Part 5
Many of the lights that welcomed sailors, or warned them off, are now gone from the headlands and from houses along the shore that no longer have to worry about their men any more than they have to worry about themselves. The mackerel fleets are no longer thick on the horizon. The wharves are gone that used to take in the mackerel at Wellfleet on the Bay side. No one eats salt mackerel any more that I know of. I have a friend who spent his boyhood in New York State who was given salt mackerel to eat on Sunday mornings. It had been soaked in milk overnight, having been taken out of a “kentle,” which was a small wooden keg, the top wider than the base, about a quarter of a barrel in size. His observation was that it was much too salty a dish for his taste.
The talkers at the livery stable, the central store, or the barbershop are also gone, as well as the sea captains who retired at the age of forty-five or fifty to become big men in their communities. The horses, truck gardens, fish heads, rum and rum runners are gone too, and what old men still whittle boats for the tourists on the beach? The ancient marvels who used to gather Cape Cod moss on their backs, telling hilarious stories about chicken stealing, cow “dressing” (manure), boundary disputes, occasional romantic murders, and hard days at sea no longer seem to be available for reference. What a lot of solid objects seem to have gone from the world!
Perhaps I have left history behind too soon, saying, in effect: “Choose what age you like. You may find yourself in another.” Perhaps it is no fault of mine.
During my autumn and winter walks I did find a lasting pleasure in recognizing old things, reconstructing neighborliness, even from a distance, learning to see the silence--the growth and shape of things, the riches of “slow time.” The ponds especially, in the Wellfleet and South Truro regions, protected by the woods around them and the land leading up to the cliffs above the beach, were clear and deep and seemed to reflect quiet habitation over a long time. The water lapped on sandy shores in the sweet, airy winter stillness, broken by the loud, bright braying of blue jays. Coon tracks were sharply etched on the shallow margins where they had gone fishing for fresh-water mussels that left meandering traces on the pond bottom. On the far ends in the shadows there were occasional ducks, like blue-winged teal, mallards, or scaups.
At Gull Pond in Wellfleet one January day there were scarfs of ice along the shore, and out in the center herring gulls flew up and settled down on open water where a light cold wind broke across the surface. Wavelets were continually pushing and jostling broken ice so that it made a high singing, almost bell-like sound.
Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen leaves to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or oaks still carrying dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike note of a nuthatch as it was rounding the scaly plated trunk of a pitch pine. Pale light moved through the woods and across the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle mossy roads, their tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a special Cape proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic, or the herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that suddenly showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated by any century but its own.
Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming in, and to hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the length of the beach. The sound held and it took away, a monumental assurance of power past all the roughness and directness of the old life, its quiet suspension in the present, and the wrenching of the not-yet born.
What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land, in the continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate change, the way the beach itself, or the dunes are changing, keeping a general state for a minute, or even a lifetime, but quite beyond catching. Its history is water.
Water created it in the first place. When the last enormous glacier melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble out in the sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins, gullies, the “kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs, or still holding water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad and narrow runs with outlets to the sea. At one time Cape Cod must have been streaming with water like a whale’s back when it rises to the surface. Now many of the original streams, rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried out, but without too much imagination you can fill the landscape with water all over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction, make it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire peninsula that does not suggest this.
It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from the motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying, pushing, grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water in the deep, still ponds; water in the underground darkness; in the gentle seaward running streams; in the tidal estuaries and marshes lowering or flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy gales full of the howling emptiness of the winter sea, when the cold metal of the wind pounds on your back and cuts at your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen sands of the beach where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and churning with impersonal passion.
Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring weather, of the same exposures. Only our terms are not the same. Some years ago I stood on the high hills of North Truro late one afternoon, watching the suns red path shining and moving across the wide waters of the bay, thinking of sea surfaces moving over the round earth to its poles, and the poverty of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates, everywhere exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were so bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in hollows or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They glittered like so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come from Provincetown and seen a dragger unloading its fish, and the fishermen cutting them up with red, raw-meat hands. The wind was shipping up the water. The gulls were crying over the racing, lathered shore.
It came to me that what had brought me here had not so much to do with a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches in their simple New England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing, old wrecks, driftwood, or fish weirs, real as it was in me, but a great new outwardness, a universal human event. Each man undergoes a series of changes during his lifetime in a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of the world. He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust, the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination and measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a Cape Cod term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning far from your home base, with very few old promises behind to sustain me. I had to come to terms with an age without age, a locality without location, perhaps a divinity in fires of no precedent or name. Above all I was required to change, to face in new directions.
* * * * *
The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On my way home I saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and inlet, its broad wings spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched straight behind it, with feet curled up stiffly, head and neck crooked back. Then it landed in shallow water. Its wings folded and it stood straight up, with a surprising, statuesque height and gaze, the long neck and head above a flock of ducks that were swimming and feeding near by, assuming the kind of composure special to a race of herons that would serve indefinitely. The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors over the entire marsh.
All the measured lights and shadows of day and night, the tides of the sea and the tides of the season, the response and joint association of all life’s components in that place stayed much the same as they had ever been, in spite of the way we hurled in our roads and relocated ourselves without rest. Its natural order was still there for old expectation to seize upon; though in terms of accumulated knowledge and wants it was more complex than it had ever been, and would have to endure a human association that was itself on the waters of change, holding hard to the mechanics of its coming. Cape Cod had suddenly lost a slow, accumulative history, perhaps in a matter of twenty years, and would be treated like the rest of the world--as it happened, as it would come about under human auspices. Our problem, one of many, might be this: how could we reconcile universal commitment with the inviolable nature of a single place?
VII
Barren Grounds
The oceanic landscape reaches across the round earth, over a curved horizon, and that may be one reason why men keep returning to it. The sea attracts the experience of distance. There is still some vicarious adventure to standing on a cliff, breathing the far-ranging air and imagining ships hidden by mists on the horizon, or unknown lands beyond that, or even remembering lands once visited. Over there is where the great passages of history have gone by.
As recently as fifty or sixty years ago, man and sea were involved in a more personal alliance on Cape Cod, and its seamen once voyaged around the world. At the same time there were some local inhabitants who considered it a major expedition to go from one side of the Cape to the other. The fishing, shipbuilding, and voyages to foreign lands that was more characteristic of the Cape before the Civil War than after it gave what might have been a too narrow community, concentrated only on its own affairs, a healthy connection with the rest of the world.
Since the Second World War Cape Cod has been filled with relative outsiders, many of whom have been transported, not necessarily through any fault or wish of their own, to stations around the globe. A place that once went out for its sustenance now waits for the world to come to it.
One of the few people I met during my off-season walks on the beach turned out to be a man who had retired from the city. The open air may have been conducive to revelation, because he told me a great deal about his life during the ten or fifteen minutes I talked to him. It turned out that the place where we stood had some significance in his own history. He looked out to sea from the edge of the cliff and pointed out over the water to show me the general region where transports used to gather during the First World War on their way overseas. He had been on a Navy escort vessel.
“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war, small business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size and circumstances of the men and societies he had met and fought and endured. Through a life-long experience of waste--or waste space--and all his tired compliance with authority and anger against it, he had saved room in him for voyages. He told me that he had come to live near the sea so that he could walk along the cliffs and the beach whenever he wanted to, and to look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a relatively free command view of destiny.
After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out for several miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within the boundaries of the National Seashore Park, and one day, when the beach grass takes hold of its denuded areas, it will no longer be recognizable as a military reservation, but when I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet had just been formally disbanded. Although it was completely deserted, its buildings and some of its installations were still intact. It had been an antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast which was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which made the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and for several years after the war ended fishermen used to protest that their boats were in the line of fire.
The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain. It was on these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo Marconi built his wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic message in January of 1903. The year before, he had built an elaborate structure with twenty masts, and this had blown down in a heavy onshore wind. The successful message, which took the form of an exchange between Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from only four masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted waves that crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On the day I walked through nearly sixty years later there was nothing left of what he had constructed but a few fallen bricks on the face of the cliff.
Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet lookout towers and firing range were still more or less intact, and the place only lacked occupation to make it come alive again. The public had been kept out of the area for many years, but now I could walk in on a winter’s afternoon and not meet a soul. I passed a sign saying: MILITARY RESERVATION NO TRESPASSING, not without vague qualms, and memories of my own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of “Halt!” to ring out.
“Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses to some ghost of past authority.
There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that fell on bare gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks. Bareness was something the Army brought to all its posts, so that a bunch of grass was considered unnecessary, or tended for dear life. The Army city, once a humming, purposeful anonymity, was now completely silent and alone, but for me it still kept some of the power of its restrictions, arousing old apprehensions--that tightening of the stomach at facing some new unknown. The bare white barracks were still intact, and the power lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or latrines. There were off-limits signs on empty streets.
I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order, with its own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the feelings of frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered the routine, the rote-mindedness which often passed for efficiency, the utter helplessness that many soldiers felt during wartime, and were obliged to accept, about being part of something huge, anonymous, even reckless and uncalculated, an ignorance of which they themselves were ignorant and to which they had not been invited. I also remembered the unassuming friendships you could make in the Army, the directness with which men accepted each other.
A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the ground. They were interruptions of a nature that did not concern me very much as a draftee in an Army camp, although--more than most--we were exposed to the wide nights and their stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn, and the extremes of heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to Army life that allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted and oversimplified--he was not his own agent--and at the same time he acted for the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him, equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands. When he protested, he was protesting against the passage of all the nights on all the waters.
I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after dark saying he had something of great importance he had to speak to me about. We went out and talked in the company street, standing on the sandy grounds between the buildings, conscious of a towering night with flashing stars. He talked desperately, on and on, about the life he had been planning before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about the job which had now been denied him, the business he was going to establish, and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business was it of the President of the United States to start a war and send him into it?
It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach grass that holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for the sea to roam on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall and the sands to shift and blow. It is inevitable, at one time or another, that each of us should stand on these barren grounds. The gloom of the sea puts all other darkness and gloom in jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable. It carries light over the earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is overbearing and restless and at the same time as strict and balanced as its tides. Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because then it stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns us, the desert without illusion.
Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of the cliff for several miles. Watchers could look out from their transversing positions over the coastline and the sea and signal the accuracy of the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile targets over the water. I climbed two of the towers that still had ladders. They were in fair condition, but clearly not too long for this world of wind and spray, of ice, rain, and snow, and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows were broken, the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors, with boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered how many young men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this lookout over the dark sea. Some of those on duty had left their names behind, probably after the war was over, judging by the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and they also left the names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls, or would-be girls, the signs of need in wastes of order.
Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact, with empty cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground outside. A strand of barbed wire made a little clanging sound of unused warning as I brushed by it. Toward the far end of the reservation, on the Eastham side, I passed another off-limits sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags located in a little hollow on the very edge of the cliff; they were beginning to slide down the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking down on the beach where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only sentinels, facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at a faster rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal weight of one war had gone, but the knowledge and power it let loose had sent us on, committing us to our human ends in the most inclusive and at the same time isolated sense, universally vulnerable.
The wind sent dark clouds of ruffled waters along the sea surfaces, surfaces that tilted and flew, stretching away and disappearing, and the sky light, feather gray in the rain, reflected everywhere. The long surf line sounded with the crash and rattle of stones. The vast flow went on unhindered, restless and controlled, delivering and holding back, a nay and yea sayer at the same time, passing all experiments, accepting all possibility without a care. How could the sea do anything about reassuring mankind as to whether or not we would survive our own acts and commitments? Did man make war, or did war make him? Perhaps we love the sea for its denial of us.
Sitting on the sandbag, I thought of the GI who had last been there, manning a gun now replaced by missiles and rockets--bothered perhaps by the cold, penetrating wind, feeling useless, waiting for his discharge from the Army, wishing he were somewhere else, not knowing beach grass from seaside goldenrod, or one gull from another, but knowing the sea, with its one sound.
VIII
A Landscape in Motion
There are a number of elevations on the Cape from which it is possible to see both sides, getting above intervening houses, trees, or hills. On the same Wellfleet Plain where Camp Wellfleet was located the moraine tilts all the way down from the cliff above the Outer Beach to the shores of the bay, and reaches of land and water come into view from all directions. One plane leads to another by easy transitions. The cliff tops shine in the wind above the steady pouring sound of the waves and the dancing of molten gold and silver on the sea. Beach grasses glitter. The land ahead is full of coarse scrub oak and green patches of bayberry moving toward dark green woods of pitch pine and clusters of houses, reaching the sheltered shores of the bay beyond them, with salt marshes, gold and red; water-shining, brown tidal flats, and a rim of blue water on the distant horizon.
It is a stunted land, not overhospitable to life by the looks of it, although flocks of chickadees bounce gaily through the scrub as if giving it their free acknowledgment. As the autumn progresses the reds change to brown, plants darken or die down, shrubs lose their leaves, and the grasses bleach. In all seasons it is a place of low growth, ready in its hardy way to receive what the wind and sun can send it. The sky is very wide overhead. You can see from one tidal area to another--almost from one climate to another--standing on the bare ground. In scale the view approximates what you can see from high in the air.
A plane shows you a much wider panorama, while diminishing the land, eliminating the size of locality and local things. It takes you high enough to see the curve of the earth, the concrete highways like ribbons across the country, the thin lines of roads and streets, the checkered fields, patches of lakes, and sprawling cities. A jet plane cuts across time. You can run after the sun as it falls on the other side of the world and almost catch it, following the mountain shadows over America, and since you pass time in that sense, not able to go faster than the speed of light, but crossing the rhythmic stations of earth and sun, I have felt it as a longer journey than that involved in a car or train. What might ordinarily take days is reduced to hours, but when we landed I have felt the days in me as much as the hours. We bypass the clock. We go from low to high, bridging a gap between the individual and the universe, leaving earth’s confinements for indefinite space, but local time is still inside us.
On the ground, obviously enough, you limit the horizon by the extent of your vision, and the horizon in turn limits you, but land and water are held by their relationships to space and to each other. Apparently all climatic cycles are world-wide; and the immediate, local weather is in part dependent on the weather behind and ahead of it. In the same way the only limit to the landscape is the globe itself. Its reaches go out of sight, if not of universal measure.