I
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline. All these autumn weeks I have watched the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree, now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.
The splendour of colour in this world of sea and dune ebbed from it like a tide; it shallowed first without seeming to lose ground, and presently vanished all at once, almost, so it seemed, in one grey week. Warmth left the sea, and winter came down with storms of rushing wind and icy, pelting rain. The first snow fell early in November, just before the dawn of a grey and bitter day. I had written a letter the night before, intending to give it to the coast guardsman who came south at seven o’clock, but somehow or other I missed him; and no welcome light flashed an answer to mine as I stood on the crest of my dune looking into the darkness of the beach and listening to the sombre thunder of a rising sea. Unwilling to stay up till after midnight for the next patrol, I went out and put a note on the coast guard key post just south of me asking the last man south in the morning to wake me up and come in and get the letter. At about half-past five I woke to a stamping of feet and a knock on the door, and in came John Blood, the tall, light-haired New Yorker, very much buttoned up into his blue pea jacket, and with his watch cap well pulled down upon his ears.
The Burst of a Wave
“Ahoy, John—thanks for coming in. What’s it like outside?”
“It’s snowing. Winter’s come, I guess,” he said, with a meditative grin.
We talked, I gave him the letter, and he went out into the dark break of dawn, the wind, and the snow.
My fire had gone out, the Fo’castle was raw and cold, but my wood was ready, and I soon had a fire crackling. All winter long, I kept a basket of little sticks and fragments of driftwood ready for the morning, and began the day with a bonfire in the fireplace. A hearthful of high, leaping flame sends out a quick and plentiful heat. Light came slowly into the world, coming not so much from the east as from some vague, general nowhere—a light that did not grow brighter but only increased in quantity. A northwest snow squall was blowing across the sedgy marshes and the dunes, “seeming nowhere to alight” in the enormous landscape, and whirling off to the sullen, iron-green, and icy sea. As I watched, half-a-dozen gulls came sailing over from the marsh. These birds like foul weather and have a way of flying out over along the breakers a few minutes after the edge of a cloud has hidden the sun, and there is a strange, ominous sense of storm in this great natural scene.
The snow skirted along the beach, the wind suffering it no rest; I saw little whirlpools of it driving down the sand into the onrush of the breakers, it gathered in the footprints of the coast guard patrols, building up on their leeward side and patterning them in white on the empty beach. The very snow in the air had a character of its own, for it was the snow of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic, snow icy and crystalline, and sweeping across the dunes and moors rather than down upon them. Chancing to look to the north, I saw Nauset Light still turning and gleaming, and as I watched, it suddenly sank to a storm-smothered and distant glow and stopped. By the almanac, the sun had risen. So began the worst winter on the Cape for close upon fifty years, a winter marked by great storms and tides, six wrecks, and the loss of many lives.
The sun, this December morning, has come to the end of his southern journey, he climbs the whitish sky to the south over the white fury of the Orleans shoals, and takes on a silvery quality from the pallor of the sky. On such a morning went ancient peoples to their hills, and cried to the pale god to return to their woods and fields; perhaps the vanished Nausets danced a ceremonial dance on those inland moors, and the same northwest wind carried the measured drumming to these dunes. A morning to go out upon the dunes and study the work of winter. Between the cold blue of the sea and the levels of the marshes, the long wall of the dunes lies blanched to a whiter pallor than the surrounding landscape, for there is no russet and but little gold in dune grass when it dies. That intricacy of green, full-fleshed life, which billowed like wild wheat in the summer’s southwest wind, has thinned away now to a sparse world of separate heads, each one holding, as in a fist, a clump of whitish and mildewed wires.
The sand moves beneath. This shrinking of summer’s vegetation, this uncovering of the body of the dune, has permitted the winter gales to reach the sand, and all up and down the great wall, on the tops of the dunes, the surface sand is moving. The direction of this movement varies, of course, with the direction of the wind, but in general the movement is toward the sea, for the prevailing winter winds are northwesterly. In some places the blown and creeping sand has covered the grass so deeply that only the very tips of the withered spikes rise out of it; in other places, on the landward rims of the dunes, the wind has blown the sand entirely away from the plant and left a withered tangle of roots and stalks sprawling in the wind. Here and there, in the dead, whitish grass, one encounters a stray tiny spotlet of snow, relic of a storm a fortnight past. Such spots linger here for inexplicable weeks and have an air of things disregarded and forgotten.
I have written of the movement of sand on the surface of the dune, yet the very essence of the work of winter here is the quieting, the enchainment of the mass of the sand. The sun no longer being hot enough to dry it, moisture lies on it and within it, it loses its fluidity, it takes on weight and definition. Footprints which the summer would erase in a quarter of an hour remain in well-sheltered places for days and even weeks. There is a winter change of colour, as well. The warm golden quality vanishes and is replaced by a tone of cold silver-grey, which makes no flashing answer to the sun.
The Winter Beach
Animal life has disappeared into the chill air, the heavy, lifeless sand. On the surface, nothing remains of the insect world. That multiplicity of insect tracks, those fantastic ribbons which grasshoppers, promenading flies, spiders, and beetles printed on the dunes as they went about their hungry and mysterious purposes, have come to an end in this world and left it all the poorer. Those trillions of unaccountable lives, those crawling, buzzing, intense presences which nature created to fulfil some unknown purpose or perhaps simply to satisfy a whim for a certain sound or a moment of exquisite colour, where are they now, in this vast world, silent save for the sombre thunder of the surf and the rumble of wind in the porches of the ears? As I muse here, it occurs to me that we are not sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which insects add to the natural scene; indeed, we take it so much as a matter of course that it does not stir our fully conscious attention. But all those little fiddles in the grass, all those cricket pipes, those delicate flutes, are they not lovely beyond words when heard in midsummer on a moonlight night? I like, too, the movement they give to a landscape with their rushes, their strange comings and goings, and their hoverings with the sun’s brilliance reflected in their wings. Here, and at this especial moment, there is no trace or vestige of the summer’s insect world, yet one feels them here, the trillion, trillion tiny eggs in grass and marsh and sand, all faithfully spun from the vibrant flesh of innumerable mothers, all faithfully sealed and hidden away, all waiting for the rush of this earth through space and the resurgence of the sun.
I find no more paths of little paws and claw-tipped feet, each one with its own rhythm, its own mechanics of walking and running. The skunks, who linger till the last chilled grasshopper has been pounced on and eaten, are now lying torpid in their dark snuggles underground, their heartbeat stilled to a ghost of its summer self. They do not, apparently, make themselves burrows on the dunes, perhaps because a wise instinct warns them that a burrow in these open sands might collapse about them as they slept. November finds them travelling up the dunes to the firm soil of the mainland moors. The hill nearest the dunes is full of their winter parlours. Twice during the winter I saw a wildcat of domestic stock hunting along the edge of the marsh, and marked how savagery had completely altered the creature’s gait, for it slunk along, belly close to the grass, like a panther. A large brown cat with long fur and a wild and extraordinarily foolish face. I imagined it was out hunting the marsh larks who feed in the stubble of the salt-hay fields. Another time, I saw the hoofs of a deer in the sand, but of this deer and its adventures in the frozen marsh I shall speak later.
At Orleans, an otter, a rare animal here, has been seen, the man who saw it taking it for a seal until it came out of the breakers and ran along the sand. Every now and then, from the windows of the Fo’castle, I catch sight of a seal’s black head swimming about close inshore. In summer, seals are rarely seen on this part of the great outer beach—I myself have never seen one—but in winter they come along the breakers reconnoitring in search of food. They have a trick of swimming unperceived under a flock of sea ducks, seizing one of the unwary birds from underneath, and then disappearing with their mouths full of flesh and frantic feathers. A confusion follows; the survivors leap from the water with wildly beating wings, they scatter, wheel, and gather again, and presently nature has erased every sign of the struggle, and the sea rolls on as before.
There has been a strange tragedy to the north; one of those dread elemental things that happen in an elemental world. The other evening my friend Bill Eldredge, of Nauset, told me that there had been a disaster that same morning off the Race. Two fishermen who had left Provincetown in a big, thirty-foot motor dory were seen from the beach to be having trouble of some kind; the dory had then drifted into a tide rip churned up with surf, and capsized and drowned her crew. A few nights later, Bill came south again, and I stood for a moment talking to him on the beach at the foot of the Fo’castle dune. A lovely night of great winter stars and a quiet sea. “You remember those two fishermen I was telling you about?” said Bill. “They’ve found them both now. One of them had a son at Wood End Station, and when he was coming back from his patrol last night he saw his father’s body on the beach.”