Part 11

Between the stations, at some midway and convenient point, stand huts called halfway houses, and stations, huts, and lighthouses are linked together by a special telephone system owned and maintained by the coast guard services.

Every night in the year, when darkness has fallen on the Cape and the sombre thunder of ocean is heard in the pitch pines and the moors, lights are to be seen moving along these fifty miles of sand, some going north, some south, twinkles and points of light solitary and mysterious. These lights gleam from the lanterns and electric torches of the coast guardsmen of the Cape walking the night patrols. When the nights are full of wind and rain, loneliness and the thunder of the sea, these lights along the surf have a quality of romance and beauty that is Elizabethan, that is beyond all stain of present time.

Sometimes a red flare burns on the edge of ocean, a red fireworks flare which means wreck or danger of wreck. “You are standing in too near to the outer bar,” says the red light to the freighter lost in a night’s downpour of March rain. “Keep off! Keep off! Keep off!” The signal burns and sputters, the smoke is blown away almost ere it is born; the glassy bellies of the advancing breakers turn to volutes of rosy black, the seething foam to a strange vermilion-pink. In the night and rain beyond the hole of light an answering bellow sounds, ship lights dim as the vessel changes her course, the red flare dies to a sizzling, empty cartridge, the great dark of the beach returns to the solitary dunes. The next day it is all entered quietly in the station log: “Two thirty-six A.M. saw freighter standing in toward outer bar, burnt Coston signals, freighter whistled and changed her course.”

Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see the comings and goings of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a great northeaster, now through August quiet and the reddish-golden radiance of an old moon rising after midnight from the sea, now through a world of rain shaken with heavy thunder and stabbed through and through with lightning. And always, always alone. Whenever I rise at earliest dawn, I find the beach traced and retraced with footprints that vanish in the distances, each step a chain forged anew each night in the courageous service of mankind.

Night patrols go between the stations and their halfway houses. Under certain circumstances and at special times of the year, the last patrol in the morning may end at a key post placed on some commanding height above the beach. While on patrol, the men carry a stock of red flare cartridges--the Coston lights--a handle to burn them in, and a watchman’s clock which they must wind with a special key kept at the halfway house. In summer, the beaches are covered twice every night, in winter three times, the first patrol leaving the station soon after dark, the second at midnight, the third an hour or so before the dawn. The average patrol covers something like seven miles. Only one man from each station is on the beach at any given time, so north and south patrols alternate through the night.

Day patrols are maintained only during stormy or foggy weather. The men then have to walk the beach night and day with not much chance for proper rest, mile after mile of a furious winter day on the heels of a long and almost sleepless night. The usual day watch is kept from the towers of the stations.

A surfman who has discovered a wreck or found some sort of trouble on the beach first burns the Coston light I have already mentioned. This warns his station that there is something the matter, and at the same time tells men aboard a wreck that they have been seen and that help is coming. If the wreck lies near the station, the guard returns with his news; if it lies near the halfway house, he telephones. At the station, the man on station watch gives the alarm, everybody tumbles up, and in the quickest possible time the crew and their apparatus are on the beach hurrying through the darkness to the wreck. Each station has now a small tractor to draw its apparatus down the beach.

The crew of a stranded ship may be taken off either in the lifeboat or the breeches buoy. Everything depends on the conditions of the hour.

The life-saving cannon and its auxiliary apparatus, its powder, lines, hawsers, and pulleys, are kept in a stout two-wheeled wagon called “the beach cart.” The “shot,” or projectile, fired from this gun resembles a heavy brass window weight with one end pulled out into a stout two-foot rod ending in a loop.

When a wreck lies offshore in the surf, the end of a very light line called the “shot line” is attached to the eyelet in the brass projectile, and the gun aimed at the wreck with particular care. One must place the shot where the men in the rigging can reach it, and yet avoid striking them. If all goes well, the shot whizzes into the very teeth of the gale and falls aboard, leaving the shot line entangled. Should the wrecked men succeed in reaching and hauling in this first cord, a heavier line is sent on, and when the mariners haul in this second line, “the whip,” they haul out to their vessel the lifebuoy and its hawser. Pulleys and cables are so rigged as to permit the buoy to be hauled in and out to the wreck by the coast guard crew.

After everybody has been taken off, an ingenious contrivance is hauled out to the wreck which cuts the hawser free. The crew then gather up the apparatus, station a guard, and return.

The crew return, the little group of men in black oilers and the men they have saved trudge off, tunnelling into the wind, the surfboat on its wagon-cradle leading the way, the hum-rhythm of the tractor dissolving in the gale. Ridges and piles of broken, twisted wreckage rim the breakers’ edges, new wreckage is on its way ashore, strewings of old weathered planking, a hatchway, sops of sailors’ clothing. A maze of footprints traces the desolate beach; the air is full of wind-flung froth and breaker spray; the gale screams unceasing. Just offshore, in the mile of surf, the wreck lies flat--utterly forlorn, and helpless as a toy ship neglected by a giant’s child. The guard left behind walks to and fro, rubs his mittened hands, and watches the breakers cover the wreck under mountains of surf, overflow, and sluice off in spouting masses and cascades ... breaking up.... Fishing schooner, rigging frozen up, one of the men with both his hands frozen ... yes, got ’em all.

I call at Nauset Station several times a week, usually late in the afternoon. Packages and mail are delivered near by, and every once in a while I call there for a message sent on to me from Eastham.

The station stands on the mainland of the Cape just where the dunes begin; it is a white wooden building built snug and low like a Cape Cod cottage; indeed, it rather resembles a Cape cottage in its design. On the ground floor is the boat room, a kitchen-dining room, a living room, and the captain’s quarters; on the floor above are two dormitory spaces. From the west dormitory, a ship’s ladder leads through a trapdoor to the tower.

My neighbours of Nauset live there much as men might on a small vessel. They have drills and duties, their definite enlistments--the first enlistment is for three years--their pay days, their service discipline, their uniforms, and days of leave. Breakfast at seven, drills in the morning--surfboat drill to-day, resuscitation drill or blinker and flag drill to-morrow--dinner at eleven, tower watch in turn through all the day, sleep and recreation in the late afternoon, supper at four-thirty, then sundown, night, and the long miles of loneliness and ocean. In winter the guards wear a uniform of dark navy blue and a blue flannel shirt; in summer they shift into sailor whites, broad collar, white hat, and all. Officially, the men are known as “surfmen” and are ranked by number according to their standing and length of service.

A fine group, these wardens of the Cape. Into the worst storm they go--without a question, with never a hesitation--a storm in which life would seem impossible. The door clangs behind them, the sleet screams at the windows, the very earth of the old Cape shakes to the thunder of the seas, but they are already on the moors, fighting on into the gale; fighting on, crawling on, for seven dreadful miles. Yet the men make nothing of it and scarcely ever talk about it--they simply take their black oilskins and rubber boots from a locker, get into them by lantern light, and go.

I owe the Nauset crew a very genuine debt. Without their friendly interest and aid, without their hospitality and continuing good-will, my experiment might well have been both over-solitary and difficult. Those long winter nights in the lamplit domesticity of my house, the rising wail of the wind on the dunes, the flash of the surfman’s light in the whirls of snow, the moment’s reunion with mankind, the pause on the beach, the moment’s talk by the fire--all that is written deep. The winter long, in foul weather, I kept a night lamp burning in a window and a pot of coffee a-simmer on the hearth. Sometimes I heard steps on the little deck of the Fo’castle, sometimes no one came, and the light guttered out unvisited in the dawn.

The majority of my neighbours are of Cape Cod stock. Born of Cape blood and reared in the Cape atmosphere, even men who have never been to sea have an instinctive turn for the sea and the ways of ships. But these wardens of the Cape are not sailors ashore; they are “surfmen.” The name is a wise one--men of the great beach, inheritors of a long, local tradition concerning surf and all its ways. These men have heard the roar of the great beach sounding about their cradles. As I have already written, the sight of the surf in a great gale on the Cape is a spectacle of mingled exaltation, magnificence, and terror, while to venture it in a boat would strike any landsman as a lunatic performance. On such occasions, the sound, traditional surf knowledge of Cape men comes into play. Captains of coast guard crews here choose their launching ground, choose their moment, choose their wave. All together now, go!--and out she runs, the captain standing astern, facing the breakers and steering, the men pulling for their lives.

Five o’clock in the afternoon, and I have arrived at Nauset Station after a walk up the beach in a cold head-wind. I slip my pack from my back and stand my beach staff in a corner of the little entry way outside the kitchen door. The great storm tore down so much of the bank that the water in the kitchen well now has an odd taste to it, and the men have had to bring drinking water from the village; a ship’s cask and a spring-water bottle stand on the entry floor. In the pink-buff walls are various locker doors.

The four-thirty supper is drawing to a close, but my neighbours are still at table, for I can hear voices and discussion at the board. I know each familiar tone. Having an ancient prejudice against disturbing friends at meals, I wait a little while ... the minutes pass ... I knock at the kitchen door.

Come in! I find my friends still at their long table at the kitchen’s farther end. Supper is just about over. Somebody went fishing yesterday, and on the table a great tureen, once full of good fish chowder, stands at dead low tide.... Sit down and have a cup of coffee with us.... Thanks, I’d love to.... Follows a shoving about of chairs to make room, and presently I am seated at the board, talking beach gossip, eating coast guard doughnuts, and sipping brown-black coffee from a giant white coffee cup of the armour-plate variety. The good hot “mug-up” of coffee, thus hospitably poured, is pleasant after my long, cold walk. My table mates are all young men, some of them scarce more than strapping boys on the threshold of the twenties. Here are the names of my hosts: Captain George B. Nickerson, Commanding Officer; Alvin Newcomb, Surfman No. 1; Russell Taylor, No. 2; Zenas Adams, No. 3; William Eldredge, No. 4; Andrew Wetherbee, No. 5; Albert Robbins, No. 6; Everett Gross, No. 7; Malcolm Robbins, No. 8; Effin Chalke, No. 9. Other old friends have finished their enlistments or been transferred--Wilbur Chase, John Blood, Kenneth Young, and Yngve Rongner, who gave me my swordfish sword.

The captains of the various stations are well-known men and rank high in the community. When I first came to Eastham, Nauset was under the command of my kind friend Captain Abbott H. Walker, an expert among surfmen and boatmen, and one of the best liked and most respected men on all Cape Cod. Two years ago, after having been in command of Nauset for twenty-six stirring years, he retired to his pleasant house on Orleans Bay. The station was fortunate in having as his successor a distinguished younger officer, Captain George B. Nickerson of Chatham. Nauset is a busy station, and Captain Nickerson has already added new laurels to its splendid history.

The table talk is good, the speech racy and vigorous. Sipping coffee, I hear of a battle at sea fought that very morning between some large unknown fish and unseen enemies--“right off the station”--the fish leaping clear, a great wound or spot visible in its side.... Here, have another cup....

“No, going out in a gale isn’t as bad as facing ‘the sand.’ Rather face a nor’easter any time.”

Every once in a while, usually in autumn, a dry gale will descend upon the beach and stir up a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara. I chanced to see such a storm three years ago. The simoon began, I remember, with a sunset of fiery rose deepening to smoky carmine, the sky being empty save for a few thin, sailing wisps. With the smouldering out of this strange sky and the arrival of starlight, a north wind which had blown vigorously all day was taken over by a devil. It shifted its quarter, began to blow directly down the beach, and increased enormously in force. Within half an hour, the whole world of beach and dune was one screaming, smoky, inhuman arabia of flying sand. Sucking up the sand from strewn miles of driftage, tearing at the roots of everything movable, the wind torrent rushed along the beach as down a channel. Presently pebbles, sticks, barrel staves, sides of old fruit crates, hoops, tufts of whipped-out beach grass, clots of breaker spume, and a world of nameless dark lumps joined the general rush through the demoniac and smothering gloom. I myself sailed before the storm, my head turtled down into the very shoulders of a canvas coat, my eyes blinking and painful from the stabs of sand, my nostrils hot and dry with the breathing of it, my mouth much occupied in spitting out grits. And I wondered who was on north patrol that night--walking into it, his head turned sideways and down, and a board held up before his face.

Once upon a time, so runs a service story, a surfman was walking the beach on one of these nights of sand when he heard behind him a strange and uncanny moan. Startled, he turned round, squinted for a second into the gale, and saw coming toward him a great, dark, bounding thing which moaned as it ran. The surfman ran. The thing followed, gaining every instant and sounding its ghostly cry. Out of breath at last, the fugitive fell flat, caught hold of the sand, and gasped out this valedictory, “If ye want me, come and git me.” A moment later, an enormous empty cask rolled over the prostrate figure and disappeared down the beach toward Monomoy. The bung halfway up its side was open, and every time the hole had rolled up into the wind, the whistling moan had terrified the night.

Who goes first south to-night? Malcolm Robbins, he goes first south, and Long, he goes at two-thirty.

Time to tidy up. Each man carries his plate and cutlery to the sink, the cook of the day puts on coal, there is talk, the vigorous clank of the kitchen pump, the sound of a dish pan filling, a smell of pipe tobacco. The surfman who has been on watch in the station tower during the meal comes in and eats alone at the cleared-off and deserted board. Clatter of dish and spoon ... voices. Baseball prospects? Radio news? Station happenings? Somebody opens a window on the last of the chill spring afternoon, and suddenly, in an unexpected instant of quiet, I hear the thundering overspill and ebbing roar of a single giant sea.