Part 1

CAPE COD

Is A Number of Things

[Illustration]

ALLAN NEAL

The selections in this book have appeared in different form in the column Soundside of the Yarmouth Register.

PRINTED AT THE REGISTER PRESS YARMOUTH PORT CAPE COD DECEMBER 1954

_We had been driving along in the full glory of a September afternoon on the Cape. It was a wonderful world of deep blues and green pines, of gleaming white sands and of sunshine singing over everything. I had been pointing out things, afraid she might miss them, or not see all there was to see in them._

_She said, “I wish you could hear yourself as you sound to others. When you talk about the Cape it is as if you owned it, all of it,--and you treat everyone else here as your guest.” There was nothing to say to that because I knew it was the truth. Still, I knew that there was a better than even chance that, given a year, more or less, she would be irritating some newcomer from the Mainland with her own possessiveness. She said, “It is really a very nice place you know, especially on a day like this. But you have been everywhere and everywhere leads you right back here. You never leave the Cape except under protest, and you rush back as if it might disappear in your absence. What is it between you and the Cape?”_

_So I thought I would try, anyway, and I began_:

“_Cape Cod is a number of things, and it means a number of things to me...._”

_First of all there is the land, the bounteous and the beautiful land, and then there is the beautiful and bounteous sea that surrounds it. And there is the special way in which the land and the sea respond to nature and her varied seasons. There are a thousand colors and a thousand variations of each; there are a thousand moods and you never know which one to expect. You only know that the land and sea are there and that there is no dullness in them._

AT THE RISING OF THE SUN

It was the strange half-light between yesterday and today. From an intricate network of twisting, turning roads you could follow the headlights of the cars as they moved from all points of the compass toward the dark outline of the hill. The moist air formed diadems of light around the headlamps and their beams sparkled from the gleaming, rain-washed street. Sometimes the cars swerved to avoid a branch or bush that had been tossed in their path by the gale winds of the night. Sometimes the lights picked out some strange creature of the night as it scurried into the brush beside the road, alarmed at this unlooked-for intrusion upon its domain.

At length each car was in place upon the hill. There was still no activity upon the Main Highway below which snaked its way down past Quivet and Sesuit to the Outer Cape. The wavering lines of street lights that from a distance twinkled through the branches seemed to grow weaker as the night shadows were replaced by a silvery grayness. The rain ended but the storm was not over. There was wind, howling across the Bay from Manomet, tossing the flexible pines into confusion, rattling the branches of maple and scrub oak that were thick with new buds, making conversation nearly impossible among people who were otherwise occupied anyway in clutching their billowing coats about them. There was the Bay, lashed now into a white fury with huge combers breaking out of a gray-green sea all along shore. You could hear the sound of them as they hit the beach. In contrast to the Bay the lake below looked peaceful, cold but peaceful, and a circling gull above it rode with the wind. He did not move his wings nor did he make any sound. It was cold all right and you could tell it by the look of the trumpeter as the first notes of the grand old hymn broke across the hills. Although no sun showed at the horizon, the sky above it showed rosy hues and the swift-moving scud overhead revealed patches of blue that had not been there before. The wind tore rudely at the pages of the hymnals but from the group clustered in the lee of the stone tower the notes came loud and true.

Soon you could tell for sure that the sun was up from the sea at Chatham and that it was to be, after all, a wonderful day. Off across the woodlands toward the Sound the trees began to cease their agitation and the sun’s rays pierced the clouds to play about them. Along one side of the Bay the long, low fore-arm of the Cape became visible as though it had just then emerged from the sea; opposite, the cliffs of Manomet were majestic and purple in the morning light.

As the light increased the air became clearer and there was a new softness in it. There was a softness and a wonderful fresh taste and you knew it was spring. The pale sleepiness had gone from the faces of the people as it had from all the earth and in its place there was new color that could have been born of the wind or of this special day. Finally, the cars, that had groped their way up the hill through the night-shadows, turned down the hill and along the twisting roads where the first sunshine was already drying the roadside pools. The roads were clean and the season was new and you could see the symbols of the age-old hope and promise all about you.

So, at last, all the cars were gone and Scargo Hill was left alone to drowse away the first early hours of a bright new day. Below on the highway the street lights had gone out and, one by one, so had the night lights in the old white houses along the way. From some houses the first, gray curls of smoke from a morning fire drifted upwards. And Easter Sunday, at the rising of the sun, had come to the Cape.

NOR’EASTER

Sometime in a Cape November there will come the first real Nor’easter, punching an effective period to the end of Fall. Then the winds come roaring out of the northeast to whip the waters of the Cape into a white frenzy and howl around the corners of old houses. These are the winds that rattle the store signs along Main Street while torrential rains beat against the plate glass windows and the shoppers are not there. It is a time to spend indoors, huddled up to the warmth of stove or open hearth, while the sturdy Cape houses settle down into the wind to weather it out. Above stairs the old houses yield gently to the wind in a motion that is reminiscent of the roll of a ship at sea. Like the ship, they will ride out this storm as they have many another throughout a long two centuries.

When a Nor’easter has passed, or settled down to a dull roar, it is a time for the Outer Beach, that magnificent stretch of shoreline that skirts the Cape from Provincetown to Chatham. One early Saturday in November I reached the Nauset Coast Guard Beach just as the peak of the high tide reached the shore and the unleashed fury of an angry Atlantic beat against the land to create one of the Cape’s most terrifying and awesome sights. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sun was trying to break through the overcast but the seas piled higher and higher, as if through their own momentum. The whole surface of the sea was a menacing mass of tortured white breakers which threw their spume in smokey clouds a hundred feet into the air. The breakers themselves reached heights of over fifty feet and followed one upon another with such savage intensity that there was hardly any distinguishing between them. They tossed a mass of miscellaneous lumber about with incredible ease. At the near shore a huge, battered scow rolled over and over and was finally spewed out upon the beach, while out in the troughs of the waves several telephone poles and a tremendous, up-rooted tree were tossed about as lightly as if they had been matchsticks. The shore was rapidly becoming littered with the toll of the storm, an extraordinary collection of objects of every size, color and shape, each with a story of its own, each with a beginning of its own, united by their common destination--the outer beach of the Cape. Each of them was smothered in a cottony mass of foam that writhed in the wind and was iridescent in the wavering sunlight and piled upon the beach like banks of snow before a plow.

The air was full of salt, new-washed, crisp and exhilarating, and the call of the beach itself was irresistible. Making cautious and slow headway, I headed south along it with the sea nipping at my heels and the salt spray in my face. This was the beach that Thoreau had known so well and that Henry Beston so lovingly described in his “The Outermost House”; but even Beston, who knew the beach in all seasons and in all weathers, might not have recognized it that day. It was hardly there at all, for nearly all of its white wideness was covered with the gaping jaws of the waves that threatened it. Westward of the beach the salt marshes were completely awash and all the way to Route 28 you looked across a whole sea that was leaden and riled and made the whole landscape unfamiliar and strange. All along the beach the breakers tore and crashed against the high sand dunes. Walking became a tricky, perilous business with the sea acting as if it were possessed of some malicious wit of its own with which it could set a trap for the unalert. So great were the breakers that, when they would recede, a hundred feet of beach would stand bare and revealed only to be covered up in the very next instant while the water reached for your feet and sent you scrambling up the sand dunes to safety. The air was filled with the continuous roar and swish of the sea but after walking a bit you could anticipate its next attack by the crash of the comber and the intensity of the swish as it swept over the sand.

The wind had played tricks with the dunes, changing not only their shapes but their entire position. In one place a ship’s spar, remnant of an ancient shipwreck, had resisted the wind which then carved a huge vertical funnel around it. Erosion and the wind had left huge pillars of sand teetering under their own weight. The whole beaten strip of beach had the look of a miniature, tortured Grand Canyon. Even the usually indestructible beach grass had suffered. Its roots were exposed, its head bowed, and in the tracings on the sand one could detect the wild gyrations it had been forced to perform at the will of the wind. In seven distinct places the sea had crashed all the way through the barrier beach, surging over the marsh toward the main highway. Three of them were knee-deep and as you waded through them the water swirled about your legs with tremendous force. Walking became a real effort. At last the Outermost House was in sight and it was miraculously unaffected by the storm. Henry Beston would have been proud of the look of it as it nestled in the dunes unconcerned by the changing and chaotic world around it.

Fording one more breakthrough I found myself at Nauset Inlet where the sea crashed toward the Mainland without hindrance and the rip tides had a special fury of their own. For nearly an hour I perched upon a steep-sided dune and watched the waves reaching for the land. Behind me a ton of sand slid into the sea with a long sigh that emphasized the instability of my position. Suddenly, however, the sun, in its full brilliance, broke through the overcast with finality. Then the wind seemed milder, and, as the tide receded, the waves became less threatening. The whitecaps, now shining in the sunlight, took on such beauty as to quite belie their destructive powers. Out over the breakers a flock of seagulls appeared, flying parallel to the shore and screaming defiance as they flew in and out of the troughs of the waves. They seemed to have confidence that the storm was over. A few feet down the beach a red fox emerged from the protection of a clump of beach grass and walked cautiously toward the water’s edge. He sniffed inquiringly at the sea air and then, with more assurance, trotted off in search of breakfast. Gradually the great wide beach emerged from the ebbing tide. It was flat and wet and covered with the debris of the storm but the oceanside world was returning to normal. The storm had left some marks that might never be erased. And it left with me a memory of a day at the Outer Beach that I could never forget.

A DRIVE DOWN CAPE

“Yes, I’ve been to Cape Cod. Drove all the way to Provincetown and back. There’s absolutely nothing to it, you know. Nothing but sand and scrub pine. How anyone could live there, or how anyone could choose to go there even for a visit is more than I can figure out!”

Every Cape Codder has probably been subjected to some such remark as the above from some “authority” who has taken all of a half day to rush down one side of the Cape and up the other, expecting who knows what miracles and side-shows, but seeing nothing anyway. It is a time to grit the teeth and be glad, at least, that they won’t be back. And yet you wish for a minute that you could show them, show them where the little lane they just passed so quickly led to a view that would be breath-taking in beauty and good for their souls, show them any of a thousand things that are waiting for those who would see. For where under the sun, if not on Cape Cod, could anyone find such infinite variety of landscape and seascape crowded into so small an area? Some of the new highways will be uninteresting, it is true, but so they are anywhere else for they are built for the age of speed when it is essential to go somewhere in a hurry and there is no time for looking around. But the new highways were designed by gentlemen with slide rules far away and they have nothing to do with the old roads that are still there to give pleasure.

There is, for example, a way of getting all the way down Cape to Truro and beyond and you need hardly touch any of the Main Roads in doing it. There is variety enough for anyone. You pass resort-type settlements, quiet ponds and hidden lakes, farmlands, beaches, vast panorama of two separate seas, flat plains and rolling dunes, salt meadow and fresh water brooks, dense pine woods and wind-swept clearings where the pine and the oak were gnarled and gaunt, but unbeaten. You can stop for a bit because there is no hurry and you can walk on a special stretch of beach along the Bay where there are no cottages and no people and the birds are many and varied. There the Bay smiles broadly all the way westward to where the protective arm of Wellfleet Harbor curves into the sea and northward to where the golden prow of Lieutenant’s Island cuts the water. Here is a beach to be combed, filled with all manner of treasure, a thousand romances of the sea at your feet. Here is air that is clean and fresh as it was in the beginning, swirling over a blue-green Bay, a white strand, and a salt marsh that is honey-colored in the sun and shot through with veins of brilliant blue by the high tide.

Leaving the beach to continue down Cape, you come suddenly upon the strangest scenery of all, where the moors of Wellfleet and Truro swell out of the Bay in fantastic shapes, and merely condescend to allow the old County Road to pass through them--which it does not do easily. The hills have been softly rounded by time and the wind, and they rise sometimes to great heights, only to fall off into sheltered valleys where the scrub pines grow. It is a crazy-quilt of topography and color, nearly smothered by a blanket of wild cranberry that is glossy-green in summer and scarlet in winter. The road is a roller-coaster, crossing and recrossing the railway, climbing tediously upwards and rushing suddenly downwards, winding snakelike, and almost repeating itself through the moors. And rounding each blind curve you come upon another sweeping view of the Bay, and of the flat hook of Provincetown in the distance. And always around you are the sand hills, like great ocean swells.

On some hills there are houses, so precariously perched that one expects to see them disappear like a ship into the trough of the waves. Sometimes the rains tear at the slopes and leave jagged scars; sometimes the blanket of wild cranberry is lifted to show the sand beneath, rose-colored in the sun. The telegraph poles along the highway stretch doggedly but insignificantly across the moors, black silhouettes that have adapted themselves to the surroundings until they look as if they might always have been there.

The moors have the look of old lands that might have been in at the writing of history. The encroachments of civilization upon them look temporary and out of place, and the sand hills have that about them which is eternal. These moors looked out upon the Mayflower in 1620 and felt the pioneer feet of Miles Standish and the other Pilgrims who set out from Provincetown to explore the Truro shore. At Corn Hill they discovered the Indian corn cache that was to mean so much to them in their struggle for survival. In these lands they found the strange grave of a white man indicating that not even Europeans were a novelty to these old hills. To the south, at Eastham, they had their first encounter with the Indians. It was this Bay shore that provided them with spring water, food, and the feel of land beneath feet that were weary from the motions of the ship. Looking for the familiar they found these dunes to be reminiscent of Holland, and they carefully gathered and took back to the ship any vegetation which looked like that of home. Then, with new courage, they turned their backs on home. They turned their backs on these moors that had given them succor. And then they sailed westward, into immortality.

FARMING THE SALT SEA

_With the Captain_

“Stay on Cape Cod, boy,” an old timer once counselled me. “There’s no snow to fight in winter and plenty of food in the sea for those who will go after it.” The Captain was one of those who went after it with the aid of one of those wonderful Cape Cod Catboats, in the beginning to sell his catch commercially, and later for the entertainment of the summer visitor on charter excursions into the Sound. Such a trip was something to look forward to with great excitement and it was no wonder that one gray morning he caught me with my foolish questions down. I arrived at the old fish shanty on the bank of the little tidal river out of breath and fearful that the lowering skies and soft gray puffs of fog from the Sound might cancel our long-awaited trip. I found the Captain seated on an upturned keg cracking shellfish bait and examining stout coils of sturdy hand-line. Like so many of my friends on the Cape he was never one to waste words and when I entered the fragrant dimness of the shanty he said his “good day” with a quick look in my direction and a slight nod of the head. (Nothing more was needed because if he hadn’t been pleased to see you, you would not in the first place have had access to the temple where all the precious tools of his trade were spread about him, where a green-horn could get all snarled up and ruin everything, and where more than sometimes the Captain would retire to think and claim sanctuary from the women-folk and the complications of life away from the shore.)

“Is it going to clear up,” I asked him breathlessly and fearful of the answer.

“It always has,” he answered soberly, and I have never been able to bring myself to ask that question of anyone since.

The Captain was right of course and it cleared much sooner than anyone could have hoped, with the first sun in many days shining eerily through the gray skies to chase the fog back out towards Nantucket. In what seemed moments, a mean kind of day had become a day of rare beauty and we were out in the Cat with a fair southwest breeze and the golden sunlight glinting off blue-green water. There was the wonderful smell of salt and of hemp and of the sun-bleached wood of the fish barrels that now carried only our hopes. There was the less appealing smell of the fresh bait in which the circling and scolding gulls had placed their hopes.

The Captain stood at the helm, his heavily tanned and wind-burned face almost black against the morning sky. One cheek was now heavily distorted and a thin line of tobacco juice seeped slowly out of the corner of his mouth. Sometimes he would wipe at it casually with the back of his hand in a most natural gesture and sometimes he would let go into the Sound but never would the tiniest speck reach the immaculate decks of his ship. His eyes were like an Indian’s, keen and penetrating, always alert and picking out things at sea, and back on the receding, pine-fringed shore, that I never learned to see although I knew they were there. He only spoke when there was really something to say and we knew that one thing he would ultimately say was that I could take a turn at the tiller. In spite of the importance of that to me it was entirely against the code to request the privilege before it was extended and I respected the code. When the great moment came the Captain would direct my course by the pointed-finger method and his own estimate of land and sea marks proved to be as unerring as any compass. Soon he would have guided us skillfully and mystically to the fishing ledge that was his secret. (He had given me explicit directions for three successive summers that had proved to be as different and contradictory as they were explicit before I became discreet enough not to ask again for the location of his particular salt water farm.) There we would sit with the sun warm and all over us and sending up little waves of heat from the bright sands of Monomoy, and with the lazy tolling of a distant bell-buoy in our ears.