Part 8
Having left the age behind when venison was our essential meat, we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed deer. In some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters. They are directly influenced by human civilization. In turn, civilization is dependent on them to the extent that they provide the basis for a multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is our hunter’s right that deer should exist, but we are not the hunters that we used to be. What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline, clothing, ammunition, whiskey?
The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be more to our advantage than any claims we make on them. They are afraid of man and keep their distant beauty from him. The heritage _they_ keep is wildness, which still has the power to arouse fear in us, and sometimes pity, as we may pity all life, including our own, that is cut short or broken by the inexorable laws of the universe.
On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and the sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some distance ahead of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two cars had just roared by with hunters in them, before she made her appearance. She seemed either wounded or exhausted, going very slowly, pulling her hindquarters stiffly behind her. When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew up and she went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only moderate speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs under the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men, who turned up their car heaters and sped away.
Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked, and a hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass. I could see the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore road, waiting with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind, getting in and out of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,” sounded across the way. After a while a number of them began to hurry ahead, almost tumbling as they ran, to converge on a deer which had apparently run to the bottom of a hollow. They surrounded the hollow on all sides, many men standing on their car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether there was actually a deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to escape, I never learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood for comfort.
The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the sea, not too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat--a very rough trade on that day for common flesh and blood--rocked forward through the waves. After a while the darkness began to fall, with a thin smoky yellow and pink band on the western horizon and a new blanket of gray clouds mounting overhead, so that all of us began to turn in under the cold breath of night.
I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every minute of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through the countless years of earthly inheritance and change, how we became so overmastering in our numbers and needs, so divorced from the exactions of nature? Shall we meet up only with ourselves?
Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains, and their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even those who abuse a hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion, are trying to keep in contact with a natural mortality which our world denies. Perhaps we need help from other animals besides the human one.
Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood, marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach with its perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone and lifted each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and sand. The gulls hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky. Even the boat had a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so with feathers, logs, or purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but swept and washed into a mutual keeping by the air and the tidal presence of the sea. I asked it to show us light and life which was our undiscovered own to help us through our mutual violence and upheavals, our narrow days.
XI
Impermanence Takes Its Stand
Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually, and the beach loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the plants and trees work so hard to hold on in their shifting ground that they never reach a climax state. They are pioneers. Such a place is open, as all earth’s shores must be, to drifters, like the black stork.
The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up in great numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm, could come in from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, Maine, or Nova Scotia, depending on how it was transported, by ships or by the sea itself. Years ago, sailing ships traveling along the Outer Cape with cargoes of lumber chained to their decks might encounter heavy seas and be in serious danger of grounding on the shoals, in which case they would occasionally jettison the cargo, which would land up and down the beaches, to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the “moon-cussers.” Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or studding, it supplied many a family with material for their houses. I can think of at least one house which is largely constructed of it.
Or as it happened not so many years ago, a log jam in a Maine river broke the boom and the logs went careening and dipping down to the sea, a great many landing after a while on the Outer Beach. Huge trunks of trees sometimes appear, carried in by the sea. I have found cherry, red and white pine, cedar, spruce, beech, and even some canoe birch with the bark still on it, a tree not indigenous to the Cape. Mahogany and walnut have been found at times, and a few years ago the cross section of a tree was discovered near Eastham that turned out to be a very hard and heavy wood from Brazil, probably fallen off a ship. Parts of dories, or larger vessels, broken oars; buoys of all colors and shapes, glass floats from lobster pots, branches, logs; boards of many different sizes and lengths, wharf pilings and planks, and dunnage, timbers used in stowing ship’s cargoes, cases of scotch, always, in my sad experience, without the scotch; crates from vessels of all the world, South American, Russian, Japanese, French, and most of the nations you can name; all these and more have been carried by the sea, sometimes for twenty or thirty years, until they were finally landed on the beach. It is wood for the fire, a house, a shack, or a table, and material for any curious scavenger, on behalf of aesthetics, science, or history.
The driftwood is a migrant, to move again soon, unless it is taken off the beach, burned in a fire, or lodged and buried deep above the high-tide line. It may serve temporarily as a place where seaweed and other litter gathers, or where crustaceans might congregate. The birds, if it is an accessible clump of branches fingering over the sands, rather than a log or heavy timber, may peck through it after such tiny animals, their tracks making a delicate tracery running under it and arrowing away. Driftwood migrates like the sand and the birds. It is another aspect of the surf’s swing and draw, its dragging out, its removal and its deposition, part of the constant remolding of this shore.
On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon, everything goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only rule. As it does everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across from one direction of the compass or another, streaming with light and moisture, lifts up, lifts you to it, and with long low swoops, sudden breaths and seething, it whisks the waters of the marshes and inlets, rounds their brown shoulders, races through trees and over cliffs clean through across the sea. The land under it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes, also waves as they do.
The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard, look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light, the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers. There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above the pouring of the surf.
Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves. Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia, “beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die, flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them. Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away, though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.
Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.
The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping back as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just above the beach its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost denuded of vegetation, deep cups with drops below them sheer down to the beach. I have seen the remnants of house foundations in such hollows, or a creosoted pole or two sticking up above the surface of the sand, not too old by the look of them, proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be. Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry, or in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain finality, giving a free, waving look to the surface of things. On the other hand this vegetation is definite enough. There is no fragility to it. It is scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth may be held down but it also gives the landscape a symmetry and economy; it does not give the impression of being hit or miss at all but very definite and sure of its place, as sure as wind-struck, salt-sprayed plants can be. Each plant stays rooted from place to place through this sandy earth, being adapted to intense light, drought, and constant winds, holding on hard against being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move into new areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in on newly deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the plants formerly rooted there.
So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance, temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes made by the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to be hummocks or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock may be held down by beach grass and have a core of bayberry bushes with only an inch or two of leaves and branches sticking out at the tops. Beach grass, bayberry, seaside goldenrod live in close if embattled communities, at least with respect to the wind. These plants and others may all join in holding such hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around them.
There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way, ericoides and tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,” but the name is usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more common of the two. They are not always easy to tell apart. The ericoides, sometimes called golden heather, has tiny spinelike leaves that stand out fairly distinctly from the stem and each other and it is a plant that stays green for a much longer time during fall and winter. The tomentosa is densely tufted, downy, softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or bluish green, being subject to winter kill more readily than the other species. On Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried, and used for fuel.
The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining ever since.
Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.
Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success.
We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.
XII
The Depths of Sight
Where is that eye to the sea beach and the sea that I might enter, to follow further than I know? There are so many unfinished depths suggested by the surface of things. A wet, white and gray pebble of quartz has the kind of grain that leads off to snow and rain and all the watery and windy associations of earth history. A feather, fitted, barbuled, light and strong, holding the air, refracting the rays of the sun and using them for its colors, has the horizon’s curve and the graces of the sky. The bryozoans on the seaweed tell a deep and primitive tale about the salt water and its animation. We should not be so impressed by our powers of assessment as to take things merely at their face value. To see more than the outside shell of the landscape I suppose we should be ready to admit its depths and whatever takes part in them, admitting also, that we are limited in our own capacity.
It is not necessarily what I see as I walk the beach that might make sense to the world but what sees me, even though it can’t write a book or drive a car. In the eyes of birds for example is a special kind of closeness to truths of nature which we might only see through a glass. Their very distance from us seems to prove it. Look at a herring gull and you see an animal with less intelligence than a goat, but with the same ungiving topaz eyes. I kept a female brown thrasher once for a week or two and there was nothing her sharp yellow gaze had for me but a constant glare, perhaps nervous or agitated but not to be deciphered otherwise. Consider the eyes of an alligator. They are not even revealing enough to be called “enigmatic,” which might be a misleading word in any case, implying some half-human wisdom like a sphinx. Its eyes are mere sunlight openings, cracks, and crevices. Its lids are turrets, drawn down on a bit of nameless colored water. Other animals, other societies, receive natural messages in ways that may have no more excitement in them than the reflection of a cloud passing across the surface of a pond, and still they may know what we do not, and the place they live in and respond to is our envy to discover. The strict, close relationships in the world of life, the life of earth, result in sensitivities which are no less rare for being divorced from self-knowledge.
That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow. And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored.
One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and the surf line.
Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head first, over and down, slipping under the water.
On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind. The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an electric communication made between one far pole and another.
Sight in our sense of the term involves symbols in a very special way, but it is part of a universal trial of knowing and reception, and in animals without consciousness and means of assessment this may mean more than automatic reaction to light. I think of a crowd of newly hatched minnows like tiny slivers of glass, running up and quivering through the water. The most definite thing about them is their large black eyes, contrasted with a bodily transparency so fragile as to seem past fragility, an artifice of growth on balance, in a chain of universal actions that might have their matrix in a dream. Those large eyes are the eyes of first attainment. Sight is the expression of an alliance with the world in lives twitching and quivering toward mutual attachment and effect. It may be the gift of misery or adoration in a man. It is the opening of gates in a child or an animal new to life.
Perhaps when you look at, if not in to, a fish’s eyes you are looking at depths of water, an animate fluidity. In its senses there is a watery knowledge with a supremacy of its own. What a lightning and at the same time a listlessness there is in them, in their hurrying ways through currents of fluid light, and their suspension in its stillness! Many of them only last for a day or a few minutes before disappearing as a food for other animals, in the mercurial depths of water allied with life, this intoxicant, this terror.
My sight meeting that of a gull or seal crosses and contains this landscape, environment, or place of existence with its own eye and its own depth to find. The expression of water, sand, and sky leads vision beyond itself.
One quiet, moderately cold night when the mist hung so low over the water and beach that they were closed in, but at the same time illuminated by the moon, I saw the port and starboard light of a fishing boat that looked to be only a hundred yards or so away down the shore. I kept walking toward them with the illusion that the boat was moored close to the beach, but after a couple of miles the lights were still receding and I turned back. The tide was close in and sheets of foam pitched in and dragged back with a sound of rattling stones but in gentle rhythm. It was a quiet sea, and beyond the surf I could detect little strikes of light, the curling over and stirring of white and silver. Up through mists and wisps of cloud the moon appeared intermittently, riding above the water. The beach was covered with soft airs, its distances diffused in gray and pink and pearl, a mood of ambiguity. I felt that whatever I might hear or meet up with was out of my control, at the dispensation of the world in and beyond the atmosphere, having unknown connections light years away and joined with fish and moon and speeding globe. In this isolation, a familiar place turned inexact and mysterious, I felt I might sense all sorts of far nerve ends tingling out of the night behind the mist. We receive very little of what reaches us out of this tribal universe, whose messages light through us unseen and unheard until we, as individuals, are turned to the dust of the sky.