Part 4
The danger attracted the attention of the Colonial Government as early as 1714, when an act was passed to preserve the trees. In 1727, Provincetown was incorporated, and a dozen years later another act forbade the pasturing of cattle on the sand hills. The Court might as well have forbidden the winds to blow or the sun to shine. Provincetowners cared nothing for laws, and continued to cut wood and turn cattle loose for the next hundred years; in short, until the danger, instead of threatening, actually arrived. The sand buried a house or two, and was advancing toward the town, salt works, and harbor at the rate of fifty rods a year along a four-and-a-half-mile front. In 1825, another commission was sent to study the situation and suggest remedies. This time they found the citizens so frightened by the marching sand that they were ready at last to obey the laws. They planted beach grass on the barren dunes, kept their cattle in the pound, and stopped cutting down young pine trees. Thus was the sand anchored and the town saved.
Pilgrim Lake is what is left of East Harbor, an extension of the main harbor of Provincetown that ended in marshes separated by a narrow strip of beach on the outer shore. The sea was a constant threat to this barrier and the people of Provincetown were afraid that it would eventually break through and start sending tons of sand into their valuable harbor, eventually making it unusable. A dike, 1400 feet long and seventy-five feet wide was finally completed in 1869, cutting across the mouth of East Harbor at the entrance to Provincetown Harbor, so that both houses and fishing industry were no longer threatened with burial; but the dunes, though held in some control, have continued to blow.
There is a small hill called Mt. Gilboa on one side of the highway at Provincetown, facing another Biblical peak called Mt. Ararat on the other, and if you climb it you can overlook the harbor and the roofs of the town, as well as the dunes and sea in the other direction. (Provincetown, incidentally, consists of a belt of houses narrowly strung along the inner shore with its streets directly oriented toward the harbor, appropriate to a people whose trade and thoughts were toward the sea. This is also true of the houses, which were built longitudinally, parallel to the streets.) In the fall, clam diggers bend down over dark flats at low tide between stretching fingers of water. Dories are stranded in the mud, or move gently on low water. Beyond them are the curving, stockadelike enclosures of the fish weirs, and draggers move in to the mouth of the harbor out of the bay. The sunlight fires the sandy faces of the long, low cliffs that extend down the inner shore of the Cape.
The town, which is so thick and crowded with cars during the summer months, a host to the cities, teeming with talk and color, a variety of human shapes, sizes, and exclamations, so reclaimed that you can hardly conceive of its austere past, becomes diminished again to a mere cluster of houses, a tenuous edge on water and sand. On the far-going Atlantic side, the dunes billow and toss. The Ararats are everywhere, peaks, crowns, domes held down by yellow beach grass on the mounds and hillocks from which the slopes dive down.
As the world’s dunes go, these may not be of major size and extent. On the other hand they have been measured at heights between sixty and eighty feet, and at times dune ridges may have reached elevations up to 100 feet. Also, their scale is such, leading from one open face to another, that human figures climbing a steep side across an intervening slope of no great distance seem tiny. The walls keep looming up and the valleys dip between, so that the whole landscape is full of a wide motion.
In all this bare largesse of sand, the texture is clean and clear. Shadows move over it like loving hands. The wind’s touch in turn has made grooves, grains, and ribs on the surface. In some areas the black mineral magnetite joins with garnet to make blackish-purple ripples in the sand, or irregular masses, or little brushstroke feathers and clouds. Everything shows clearly, from human footprints and the long ruts made by beach buggies, to mice or rabbit tracks. And I suppose that in the summer--if you pounce in time--you can see insects leaving their traces, like dune grasshoppers, colored and grained like sand, or a spider that buries down in the sand, thus avoiding extreme temperatures; or even a toad. I once found a Fowler’s toad quite far out on the beach where it must have wandered away from the dunes.
A stick that drops down from one of those shrubs so besieged by wind and sand waggles down a dune making a fine tracery, or what looks like a stamping of birds when it is lodged in one place and blown back and forth. An oak leaf merely blown for a slight distance down the sand makes a track, with all its lobe ends imprinted like a long tassel or thin strands of separate strings. Except for the beach-buggy tracks, that follow one route fairly consistently, and may be visible for months at a time, and the beach grasses, continually renewing their precise circles on the sand, most of these tracks soon disappear. There is a constant moving of sand particles, a sweeping over by the wind. The open dunes are trackless areas where tracks take on great significance.
During winter days when the northwest wind blows with fury along the exposed shores of the Cape, it may be too uncomfortable to stay in the dunes for any length of time. You gasp in the polar air and hide your face from the stinging sand. Each sand grain is lifted and sent with the speed of a projectile along the surface of the dunes. Given a little shelter from which to watch you could see the dunes change shape in an afternoon, or an hour. It is on days like this that they migrate like waves, with long slopes on their upwind sides, steep ones on their lee.
On their bright and stable days, the long dune shoulders at the top of each rise tilt you up, body and vision, into the dizzy heights of a sky graded from cobalt to indigo, the way the scale of things in the landscape goes from sand grains to rocking seas without distraction. The dunes almost seem to ask for a long-distance running from both men and clouds. They are a place of flying, falling, and tumbling, shaping the motion of what comes to them, asking for an approach that soars.
Also, they have their secrets, their ground-level associations. In October the beach-grass heads are loaded with yellow seeds. Where the plants are clumped together, providing protection from the wind, nests of seed gather on the leeward side, visited by birds that leave many little tracks and sometimes a feather or two. Mice also leave their dimpled trails, circling around the beach grass, traveling across bare sand for short distances before they disappear. There is a special delicacy in the visits of birds and mice. I had the fancy, following these small trails, of watching mice under the moon, with all their scuttling, nibbling, and investigating, so that some of their excitement, their fidgety life dance might be translated for me. I even thought it might help bring me down from a world too heavy with size to a neater reality.
Startled by a little crash of twigs and leaves, I saw a rabbit darting up a dune slope. It bobbed to the top and stayed motionless for a few seconds in a bayberry thicket until I followed it to find what might be the meeting place of a whole tribe of rabbits, if I could judge by the amount of tracks and pellets of dung there were, all on the rim of a small bowl held together by the bayberries with a small scrub oak coming up from its base. These semiprotected hollows are quite typical of the dunes. There are also small woods of pitch pines, thickly carpeted with needles, where the tree roots can get some moisture at the bottom of a valley between the dunes. Scrub-sized oak, pine, sometimes bayberry, beach plum, or wild cherry, hold down many hollows, with the help of beach grass on the shoulders around them.
The beach grass has had much deserved honor heaped upon it, in the proportion that it is able to live with the tons of sand that are also heaped upon it. It is perfectly adapted to being covered over by sand since it sends up stems which in turn root themselves, and then grows on, letting the old roots die. As a sand hill builds up, the beach grass is able to maintain itself in this fashion without being buried and to hold down the sand with a network of roots and stalks. It stabilizes such hills until the point where the wind may sweep so constantly around them as to expose them and cut away the sand, leaving the grass in splendid isolation with its outer roots hanging in mid-air. So beach grass and sand have a special collaboration which man does his best to encourage, especially after he has made rescue work necessary.
The sand masses have great weight and volume and are stable in themselves but it is their surfaces that flow and shift with the wind, so that the whole region is remolded over periods of time. It is fascinating to sit in a valley between the dunes and reconstruct their curves, seeing how the sand has been swept down one side and blown up another, sent over a hill to make a new one on the other side, held for a long time and then broken loose to change its residence, motion, and stability joining to make those noble forms.
The dunes may threaten man’s house, or road, or wood lot in immediate terms, but in themselves they are like distant monuments dedicated to natural force, perfect, calm, threatening or joining all that which lies ahead of them with equanimity. Time and its lapses seem immaterial, more so than the wind that shifts them. Now, or in years to come, a migrating dune will kill off a tree or a shrub and what does it matter? Can I care about what happens to one of a thousand scrub pines? I think not; but perhaps I can care about the event in the whole sequence of growth, change, and reshaping. Slow and statuesque, the dunes under the great air are another balance in process, like the beach beyond them.
I think of some of the trees in the dunes and their struggle with the winds and the encroaching sands, and I am unable to shed tears over something that is unable to cry, but sometimes the word desperation comes to me, when I see evidence of their long efforts to hold on. You will see a dying cherry tree that has sent shoot after shoot, trunk after trunk, all over the side of a dune or sand hill that is being worn away, and they are full of the contortions of struggle--arrested, like the statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling with the snakes, but real enough. Or another hummock or small dune, where a beach plum or bayberry may not have enough purchase left, has a mass of twisted branches and twigs strewn down its sides, the wreckage of a genuine defeat.
On the north edge of Provincetown the migrant dunes skirt the woods and thickets on their borders like icebergs, clean-rounded, immense shoulders of satiny sand slipping by trees: shad, bayberry, beach plum, red maple, oak, or pine. Because of the stable nature of sand, except when it is blown, they stay where they are, great suspended masses, their progress only measured at intervals, leaving evidence of trees that are buried, or about to be buried, behind them.
I am indebted to Dr. Loren C. Petry for pointing out to me that some trees are able to grow in the same way as beach grass, while they are being covered with sand. Pines will die when they are only partially buried, but this is not true, for example, of cottonwoods whose branches send down roots soon after they are buried, and so maintain their water and mineral supply. He has seen fifty-foot specimens of this tree--along the southeast side of Lake Michigan--of which some forty feet were buried, with the remaining ten feet growing vigorously.
The trees in the wooded areas bordering the dunes, particularly the pines, look as if they were covered with a soft whitish powder. It is caused by the very fine sand grains dusted over their leaves and needles by the wind, and during the winter this can be seen for miles down the Cape, well south of High Head.
Almost all the trees here have a temporary existence, holding on as well as they can, fighting for light, food, and moisture. Even if there used to be more woodland than there is now--and the evidence is good--there is nothing about this narrow area, stretching into the sea, made by the sea in collaboration with the wind, that looks settled. The word stabilized can be applied to a dune and in a sense to anything that remains rooted, anchored, or in place for a certain length of time, but in this case the word balance might be better. Motion, either latent or in view, is in equilibrium throughout this rare place, half desert, occasionally wooded, full of gardenlike patches of low growth standing out in their variety of color and shade, seeming to move like the clouds. There are shadows everywhere, made by low twigs, needles, or grasses, the slightest thing lying across the sand, in sketchy rhythmic patterns tossed by the wind, while the greater shadows made by the high dune outlines are shifting steadily with the time of day.
Aside from mice, rabbits, skunks, toads, insects, and the indigenous plants, this seems a place for nomads, and the birds that are free to forage, like a dark pigeon hawk that swoops across on its hunt for prey, or an occasional marsh hawk, breast feathers gleaming in the sunlight, its shadow passing across a dune wall. Little flocks of birds burst here and there through the thickets, like chickadees, myrtle warblers, or juncos that move around on the ground pecking for seed. In their fall migration many of the juncos, or “snowbirds,” reach Cape Cod by a long, over-the-water route, and flocks that arrive on the Outer Beach begin to move up into the dunes in a search for fresh water, perennial pilgrims.
I sat on the top of a high dune one afternoon and watched a beach buggy swaying and swinging up in my direction along a track that led from the shore. It droned up and careened by me, plowing and slipping through the sands, and away down a long slope it went on the dunes’ free forms, cutting across the shadows that were spearheading toward the sea. Then I heard children’s voices in the distance coming over quite clear and shrill, falling off at intervals before the wind. The slopes and valleys stretched with pure travel in between. It was the kind of place where all views and associations keep on, across a shifting range. It lacked fixed ways, decided roads. Only packed in by the open ocean and the long reaches of time, the roving dunes made a continually majestic statement which no amount of cans, broken glass, or human footprints could erase.
Off on the end, the edge, past the cities and the suburbs, the fixed house lots, the fields, and plains that make a patchwork of an entire nation, here is a country let go, barren, down to an essential minimum, but tossing and flowing with its own momentum in an envious proximity to the sea. It is the first and last land in America.
VI
A Change in History
The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say fairly well because I do not see how it is possible to recapture the deep complexities of what was present and now is past, although there is enough past left in us to provide great confusion about the times we have to face. Many tourists run after “charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are slight enough to admit that they have very little to do with the dark realities of three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We are in no need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight in the heavens we have created for ourselves. We look on the earth’s great flowing beauties with an inclined eye. For all its “conquest of nature,” perhaps because of it, our civilization has a tenuous hold on the waters and lands it occupies. We are in danger of being overlords, not obligated to what we rule.
We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in for fish chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily invited in because we are tired and out of our way. There is no time for that, and besides there are too many of us.
The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape Cod is now subject to a population spreading out as a result of the tremendous growth of cities and towns. It is predicted that the number of winter residents will increase by forty or fifty thousand in the next twenty years, and the summer visitors to the Great Beach may pass all bounds eventually. As the speed of transition has been increased between one era and another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing. When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an investment, as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or something too priceless to let go. There are always other places to move to. Each man used to be his own nomad, now nomadism is supplied to all of us by the mechanics and riches of society. During the tourist season the average length of visit per person has been estimated at three days, enough time to sense the breadth of things if not the circumstances.
If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites, Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open beauties it still displays, even with the National Park, which has saved a great deal of it from the seemingly unalterable army of bulldozers in the nick of time.
The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over woodland and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human foresight at any time, with or without the bulldozers. In that respect we have not changed, though we are not as dependent on the locality we live in as we used to be. Food and resources come from afar. Still, all places, regardless of the human adventure, have their underlying tides, their own measured and perhaps measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in subtle ways. We continue to be affected by what we can neither transform nor avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have no barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while ghosts of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.
The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period of my own, was filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the cliff above the beach, a majority unoccupied but with a house here and there showing a little more substance to it, the evidence of a year-round resident. With some exceptions, they were bare in appearance and devoid of individuality. No uncommon effort had been made to give them much distinction. In the winter and fall they lost whatever color by human association they might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed, pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of exposed wood, and since they were not in Florida they could not borrow any youth from the sunshine. Their spirit was old before they were built, and in that respect indigenous to the seashore. The bare coast and the gray waters seemed to hold them in contempt, or at least indifference, and they became as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of pretension, whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their own little plots of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia and scrub oak, joining the general economy of the landscape, no blowing leaves and limbs above them, no spreading lawns around. Whoever might live in them after the mild, money-making season could be gripped by the real weather without interference.
Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in antiques, even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is no alternative if we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there ever be such a thing as an antique rocket? But there is still a flow of age, a distant sense of things that it is possible to find, hanging like mist over an inlet, booming like the sea over the far side of a hill.
You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas, a single-track road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon or a stage, during the years when it took two days to get to Boston and the sea route was the preferred one. Even with the jet planes droning overhead and the cars grinding gears in the distance and the about-to-break sound of the future in the sky somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as the outline of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half one afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented, washed out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost with definition.
In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the houses were located here and there along the old highway, or dotted around in sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the wintertime you are very likely to meet no one, since there are comparatively few year-round residents. Once the place was full of local need, local talk, or tragedy. What wrecks now occur along the treacherous offshore bars can usually be taken care of by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the area quickly in a jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was no radar for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the wrecks that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer lifeboat crews composed of men from neighboring houses, with a boat kept ready in a hollow above the beach, ready to be launched out to the rescue, in terrible seas that were a common part of existence.
In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns had between three and four hundred sailing ships between them and a majority of their men went out to sea. In a great storm occurring in October of 1841 the town of Truro lost fifty-seven men, being already burdened with a large population of widows, and on the day after the storm nearly a hundred bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most of them were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast gale screaming and the sea sweeping their decks.
The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy have been responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks in the past, and taking the measure of the storms that strike the coast, it is hard to see how there could have been as many survivors as there were, even with the gallantry and local experience of the amateur lifesavers. Many ships ran aground too far offshore to be reached, and were pounded to pieces. The death-dealing power of the offshore sea in these storms seems unparalleled. The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche. It chews and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming waters plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of unapproachable violence.