Part 6
The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is full of the collaborative music of air and trees. They may be poor trees, low and rangy, subject to great abuse, but in their growth they make the land march between its surrounding waters. The gray oak trunks go in ranks and tiers for mile after mile down the center of the Cape, interspersed by individual pitch pines, or backed up and sided by pines in independent woods that look rounded and bunched in the distance, pocked with dark green shadows. The oak branches thrust up their candelabras of branches and stiff twigs against the pale sky, ready for next spring’s sunlight. The pitch pines stand with scaly, dark brown trunks and thick needles rocking and switching around, authorities on wind, and sandy soil, on impermanence, on taking your chances when and where you can.
Geologists say that this truly “narrow land,” no more than a mile wide in some sections, seven or eight in others, may vanish under the sea in five or six thousand years. Its border of sands is always in the process of roaming and shifting. The Cape has no bedrock. Its rocks are migrants, brought down from the north by moving ice. In spite of the evidence of some once fairly rich timberland and deep topsoil, the Cape does not convince you of any depth and permanence other than its alliance with salt water.
The sea gives and the sea takes away, breaking through a barrier beach during winter storms and roaring into the marsh and sheltered inlet behind, cutting down cliffs a foot or two a year, or imperceptibly stealing inches from a low-lying shore; while it adds new beaches, packs new tons of sand around an outlying spit or shoal. Last year, when I accompanied a group of children on their geology class, we uncovered a burying pit for horses and cows in the sandbank at the head of one of the bay beaches. If there had been a farm in the vicinity, a hundred years or more ago, the sea may well have cut in over half a mile to reach these bones.
The winds sweep overhead, or merely threaten, the beach waters lap gently, or bridle and roar, and the only stability I feel is that of the tides, a lasting balance between the give-and-take of water and land. The Cape’s ravaged past and stunted present seems transmuted into motion. What this spit of land has taught me is an altered sense of the context of time. I once saw a tree either as material for the woodpile, or something with a growth so slow as to pass notice. Now I have begun to see trees moving by the million in a million varied places. Natural change is made up of so many circumstances, the continuum of life in its vast order is so far from being held down by history, that everything requires us to move on into the distance. It may well be regretted, but Cape Cod is not so much a place for traditionalism as a victim of the beautiful and impatient earth.
_The Dead and the Living_
A cautious solemnity is beginning to take hold, although the weather plays new tricks as it alternates between the influences of north and south, east and west. Rain pours over the land. Then, on a warm day, there is thunder and lightning at noon, succeeded by a furious northwest wind after dark, bringing in a deeper cold. The wind hums and roars during the night, and with the sky clear and the stars out, the Cape has a new swept and running feel to it.
On a night of full moonlight, there are glassy shadows between the trees, with a dry surf of air; and if sight brings sound, almost tinkling beams of light from the low moon. New stations, new harmonies of cold are suggested by stiff trees on their low hills and hummocks, standing against persimmon and topaz sunsets, or by a crystal edge on the sunlight.
We have had light frosts, but by the end of the month no consistent, freezing weather has been reached. Then on the thirtieth the temperature drops to 20 degrees. I notice a flower, Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming, all by itself in a field of matted grass. During the night the surface of the ground is frozen hard ... a cap of reality at last, with no more lingering. There is a genuine glittering clarity of cold, in cloud, and branch and stone. Out on the bay the low waves look as if they had a harder push and pull to make, imbued with new heaviness. A boy shows me the frozen body of a red-legged grasshopper, perfectly preserved for a little while by a power to which its only adaptation is death. What still stands above ground now faces poverty, and primitive recalcitrance.
There is a kind of ice sludge being nudged in by the tides along the shore and through rippling purple waters of tidal inlets. There are ice circlets around the marsh grass. Thin ice sheets form at the rim of fresh-water ponds.
The inland world seems either subdued or facing survival’s icy stare, and even self-sufficient human society looks ready to draw in and hole up for the winter. But since Cape Cod is surrounded by the sea, it has another depth, another range, where other populations roam while the rest of us wait and shiver. Above water, the more visible migrants are those wintering sea birds--auks, scoters, black ducks, eiders, old squaws, brant and Canada geese--that feed along the shore, in sheltered inlets, or in waters farther out, depending on their habit.
In my locality Canada geese and black ducks are swimming through peat-rooted grasses off Paine’s Creek where the terns were fishing two months ago. A line of white-winged scoters flies low over the heaving waters of the bay. I watch two black ducks in the sky, approaching from the north. They are coming over at high speed downwind with wings beating hard. Then more ducks fly up across inlet and marsh, taking off to windward. They swing back for a short stretch, then up again, as if to hold position, like travelers reconnoitering, then fly on and out of sight.
Two miles or more from shore I see points of spray going up from the surface of the water, and above them many large white birds continually turning and diving, from a considerable height. These are the gannets, that appear off Cape waters in the autumn after they have nested on their island territories in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The immature, first-year birds, which can also be seen diving for fish, are almost totally black. They are usually not with us for long, since they pass to winter feeding grounds, which may be as far south as the Caribbean.
Anyone who has seen them crowding their nesting grounds on Bonaventure Island off the Gaspé Peninsula, will know, from close observation, how spectacular these birds are. They allow tourists to come almost as close to them as chickens in a yard. Thousands of pairs nest at the top of high cliffs or along their ledges above the water, each with its established square foot or two of nesting territory. A loud, rattling cry goes up, out of a multitude of hoarse croaks and groans. I felt a great sense of pressure and establishment in this bird city, this singular society with its consistent behavior and ceremony. The pairs greet one another bowing, or with heads raised and the long thick bills fencing. Their stiff carved heads are always in motion, always in response to one another. It is a pressing, elaborate spectacle, ancient and authoritative.
Gannets are awkward landers. They come in stiffly and do a kind of top-heavy tumble when they hit the ground; but as ocean flyers they have no superiors. When I see them again silently gliding over the waters off the Cape, I greet them for their earth-honored mastery. At a distance they might be mistaken for herring gulls, but they are much larger, and their long black-ended wings are typical. When you see points of spray going up far out on the water, and white birds diving, you have unmistakably seen the gannets.
Earlier this month, during an easterly storm, with pouring, blinding, deafening wind and rain, a few gannets were flying close to the shore off Paine’s Creek where the water was a little calmer and the atmosphere less overcast than farther out in the bay. The birds flew low, since the fish they were hunting were in shallow water and presumably close to the surface. On this stormy morning they flew in an almost leisurely way over the surface, flapping their wings and gliding. They would turn casually and dive, their wings half spread. Then they rose and flew steadily on with power and ease, their wings feeling the stiff wind, using it like the ancient professionals they were.
Now the north wind is blowing hard in the late afternoon. There are slate-gray cloud masses in the sky, with a steely light where the sun rays through, and the temperature has dropped to about 40 degrees. Offshore over rocking, ponderous, gray waters, I can see the crowds of gannets following a shoal line in the distance. They catch the light from the sun when it strikes occasionally through the clouds, intensifying their whiteness and turning the water green. They seem to drift and turn continually, their arrowed bodies plummeting down, the splashes appearing against white bordered waves. As I walk inland the sun goes westward behind massive clouds and the gannets, far out, high and white, keep diving with exact abandon.
The intermittent sunlight wheels in to brighten the yellow grasses and make the sand sparkle. To the north it is as if the sky were moving down from its Arctic limits and announcing new themes, with iceberg clouds, and high walls of cold against which the sun strikes new fire, while the wind rushes down to make the message felt. A flock of sharp-tailed sparrows lands on the sand, the marsh-side of a dune. They fly up into the stiff, cold air, and then drop down into a small hollow for protection. They stay there for a while under the great force of wind and blown sand, not closely knit so much as spread out in what looks like a perilous unanimity. If one sparrow should stray even a foot away from the rest, in their over-all, though loose, pattern, I feel as if it must be irretrievably lost, blown off, and separated. That which holds the sharp-beaked, yellow-headed little birds together is in their senses. They intercommunicate as one flock and form. It is a control--as lightly manifested as the sparrows themselves, but as powerful as the elements against which they stand.
_December_
_An Old Place, an Old Man_
When the feel of winter comes, in November or early December--though by astronomical calculation winter does not start until December twenty-second--when the first hard seal is set on the ground, and we are settled in with a new plainness, then it is not difficult to bring back yesterday and its country living. Winter’s role in the year’s wheel is an arresting, for the sake of renewal, a sleep, or half sleep, for later waking. It has its own suspense and violence, its roars and silences, like the other seasons, but in general its order is of a different quality, having an inwardness and resistance, a bare, gray need to keep things inside and hidden down. This is the time of year that shows a plain connection between human beings and their land.
I see last leaves whipping around the hollows off an old Cape road, or walk through the now more oblique rays of the sun that yellow the sandy ground held by thin, waving grasses, gray beach plum or bayberry bushes, and I recognize what has been left behind.
Here, surrounded by open slopes, is an abandoned house site, now a cellar hole, walled by square blocks of glacial granite. Orchard grass, timothy, and redtop still engage the old domesticity. Inside their circle you can see where children played, water was fetched and carried, chickens fed, and voices raised. There are yucca plants close to the foundations, and a rose or two. I transplanted such a rose a few years ago, and with added nourishment it turned from a slight, single-petaled flower to a great bunch of pinkish-purple fragrance.
Unlike some abandoned farm sites in other parts of New England, there is nothing left here to show what the inhabitants did. There are no harrows, stone bolts, yokes, or farm implements, not even any pots and pans. The stones are left, and the faithful grasses, and beyond them the crunchy, gray deer moss, and beard grass of indigenous fields. It was a small place, of bare subsistence. Whatever the qualities of the people who lived there, they left simplicity behind them. Not too far away, a bulldozer is making a desert with giant scoops, high-tension wires are marching by, and a plane rips the air overhead. We are encroaching in our oblivious fashion, without delay. The new domesticities may occupy only a tenth of an acre each, but they engage all lands. The old domestic wildness cannot be replaced. It was a lodgment limited by need, gray outside and dark within, perhaps unbearably close and confined at times, but with a knowledge of its earth.
It seems to me that as the world has grown outward in recent years, even I, a comparative newcomer to Cape Cod, have lost some local life to memory. When you live in a place for the first time you see behind it to its roots and grain, before the storms of circumstance blow you away from it. I remember a few old men who seemed so representative of the old Cape that it will never be the same now that they are gone. The loss is of a country speech, the flavor of a flesh and blood nurtured on locality. What has replaced them can be defined in terms of California as well as Cape Cod, which means no detriment to either, for what we are now obliged to consider is locality in a wider field. But those old men were born as we may not yet be born, sturdily, in custom and resignation.
Nathan Black died in October 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He was born in 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a near neighbor. His land abutted mine, and since he was the proprietor of the Black Hills Barber Shop, I could walk down through the woods to get my hair cut, for the price, in a trillion-dollar world, of fifty cents. He was a heavy man, with bright brown eyes, and a head of curly white hair. He fitted the open Cape Cod weather, or the weather fitted him. I am not sure of the distinction. Nearly ninety years of change, of natural cataclysm, of both peace and abysmal war in the human world, had left him in the same place, with the same measure, outwardly at least, of stability.
When he left his place, or the customary orbit of work and old friends that constituted his life, perhaps to drive out on a new highway or to the chain store, he may never have stopped being surprised. I remember his looking at me with a kind of amused questioning--but no alarm--and saying something about no one belonging here any more. The new population didn’t quite make sense to him.
In the way of old countrymen who knew their boundaries, he was tough and unforgiving in his role of landowner. He had his rights, “By gawly!” and he would know when someone did him wrong. He held on hard, and I suspect there were neighbors who felt the possessiveness too strongly, but this being none of my business, I will go in and get my hair cut.
The shop, with a tool shed under the same roof, where “Nate” used to grind knives and axes, stood, and still stands, across the yard from the house where he was born. There are some other gray-shingled, outlying buildings on both sides of a dirt road that runs through scrubby woods and hollows, dry hills sloping down to marshy bottom land ... wood-lot country. One December day I rapped at the door, and he put his jacket on and walked across the yard with me, where two white ducks were parading and some red chickens giving the frozen ground a going over. The old man bent down a little and spoke to his dog Bonnie, a cream-colored spaniel, which had just wagged up to him: “Did you get it?”
Then, to me: “I lost an egg. Picked up five eggs, out of the hen yard this mornin’, and came back with four. Maybe there was a hole in these old pants of mine.”
The barber shop was small, long and narrow, but he had a stove in there that kept it warm. There were some old magazines on a bench against the wall, with a black Homburg hat hanging on a peg. It had been given him by an old customer, a wealthy man who had lived on the Cape during the summer and had come in to have his hair cut for many years before he died. There was a photograph on the wall of the two of them with an inscription underneath that read: “Established 1884. A satisfied customer is our best advertisement.” They were standing out in front of the shop, smiling in the sun.
“Feller came here yesterday and I had to clip him in the kitchen. Shop was too cold,” Nate said.
The calm of the place was comforting. It came, I suppose, from an acceptance that emanated from him, and brought in many old friends, who would sit down to say: “Nate, just thought I’d come over and pass the time of day.”
Whatever he had to say about other people never left them without the honor of human circumstances. “Pretty close, he is,” he would say with a little laugh, or “I guess he had a shade on” (a Cape Cod expression for being drunk). “Guess you can’t hold on to nothin’,” he said about some local theft, in a way that insisted on not being roused beyond necessity.
His origins were out of a kind of history of which there was very little left intact except himself. He once showed me a tintype of his mother, a handsome girl named Bridget Malady, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1862. His father, Timothy Black, was born in Yarmouth, on the Cape. At the age of ten he signed on as a cook aboard the packet which sailed between East Dennis and Boston, and seems to have spent a good deal of his life on intermittent voyages at sea. He was also in the butchering and slaughtering business with his two sons. In the autumn they used to butcher eighty-five hogs or more, at the rate of three a day. And in some rough but related way, Timothy Black started his son in the barbering business. Nate remembered how his father used to cut his hair in the kitchen, long before the Black Hills emporium was established: “I used to sit there while he was sort of pummeling at me on the back of the neck. By gol! I sure did cringe when he was chopping me with those women’s scissors.”
While I, seventy or eighty years later, was sitting in the barber’s chair, getting more expert and calmer work done on me, I assembled a little of the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an expedition to the post office or the store took up a large part of the day. That was the time when you could hitch the horse up to a post and stop for a long chat, “having the capacity to waste time” as I heard a Texan phrase it about some of his countrymen in the western part of the state. People walked between their houses--there are foot paths still showing--on barren hills. They had small herds of cows that foraged on the sloping fields. Families used to picnic together by the ponds, and there were barn dances on Saturday nights, which were sometimes the occasion for a rip-roaring fight. I have heard it said that Nate Black was the strongest fighter in the region, when outraged beyond his normal patience, but he would reveal none of this prowess to me.
The Black family also held dances in their kitchen. The father of the house played the violin. On such occasions they would have plum porridge suppers, or they served crackers, milk, and raisins, and sometimes hulled corn.
He was of a piece with his surroundings. I think of many things he talked about while I was having my hair cut and they all meant the gray, sea-girded land, and a human closeness to it. I think of the deer that ate his beans, of his duck that was carried off by a fox, of foxes being reduced in population by the mange, of a watering place for horses by Cedar Pond in East Dennis (a beautiful pond with ranks of dark cedars backing it up, and now being encroached upon by house lots); and he talked about the big eels waiting to eat young herrin’ (or alewives) at the mouth of a pond, and of sounding the depths of Round Pond here in West Brewster.
And then there was his dog which had to be chained up because it got so wildly excited chasing rabbits through the woods that it was constantly lost, having once been picked up nearly ten miles away; and the coon that climbed a tree after a hen; and his little granddaughter wanting to shine a flashlight through the window one night and take a picture of a coon she saw outdoors, because it was “such a pretty-looking animal.”
There also come to mind the fishing boats all-over white with screaming gulls, that he once spoke about with real excitement, and, of course, the yearly work on his cranberry bogs ... he and his tart and lively wife used to pick them together; and the shifting price of cranberries, and his wood lots, and who was after him to buy some of his land.
“Yes yes” he would say, in the Cape Cod fashion, and always, when a customer was leaving the shop: “Come again.”
His wife Emily died two years before him. Some time before that I stopped to talk with him when he was scything the family plot in Red Top Cemetery, which lies at the junction of two country roads, on a little hill or high knoll up in the sky and the ocean winds. He told me two women had come up one day while he was there and said: “What a nice place!” He and his wife are buried there, in a place which has no more permanence than any other, but for them and by them had the simple power of acquaintance.
_Night in the Afternoon_
If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and stars never fail us.
The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I am not one to disparage such banalities.
“Good morning.” “What’s good about it?” Dead oak leaves hang like wet rags in the cold rain. After the rain stops there is a cold moisture suspended in the air with its own whiteness. There is a silence everywhere, except for a chickadee’s harsh split trills nearby, the low tone of offshore waters, and the indiscriminate sound of engines on roads or in the sky. The woodchuck, the box turtle, and the chipmunk are asleep. There are no insects above ground to catch the eye. The day shortens, and we who are always calling for more sunshine, pleased at the idea of some perpetual, impossible comfort, are obliged to confront night in the afternoon. Life is quiet, stripped of redundancy. There is a new restraint about our depopulated local world, and at the same time new openings afforded. At least the season seems to offer another quality for interpretation. Perhaps, for example, because the trees are bare and the ground devitalized, we are to look up and find the sky.