Part 5

Midships, a discussion was going on round the open mouth of one of the fish holds. The _Hickey’s_ catch was still there, a mass of big greyish fish bodies, haddocks with staring eyes, cod with chin whiskers, flounders, and huge lemon soles. The discussion concerned the possibility of the fish having had a bath in fuel oil when the seas washed into the _Hickey_ at high tide. No one took serious alarm, and the fish, handed out to all comers by a member of the crew, proved excellent eating.

So they stripped the _A. Roger Hickey_, took out her engine and such gear as they could, and then someone set fire to the hulk. By the end of the winter, there was not even a splinter of this vessel on the beach. She was the third wreck, and there were others to come.

As the winter closed in upon the beach, I began to look forward to days when I might see what took place there during icy weather, but such opportunities proved even rarer than I had expected. Thrust forth as it is into the outer Atlantic, the Cape has a climate of island quality and island moderation. Low temperatures may occur, but the thermometer almost never falls as low as it does on the inner Massachusetts coast, nor do “spells” of cold weather “hang on” for any length of time. Storms which are snowstorms on the continental mainland turn to rainstorms on the Cape, and such snowstorms as do arrive form but a crust upon these Eastham moors. Two days after the storm the snow has thinned to great decorative patches on the slopes of sedgy hills; in another day only fragments, drifts, and stray islets remain. There is even a difference of temperature between the mainland moors of Eastham and the dunes. It is warmer on the bar. On a casual winter day I have noted a difference of eight degrees.

The work of cold weather--I mean weather when the temperature sinks toward zero--is thus to be observed only on occasion along this beach. When it comes, it comes all at once, creates a new world overnight, and vanishes overnight. The agency that brings it is the northwest wind sweeping down on us across Massachusetts Bay from the forests and frozen lakes of northern Canada. I remember one of the nights of its coming, a Thursday night early in January with great winter clouds moving out to sea, opening and closing over the cold stars, the wind on the beach so icy that I found myself, when I first went out into it, breathing it in little reluctant breaths. The next day was as cold and desolate a day as I have ever seen upon the beach. The ocean was purple-black, rough, and covered with sombre whitecaps; the morning light was pewter dull, and over earth and sea and the lonely sands hung a pall of purple-leaden cloud full of vast, tormented motion as it crossed the Cape on its way to the Atlantic. Looking off to sea, as I walked down my dune to go exploring, I saw a solitary freighter hugging the coast for shelter from the northwest wind; she was plunging heavily in the great seas and flinging up tons of spray with each plunge, and her bow and her forward deck were already thick with ice. Gulls flew along the iron-black and sombre breakers of the ebb, their white plumage chalky in that impure and arctic light. The wind was a thing to search the marrow of one’s bones.

Two beaches had formed in the icy night, best seen and studied at low tide. The upper beach occupied the width between the dunes and the line of the night’s high tide; the lower beach sloped from this high-tide mark to the open sea. The upper beach and the dunes were frozen hard. The frozen sand was delightful to walk upon, for the tiny congealed grains afforded a safe, sustaining footing, and the surface, though solid, had the resiliency of thick, unvarnished linoleum on a good floor. It was an odd, an unnatural experience, to hit one’s foot on a ridge of frozen sand. Fragments of wreckage imbedded in the sand, wreaths of imbedded seaweed--all these were as immovable as so many rocks. At the very foot of the largest of the dunes, I found a male surf scoter or skunk coot frozen stiff. A few solid kicks dislodged it, and I picked it up, but could find no wound. The lower beach, that is to say the width that had been covered by the tide during the night, was frozen solid at its junction with the upper beach, but the fine slope down to the breakers, though frozen firm, was not frozen through and through. Along the edge of the breakers, it was not frozen at all.

Between these two beaches, one above, one below, one frozen solid, the other crusted over, there ran a kind of frontier some eight or ten feet wide, a no-man’s-land of conflicting natural forces. At the height of the night tide, the seething foam rims of the sliding surf, flung by the ocean into the face of the night cold, had frozen on the sloping beach in layers of salt ice which preserved all the curves and foamy ridges of the captured edge of the sea. The brim of a high tide, that very spirit of energy and motion, lay there motionless on a beach itself deprived of motion; the scalloped edges, the little curls of foam, the long, reaching, rushing tongues, all these were to be seen enchanted into that ocean ice which is so much like a kind of snow. At its upper edge this image of the surf brim was but a glaze of ice on the beach; at its lower edge it was twelve to fifteen inches in height and fell off sheer, like an ice cake, to the beach below. And north and south it ran, mile upon icy mile, as far as the eye could see.

The subsequent history of this ice is not without interest. After two days of bitter cold the wind changed in the night, and that night’s tide quietly removed every vestige of the ice cakes from the beach. The swathe on which the ice had lain, however, remained half visible, for there water and sand had mingled and frozen deep. Presently the upper beach thawed, the cold crumbling drily out of the sand, and the lower beach, which had yielded its frozen surface to each succeeding tide and frozen again during the ebb, remained as the last tide left it. Between the two beaches, the width of buried ice lingered for a fortnight, resisting sun and whole days of winter rain. It had a way of coming suddenly to an end, and of beginning as suddenly again; sand drifted over it, the tide edge seeped through to it, the moving beach, forever adjusting itself to complex forces, burst it open, yet it lingered on. For all of us who used the beach, this buried width of ice became a secret road. The coast guards knew it well and followed along it in the night. As I set down these words, I think of the times I have come to a blind end and prodded the sand with my beach staff in search of that secret footing. Little by little the sun and the tides wore down its resistance, and so it disappeared, and our searching feet knew it no more.

The great marsh was another desolation on that same overcast and icy day. Salt ice had formed in wide rims along the edges of the great level islands, the shallower channels had frozen over, and the deeper ones were strewn with ice cakes sailing and turning about in the currents of the tides. The scene had taken on a certain winter unity, for the ice had bound the channels and the islands together into one wide and wintry plain.

On the next morning--it was sunny then, but still freezing cold--I chanced to go out for a moment to look at the marsh. About a mile and a half away, in one of the open channels, was a dark something which looked like a large, unfamiliar bird. A stray goose, perhaps? Taking my glass, I found the dark object to be the head of a deer swimming down the channel, and, even as I looked, there came to my ears the distant barking of dogs. A pair of marauding curs, out hunting on their own, had found a deer somewhere and driven the creature down the dunes and into the icy creeks. Down the channel it swam, and presently turned aside and climbed out on the marsh island just behind the Fo’castle. The animal was a young doe. I thought then, and I still believe, that this doe and the unseen creature whose delicate hoofprints I often found near the Fo’castle were one and the same. It lived, I believe, in the pines on the northern shore of the marsh and came down to the dunes at earliest dawn. But to return to its adventures: All afternoon I watched it standing on the island far out in the marsh, the tall, dead sea grass rising about its russet body; when night came, it was still there, a tiny spot of forlorn mammalian life in that frozen scene. Was it too terrified to return? That night a tide of unusual height was due which would submerge the islands under at least two feet of water and floating ice. Would the doe swim ashore under cover of darkness? I went out at midnight into my solitary world and saw the ice-covered marsh gleaming palely under a sky of brilliant stars, but could see nothing of the island of the doe save a ghostliness of salt ice along the nearer rim.

The first thing I did, on waking the next morning, was to search the island with my glass. The doe was still there.

I have often paused to wonder how that delicate and lovely creature endured so cruel a night, how she survived the slow rise of the icy tide about her poor legs, and the northwest gale that blustered about her all night long in that starlit loneliness of crunchy marsh mud and the murmur of the tides. The morning lengthened, the sun rose higher on the marsh, and presently the tide began to rise again. I watched it rising toward the refugee, and wondered if she could survive a second immersion. Just a little before noon, perhaps as the water was flooding round her feet, she came down to the edge of her island, and plunged into the channel. The creek was full of ice mush and of ice floes moving at a good speed; the doe was weak, the ice cakes bore down upon her, striking her heavily; she seemed confused, hesitated, swam here, swam there, stood still, and was struck cruelly by a floe which seemed to pass over her, yet on she swam, bewildered, but resolute for life. I had almost given up hope for her, when rescue came unexpectedly. My friend Bill Eldredge, it appeared, while on watch in the station tower the day before had chanced to see the beginning of the story, and on the second morning had noticed the doe still standing in the marshes. All the Nauset crew had taken an interest. Catching sight of the poor creature fighting for life in the drift, three of the men put off in a skiff, poled the ice away with their oars, and shepherded the doe ashore. “When she reached dry land, she couldn’t rise, she was so weak, and fell down again and again. But finally she stood up and stayed up, and walked off into the pines.”

III

I have now to tell of the great northeast storm of February 19th and 20th. They say here that it was the worst gale known on the outer Cape since the _Portland_ went down with all hands on that terrible November night in ’98.

It began after midnight on a Friday night, and the barometer gave but little warning of its coming. That Friday afternoon I had walked up the beach to Nauset Station, found Bill Eldredge on watch in the tower, and asked him to wake me up when he went by at midnight. “Never mind if you don’t see a light,” I said. “Come in anyway and wake me up. I may go down the beach with you.” I often made the patrols with the men at the station, for I liked to walk the beach by night.

Shortly after midnight, Bill came to the door, but I did not get up and dress to go down the beach with him, for I was rather tired from piling up a mass of driftwood, so I sat up in bed and talked to him by the dying light of my fire. On bitter nights, I used to put a big log on in the hope that it might flicker and smoulder till morning, but on average nights, I let the fire die down to a bed of ashes, for I am a light sleeper, and the little play of flames on the hearth kept me awake. Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone stirs in them a certain watchfulness.

The coast guardsman stood against the brick fireplace, his elbow propped for a moment on the shelf; I scarce could see his blue-clad figure in the gloom. “It’s blowing up,” he said. “I think we are going to have a northeaster.” I apologized for not getting up, pleaded weariness, and, after a little talk, Bill said that he must be going, and returned to the beach. I saw him use his flashlight a moment as he plunged down the dune.

I woke in the morning to the dry rattle of sleet on my eastern windows and the howling of wind. A northeaster laden with sleet was bearing down on the Cape from off a furious ocean, an ebbing sea fought with a gale blowing directly on the coast; the lonely desolation of the beach was a thousand times more desolate in that white storm pouring down from a dark sky. The sleet fell as a heavy rain falls when it is blown about by the wind. I built up my fire, dressed, and went out, shielding my face from the sleet by pulling my head down into the collar of my coat. I brought in basket after basket of firewood, till the corner of the room resembled a woodshed. Then I folded up the bedclothes, threw my New Mexican blanket over the couch, lighted the oil stove, and prepared breakfast. An apple, oatmeal porridge, toast made at the fireplace, a boiled egg, and coffee.

Sleet and more of it, rushes of it, attacks of it, screaming descents of it; I heard it on the roof, on the sides of the house, on the windowpanes. Within, my fire fought against the cold, tormented light. I wondered about a small fishing boat, a thirty-foot “flounder dragger” that had anchored two miles or so off the Fo’castle the evening before. I looked for her with my glass, but could not see into the storm.

Streaming over the dunes, the storm howled on west over the moors. The islands of the marsh were brownish black, the channels leaden and whipped up by the wind; and along the shores of the desolate islands, channel waves broke angrily, chidingly, tossing up heavy ringlets of lifeless white. A scene of incredible desolation and cold. All day long I kept to my house, building up the fire and keeping watch from the windows; now and then I went out to see that all was well with the Fo’castle and its foundations, and to glimpse what I could, through the sleet, of the storm on the sea. For a mile or so offshore the North Atlantic was a convulsion of elemental fury whipped by the sleety wind, the great parallels of the breakers tumbling all together and mingling in one seething and immense confusion, the sound of this mile of surf being an endless booming roar, a seethe, and a dread grinding, all intertwined with the high scream of the wind. The rush of the inmost breakers up the beach was a thing of violence and blind will. Darkness coming early, I closed my shutters on the uproar of the outer world, all save one shutter on the landward side.

With the coming of night the storm increased; the wind reaching a velocity of seventy to eighty miles an hour. It was at this time, I am told, that friends on the mainland began to be worried about me, many of them looking for my light. My lamp, a simple kerosene affair with a white china shade, stood on a table before the unshuttered window facing the land. An old friend said he would see it or think that he saw it for a half minute or so, and then it would vanish for hours into the darkness of the gale. It was singularly peaceful in the little house. Presently, the tide, which had ebbed a little during the afternoon, turned and began to come in. All afternoon long the surf had thundered high upon the beach, the ebb tide backed up against the wind. With the turn of the tide came fury unbelievable. The great rhythm of its waters now at one with the rhythm of the wind, the ocean rose out of the night to attack the ancient rivalry of earth, hurling breaker after thundering breaker against the long bulwark of the sands. The Fo’castle, being low and strongly built, stood solid as a rock, but its walls thrummed in the gale. I could feel the vibration in the bricks of the chimney, and the dune beneath the house trembled incessantly with the onslaught of the surf.

[Illustration: _The Bank After a Storm_]

Where were my friends at Nauset Station, thought I, in this furious night. Who was on his way north, with seven miles of night and sleet to battle through before he returned to the shelter of the station and the warmth of that kitchen stove which is kept polished to a brilliance beyond all stoves? It was Bill, as a matter of fact, and because of the surf on the beach he was using the path which runs along the top of the cliff close by its brim, a path exposed to the full violence of the gale. As I mused thus, troubled about my friends, there came a knock at my open window, and then steps outside and a knock at the door. Letting my visitor in was easy enough, but to close the door after him was another matter. Closing the door against the force of the gale was like trying to close it upon something material; it was exactly as if I were pressing the door against a bulging mass of felt. My visitor was Albert Robbins, first man south from Nauset, a big powerful youngster and a fine lad; he was covered with sleet and sand, sand and sleet in his hair, in his eyebrows, in the corners of his eyes, in his ears, behind his ears, in the corners of his mouth, in his nostrils even. And a cheerful, determined grin!

“Wanted to see if you were still here,” he said humorously, rooting sand out of his eyes with a knuckle. I busied myself getting him a cup of steaming coffee.

“Any news? Anyone in trouble?” I asked.

“Yes, there’s a coast guard patrol boat off the Highland; something’s the matter with her engine. She’s anchored off there, and they’ve sent two destroyers out from Boston to get her.”

“When did you hear that?”

“This afternoon.”

“Didn’t hear anything else?”

“No, the wires blew down, and we can’t get beyond Cahoons.”

“Think they’ve got any chance if the destroyers haven’t got to them?”

“Gosh, I hope so,” he said; and then, after a pause, “but it don’t look like it.” And then, “So long,” and into the storm again.

I did not go to bed, for I wanted to be ready for any eventuality. As the hour of flood tide neared, I dressed as warmly as I could, turned down my lamp, and went out upon the dunes.

An invisible moon, two days past the full, had risen behind the rushing floor of cloud, and some of its wan light fell on the tortured earth and the torment of the sea. The air was full of sleet, hissing with a strange, terrible, insistent sound on the dead grass, and sand was being whirled up into the air. Being struck on the face by this sand and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip. I have never looked on such a tide. It had crossed the beach, climbed the five-foot wall of the dune levels that run between the great mounds, and was hurling wreckage fifty and sixty feet into the starved white beach grass; the marsh was an immense flooded bay, and the “cuts” between the dunes and the marsh rivers of breakers. A hundred yards to the north of me was such a river; to the south, the surf was attempting to flank the dune, an attempt which did not succeed. Between these two onslaughts, no longer looking _down_ upon the sea, but directly into it and just over it, the Fo’castle stood like a house built out into the surf on a mound of sand. A third of a mile or so to the north I chanced to see rather a strange thing. The dune bank there was washing away and caving in under the onslaught of the seas, and presently there crumbled out the blackened skeleton of an ancient wreck which the dunes had buried long ago. As the tide rose this ghost floated and lifted itself free, and then washed south close along the dunes. There was something inconceivably spectral in the sight of this dead hulk thus stirring from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.

As I walked in the night I wondered about the birds who live here in the marsh. That great population of gulls, ducks, and geese and their rivals and allies--where were they all crouching, where were they hidden in that wild hour?

All Sunday morning there was sleet--more sleet fell in this storm than the Cape had seen in a generation--and then, about the middle of the afternoon, the wind died down, leaving a wild sea behind. Going to Nauset Station, I had news of the disaster at the Highland. The destroyers, in spite of a splendid battle, had been unable to reach the disabled patrol boat, and the luckless ship had gone to pieces. It is thought that she dragged onto the outer bar. Nine men had perished. Two bodies came ashore next day; their watches had stopped at five o’clock, so we knew that the vessel had weathered the night and gone to pieces in the morning. What a night they must have had, poor souls!