Part 7
This also happens occasionally on land. We all know that the sea is out there, that the wind swirls over us, and the storms carry more traffic than planes, but strangers sometimes appear as if to prove that no place is what it seems to be. One spring a vermillion flycatcher suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. I saw it in its exciting tropical gaiety as it flew down next to a shining patch of spring rain on an asphalt road. It is a native of Texas and New Mexico. Black or turkey buzzards ride the great airs of spring and sometimes fly northward, wheeling unexpectedly overhead. In November of 1962 I saw a black stork, _Ciconia nigra_, which had somehow managed to make it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps managing to stop for rests in such areas as Greenland and Newfoundland. It landed near the Coast Guard Station, now National Seashore Park headquarters, at Eastham, in an exhausted state, to be picked up by the Audubon Society and later transported to the warmer climate of Florida.
The black stork breeds from Central Europe to Korea and China, and it winters in Africa after a long round of migratory journeys. Its advent was greeted with a certain amount of mild curiosity and even some jokes in the local paper, one of which had to do with its liking for Cape Cod scallops on its arrival. What better reason for coming here! (The truth is that like other newly captured birds, it had to be force-fed.) In any case it was a rare event, joining Cape Cod with Africa, and to see it was equivalent to seeing an antelope on Route 6. With large strong wings, attenuated red legs, a long, stout pinkish bill, red around the eyes, it waited in captivity with what seemed to be an air of great sadness, transplanted as it was, taken in to a gray, cold land without any sound but engines, human voices, and the wind, without any greenery but the thin-needled pines; and it roosted silently, twitching occasionally in its inactive unused state, an unwilling, unwitting Marco Polo in New England.
This is a narrow place, restricted by nature and by men, but foreign lives still fly to it like sparks in the air, and the sea beyond it takes things on their way with more room than analogy is yet aware of. What the sea sends in, like a dead skate, a starfish, horse mussel, or finger sponge, seems perfectly familiar as fish, marine, background animals, but they are also genuine primitives, remote not only from human physiology and complete understanding but from that part of the earth’s surface that we inhabit. In fact many of the hints of marine life that are either brought up along the beach, or that appear in offshore waters, like a whale or a dolphin, have a theatricality, an off-stage hint of a wealth of other acts, tricks, and forms still to be seen. The simple, primal watery element has embodiments of use which are comprehensible and have been studied for a long time, but these are endowed with physical natures and capabilities that might make an air-breathing, earth-bound human quite envious.
During a violent coastal storm, with winds up to seventy and eighty miles an hour, an exhausted harbor porpoise was cast up on a bay beach recently, and there it died. I confess I had never seen one out of water or even close to me before. For all the pictures I had seen, and all I had read, nothing prepared me for such perfection. Its round body, four to five feet long, was butt-ended at its head, in which there were small eyes, and small teeth in the jaws. It had just as much of the quality of flow as a raindrop, and at the same time was a solid packing of energy. Its skin graded down from the jet black of its back and upper sides through streaks of gray like rain along the sea down to a white belly, and without scales, it had a thick, smooth satiny polish like ebony or horn, perhaps reminiscent of synthetic rubber or plastic but of an organic texture which neither of those products could equal. The porpoise had a single fin on its back and a tail that could strike vertically for power and thrust. Its body was fairly heavy, weighing about a hundred pounds, but everything of speed and liquidity and dashing, leaping strength was reflected there. It lay on the upper part of the beach, conspicuous among the long piles of storm litter, the logs, pieces of broken dories, and thick seaweed, spectacular in its simplicity, a black and white that made me think of breaking waves in the night sea. I saw it curve over the surfaces of the water with consummate grace, slide away, and disappear.
“Where did you ever see more of nothing?” I was once asked as I looked out over endless dry Texas plains billowing like waves. Nothing or everything. Who knows? Who knows what the emptiness leads to or contains? The beach lies open. Its sands and rattling stones lead back through ages of weathering and change and are at the same time part of the wide give and take of the present.
The tiny spider crab, though isolated on the beach, was also a link with a teeming offshore existence, which hid in shadowy worlds of kelp and rockweed, or floated and roamed by with a free energy that was in complete denial of our tightening fall and winter world. Backed by a cliff, walking on sands shadowed and cold, faced by the churning waves, it is hard to believe in a life so rich. There are no rocky shores revealed at low tide and streaming with weed to prove the temperate fertility of the sea. The beach is a transition zone between one environment and another, but except in those areas where the cliffs are reduced to low sand hills, protecting a marsh or estuary behind them, the transition is a sharp one, the sands dipping from the inconstant sky to the constancy of salt water.
Along those stretches of beach where the sea has taken stones and boulders and deposited them offshore, storms sometimes bring in fairly large quantities of seaweed, which need beds of stone for their attachment. The fucus or rockweed, the laminaria or kelp, and some of the “red” algae like Irish moss which are among the more common kinds found along the beach, have no roots, since the plants take all their nourishment from the sea water that surrounds them, but are anchored by holdfasts, stubby structures which in the laminaria may look like the exposed, above-ground roots of some tropical trees, and in the fucus a round expansion of the tissues at its base, which is strongly and tightly sealed to the surface of rocks and stones.
Everything about these weeds, with divided, narrow, or tapering fronds to resist being torn by the waves, with bladders serving as floats, with gelatinous surfaces, with hollow stems, are eloquent of the nature of salt water, its ebb and flow, its depths, its capacious circulation. The seaweeds found on the beach, black, thin, dried out, or fresh and slippery, olive green, brown, or red, having been torn loose by a storm, start growing beyond the violent action of the surf, and grow for the most part to a depth of some forty or fifty feet. Different varieties like different depths, but since they are not free floating unless torn loose they are not found beyond the point where rays of sunlight, necessary for manufacturing food, cannot reach them.
Over and beyond them, in surface waters where the light penetrates before being absorbed, is a vegetation, varying in abundance according to place and season, but of incredible numbers over all, the one-celled microscopic organisms that are the basic food of all the seas. The seaweeds are simple and primitive in structure compared with much of the plant life on land, the more hazardous, contrary environment, and the members of the phytoplankton (the planktonic plants), even more so, although the diatoms, which form a large part of it, show a variety of outer form. Each diatom has a skeleton, made largely of silica, an outer shell hard enough to resist easy dissolution when the plant dies. It is formed like a pillbox, or a casket, or it is shaped like a quill, a ribbon, or rod, or it is joined with others in beads and chains. Each is minute, an etched, crystalline perfection, and each is lost in other billions, which we might only see on occasion as a green or greenish-brown stain across the water.
The shells of dead diatoms rain down through the water and form thick deposits on the floor of the sea. The cliffs above the beach are full of them. Cities have been built on their fossilized shells. In their number the diatoms balance the magnitude of the sea. In size they are basic to the existence of the minuscule animals of the zooplankton that feed upon them, and are eaten by larger animals in turn. A diatom’s delicacy and sparkling beauty as it reflects the light could indicate that universal productivity must start with a jewel, and perhaps end with it too.
That which is minute, like the diatoms, or cells, which are the basic structure of life, is a clue to the significance of things, leading from the simple to the complex and multifarious, but finally rounding us back to where we started. A man himself is the unique single cell with its own nature. Each life has its irreducible quality. I have been told that if you look at a diatom through an electronic microscope, from one increased magnification to another, you can see all its protuberances and layers disappear, and finally a sparkling crystalline form is revealed, like a cosmic surprise.
I suppose it is part of my fate as a large and clumsy animal of the mammalian order, crashing through the underbrush, knocking down trees, and displacing earth’s other inhabitants, to miss a great deal, at least with my unassisted eyes. To learn about some new form of life which I may have been passing by for years is often something of a redemption. I can then say that we have not yet been so run down by our own traffic that we have lost the capacity to see.
Not long ago a colony of bryozoans was pointed out to me, at least the gelatinous crusts of the compartments in which they lived, like little tufts and fringes attached to the fronds of seaweed cast up on the beach. They are tiny colonial animals that make cups and compartments joined together in branching stems, from which they send out little crowns of delicate, filamentous tentacles waving in the water. There are three thousand marine species of them, growing in different forms, and having different surfaces for their attachment. I had thought previously that the little pale-colored, branched tufts were a part of the seaweed. Now another small marvel had appeared on my horizon.
The beach was empty where I walked, except for bird tracks, tidal wrack, driftwood, bits of shell, or a finger sponge in evidence of the life alongside it, and depending on the warmth and receptivity to life that the season held, excepting also whatever microscopic animals might be crawling over wet surfaces around the sand grains. Again, emptiness, or poverty, is always qualified. After all the copepods, the nematodes or thread worms, and other groups unseen or unknown to me might be underfoot in vast numbers; and as I continued on there was no counting the number of little holes in the sand made by beach fleas or sand hoppers. As the autumn deepened I supposed they were unoccupied and deserted, since these beach dwellers, as I had heard it, should have been tucked away in their burrows by this time, with the door shut above their heads, waiting for March and April to bring a warm sun which could tease them out of dormancy. But one bright morning in the middle of November I saw a great many of them hard at work.
At first I noticed thousands of little mounds on the surface of the sand in a strip some six to fifteen feet wide along the upper part of the beach, following in general the outlines of the previous high tide. Where a log or shelving bank was in the way, these mounds, and the many holes accompanying them, about knitting-needle size, were concentrated on the seaward side. I noticed that shore birds had attempted to pluck the occupants from their holes and had reached down two to three inches. I scooped out the sand where a hole was, spread it around, and revealed a little animal not over a half inch long, with two large eyes covering the sides of its narrow head. The eyes were not only conspicuous, they were also startlingly white; and the sand-hopper’s body flattened on both sides, was a mother-of-pearl, somewhat translucent. This odd creature, one of a family in the order of amphipods, is called _Talorchestia megalopthalma_, a title that gives special credit to its eyes.
I put my pale-moon animal back in its hole, but to be held and thrust against its own volition apparently immobilized it, so I let it go free down the sands. After a second or two it made a few big and seemingly crazy hops--on sidelong springs like a toy--down a line of mounds and holes, popped into a hole and promptly disappeared.
I noticed that little spouts and bursts of sand were coming from many of these holes and with a little patience I could see some of the hoppers coming up as if to look around, as is customary with gophers and chipmunks, and then turning around and going back down again. What they were doing of course was a major job of digging, passing the sand up from one pair of legs to another and throwing it out the hole with a jerk. There was hardly time or inclination to pause and look around the far horizon. It was work that had to be done unceasingly, between tides and between seasons. Perhaps, if tomorrow brought consistently freezing temperatures, they might not appear again in any great numbers until spring; but their usual daily round meant frenzied feeding at low tide and after dark when no winged predators were around, followed by another return to the upper beach and another furiously energetic period of digging homes for themselves. Terrestrial animals, which might drown after a period of immersion, and yet bound on this strip of sand to the tides, they had a more legitimate claim to the beach than most of us.
Looking down at them, or in on their busyness, I had an extraordinary Gulliverlike feeling of encroaching on a world to which I did not belong. It was one kind of an eye looking at another without any sense of whether it was seen in turn or not, in a dichotomy of function, race, size, and place. It took the beach out of my possession. This was a place of other-world connections at which I could hardly guess. Do we need to wait for the men from Mars?
These are extravagant animals, with their grandiose if relatively blind eyes, with their feats of digging, their hunger dance. In a sense they have a very narrow range, between upper and lower tide, between one season and the next, between feeding and digging on their strip of sand, between hiding and emerging, and their life span is short; but what a use they make of it!
_Talorchestia megalopthalma_ is now on my life list, as the “birders” put it, a pearly prodigy of moon leaps that may, for all I know, be the beach’s foremost citizen.
I also caught a glimpse of another little animal as I turned over a piece of driftwood. It had numerous legs (seven pairs in all, I have learned), and a flattened body, though slightly rounded on top, and oval in shape, reminding me of a pill bug or sow bug, one of my most familiar landed neighbors, which can be found under almost any boulder or log that provides shade and moisture. The marine, or beached member of the family I met, was grayish white in color, and apparently had the same preference for moisture--if not too much, since it evidently lived at the high-tide line, and was “terrestrial” like the sand hoppers. Some of these isopods swim in the open sea, others live in shallow water, or at the low-tide line, and most are scavengers, feeding on dead animal matter.
All these and countless others are symptomatic of a tidal range, an ebb and flow that extends between sea and land in terms of millions of years of emergence and adaptation. In them the two worlds find their division and also their meeting and intercommunication. Their characteristic areas, their “life zones,” from the tropics to the poles, all require extremes of risk and of the struggle to survive it. In one place or another they dance to the inexorable measure of things, limited in what they do but exceptional in their way of doing it.
On this beach, so unique, so well defined, and at the same time so widely involved, every upward surge of the waves and every bubbling retreat sinking through the sand, every range of tide, from the new moon to the old, every storm, every change in the season, every day and every night, is embodied in existence.
I would think it presumptuous of me to claim any more on behalf of a bug or myself than we could in our honest natures fulfill, but faced by the shining tides of life, I am sure we have great things to do.
My translations are on this beach. I am still a part of its measure, and when I forget those overwhelming controls that human power insists on, and all the artificiality men use to overcome their natural limitations, I begin to partake in this miraculous context. It is a cold beach, a bitter sea. Covered with cold, the sands impersonally receive the shadows moving over them tall and wide, gradually shifting and easing over slopes and shoulders toward the surf with its continual lunge, its pull and push, displacing the pale light that stands over the beach and gives it a hard winter brightness. The waves pour and foam and bubble up the beach and recede with a rainlike glistening and seething that sinks in, leaving dark stains behind. The middle part of the beach shows long thin lines like scars where the last tides came, part of the never ending drawing and erasing on this tablet of the sea’s art. It is all clean, and naked, defined, and at the same time rhythmically boundless, providing everything that comes to it with an inexhaustible dimension. It needs another language, and at the same time no language could really encompass it. In this bold breath and silence moving up, scene shifting, always starting again, there are decisions of sun and waves, of wind and light, that leave me with a true silence, a great room to fill, though it is in my blood and veins, the roots of me to feel, and any companion whom I meet must be in an ancient earth sense completely new, with a freshness made of a million years.
X
Deer Week
The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were loaded with whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking up and down offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside from the two men that I could see in the boat, the shore was a world unoccupied, bright, wide, and cold, one about which the mass of us might care or know very little.
On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the bay, black ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers rode the choppy waters. The bay also ran hard with whitecaps; and the wind with a bare fury roared head on at empty summer houses facing the north, and drove across headlands glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes in its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking and shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought the whole north with it and the gulls that hung there or rose steeply into it, were allied with its violence in a way that was hard to understand.
Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of human preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in December, and the pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of guns like the hard slamming of doors, and down the highway at least every other car was loaded with hunters dressed in red, and on nearly every sandy side road several cars were parked. Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff looking out to sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in that direction.
Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out of their cars like spectators at a football game, they seemed as covered with neon lighting as a city street. In fact many of them do come from cities to the north and south of the Cape, which can now be reached in much faster time than used to be the case, and they follow the same pattern as many of the summer tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who live away from streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The lookouts stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the woods where I live. The guns resound from all points of the compass.
Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game birds. One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning from a hunting expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless. One man had managed to shoot a partridge on the way, but he ruefully admitted that someone had stolen it from the back of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started straggling back, while guns were still going off in what seemed a completely indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion.
“Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great cheerfulness.
I was helping one of the hunters extricate his station wagon from a muddy hole, and by that time I had a feeling that, like many other human enterprises, hunting was a communal affair which might turn out one way or another, but like a battle, had no certain outcome. It was clear, in any case, that very few of these men had much of an idea about the habits of the animals they were hunting. Some species of ducks, for example, feed more readily after sundown and so are more easily found, and more vulnerable. A half century ago, the population of wild fowl was probably less safe than it is now. A yellowlegs, flying up out of a marsh in late autumn, did not have much of a chance to start south. Some local hunter was waiting in anticipation, someone who probably knew the marshes and the shore as his ancestors had known them.
If the hunters had an unlimited season on this narrow peninsula, Cape Cod would be in a state of siege the year around, regardless of what happened to the ducks, partridge, quail, or deer. We have the universal problem of room and numbers. After all, the human population is increasing at a faster rate than most birds. Perhaps our populatedness results in less concern for the rest of life simply through lack of association with it. Do we know what we are shooting at? Hunters who blast away into flocks of eiders or Canada geese, leaving many of them wounded, unable to retrieve the rest because they are too far out in the water, are not doing anything but getting rid of their feelings, which are not necessarily worth cherishing.
The deer population may not decline because of hunting. Their numbers, their balance between starvation and survival depends largely on the kind of country they live in, on its vegetation. Cape Cod is only a half mile in width in some parts of it, seven or eight in others, but down the middle of it there is a wide belt of low growth, of tangles, shrubs, and low, cut-over woodland which provides good forage for deer and good concealment, even with the human armies in their midst.
Hunting deer is thought of as an American heritage, our birthright, part of the Thanksgiving celebration, handed down from fathers to sons. Since deer are one of those species, unlike their predators the wolf and the mountain lion, that have managed to live abundantly in the presence of man, so much so that they sometimes require “weeding” to save them from starvation, hunting them is as legitimate as it ever was, provided the hunting is controlled; but we no longer need them as we did.