Part 3

Also there were tree swallows gathering and perching on the hot, glittering sand, and on smooth gray driftwood just below the dunes. It was a band of them, adults, and young hatched during the early spring, chittering and shining with their brilliant blue-green backs and white bellies.

It seemed to me that out of these birds--my unwilling or indifferent companions--came a protest, the protest of a desert in its beauty, an ancient sea land claiming its rarity, with these rare inhabitants, each with its definition and assertion, each having the color and precision of life and place, out of an unknown depth of devising.

Behind the beach at Provincetown and Truro are eight square miles of dunes, making a great series of dips and pockets, innumerable smooth scourings, hollows within wide hollows. Standing below their rims are hills, mounds, and cones, chiseled by the wind, sometimes flattened on the top like mesas. These dunes give an effect of motion, rolling, dipping, roving, dropping down and curving up like sea surfaces offshore. When I climbed the bank to see them I heard the clear, accomplished notes of a song sparrow. There were banks of rugosa roses in bloom, with white or pink flowers sending off a lovely scent, and the dunes were patched with the new green of beach grass, bayberry, and beach plum, many of the shrubs looking clipped and rounded, held down by wind and salt spray. The purple and pink flowers of the beach pea, with purselike petals, were in bloom too, contrasting with dusty miller with leaf surfaces like felt, a soft, clear grayish-green. Down at the bottom of the hollows the light and wind catching heads of bunch grass, pinkish and brown, waved continually; and the open sandy slopes were swept as by a free hand with curving lines and striations.

A mile or so at sea, over the serene flatness of the waters, a fishing boat moved very slowly by. I started down the beach again, following another swallow that was twisting and dipping in leafy flight along the upper edge of the beach. On the tide line slippery green sea lettuce began to glimmer as if it had an inner fire, reflecting the evening sun. I stopped somewhere a mile or two north of Highland Light in Truro, built a small fire of driftwood to heat up a can of food, and watched a bar appearing above the water as the tide ebbed. Low white waves conflicted and ran across a dome of sand, occasionally bursting up like hidden geysers.

The terns were still crying and diving as the sun’s metal light, slanting along the shore, began to turn a soft yellow, to spread and bloom. They hurried back and forth, as if to make use of the time left them, and fell sharply like stones into the shimmering road of light that led across the water.

Where I live on the upper Cape, that part of it which lies between the Cape Cod canal and Orleans, the land heads out directly to the sea, toward the east from the continental west. Cape Cod Bay lies to the north and Nantucket Sound to the south. The arm of the lower Cape turns in the Orleans area and heads up on a north-south axis, the head of it, or hand if you like, curving around so that the sandy barrens in the Provincetown area are oriented in an east to west direction again. I am used to looking toward Kansas to see the setting sun, and from the curving shore line at Truro I had the illusion that it was setting in the north and that when it rose the next morning it appeared to be located not very far from where it set, a matter of ninety or a hundred degrees. In fact it does set closer to the north at this time of year, and along the flat ocean horizon this becomes more clear to the eye, as well as its relative position at dawn and its arc during the day. On the open beach in spring and summer you are not only at the sun’s mercy in a real sense, but you are also under wider skies. In the comparative isolation of the beach, which is convex, slanting steeply toward the water, and therefore hides its distances, I felt reoriented, turned out and around through no effort of my own, and faced in many possible directions.

Shortly before sundown a beach buggy, curtains at its windows and a dory attached, lumbered slowly down some preordained ruts in the sand, and then a smaller one passed by at the top of the low dunes behind me. Fishing poles were slung along the outside of both machines. It was getting to be a good time to cast for striped bass.

I sat on the sands and listened to the sonorous heave and splash of low waves. The sun, like a colossal red balloon filled with water, was sinking in to the horizon. It swelled, flattened, and disappeared with a final rapidity, leaving a foaming, fiery band behind it. I suddenly heard the wild, trembling cry of a loon behind me, and then saw it fly over, heading north. The wind grew cool, after a hot day when the light shone on metallic, glittering slow waters, and sharp, pointed beach grasses clicked together, while I watched the darkness falling around me.

A small seaplane flew by at low altitude, parallel to the shore. A sliver of a moon appeared and then a star; and then single lights began to shine on the horizon, while from the direction of Highland Light an arm of light shot up and swung around. A fishing boat passed slowly by with a light at its masthead and two--port and starboard--at its stern. A few night-flying moths fluttered near me. The sky began to be massive with its stars. I thought of night’s legitimacies now appearing, the natural claim of all these single lights on darkness, and then, making my bed in a hollow just above the beach, I lowered down into infinity, waking up at about one o’clock in the morning to the sound of shouting, a strange direct interruption to the night. It was the loud implacable voice of the human animal, something very wild in itself, filling the emptiness.

“For Chrisake bring her higher up! I can’t have her dig in that way.” The tide had come in and someone was having trouble maneuvering his beach buggy along the thin strip of sand now available.

The light of dawn opened my eyes again before the sun showed red on the horizon, and I first saw the tiny drops of dew on tips and stems of beach grass that surrounded me. A sparrow sang, and then, somewhere behind the dunes, a prairie warbler with sweet notes on an ascending scale.

When I started walking again I caught sight of a young fox. Its fur was still soft and woolly and its gait had a cub’s limpness where it moved along the upper edge of the beach. I wished the young one well, though I suspected it might have an uncomfortable life. In spite of an excessive population of rabbits, and their role in keeping it down, foxes have not been too highly regarded on the Cape. In recent years they seem to have been a skinny and somewhat dilapidated bunch for the most part, suffering from parasitic skin diseases, and ticks in season. I once saw a fox out on an asphalt road sliding along on his chin and side, shoving and dragging himself in such a frantic way that I began to feel very itchy myself. I have heard them referred to in scornful way as “spoilers,” fond of scavenging and rolling in dead meat. In other words, they are smelly, diseased and, to add another epithet “tricky,” not to be trusted.

Yet this cub exploring an early morning on the sands had a future, however limited, and I remembered the lively trot of foxes when they are in good health, and their intelligence and curiosity, and simply their right to whatever special joys they might inherit.

I carried a pair of field glasses with me, along with the somewhat thoughtlessly assembled equipment I wore on my back and which seemed increasingly heavy as time went on. When not too conscious of my burden I would use the glasses to bring an inland or offshore bird closer to me. I noticed five eider ducks across the troughs of the waves, a remnant of the thousands that winter off the Cape along with such other sea birds as brant, Canada geese, scoters, mergansers, old squaws, and various members of the auk family. I passed a dead gannet lying on the sand. It had been badly oiled, reminding me of the hazards of jettisoned tanker or freighter oil to all these water birds which land on the sea to rest or feed.

There were a number of kingbirds on the dune rims, and they kept dropping down over the beach in their special way, to hover with fast wingbeat and flutter after flying insects. I heard the grating call of redwings, indicating marshy areas inland of the beach, but the cliffs above began to increase until they were 100 to 150 feet high or more, and the sun was so fierce that I had little interest in trying to scale them to see what was on the other side.

I plodded on, noticing very little after a while, my attention blunted, reduced to seeing that one foot got in front of the other. The more level upper parts of the beach provided fairly good walking, but the sand was soft, and to relieve my aching muscles I would then angle down to the water’s edge where it was firmer, and there I was obliged to walk with one leg below the other because of the inclination of the beach. So I would return to the upper beach again and push ahead. I walked on, very hot and slow, seeing no one for miles until I came up to a group of bathers below a road and parking lot giving access to the beach, of the kind that are scattered along its reaches; and there I refilled my canteen at a cottage and went on.

I found that if I rested too long during this hike I had little desire to go on again, so I confined myself to an army “break” of ten minutes every hour. Renewed walking unlimbered me a little and the wind off the water cooled my sweating skin. I listened to the sound of the waves. In addition to their rhythmic plunge and splash, their breathing, they clashed occasionally with a sound like the breaking of heavy glass, the falling of timber, or a load of bricks.

I passed what was left of two shipwrecks during the day, a reminder of the dangers that still face ships along this coast with its fogs, its shifting winds, its storms, the hidden, treacherous offshore bars. The sands often reveal the timbers of old ships. One day their ribs, sodden and dark, barnacle encrusted, may reach up out of oblivion, and not long after that the water buries them under tons of sand. From them a local history calls out for recognition. Thousands of ships over three centuries wrecked on shoals, engulfed by violent seas, men with the dark of doom in them, to drown or to survive, and only a few timbers left to declare the ultimate dangers and their terror.

I was not in Death Valley, or on a raft at sea. My walk was not unusually long, and I could leave the beach if I had to, but the enormity of the area filled me more and more. It had so much in it that was without recourse. Its emptiness, the great tidal range beyond it and through it, the raw heartbeat of the waves, the implacable sun, established the kind of isolation and helplessness in me which the commerce and community of our lives tries so hard to disguise. Even the birds, I began to think, were more secure than I. They had their strong bright threads of cognizance to the areas they came to, the water, the sands, the marsh. They were fixed in entity and grace, eating what was theirs by evolution to be eaten, using land and air in the ways that had come to them, knowing this place and all places like it in terms of its bounds and boundlessness, meeting its naked eye in the ways they had been sent to do.

I started off in the morning admiring the brilliance of the sun, the small shadows from the dunes and across the beach, through driftwood, isolated beach plants and tidal wrack, with the wide flooding of light ahead and the variation in reflected light across the sea. I felt the sea moving quietly beside me. The waves heaved and sighed and spray was tossed lightly above the sand. Everything was continuous, untroubled, and deliberate; but as the day wore on the sun became my enemy, and I had very little rage or resource in me to fight it with. I was not fitted to environmental stability, like a bird, or fox or fish. I found myself in an area of whose reaches I had never been wholly aware, and in me there was no mastery. The sun was not only hostile. It was an ultimate, an impossibility; and the waters beside me began to deepen from their pleasant daytime sparkle and freshness into an incalculable realm which I had hardly entered. I was touching on an unimagined frontier.

I spent my second night on the beach a few miles from Nauset Light where I left it the following morning. It was in the South Wellfleet area, and as I started to sleep on the sand a little above the high-tide line, I remembered that this was about the same place where a fishing boat had been wrecked two years before and two men drowned. I had seen the boat, with its cargo of fish, and some of the men’s clothing strewn along the shore, and I had heard a little about the depths of their ordeal. Their story haunted me; and then I began to feel that I might be caught by the tide while I was asleep. There were only about twelve feet between the bottom of a steep cliff and the high-tide line. I would soon be lying on a narrow shelf at the sea’s edge. So as the vague thought of being engulfed began to invade me, I took up my pack and sleeping bag again, retraced my steps down the beach, and found a way to the top of the cliff, where I spent the night in another hollow.

The light of dawn, lifting quickly out of the sea, flooding into the range of low-lying land, woke me up again, and it signaled to the birds, who started singing in all the thickets and heath around me with a sweet, high, shrill intensity, a kind of automatic worship; and after a while they quieted down again.

Little dirt roads dropped back from headlands through green slopes covered with bearberry and patches of yellow-flowered Hudsonia, or “poverty grass,” and there were hollows dipping back inland, and woods of stunted pitch pine. From the top of the cliff I watched the sun starting to send light running across the blue table of the sea, making it glitter and move. The intensity of light and heat began to grow steadily as I walked down the beach again for the last stretch toward Nauset.

The beach is not so very far from where I live, or for that matter where anyone lives on the Cape. It is a few miles down the road, beyond the trees; and yet when I came back from my walk I felt as if I had been at enormous remove from my surroundings, caught out where I might have feared to be. The long line of sand and surf, the intensity of the sun, the cover of stars had come close enough to put me in council with that which had no answers. I was in awe of nature; and I understood that the sun and sea could be our implacable enemies. It was in this context that I saw our human world as subject to a stature that it never made.

III

The Resources of the Sea

Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color, shadows, sound, substance, novelty in great detail, invade the smallest areas. One flower may attract many species of insects, brilliantly patterned and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating, gathering pollen, in any number of arresting ways, and the growth of plants around you, the shape of leaves, the general stir of things comes running like a carnival.

On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling, moving slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of the green surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead; the wind flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an occasional dead skate or dogfish comes to your attention as you walk on. A black crow pecks at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling flits by. You notice a finger sponge attached to a large mussel or a sea scallop, broken loose and washed in from offshore beds, and that seems to be all, in a relatively empty world; but between these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a bird or bird track, a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space.