Part 5

But after all it is only man’s changes that make the tip of the Cape and its near-by narrowness different in our day from what it was when Myles and his men trod it with matchlocks ready and matches lighted, spying out the land. These as yet have not gone so deep but you may find portions that seem as wild and untrammeled now as they were then. Indeed they may well be identical. That a row of sand dunes has moved before the winds a half mile east or west matters little to the eye. They are sand dunes still, and the vegetation which grew up on them in one place or was wiped out, cut off by gnawing sand particles and blown away by the wind, or buried beyond all hope of resurrection in the over-riding drifts is the same to-day as it was three centuries ago. On this primal wildness of the Cape the march of human progress has in some measure encroached, but it is a long way from obliterating it yet. I fancy a man, choosing his route, could start at Race Point and go down the land by beach and by dune, to a point far beyond the one reached by the second, farthest, land-exploring expedition of the Pilgrim scouts from this point, without seeing more evidence of human settlement than the wheel tracks of a road deep in sand or a glimpse of the towering turrets of the Pilgrim monument which dominates the landscape for a long distance. Through this same length of Cape wind, of course, the hard ribbon of a State-built automobile road and the railway. But it is easy to lose and forget these.

In fact, you need but to climb sand hills and slide down sand declivities a very short distance north of the center of Provincetown itself to be as near lost as the Pilgrim scouts were and to find those dense thickets of thorny growth which they complained were like to tear their clothes and their very armor itself off their backs. No doubt the greenbrier was responsible for much of this wreckage of Pilgrim habiliments. Most varieties of this wild smilax, of which we have a dozen or so in this country, are to be found in more southern latitudes. But we grow here in eastern Massachusetts commonly the Smilax rotundifolia which climbs to treetops, is as strong almost as cod line, and is well set with vigorous thorns. In the moist hollows among the sand dunes this vine finds good sustenance, puts forth most vigorous growth, and barricades gullies sometimes with an almost impenetrable entanglement of its thorny ropes. I have rarely seen a tropical tangle which is more impenetrable than one of these. It climbs and twines among beach plums and scrubby wild cherry shrubs, weaving all together in a dense matting. To Pilgrim warriors fresh from English fields or Dutch meadows this thorny wild tangle must have been embarrassing indeed. Even without the greenbrier the rich growth of blueberries, high and low blackberry, wild rose, bayberry and sweet-fern may well have sorely tangled and tripped their unaccustomed feet.

All these are growths of the bottom lands, the hollows among the sand dunes back of the town. Within some of these are little fresh ponds in which grow waterlilies and the usual aquatic plants of such places. Here amid the prevailing wildness are many little beauty spots which, could the Pilgrims have come to them before the winter frosts had wrecked the vegetation, might have tempted them to stay. Passing on down the Cape you soon leave these behind and get into the higher dunes on the narrowest part where vegetation has little chance for its life. Here for a mile or two one might well think himself in Sahara. The sands, blown hither and thither and piled in fantastic shapes by the winds, are as clean as those of the beaten sea beach, as free from all suspicion of humus.

Yet if you will cross Sahara in most any direction to the camel’s-hump hills which are scattered over its border as if a caravan had become petrified there, you will find the humps sprouting vegetation, a vegetation that is sparse, perhaps, but to your astonishment is glossy and luxuriant of leaf. More than one of these mounds represents a drawn battle between whelming sands, wind-driven, and a vigorous wild cherry tree. How such a tree finds its start in these shifting, scouring sands is a puzzle. Yet once started it is easy to follow with more or less accuracy the course of the war which lasts years. The winds take the young shoot for a nucleus and pile their sands all up about it, yet may not quite cover the very tip, for there the varying draft whirls the topmost sands away again. The sand really helps. It mulches the young plant and protects it from the winter cold and the gales, from the summer heat and the drought. Each year the thus protected plant grows joyously more straight shoots, to be whelmed again almost to the tips by the sand, and so the merry war goes on till finally we have a dune twenty-five or thirty feet high, with the trunk and larger branches of a wild cherry tree for a core, its smooth, hard-packed surface wreathed with green leaves and often bearing rich, dark fruit for the delectation of all who pass.

These brief, hilltop oases do not relieve the desert-like wildness of this narrowest part of the Cape, however; they merely serve to accentuate it. From them you see the vasty blue velvet of the ocean outside the Cape and think it but a brief plunge to it through the glittering sands. Yet as you go toward it you find that one sand ridge hides another and that the valleys between hide brackish meadows in which grow strange plants, fleshy of stem and stubby and thick of leaf, as if they were degenerate offspring of land plants that had most unhappily intermarried with sea weed. On the margins of these witch pools it is a pleasure to find growing good old sturdy homely dusty-miller. Whatever broomstick-riding hags infest these weird hollows of windy midnights, here stands that plain common-sense Puritan to shame their reveries. Cineraria maritima may not have come in the Mayflower, but some ship from England brought him and he is a Puritan without doubt. If the witches do gather in these wild hollows of Cape Cod’s desert I warrant you he gets after them with a tithing rod and drives them back abashed to their own chimney corners.

Passing the desert you find the Cape widening again and growing green with vegetation. Yet something of the witch impress is on it still. In the distance you see forests of pitch pine which as you approach show branching trees of seemingly luxuriant growth. As you stride up to these trees you find them shrinking in stature while yet keeping their proportions and luxuriance, and finally you march, a modern Gulliver, through this Liliputian forest that may not reach higher than your shoulder. Here was a Pilgrim’s progress for Myles and his men that may well have added an eerie touch to their expectation of wild men of the woods. Such a forest--and I have no reason to believe the North Truro forests have changed much in just three hundred years--might well produce trolls or giants, as well as Indians. I can fancy the mail-clad explorers glancing at the glades of these enchanted woods with a bit of superstition in their apprehensions, saying prayers out of one side of their mouths and charms against evil spirits out of the other. Nor can one blame them, thinking what these hills are in dreary November weather, with snow squalls hiding the sun and the wind complaining among these loneliest of forest trees.

In late summer it is different. Out of the gray reindeer moss and poverty weed which are more prevalent than grass on the sands beneath these trees spire slender scapes of Spiranthes gracilis, the tiny orchid that someone named ladies’ tresses, not because the flower looks like them but reminds of them, being wayward and fragrant and lovingly blown by all winds. Here is goldenrod, and wee asters are just opening their baby-blue eyes to the approaching autumn. Wood warblers trill in the absurd forest, and the rich aroma of its leaves subtends the lighter fragrance of the blossoming wild flowers. In feathery glades among these Truro trees one might forget that winter is to come and bring bleakness and desolation unspeakable to the land with him. But if winter does not always warn, the sea does. Not so deep in any witch hollow can you hide, not so far may you wander in enchanted forests, as to escape its call. The trees murmur continually the song of the surf, and the crash of its breakers echoes continually in the air overhead. The wind song in the trees is not menacing, it is simply a minor melody, full of melancholy, as if it knew sad things and could but let them tinge its music. But even on quiet days when the south wind drifts gently in over the bay there sounds from the air above these mellow glades the growl of white-faced breakers that are never still on the northern shore. Out of the northeast they roll over gray-green leagues of cold sea, and as they bite deep into the sand of the shore behind Peaked Hill Bar, and drag it and all that is on it down into their maw and hurl it all back again, beating it on the beach and snatching it and beating it again, it roars inarticulate threats that make the onlooker draw back glad of a space of summer-dried sand between him and its depths. If this threatening undertone lingers in the ear even on a summer day with the wind warm and fragrant from the south, how must it have sounded to the Pilgrim explorers in a November northeaster?

And yet, for all the November bleakness to come, for all the ever-warning growl of the sea, I wonder, had the Pilgrims arrived at Provincetown in late August, if they would not have stayed. Nowhere in New England would they have found the late summer huckleberries sweeter or more plentiful, nowhere the beach plums rounder or more prolific. Here was to be gathered in handfuls bayberry wax for their candles, and its aromatic incense floats over the Provincetown hills to-day as rich and enticing as then. There is little hope of fertility in the sand banks, to be sure, yet in the cosy hollows between these the homesteaders of to-day plant corn and beans, pumpkins and peas, and their gardens seem as luxuriant and productive as any that one might find in Plymouth County. The native trees of the place seem dwarfed, as I have said. But in the town itself are willows and silver-leafed poplars, planted by later pilgrims, which have reached great size, a willow in particular in the older part of the town being at least five feet--I would readily believe it is six--in diameter. There must be fertility somewhere to grow an immigrant to such girth.

Here too, rioting through the old-time flower gardens and out of them, dancing and gossiping by the roadside and in the field, sending rich perfume across lots as a dare to us all, is Bouncing-Bet. I cannot think of this amorous, buxom beauty as having been allowed to come with a shipload of serious, praying Pilgrims or any later expedition of stern-visaged Puritans. I believe she was a stow-away and when she did reach New England danced blithely across the gang plank and took up her abode wherever she saw fit. Thus she does to-day. All over the Cape she strays, a common roadside weed and a beauty of the gardens at once. Out of this point where the Pilgrim epic first touches our shores she comes, with the memory of the visitor, a welcome garnish to the long sandy trail once trod by Myles Standish and his armor-clad scouts.

VII

IN OLD CONCORD

_The Unspoiled Haunts of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau_

One may seek in vain in Concord the reason for Concord. “It is an odd jealousy,” says Emerson, “but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by, and is now in its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent wood.”

With this same odd jealousy one may tramp the fields and woods, the pleasant highways and the village green to-day and not quite find Concord, for the Concord that one’s mind presaged has passed on. This is but far-off reflection and echo of the triumph. Fuit Ilium. Yet here is all that first gave the name to the town, and more. Here are peaceful rivers meeting in rich meadows from which spring with the rising ground fruitful fields. Here men dwell in amity and keep singularly intact the beauty and thrift of a New England village of a century ago, though even here one can see wealth taking the place of prosperity and the pretentious ugliness of the modern attempt at Queen Anne architecture shouldering the quiet dignity of the old Colonial residences off the street. Here and there a little of the husk of the Concord of the Revolution remains, though somewhat sadly hemmed in. A simulacrum of the Concord Bridge still spans the flood, done in resonant cement, but here the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. Nor is his jealousy an odd one, for the rude bridge that arched the flood led somewhere. This echo of the triumph that has passed by drops him who would tread in the footsteps of heroes within the narrow bounds of an iron picket fence beyond which keep-off-the-grass signs doubly defend the way. In the presence of these the Minute Man seems superfluous. The British never would have got by this. Fortunately it is easy to believe that the Minute Man has never seen the barricade or the signs. In him at least Concord, the Concord of the Revolution, holding in its calm heart sons born of the soil and sturdy with its grit, is personified for all men for all time. To turn one’s back upon the fence as he does and look across the grassy Musketaquid vigilantly at those swaying lines of British bayonets is to dwell for a little in the Concord which, with a streak of yellow flame and a whizzing bullet, first leapt skyrocket-like into the world’s eye. Many things have made the beautiful village a Mecca whither journey pilgrims from all over the world. All come eager to look upon the spot where the farmers marched deliberately upon the king’s troops and dared fling back into their faces the red gauntlet of murder. It is not to be believed that curiosity merely is the spirit which informs these pilgrims. One can but feel that they come to the bridge in reverence for the principles involved in the fray, and in looking upon the very spot hope to learn what went into the making of the men who so boldly hazarded life and worldly comfort and prosperity in the defense of these principles.

For, after all, it was the men behind the principles that counted. Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature of the heroes that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord soil. Did they come of the fertility within it? One must say yes, in part. Down stream a little, not far below the bridge, I found an old-time path of their day, now long since disused, along which in the rich bottom land the meadow thistles grew ten feet tall. Such virility the Concord soil no doubt gave to the heroes who ceased delving in it only to grasp their muskets for the fray. The Minute Man holds to his plow still, the sculptor justly thus carving him. Out of the good brown earth one can easily know that courage and self-reliance thrilled through share and beam and handle into the bone of the man himself. Till the earth is fluid such men do not run. Like it they stand firm. Yet here is but the bony structure of the man in the Concord fight. Something more must go in to the making of a hero. It has been justly said that at the narrow bridge stood men born in direct descent from heroes of a stubborn stand, a stricken field, of seven hundred years before, and I dare say it is true. Planted among the Concord meadows and fertile uplands, grown lusty upon the richness of her soil, were men of Kent, that sturdiest county in all England; men whose very forbears had stood with Harold behind the wattled fence at Hastings, and died there with Norman arrows in their necks. More than all else in the building of men blood counts.

Yet, tramping the highways and fields of the old town, dreaming within her woodlands and by her ponds and streams, it pleases me to think there is more to it even than this. In Plymouth woods grows the mayflower, as we love to call it, the trailing arbutus, filling the spaces with rich scent in late April and early May, and though it is eagerly sought by thousands and is sold in bunches on all city streets in spring, yet it is not rooted out but retains its hold on the soil there. In certain other eastern Massachusetts towns the trailing arbutus never grew, and though I know of many attempts to transplant it to these none have succeeded beyond a slight growth that is hardly lusty or likely long to survive. Yet among the Maine and New Hampshire hills again the mayflower grows luxuriantly. So it is with the hepatica and the maidenhair fern. Some cool northern hillsides are beautiful with these, others with equal shade, cool springs, moss and gravel have never known these plants. No. More is necessary than that the blood of men should fall and take root in fertile soil. There must be fluid, where seed and fertility meet, some of that ichor which flows in the veins of the immortals, and it must enter into the growth. Only thus does Hodge become hero. Without it he holds both hands on the plow and lets the British pass the bridge and go on. How many nations have thus been stillborn and buried in the furrow no history can tell us.

Little by little nature gives us the secrets of these things, as when after a time she taught the Australian planters why clover would not produce seed there. It grew well in fertile soil when seed was brought from England; it blossomed and made good fodder for cattle, but never a seed. Then they imported bumble-bees from the English meadows with probosces long enough to reach the nectar in the bottom of the clover blooms and thus be pollen carriers from plant to plant. Here was the solution of the problem, the ichor of immortality that the clover needed. So with alfalfa and most leguminous plants. Scientific investigation has shown that if seeds of these are to grow well and thrive in new regions distant from that of their cultivation more is needed than the right soil and climate. Certain mysterious bacteria are present on the roots of all plants of this genus, and in some obscure way take from the soil and give to the plants the elements of vigor and success. Now the scientific horticulturist steeps his seeds of alfalfa or other leguminous plants in a culture of these bacteria, and knows that if his planting is in fertile ground and the sun and rain do their work well his harvest will be bountiful. Here again is the ichor of the gods, Vishnu become fluid and incarnating himself in obscure bacteria for the building of the plant world.

So, I can but fancy, has it been with Concord and her men. The seed of the Kentish heroes of Harold’s time has grown since in many soils. In Concord when time was ripe it found fluid there some of the ichor of the immortals coursing through farming tools to the making of fire for heroic deeds. The Concord fight did not happen; it had to be. It was not that every Concord farmer’s barn was full of munitions of war. Every Concord farmer’s blood was full of powder. The shot had to be fired there.

For nearly three-quarters of a century this mysterious essence of greatness that one feels must always be present in places where great deeds have taken place seems to have flashed no spark to the outer world. Grass waved on Concord farms and fell before the scythe, and new generations of farmers grew up to take the places of those which passed unmarked outside their community. For that space of time Concord was, very much as Troy was, the scene of a memorable fight. Then came Emerson to bring back to the place something of the nobility of spirit and independence of thought and action that must have come to it with his ancestor the Rev. Peter Bulkeley. Here was the scholar and the preacher instead of the farmer, but born of the same old sturdy stock and come back to set roots in Concord soil. Here he walked daily in the fields and woods with his veins open to that same ichor of the gods which had not made patriots and heroes indeed, but had given them tongues, which seems to have given power of expression to him who was already poet and seer. Here with him, grown up out of the same town, was Thoreau. Hither came Alcott to paint the bubbles of his inchoate dreams in rainbow conversation. Hither too came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did the others and feel as did they the divine afflatus drumming in their veins and the impulse to sturdy independence coming up to them out of the Concord soil as it thrilled up to the Minute Man through his plow handle. It was not so much that these men had within them the poetic fire, but that it burned there on the hearth of freedom, independence, and intense individuality.

With them Concord came again into the eye of the world, and because they preached as well as wrought, the world’s eye is still upon it. And, as after the Minute Man and his times passed the little village slumbered, seeming to wait placidly for the next troubling of the waters, so now Sleepy Hollow, where these four dreamers lie, seems to be the real center of the town. The mystic dreams of Hawthorne, the golden serenity of Emerson, the primal wisdom of Thoreau, and the roseate fog of Alcott’s transcendentalism all flow serenely forth over its rim and flood the green hills and shadowy valleys of the region with peace and sweet content. Here, almost side by side, rest the four, and such blood of the gods as flowed in them is piped to all the world by way of what each wrote. No wonder Concord is a place of pilgrimage and people come by thousands to these graves as devout Mohammedans go to that of the prophet. Red oaks set their roots deep in the knoll where these lie, and white pines tower above them as if forming the first and most fitting round in their ladder to the stars. Out of the tops of these pines the harper wind should pluck harmonies beyond those common to groves.