Part 11

A strange thing happens here during these luminous tides. The phosphorescence is itself a mass of life, sometimes protozoan its origin, sometimes bacterial, the phosphorescence I write of being probably the latter. Once this living light has seeped into the beach, colonies of it speedily invade the tissues of the ten thousand thousand sand fleas which are forever hopping on this edge of ocean. Within an hour the grey bodies of these swarming amphipods, these useful, ever hungry sea scavengers (_Orchestia agilis_; _Talorchestia megalophthalma_), show phosphorescent pinpoints, and these points grow and unite till the whole creature is luminous. The attack is really a disease, an infection of light. The process had already begun when I arrived on the beach on the night of which I am writing, and the luminous fleas hopping off before my boots were an extraordinary sight. It was curious to see them hop from the pool rims to the upper beach, paling as they reached the width of peaceful moonlight lying landward of the strange, crawling beauty of the pools. This infection kills them, I think; at least, I have often found the larger creature lying dead on the fringe of the beach, his huge porcelain eyes and water-grey body one core of living fire. Round and about him, disregarding, ten thousand kinsmen, carrying on life and the plan of life, ate of the bounty of the tide.

III

All winter long I slept on a couch in my larger room, but with the coming of warm weather I have put my bedroom in order--I used it as a kind of storage space during the cold season--and returned to my old and rather rusty iron cot. Every once in a while, however, moved by some obscure mood, I lift off the bedclothing and make up the couch again for a few nights. I like the seven windows of the larger room, and the sense one may have there of being almost out-of-doors. My couch stands alongside the two front windows, and from my pillow I can look out to sea and watch the passing lights, the stars rising over ocean, the swaying lanterns of the anchored fishermen, and the white spill of the surf whose long sound fills the quiet of the dunes.

Ever since my coming I have wanted to see a thunderstorm bear down upon this elemental coast. A thunderstorm is a “tempest” on the Cape. The quoted word, as Shakespeare used it, means lightning and thunder, and it is in this old and beautiful Elizabethan sense that the word is used in Eastham. When a schoolboy in the Orleans or the Wellfleet High reads the Shakespearean play, its title means to him exactly what it meant to the man from Stratford; elsewhere in America, the terms seems to mean anything from a tornado to a blizzard. I imagine that this old significance of the word is now to be found only in certain parts of England and Cape Cod.

On the night of the June tempest, I was sleeping in my larger room, the windows were open, and the first low roll of thunder opened my eyes. It had been very still when I went to bed, but now a wind from the west-nor’west was blowing through the windows in a strong and steady current, and as I closed them there was lightning to the west and far away. I looked at my watch; it was just after one o’clock. Then came a time of waiting in the darkness, long minutes broken by more thunder, and intervals of quiet in which I heard a faintest sound of light surf upon the beach. Suddenly the heavens cracked open in an immense instant of pinkish-violet lightning. My seven windows filled with the violent, inhuman light, and I had a glimpse of the great, solitary dunes staringly empty of familiar shadows; a tremendous crash then mingled with the withdrawal of the light, and echoes of thunder rumbled away and grew faint in a returning rush of darkness. A moment after, rain began to fall gently as if someone had just released its flow, a blessed sound on a roof of wooden shingles, and one I have loved ever since I was a child. From a gentle patter the sound of the rain grew swiftly to a drumming roar, and with the rain came the chuckling of water from the eaves. The tempest was crossing the Cape, striking at the ancient land on its way to the heavens above the sea.

Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast detonations which jarred the walls. Houses were struck that night in Eastham village. My lonely world, full of lightning and rain, was strange to look upon. I do not share the usual fear of lightning, but that night there came over me, for the first and last time of all my solitary year, a sense of isolation and remoteness from my kind. I remember that I stood up, watching, in the middle of the room. On the great marshes the lightning surfaced the winding channels with a metallic splendour and arrest of motion, all very strange through windows blurred by rain. Under the violences of light the great dunes took on a kind of elemental passivity, the quiet of earth enchanted into stone, and as I watched them appear and plunge back into a darkness that had an intensity of its own I felt, as never before, a sense of the vast time, of the thousands of cyclic and uncounted years which had passed since these giants had risen from the dark ocean at their feet and given themselves to the wind and the bright day.

Fantastic things were visible at sea. Beaten down by the rain, and sheltered by the Cape itself from the river of west wind, the offshore brim of ocean remained unusually calm. The tide was about halfway up the beach, and rising, and long parallels of low waves, forming close inshore, were curling over and breaking placidly along the lonely, rain-drenched miles. The intense crackling flares and quiverings of the storm, moving out to sea, illumined every inch of the beach and the plain of the Atlantic, all save the hollow bellies of the little breakers, which were shielded from the light by their overcurling crests. The effect was dramatic and strangely beautiful, for what one saw was a bright ocean rimmed with parallel bands of blackest advancing darkness, each one melting back to light as the wave toppled down upon the beach in foam.

Stars came out after the storm, and when I woke again before sunrise I found the heavens and the earth rainwashed, cool, and clear. Saturn and the Scorpion were setting, but Jupiter was riding the zenith and paling on his throne. The tide was low in the marsh channels; the gulls had scarcely stirred upon their gravel banks and bars. Suddenly, thus wandering about, I disturbed a song sparrow on her nest. She flew to the roof of my house, grasped the ridgepole, and turned about, apprehensive, inquiring ... _’tsiped_ her monosyllable of alarm. Then back toward her nest she flew, alighted in a plum bush, and, reassured at last, trilled out a morning song.

[Illustration: _Piping Plover at Nest_]

_Chapter IX_

THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE

I

Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye. I like a good smell--the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows late on summer afternoons.

What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever learned to endure that foul blue air? In the Seventeenth Century, the air about a city must have been much the same air as overhung a large village; to-day the town atmosphere is to be endured only by the new synthetic man.

Our whole English tradition neglects smell. In English, the nose is still something of an indelicate organ, and I am not so sure that its use is not regarded as somewhat sensual. Our literary pictures, our poetic landscapes are things to hang on the mind’s wall, things for the eye. French letters are more indulgent to the nose; one can scarcely read ten lines of any French verse without encountering the omnipresent, the inevitable _parfum_. And here the French are right, for though the eye is the human master sense and chief æsthetic gate, the creation of a mood or of a moment of earth poetry is a rite for which other senses may be properly invoked. Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.

One reason for my love of this great beach is that, living here, I dwell in a world that has a good natural smell, that is full of keen, vivid, and interesting savours and fragrances. I have them at their best, perhaps, when hot days are dulled with a warm rain. So well do I know them, indeed, that were I blindfolded and led about the summer beach, I think I could tell on what part of it I was at any moment standing. At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool--cold even--and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward the dunes, now a point toward the sea. For twenty feet a humid and tropical exhalation of hot, wet sand encircles one, and from this one steps, as through a door, into as many yards of mid-September. In a point of time, one goes from Central America to Maine.

Atop the broad eight-foot back of the summer bar, inland forty feet or so from the edge of low tide, other odours wait. Here have the tides strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted festoons of ocean vegetation--with common sea grass, with rockweed olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled green leaves of sea lettuce, with edible, purple-red dulse and bleached sea moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long. In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering--for their very substance is water--and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into the burning air. I like this good natural savour. Sometimes a dead, surf-trapped fish, perhaps a dead skate curling up in the heat, adds to this odour of vegetation a faint fishy rankness, but the smell is not earth corruption, and the scavengers of the beach soon enough remove the cause.

Beyond the bar and the tidal runnel farther in, the flat region I call the upper beach runs back to the shadeless bastion of the dunes. In summer this beach is rarely covered by the tides. Here lies a hot and pleasant odour of sand. I find myself an angle of shade slanting off from a mass of wreckage still embedded in a dune, take up a handful of the dry, bright sand, sift it slowly through my fingers, and note how the heat brings out the fine, sharp, stony smell of it. There is weed here, too, well buried in the dry sand--flotsam of last month’s high, full-moon tides. In the shadowless glare, the topmost fronds and heart-shaped air sacs have ripened to an odd iodine orange and a blackish iodine brown. Overwhelmed thus by sand and heat, the aroma of this foliage has dissolved; only a shower will summon it again from these crisping, strangely coloured leaves.

[Illustration: _Nesting Tern_]

Cool breath of eastern ocean, the aroma of beach vegetation in the sun, the hot, pungent exhalation of fine sand--these mingled are the midsummer savour of the beach.

II

In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.

The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep, that I trudge through it as through snow.

The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.

Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” _Tabanus costalis_, stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however, I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from mosquitoes.

Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed. Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed, has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.

On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep, finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller, sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny, sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.

“June bugs,” _Lachnosterna arcuata_, strike my screens with a formidable boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary black wasps scratch themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon flies.

The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea; heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.

III

I have spoken in another chapter of the melting away of bird life from this region during April and May. There was a time when the all-the-year-round herring gulls seemed the only birds left to me, and many of these were immature birds or birds whose plumage was then changing from immature brown to adult white and grey. One cold, foggy morning late in May, I woke to find the beach in front of the Fo’castle crowded with these gulls, for a number of hake had stranded during the night, and the birds had discovered them and come to feed. Some fed on the fresh fish, findings being keepings--I saw various birds defend their individual repasts from late arrivals and would-be sharers with a show of wings and a hostile cry--others stood on the top of the beach in a long, senatorial row facing the sea. The maturing birds were of all tones of white and brown; some were chalky and brown, some were speckled like hens, others were a curious brown-mottled chalky grey. The moults of herring gulls are complicated affairs. There are spring moults and autumn moults, partial moults and second nuptial plumages. Not until the third year or later does the bird seem to assume its full nuptial and adult coloration.

When I first open my eyes on a bright midsummer morning, the first sound that becomes part of my waking consciousness is the recurrent rush and spill of the summer sea; then do I hear a patter of tiny feet on the roof over my head and the cheerful notes of a song sparrow’s home-spun tune. These sparrows are the songbirds of the dunes. I hear them all day long, for I have a pair nesting on the seaward slope of this dune in a clump of dusty miller. My building of the Fo’castle has given them something to sit on, something they can see the world from, and on its ridgepole they perch, singing at life in general with a praiseworthy persistence. The bird really has two songs, one the nuptial aria, the other the domestic tune; it sings the first in the nest-building, egg-laying season, and the second from the close of the honeymoon to the silence in the fall. I was amazed this year at the suddenness of the change. On the afternoon of July 1st I heard the birds on my roof singing aria number one; on the morning of July 2d they had turned the page to aria number two. The songs are alike; they resemble each other in musical “shape,” but the first is much more of a warble than the second.

On throwing open my door on the dunes, the morning sea, and the vast empty beach with its coast guard paths, I find the house being stormed by swallows--they are picking up the half-torpid flies that have spent the night on the shingles and just buzzed off--and on looking north and south along the dunes I see swallows everywhere. The grass glistens in the early morning light, the slant of the sun picks out the ripening spears, the graceful birds swim close above the green. Most of these birds are bank swallows, _Riparia riparia_, but I often see barn swallows, _Hirundo erythrogastra_, and tree swallows, _Iridoprocne bicolor_, scattered in among them. A little after seven o’clock they melt away. Through the day stray birds come foraging, but the swarm is a morning affair. The bank swallows (the bird with whitish underparts and a dark band across the breast) have nests north of Nauset Station in a clay stratum of the great bank; the tree swallows and the barn swallows live farther inland near the farms. Some say that the bank swallows nest in these dunes. I have never found their nests in this living sand, but the swallows may manage it, after all. Time and again have I been astounded at the manner in which animals use this sand as if it were ordinary earth. Not long ago, on the top of big dune, I found that moles had tunnelled a surface of live sand for six or seven feet.

[Illustration: _Tern Coming to Full Stop Head-on into the Wind_]

The common tern, _Sterna hirundo_, here called the mackerel gull, dominates both the beach and the summer day. Three or four thousand of these birds are nesting in the region; there are nests on the dunes, and whole colonies on certain gravelly areas in the marsh islands near Orleans. All day long I watch them flying to and fro past my windows, now sailing with a favouring wind, now battling into an opposing breeze; I see them going along the breakers long before sunrise, white birds flying past a rosiness of eastern sky and an ocean still blue and dark with night; I see them pass like spiritual creatures in the dusk. There are crowded days when I live in a cloud of their wings and the clamour of their cries.