Part 12

On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon, everything goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only rule. As it does everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across from one direction of the compass or another, streaming with light and moisture, lifts up, lifts you to it, and with long low swoops, sudden breaths and seething, it whisks the waters of the marshes and inlets, rounds their brown shoulders, races through trees and over cliffs clean through across the sea. The land under it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes, also waves as they do.

The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard, look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light, the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers. There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above the pouring of the surf.

Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves. Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia, “beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die, flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them. Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away, though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.

Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.

The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping back as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just above the beach its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost denuded of vegetation, deep cups with drops below them sheer down to the beach. I have seen the remnants of house foundations in such hollows, or a creosoted pole or two sticking up above the surface of the sand, not too old by the look of them, proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be. Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry, or in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain finality, giving a free, waving look to the surface of things. On the other hand this vegetation is definite enough. There is no fragility to it. It is scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth may be held down but it also gives the landscape a symmetry and economy; it does not give the impression of being hit or miss at all but very definite and sure of its place, as sure as wind-struck, salt-sprayed plants can be. Each plant stays rooted from place to place through this sandy earth, being adapted to intense light, drought, and constant winds, holding on hard against being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move into new areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in on newly deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the plants formerly rooted there.

So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance, temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes made by the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to be hummocks or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock may be held down by beach grass and have a core of bayberry bushes with only an inch or two of leaves and branches sticking out at the tops. Beach grass, bayberry, seaside goldenrod live in close if embattled communities, at least with respect to the wind. These plants and others may all join in holding such hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around them.

There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way, ericoides and tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,” but the name is usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more common of the two. They are not always easy to tell apart. The ericoides, sometimes called golden heather, has tiny spinelike leaves that stand out fairly distinctly from the stem and each other and it is a plant that stays green for a much longer time during fall and winter. The tomentosa is densely tufted, downy, softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or bluish green, being subject to winter kill more readily than the other species. On Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried, and used for fuel.

The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining ever since.

Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.

Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success.

We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.

XII

The Depths of Sight

Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter, to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted, barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity.

It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass. Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not, and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth, result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from self-knowledge.

That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow. And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.

One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and the surf line.

Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head first, over and down, slipping under the water.

On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind. The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an electric communication made between one far pole and another.

Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very special way, but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and reception, and in animals without consciousness and means of assessment this may mean more than automatic reaction to light. I think of a crowd of newly hatched minnows like tiny slivers of glass, running up and quivering through the water. The most definite thing about them is their large black eyes, contrasted with a bodily transparency so fragile as to seem past fragility, an artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of universal actions that might have their matrix in a dream. Those large eyes are the eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an alliance with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration in a man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new to life.

Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are looking at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses there is a watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a lightning and at the same time a listlessness there is in them, in their hurrying ways through currents of fluid light, and their suspension in its stillness! Many of them only last for a day or a few minutes before disappearing as a food for other animals, in the mercurial depths of water allied with life, this intoxicant, this terror.

My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains this landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own eye and its own depth to find. The expression of water, sand, and sky leads vision beyond itself.

One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low over the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the same time illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard light of a fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or so away down the shore. I kept walking toward them with the illusion that the boat was moored close to the beach, but after a couple of miles the lights were still receding and I turned back. The tide was close in and sheets of foam pitched in and dragged back with a sound of rattling stones but in gentle rhythm. It was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could detect little strikes of light, the curling over and stirring of white and silver. Up through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared intermittently, riding above the water. The beach was covered with soft airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood of ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond the atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away and joined with fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation, a familiar place turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I might sense all sorts of far nerve ends tingling out of the night behind the mist. We receive very little of what reaches us out of this tribal universe, whose messages light through us unseen and unheard until we, as individuals, are turned to the dust of the sky.

Night or day, the sea and sea beach offer their changing spaces of light. One afternoon in January, halfway between hours of warmth and hours of cold, rain and snow, morning and evening, the sea off Nauset was racing green, spray tossing off the tops of the waves that simultaneously paused, curved up, and broke down in thunder. The whole sky was full of cloud featherings borne over before the wind and along the horizon out to sea were colors of lavender and gray, and pale-green openings like caves. The wide, steep beach was full of gloss, with a roll and fire of its own, and above it fringing the edge of the sandbanks the beach grass curved out and waved. I felt a resonance in the beach, a tremendously heavy and vibrant tone, the tonnage of sand and surf in harmony along with a low moan from the sea’s lungs.

Small flocks of black ducks quivered over the water and then flew in to Nauset marsh. Then the heavier Canada geese beat in with stalwart wings, to thin out from their V formation to a long line as they wheeled in low against the wind and then regathered as they settled down on the marsh.

Blackback gulls glided low across the outer line of the surf and sometimes their shadows appeared on the curving wall of a wave. Herring gulls soared in the heights and then beat forward on sinewy wings like flounders pulsing and beating through the water.

One gull flew down the beach with a ribbed mussel which it had found on the marsh and dropped it from high in the air. Then the bird retrieved its food and tried again, taking a chance on whether or not it would strike some boulders and break, since this is a haphazard and not a very knowledgeable game with the gulls. They pick up the habit from each other, by example rather than inheritance. Sometimes it works and just as often it does not.

The seaways of soft feldspar green foamed and flew, and the clouds ran. Thin black strings of seaweed lodged in the sand were waggling back and forth in the wind. There was a swish of milky surf up the beach. Over the uncountable numbers of sand grains, each with its own size, shape, and color was a clean radiance, even a magic. Because in this realm of wide, majestic use, of continual advent, each offering was still of a proportion perfect for its moment in time. Each single action, the silhouette of the straw-colored grasses curving before the wind, or a gull shadow on a wave, a crystal grain sparkling in the light, was of such an excellence as to defy category or name. And they were magic and miracle in their shape and ways of use because they had life’s inveterate sanction, and that above all else is not subject to lessening or degradation in this world of nature.