its manifestations is still too quick for the eye, or for the facts.
Science itself goes on proving that there is no infinite exactitude and that many things can only be explained in terms of probability. The fact that nothing is stopped by our constant search for a simple solution to life is what keeps science in business. The search into the nature of cells finds them full of inner whirlings, the motion of countless component parts, of a universal restlessness. They are structurally fantastic and each kind is manifestly different. Our voyage toward the invisible is unending. The molecule or the jellyfish, seen through one human lens or another, retain their share of the marvelous. And if we marvel, we are still capable of learning.
A radiance above me, a changing freshness in the air, between warm and cold, a shudder of wings over the beach, another language of unexplored dimensions, life expressions understood in terms of sight and spirit, and still to be learned--the nonhuman advents that pass the limits of a man. There is a common realm of action and perception, whose boundaries we may never reach, where men can be more grateful for their belonging than their isolation. It is part of the changing state of inanimate things, the response of lesser forms of life to the construction and motion of the world that invades them and which they invade, and it is acted out by the mind. The tidal waves run through us all. To see as men see and merely to react like a moon snail or a horseshoe crab to the difference between light and dark are two representative actions in the same vast realm of response.
Do men belabor the special nature of consciousness too much, as if it were some kind of A-1 badge that separated mankind from the rest of animate creation? Consciousness must be infinitely more mysterious, more connective, than any attributes we may assign it of personal distinction.
XIII
The Flight of Birds
The appearance of migratory birds in fall and spring, or simply their constant activity, suggests their range. The ability that a gull displays in the turmoil of the air is enough to bring other winds to these shores, to make you realize that the beach joins the long shore line between Cape Cod and Florida, that the waters to the north of us move on toward Labrador and Baffin Bay. Their wings are allied to the circulation of the North Atlantic. New England is not so far from the Arctic Circle, and when the auks, the old squaws, or the buntings come down to Cape Cod in the autumn they bring the proof with them.
We have had an appalling record this side of the Atlantic, of decimating the population of sea birds, which are more vulnerable than other species because of their nesting habits, on islands or rocky foreshores. The great auk has gone, and the puffins reduced to small numbers. If we were able to kill them all off, either on purpose or through lack of responsibility, what little island people it would make us!
The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting black and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and rocky headlands where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the cast of deep and icy waters. One June day, when the beach at Race Point was glaring with light, and all the winter leavings, like the twisted dead stalks of dusty miller, were being replaced by a freshness in the shine and scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or little auk, on the beach a few yards away from the water. It is a very small bird, though conspicuous enough with its penguinlike stance, its black and white plumage, and though it was in full view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When I approached, this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away from me down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since most dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a “nonbreeding straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more temperate waters not locked in ice like their home feeding grounds. Over a period of years and at unpredictable times, there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds are blown inland by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places: ponds, back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping centers. Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease, if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided they survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a number of them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod highway.
The dovekies are messengers from the north. The way the gulls use the wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into it, hovering, then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing skill of other birds that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics of the open sea. They are masters of the art of air as no plane can ever be. I remember watching some fulmars in the wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the great blue-green waves in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They glided between the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless deliberation, and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned. Back and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my lungs, my admiration.
In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights the constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of red-backed sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and sun-reflecting at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness set going in them which must carry them a long way. They are long-distance migrants flitting from one end of the earth, one shore line to the next, and judging by their actions it is hard to believe that they could ever rest. Searching for crustaceans or sand worms along the beach, they run on flickering black legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing in syncopation. When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it piles in and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick, automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back they seem to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying.
Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the beach and then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a tide bird faster than the tides, where there is no following it. This bird is quick and sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation.
Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I take most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness in them, skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam. The white in their plumage is so pure, snow paths between markings of black and cinnamon, like briers and weed stalks, with suggestions of greenish gray when the sun shines on them. They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions of the musk ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at the least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches of the world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty and its freedom.