Part 11
And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale, carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness. The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but that--a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an “incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned, four survived, and one is missing.
[Illustration]
They were returning to Boston with 38,000 pounds of fish, after fishing west of Georges Banks. During the night, through a thick fog, a thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour wind, high waves, and heavy rain, the radar stopped working and the crewmen were unable to see. The “Back Shore” bar, on which the trawler ran aground, is an old graveyard for ships. Modern equipment has cut down greatly on losses, along with some of the old safeguards against them. Many lighthouses are no longer manned by lighthouse keepers and their families. Great beams of light swing out over the dark sea and back again with inanimate, unmanned precision. Members of Coast Guard rescue crews may no longer be men born and bred here who know every inch of their beaches. In fact, they are more likely to come from a different state, and to be stationed temporarily on the Cape, so that a man hunting for a wreck may not have too exact an idea of his location.
During the afternoon, after I hear the news and drive to see the wreck, a southwest wind blows over the cliffs that stand above the Wellfleet beach, and clouds swirl up across the blue emptiness. Cars line both sides of the road. A thin trickle of people walk along the heights, sands held by yellow grass and purple patches of bearberry, and there are others far down the long beach where the trawler lies, heaved over to starboard.
From morning news accounts and a scatter of talk the story of the doomed ship and the rescue comes to me a little, from under its nighttime shroud of fog and heaving waves. After the radar quit and the vessel ran aground on the sand bar, the crew made a futile effort to get her off. Then the radio failed. The ship was being knocked around in the thrashing darkness. All attempts failed to put dories overboard. And the seven men went into the pilothouse, where they stayed for some five hours. When day broke, the tide was changing and the seas seemed bigger than ever. The men were battered and exhausted. The trawler’s decks were awash, and they thought she was beginning to break up. The captain then ordered the crew over the sides, at which time the ship was some 600 to 700 yards offshore.
A local family, a man, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter, proprietors of summer cottages above the beach, were wakened at four forty-five in the morning by two coastguardmen who had seen the wreck and stopped in to use the phone. While one of the men drove along the heights and trained the spotlights of his jeep on the wreck, the other, accompanied by the family, walked down to the shore. The fog had lifted a little and they could see white spars rocking above the water, and what looked at first like debris, being washed back and forth against the shore. Forming a hand-to-hand chain, the four rescuers then managed by just standing out far enough in the icy water to pull three men in. More Coast Guard personnel came later and rescued the fourth. The survivors were terribly numbed by the cold. One of them had to be forced into walking so as to save his life. “How much further?” he kept mumbling, as he stumbled around in the sands, held up by the mother and daughter. Later, the flesh of these survivors was found to be black and blue from the pounding they had taken on board the ship and in the surf, flung against the sands.
Two other crewmen were found dead on the beach. Another local resident saw one of them where he lay at the bottom of a ladder that reached down the cliff: “A big man, between thirty and forty. He had coveralls on, but no shirt.”
His wife says: “I’ll never complain about the price of fish again!”
There are plenty of fish in evidence, all for free, although not a single one is taken away. The boat’s catch must have been broken into and scattered by the surf. Every ten yards or so along the wide, shelving beach are dead fish, lined up as if they had been placed there--a market display, for no taste but dissolution. Gray haddock cleaned by the fishermen’s knives. Rose fish, pinkish, orange-red, a sunset color, with fringed fins, and enormous jellied eyes rimmed with white, like goggles.
A hatch cover floats loose in the water, and a pair of yellow, oiled fisherman’s overalls lies on the sand.
The boat, which was shoved and lifted by the seas until it now lies a few yards off the beach, is just ahead. We curious onlookers walk toward it in growing silence. The surf waters are breaking on the beach beside the strong, humble craft, inactive, done, pounded down. I can make out her name, _Paulmino_, along the bow. She is banked over hard, and the waves, still fairly high, back and fill around the stern. They well up, then ease away again. Where water sloshes amidships there are tattered nets and bobbing cork floats. The steel masts stand with ropes and stays unbroken, and the high, white pilothouse is intact, where they spent their terrible night.
I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death, or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that no mortal fear escapes.
_April Light_
One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water. There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead.
Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal--probably a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the channel--swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with a yell as its head slips by and out of sight.
A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high spring night--life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its origins.
Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance. The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light.
There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a beetle’s iridescent green.
Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible to see the grass growing.
There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds, making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance.
In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow sunlight of a path where I am walking.
These are the signs of spring, the illuminations I have been waiting for. And its fresh, cool wind, striking my face, seems to carry new senses with it. It is beginning to be fragrant and full. It calls up in me a new alertness along with a new contentment. But underneath all these pleasant surfaces and scattered events, I feel the power of their origins. For all I can find and associate with spring, the romantic, welcome season, there are vastly more uncounted changes, unrealized ways of reaching up and out, responding to a new range of light and darkness. The protozoa tell me I have seen nothing yet as to fire. The migrant herring coming in at night say this April is ageless and dark. Everywhere around me, things deeply silent and unseen begin to share a proximity. They move in the waters, while they shoulder the dirt below ground. In the structure of their alliances, developed in measure and with appropriateness, is the co-ordination of the great globe as it spins in space. They respond to a power which not only defines the “spring” but will transform it and send it on its way.
“_Frightened Away_”
The swallows freely dip and fall and sail in high wild air, and as a southern surprise two adult turkey vultures soar low over the land, their wings like great flags, frayed at the tips. The cattail seeds begin to fly. Part of April’s cool progression, the tough-leaved Mayflowers blossom out of banks and brown leaf litter, with tiny pink and white flowers, deep cupped, strong and sweet of scent.
On the twenty-fifth there is a big run of alewives in the brook. It is an event that attracts attention. Cars stop by. Small crowds gather and walk down to see the fish. This is not as great a day as it used to be, when salt herring counted heavily in the economic livelihood of Cape Cod, but it brings up remnant feelings. And the fish, after all, provide an open ceremony, even though the details of their natural or economic history may not be known to everyone. It is a spectacle worth leaving a car for, and might even tempt someone to leave his car for good, suggesting new roads and means of locomotion not yet considered.
They mass in the shallow water of the brook, with flinty gleams showing on their backs and dorsal fins. Eyes staring, mouths gaping, turning and wheeling, the foot-long alewives move up through the fishways, obeying their great drive for fulfillment. Herring gulls gather above the water course by which the fish ascend through marshes and then fresh water to their spawning areas in the ponds. They circle overhead in the blinding sky, like a prodigal crown.
The alewife multitude always draws a “why” from some visitor. Their force is so obvious and yet not quite to be explained by referring to them as “poor fish.” Huge numbers are caught in nets where they die in a shining, gasping, shivering mass, and then are hauled away in barrels for the purposes of bait or cat food. Others attempt impossible rocky barriers and die of wounds or exhaustion, and a certain percentage have fallen prey to gulls before they arrive. They encounter enormous hazards, and the alewives, unlike men, or as men think of themselves, are unable to turn back. The plan that put them here seems wasteful and even too bold for those who see life in terms of human ascendancy, where all problems are subordinate to our conscious attempt to use the earth and save ourselves. But there they are, back again so committedly as to make the most self-enclosed glimpse something of the primal energy that makes all life insist on renewal and advance. Even the children who jump down to the water’s edge and try to flip the fish out with their hands, treating them sometimes with extraordinary cruelty, must feel some attachment to this force, or perhaps they feel it more than the rest of us.
After trying to explain the habits of alewives to a group of children one day, I asked them why, if all the fish were taken out of the brook every day in the week, there would be hardly any fish returning in a few years’ time.
I don’t excuse my lack of clarity. In any case, one boy answered: “Because they would get so frightened they would all go away and not come back.”
Wrong, of course. Someone might even be tempted to cry: “Ridiculous!” The answer to the question is that most of the alewives return to the stream in whose headwaters they were hatched and where they grew up for a few weeks or months of their lives before returning to salt water. They then continue to grow in the sea, returning at sexual maturity in three or four years’ time. So if all the spawning fish are taken out of the brook every day in the week there would be no eggs to hatch out in the ponds above the stream, and the population would be decimated.
“No,” you say to the child, “you don’t understand. Let me explain this again.”
That the fish are “frightened” does not come into the picture at all, aside from the facts, and it is blatant anthropomorphism to try and read human response or attributes into a fish. Does a fish take fright? Perhaps, although it might be more accurate to call it an alarm, or flight reaction, an automatic nerve response inherent in the whole race.
Trying to talk like an adult, I describe the alewives’ running in to spawn as “slavery to the reproductive urge.” What happens to them on the way is immaterial to this unconscious necessity. Fish that commit suicide do not do so out of choice.
And yet, when these fish swing away from me, as my shadow comes over them, when they try time after time, sometimes frantically, to climb a mound of rocks or a head of water, I wonder about being “frightened,” or the noun “fear.” Is this spring stream of life without it? A bird trips off a branch in sudden alarm, cries out, and then forgets, to start in on a singing joy all over again. Birds are more emotional than cold-blooded fish, but if fear is a protective, lifesaving reaction inherent in a great many animals, then the fish may not be devoid of it. They are one of the foods of the universe, and in balance with that function, it is not just that their glands stimulate them to momentary activity, or that they flinch before disaster, but that they express in their bodies the wild need for freedom to act, to find, to run, to be, that manifests itself in highly developed animals, and to some degree in the lesser ones. They are in a sense compensating for the uses to which they are put as a prey, or element, of universal appetite.
The alewives will not be frightened away, but they will come back with fear. It is not wise to be too impatient with a child.
_May_
_Declarations_
The colder, and still relatively silent world of April is past. Warm sunlight runs across trees, sharp shadows, water and sand, with a penetrating radiance. The alewives now come up the inland stream day after day. Pale, sun laden, they move against the fast-rushing current, arousing great excitement in the gulls. The big white and gray birds hover over, then dive down in a flock where the fish crowd in shallow water on their way up. The valley is full of marauding and assemblies and crying out as the fish keep on, rushing and weaving with the stream flowing over their backs.
And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like standing clouds in open woods and valleys throughout the Cape. Pink and yellow and silvery-green colors begin to appear on the oaks. Anthers are hanging conspicuously from the pitch pines.
Fish, insects, plants, birds are all, if I can personify them so, in close and obedient relationship to nature. They count on strength and protection when they sing or flower out above the ground. They are in confident relationship to the general being. And so they act with confidence. They have come. They will be. They declare themselves. The birds make the dawns sound with a silvery rain of music. On the morning when a thrush wakes me up, its rippling and melodious peals lifting and diving through the air, I have an incalculable urge to migrate outward and claim new territory. Spring tells me I have not had enough.
The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods, each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help us not only in our geography but to extend our senses.
Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land possession.
The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare.
“Air_tree_!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-_tree_!” continually, inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true awareness.
In the newly unfolding regions of delicate leaves a prairie warbler sings “Tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee” very rapidly, on an upward crescendo. A slim little bird, with a yellow breast streaked with black, its sharp trim beak opens wide as the notes swell out of its throat, and it seems to send song as far as it can. I think of constant effort, constant quick hearts. It picks up a light green caterpillar from the oak leaves and sings as it holds it in its beak. Then the warbler beats at the insect a little, pecks and shakes it, then swallows it down; and goes on singing.
An oven bird perches on the oaks and sings, with breast uplifted, tail shaking, making a glorious effort. How could I dare say that this bird or another down the road, which accompanies it, is only singing something that sounds to our ears like “Teacher-teacher-teacher”? No bird song is alike, even in members of the same species. Each individual has its variation and seems to derive strength and pleasure from it. And it seems to me that they not only declare their rights and titles but are expressing something on behalf of spring. It is as if they sang: “It is not I. It is not I” but rather, all flowering, crossing, taking or accumulating, all growth. The song is a part of earth.