Part 9

We are now in a genuine country state of which the urban power talks with both scorn and ignorant nostalgia. The summer no longer pounds at our temples. The fall color is gone. There is nothing to look at, and very little to hear except the wind, or a plane in the distance, a car on the highway. To a city lover it is silent and deadly dull.

As to the nostalgia, I doubt that there is much stress any more on the virtue implicit in country living. Since all men now dwell in all places, they question virtue everywhere; but some still talk as though the country were a place for that intangible peace and moral order that they think is lacking in the world. The country, however, is in the grip of a power that has no moral values and is greater than morality. It is false and true. It is benign and it is terrible. It cures and it kills. And I do not suppose that whether or not the earth is made up of human cities can make much difference to it. I am waiting for a deeper tone than hope.

There is no noise or compelling distraction in a field or stand of trees. Still, a forester suggested to me that if trees could make themselves heard, in their internal growth and adjustments, the roar would be deafening. The same thought has been applied to life in the ground, with its countless microorganisms, in a state of continual displacement and turmoil, growing and dying, consuming and being consumed. They too might roar. We have enough at hand and under our feet to make general tumult no surprise.

The point about this countryside is not its isolation but its potentiality. It is in charge of origins. What is more dramatic than the production of seeds in plants and grasses over one small field? The seeds are in uncountable numbers, and each one is a miniature plant, an embryo, surrounded by food and a protective coating. It is an embodiment of force. It eats and breathes, and now goes into a period of dormancy like an animal, ready to germinate in the spring when conditions are favorable. Such facts are part of elementary biology, but they cover up the stir and momentum of the globe.

These seeds, on grass and weeds now growing thinner, drier, more colorless, are not only rich in generation, on their own account, but they provide beyond themselves. The juncos, or snow birds, that come down from the north will survive on a seed diet throughout the winter, with the sparrows, and that sustaining food the mice, preyed upon by fox, weasel, or hawk. The simplest “food chain” suggests the links in many others. In fact there is no fundamental separation anywhere in this common world of life, despite the greatly various environments of water and land that we use to help us differentiate between the species. Winds blow through. Tides lap over. Each plant and animal is proof of general contact and association.

The insignificant seed has energy and sustenance enough to perpetuate many worlds. It makes me look at mere grass with more interest than I did. I believe there are some fourteen hundred species of grasses in the United States, of which I know less than a dozen. There is one grass which grows in many areas of the Cape, through open slopes, pine woods, sandy, run-down fields, that I have heard called beard, or prairie grass. I have walked by it, on it, and through it for years without knowing its name, though its nameless, light-catching beauty often caught my attention. It turns out to be broom sedge (Andropogon scoparius), a plant that reaches from here and the Middle Atlantic States south to Texas and across the southeast to California. It is a poor soil, poor forage grass, appropriate to this nonagricultural region. Its stems rise from a bunch of curving, rustling leaf blades, and are covered with tiny florets that go to seed in the fall, little feathery tufts. As the autumn months progress it grows more colorful, deepening to tawny pink, with a touch of purple, before it takes on its straw-colored midwinter hue. The little silky feathery tufts shine in the sunlight like the slightest spits and sparkles on a pool, or tiny plumes of frost, intangibly gentle, sustaining their brightness as the winter comes on. The stems are two to three feet tall, and with their delicate adornments, they stand the year around, stirring, curving forward, nodding back, with the utmost refinement. So I praise what is for me a new discovery, though it has stood near me in its own praise for many years--a country eloquence.

Almost all local preparations are done. The seed is sown and made ready. The time for persistence is coming, when those grasses we take so much for granted will hold our earth together. When the sun warms them, drying on slopes and through old fields, they smell sweet underfoot, a natural, uncut hay.

The Clouds

The power of sending on is latent in the seed, but the weather itself is always openly manifest, and when the leaves fall, when the summer nests begin to show up in unexpected places, then it hits us even harder. The northeast winds are beginning to be something to hide from. The sky stares with a wider, colder eye.

When it is cloudy I hear the dull drone of unseen planes far above me, and I think of a world at large that is teeming with meetings and negotiations, losing decisions, waiting on results. The immediate earth seems to shift, tack, and decide according to its clouds, that slant up the sky in fibrous strands, hang deep and low, or lift across the sunlight.

The sun’s rays slant lower between the open aisles of the trees, and there is a keener, icier edge to the light. I walk out through a hollowed, dipping and waving landscape onto gray-green lichens, and dry, sweet-smelling grasses of an old field laced with briars, and the pale blue sky is on top of me with intoxicating height. The vapor trail of a jet plane cuts across the sky for miles, while slower clouds ease and change across the November blue, allowing lazy time for the imagination.

But if to imagine is a dispensation from nature that allows us to take part in her intricate creativeness, then it is no idleness. Rationally, a cloud, whether cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, or a combination thereof, is what it is: a collection of drops of water, or ice particles, suspended in the air. Meteorology as a science must be one of the most intriguing, since its subjects never sit still. I would, if I could, make an analysis of the clouds that are typical of a season, the changes in pace that make themselves known overhead; though the old maritime men of Cape Cod could do a better job. They knew what they depended on, in the way of calm or storm, and predicted what they felt. Subjective interpretation is suspect these days, but it implies a common familiarity for which objective analysis offers no substitute. The sensate imagination, with its head in the clouds, finds interconnections past their specialty and name.

Clouds, collecting moisture from the ponds, lakes, or ocean waters, have many of the shapes and patterns of the land, or head, if you like, that they come from. We can find faces in them, as well as in the dregs of a teacup; but they are the images of an invention that is more fluid than our own. Their texture may cause them to look like scratched, glacial rocks, or they are wooly and fibrous at the same time. They might suggest cocoons or the nest of fall webworms. They hang in snowy shoals or in striated banks. They ripple like the sands at low tide. They look like whitecaps on the sea. They move as slowly and inexorably as fields of ice, or in quick bursts ahead of the wind. They roll in mountainous abundance, or fan out like a river’s long fingers stretching out across a delta.

Clouds suggest seaweed, grasses, wings. Occasionally they remind me of ferns, and of the fernlike patterns that the frost makes on a window, or they resemble some basic structure of a living thing. As plants and animals are united in fundamental physical laws and in their chemical composition, so clouds, for all their evanescence, cannot be separated from the world of life. Clouds are announcements of progress and decline. They show the sky’s adventures. There is more to them than my fancy. The light, the wind, the altitude, temperature, time of day or year commit them to a definite size, shape, and existence. They are images of substance, in a motion which casts everything into its weather, including that human sign on the sky, the jet’s trail, imposing an abstract scar ten miles across.

The Inconstant Land

When the clouds cover the sky like gun smoke and the air feels cold and restricting, I am reminded that the character of Cape Cod has nothing to offer an uncertain world except uncertainty. Its trees are not of a size to hang on to, and its dunes shift like the waves. It is a land that men have ravaged with fire, not excluding the Indians who preceded us, and abused without compunction. It is said there used to be great stands of trees on the Cape, hardwoods, hemlocks and pine. The remnants of submerged Atlantic white cedar forests have been found as far as three miles out in Cape Cod Bay, and bog borings have revealed the evidence of timber in some areas where trees now have only a bare subsistence. But during the nineteenth century, judging by photographs and local account, this peninsula was much poorer in trees than it is now, even though our local woods cannot be given credit for much height and dignity.

A man from New Hampshire visited me briefly a few years ago and said: “What in the world are you living here for? There aren’t any trees!” I pointed out to him that we had the sea, but the place seemed poor and flat to him, and he headed back to the mountains and tall timber as fast as he could, though he first chose to have a lunch of seafood, on his way out.

When I bought the land I live on, it had a desolate appearance aside from a long view of the water, but its high wildness appealed to me. It was covered with dead oaks, standing everywhere like stripped spars. They had been killed off by a severe infestation of gypsy moths, and were, in any case, weak, cutover growth to begin with. The local landowners cut the woods down almost completely, then waited, twenty-five years in many cases, to cut them again. Others cut for firewood whenever they needed it. This area is covered like a rabbit warren with tracks made by wagons coming in to take out wood. I talked with a man recently who used to ride on the wagon seat with his grandfather when he was a boy. They liked to pull trees out when the frost was in the ground. Even then the wagon would be so heavily loaded that it sank in almost to the axles, with the horse pulling hard in the middle. The deep ruts are still to be seen. Besides taking out the wood for sale and for their own use, the owners would sell it “on the stump,” letting individuals go on their land and cut.

Since this was a country whose inhabitants often made a sparse living out of livestock as well as fish, the land was also used for grazing. Cattle and sheep kept the brush and ground cover down. Many sandy hillsides were not only bare, but beginning to erode badly.

In his Cape Cod, Thoreau speaks of the country between the towns of Barnstable and Orleans on the bay side as being “bare, or with only a little scrubby wood left on the hills.” “Generally,” he writes, “the ploughed fields of the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of salt and Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander’s notions of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and he will not be able, for some time afterwards, to distinguish soil from sand.”

Fire has tormented the Cape, ever since the Indians, who used it to clear areas for corn, or to increase the visibility when hunting game. When the humus on the woodland floor is thin, and the trees not healthy or high enough to provide protective shade, thus retaining moisture in the ground, a severe drought may make them ripe for burning. I have heard it said that fires used to be set deliberately in order to improve the blueberry crop. And a neighbor tells me that he has seen thirty or more fires set by the sparks from a train, chugging down the Cape, as he watched from a bare hillside half a century ago.

Oddly enough, the pitch pine owes a great deal of its present prosperity to fire. It is one of the few trees whose roots stay alive and which comes back after an area has been burned over. Most of its competitors, except scrub oaks and black oaks, are killed off. It is a tough tree, and when it grows to good height with its rugged, wind-whisking look, a beautiful one; but it has its vulnerable points. It is very greedy for light, being what the tree experts call an “intolerant tree,” and it cannot stand competition. Pitch pines that come up under the shade of oaks or even of their own kind, soon die off. They demand their own ground. The oaks, especially the white oak, are much more tolerant of shade, and may in time push out the pitch pine, provided fires are held to a minimum in the future.

The oaks are monumentally persistent. Cut them down fifty times and they will sprout back from the roots, which merely spread out a little further and send out more shoots. These “sprout hardwoods” have poor quality wood. They have fungus diseases, and are subject to attack by insect borers. The general attitude toward them is that they are worthless. Now that they are not much in demand for firewood, the bulldozer, rather than the ax, is their major enemy. But they deserve some admiration for holding their own. The first year or two after cutting, a sprout oak will grow very fast, but then it settles down for a long future, beginning to grow at a slow, insistent rate, taking what comes. This is a windy and salty land, where oaks may never grow to great girth and height, but they seem eloquent about their right to last out the next five thousand years on Cape Cod as well as we, even though thirty feet, or in some areas five, may be the maximum they reach. This is their chosen land.

The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is full of the collaborative music of air and trees. They may be poor trees, low and rangy, subject to great abuse, but in their growth they make the land march between its surrounding waters. The gray oak trunks go in ranks and tiers for mile after mile down the center of the Cape, interspersed by individual pitch pines, or backed up and sided by pines in independent woods that look rounded and bunched in the distance, pocked with dark green shadows. The oak branches thrust up their candelabras of branches and stiff twigs against the pale sky, ready for next spring’s sunlight. The pitch pines stand with scaly, dark brown trunks and thick needles rocking and switching around, authorities on wind, and sandy soil, on impermanence, on taking your chances when and where you can.

Geologists say that this truly “narrow land,” no more than a mile wide in some sections, seven or eight in others, may vanish under the sea in five or six thousand years. Its border of sands is always in the process of roaming and shifting. The Cape has no bedrock. Its rocks are migrants, brought down from the north by moving ice. In spite of the evidence of some once fairly rich timberland and deep topsoil, the Cape does not convince you of any depth and permanence other than its alliance with salt water.

The sea gives and the sea takes away, breaking through a barrier beach during winter storms and roaring into the marsh and sheltered inlet behind, cutting down cliffs a foot or two a year, or imperceptibly stealing inches from a low-lying shore; while it adds new beaches, packs new tons of sand around an outlying spit or shoal. Last year, when I accompanied a group of children on their geology class, we uncovered a burying pit for horses and cows in the sandbank at the head of one of the bay beaches. If there had been a farm in the vicinity, a hundred years or more ago, the sea may well have cut in over half a mile to reach these bones.

The winds sweep overhead, or merely threaten, the beach waters lap gently, or bridle and roar, and the only stability I feel is that of the tides, a lasting balance between the give-and-take of water and land. The Cape’s ravaged past and stunted present seems transmuted into motion. What this spit of land has taught me is an altered sense of the context of time. I once saw a tree either as material for the woodpile, or something with a growth so slow as to pass notice. Now I have begun to see trees moving by the million in a million varied places. Natural change is made up of so many circumstances, the continuum of life in its vast order is so far from being held down by history, that everything requires us to move on into the distance. It may well be regretted, but Cape Cod is not so much a place for traditionalism as a victim of the beautiful and impatient earth.

The Dead and the Living