Some of this wreckage is centuries old. High course tides carry débris up the beach, sand and the dunes move down to claim it; presently beach grass is growing tall in sand wedged between a ship’s splintered ribs and its buried keel. A few laths from the Montclair are whitening on the beach.
Two miles down the beach, its tiny flag streaming seaward in the endless wind, stands Nauset Station, chimneys, weathered roof, and cupola watchtower just visible above the dunes.
III
From Monomoy Point to Race Point in Provincetown—full fifty miles—twelve coast guard stations watch the beach and the shipping night and day. There are no breaks save natural ones in this keep of the frontier.
Between the stations, at some midway and convenient point, stand huts called halfway houses, and stations, huts, and lighthouses are linked together by a special telephone system owned and maintained by the coast guard services.
Every night in the year, when darkness has fallen on the Cape and the sombre thunder of ocean is heard in the pitch pines and the moors, lights are to be seen moving along these fifty miles of sand, some going north, some south, twinkles and points of light solitary and mysterious. These lights gleam from the lanterns and electric torches of the coast guardsmen of the Cape walking the night patrols. When the nights are full of wind and rain, loneliness and the thunder of the sea, these lights along the surf have a quality of romance and beauty that is Elizabethan, that is beyond all stain of present time.
Nauset Station
Sometimes a red flare burns on the edge of ocean, a red fireworks flare which means wreck or danger of wreck. “You are standing in too near to the outer bar,” says the red light to the freighter lost in a night’s downpour of March rain. “Keep off! Keep off! Keep off!” The signal burns and sputters, the smoke is blown away almost ere it is born; the glassy bellies of the advancing breakers turn to volutes of rosy black, the seething foam to a strange vermilion-pink. In the night and rain beyond the hole of light an answering bellow sounds, ship lights dim as the vessel changes her course, the red flare dies to a sizzling, empty cartridge, the great dark of the beach returns to the solitary dunes. The next day it is all entered quietly in the station log: “Two thirty-six A.M. saw freighter standing in toward outer bar, burnt Coston signals, freighter whistled and changed her course.”
Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see the comings and goings of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a great northeaster, now through August quiet and the reddish-golden radiance of an old moon rising after midnight from the sea, now through a world of rain shaken with heavy thunder and stabbed through and through with lightning. And always, always alone. Whenever I rise at earliest dawn, I find the beach traced and retraced with footprints that vanish in the distances, each step a chain forged anew each night in the courageous service of mankind.