The Great Beach

Part 1

The Great Beach

Books by John Hay:

A PRIVATE HISTORY THE RUN NATURE’S YEAR A SENSE OF NATURE (with Arline Strong) THE GREAT BEACH

The Great Beach

JOHN HAY

ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE

Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York 1963

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-18198 Copyright © 1963 by John Hay All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

To Conrad and Mary Aiken Henry and Gertrude Kittredge

Foreword

I suppose that anyone writing another book about Cape Cod can be convicted of temerity, in the face of such predecessors as the three Henrys--Thoreau, Beston, and Kittredge--as well as Dr. Wyman Richardson. However, each to his own eye. I write about the Cape because of the circumstances of living there, long enough to have begun to learn a little about it; also, the coast is long and the sea will not stop with the outer beach. All Americans who not only love nature but stand in awe of it will be more and more hard put to explain their reasons, as we crowd our magnificent land and diminish it in proportion to the size of our demands. In The Great Beach are some of my reasons.

I am grateful to Dr. Alfred C. Redfield, Dr. John M. Zeigler, Mr. Joseph Chace, Dr. Loren C. Petry, Dr. Howard L. Sanders, and Dr. Ransom Somers for various assistance during the writing of this book, and hope they will not have any serious objections to the way I have used such information as they may have given me. This book also owes a great deal to the discerning and useful criticisms made by Richard K. Winslow, of Doubleday.

Contents

Foreword vii

I--From a Distance 1

II--An Unimagined Frontier 8

III--The Resources of the Sea 18

IV--A Rhythmic Shore 26

V--Dune Country 35

VI--A Change in History 46

VII--Barren Grounds 56

VIII--A Landscape in Motion 63

IX--Who Owns the Beach? 76

X--Deer Week 87

XI--Impermanence Takes Its Stand 93

XII--The Depths of Sight 99

XIII--The Flight of Birds 107

XIV--The Marsh 116

Part 2

XV--The Uses of Light 124

The Great Beach

From a Distance

The Pilgrims who reached Cape Cod in 1620 had heard of it before. It got its name in 1602 and had been touched on by European seamen at least a century before that, and so when the Pilgrims “... fell in with that land which is called Cape Cod; the which being made and certainly known to be it, they were not a little joyful.”

Their coming had taken a long time, and they had passed over “a tedious and dreadful” sea; but as Bradford’s history relates it further: “... they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”

“And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruell and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to ye top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main barrier and gulf to separate them from the civil parts of the world.”

Now, nearly 350 years later, that lone land reaching out into the mighty ocean seems to be full of the “solace and content with respect to outward objects” which the Pilgrims lacked. Roads, gas stations, shopping centers, and a continually increasing number of houses, proclaim it as human territory, another populated home ground from which we have to go far to be separated from civilization. The simple, raw existence which the Pilgrims not only endured but anticipated has been replaced by a world of goods, which is not to say that we do not have to have a fortitude of our own, made inevitable, in great measure, by the very abundance we have achieved.

The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general outline as it is now, although the original woodland has been cut down, or burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees, much of the topsoil has eroded and blown away, and the shore line altered in the course of natural change. Superficially at least, it has been tamed, and in most areas the primal, unknown wildness is hard to imagine. The last thing you would expect to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a Cape Cod beach would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one, wilderness being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both by its vastness and the difference between water and air, could answer the description, and also the sands that define its limits.

Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the tip of the Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island is not undiscovered country. Many men have walked it. Planes skim over it in no time at all, and the beach buggies bruise it with impunity. Still, the marks we make on it are all erased in time. The sea and sand insist on their own art. The beach is in a continuous state of remaking and invites discovery. It was first called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David Thoreau. Otherwise it has been known for a long time as the Outer Beach, the Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now it forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park--in the process of establishment--and is therefore not owned by individuals, or the towns in which they reside, but by the people of the United States. It is under national protection and possession at the same time, so how we approach and treat its future is a very great responsibility, which is appropriate enough.

The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to America before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most travelers it means the end of a highway, a place of summer sands. It is in fact one end of a whole continent of roads, of communications, of the vast and intricate business of human passage. In a sense it used to be the other way around. With all the known parts of the civilized world behind them, the Pilgrims found in this beach not an end but a beginning, whatever it might entail, and that of course, is why they went there.

This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the “tedious and dreadful” highway of the sea--city dwellers, road, rocket, car, and plane makers that we are--to the extent that we too may find it again for the first time. The beach, lying by the sea and sea invested, is always ready for a new kind of attention in a new world. That is the nature of the place. Cape Cod itself, now and ultimately, is at the disposition of the sea rather than human enterprise.

The Cape is a narrow peninsula, a little terminal arm jutting out in to the Atlantic, constructed of loose material left by the last glacier some 20,000 years ago. Its upper part, starting beyond High Head at Truro and forming the Provincetown hook, or hood, is of recent origin. It lacks the cliffs that stand over the beach from a mile or so north of Highland Light to as far as the Nauset Coast Guard Beach at Eastham, and for the most part has a history of deposition and accretion rather than removal. It was formed by storms, tides, and currents, piling in sand and other materials from the shore to the south, over bars and reefs of glacial debris. The sand is still packing up around Race Point, as it is also adding to the shore south of Nauset to the tip end of Monomoy Island, while storms take it away from other parts of the shore line. Within living memory a large island called Billinsgate, on which there was a lighthouse and at one time a “Try Yard” for whales, disappeared under the surface of Cape Cod Bay. It now appears as a shoal at low tide and is otherwise covered over by water, although the rocky lighthouse foundations still show above the surface in all but the highest tides. On the Bay side the shore line has been filled in in some areas, while it has receded in others, revealing for example, the bones of horses and cows in the bank at the head of a beach, which were once presumably, some distance behind it. Many a cottage owner after a storm has found his living-room floor with nothing below it but the tide.

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