Under this April blue, the great marshes are emptier of life than I have ever known them; no longer do westerly winds carry to my ears a sound of spring and wooing. The marsh ducks have sought their ponds and wilderness lakes, the larks have climbed the sky to Labrador, even the herring gulls are scattering. Though the breeding season of the latter bird does not begin till the first or second week in May, the marriageable are already wandering east to Maine. Hundreds of isles and islets on the Maine coast are as wild to-day as they were when Champlain visited the archipelago, and the herring gull breeds there by the twice ten thousands.
The sand has entirely resumed its looseness, its fluidity, but its colour still tells of winter in a faintest hint of grey. The golden warmth is there and is emerging; the climbing sun will soon exorcise this ghost of cold. Through the winter flows and spreadings of the sand, the new spears of dune grass rise, the leaves rolled into a green poignard with a tip of rhubarb bed and a terminal spike as piercing as a thorn. Other leaves, other spikes grow from the withered fists of the old plant, and what are left of last year’s leaves now crack from brittleness and drop away. Even the oozy vegetation of the flats is sharing in the spring. At dead low tide the streaming eel grass of the channel beds, Zostera marina, reveals new patches of wet, bright yellow-green; these stains dominate the spring colours of my world and are very beautiful to see when the April sun is shining.
Mammalian life was the first to emerge from the sterility of winter—I found skunk tracks on the dunes after the certain warm nights in March—and after the mammals came returning birds. Insect life has scarce stirred, though a few stray unknown flies have made their way into the house. In that kingdom life must begin again from the beginning.
April and the sun advancing, the disk rising each day to the north of where it leaped from yesterday’s ocean and setting north of yesterday’s setting, the solar disk burning, burning, consuming winter in fire.
II
I devoted the entire day yesterday to an adventure I have long had in mind, a walk across the Cape from outer ocean to Cape Cod Bay. As the crow flies, the distance from the Fo’castle to the west shore is about four and a half miles; afoot and by the road, it is nearer seven and a half, for one must follow roads lying north of the great lagoon. The day was pleasant; cool, easterly winds blew across the moors, and it was warm enough when I found both shelter and the sun.
I walked to Nauset Station close along the landward edge of the dunes, out of sight and sound of the sea. All up and down these western gradients of grass and sand the plant life of the region is pushing through the surface drifts and sandy overflowings which crept eastward during winter; green leaves of the beach pea are thrusting up; sand crumbs still lodged in their unfolded crevices; the dune goldenrod is shouldering the bright particles aside. Against the new olive colouring of the dunes, the compact thickets of beach plum are as charred-looking as ever, but when I stroll over to a thicket I find its buds tipped with a tiny show of green.
Arriving at Nauset, I found my coast guard neighbours airing their bedding and cleaning house. Andrew Wetherbee hailed me from the tower; we shouted pleasantries and passed the time of day. Then down Nauset road I went, turning my back on ocean and a rising tide.
The first mile of the road from Nauset to Eastham village winds through a singular country. It is a belt of wild, rolling, and treeless sand moorland which follows along the rim of the earth cliff for two thirds of its length and runs inland for something like a mile. Nauset Station, with its tiny floor of man-made greenery, lies at the frontier between my dune world and this sea-girt waste. Coast guard paths and the low, serried poles of the coast guard telephone are the only clues to the neighbourhood of man.
Desolate and half desert as it is, this borderland of the Cape has an extraordinary beauty, and for me the double attraction of mystery and wide horizons. Just to the north of the station, the grass turns starveling and thin, and the floor of the border waste becomes a thick carpet of poverty grass, Hudsonia tomentosa, variegated with channels and starry openings of whitish sand. All winter long this plant has been a kind of a rag grey; it has had a clothlike look and feel, but now it wears one of the rarest and loveliest greens in nature. I shall have to use the term “sage green” in telling of it, but the colour is not so simply ticketed; it is sage green, yes, but of an unequalled richness and sable depth. All along the waste, the increasing light is transmuting the grey sand of winter to a mellowness of grey-white touched with silver; the moor blanches, the plant puts on the dark. To my mind this wild region is at its best in twilight, for its dun floor gathers the dark long before the sunset colour has faded from the flattened sky, and one may then walk there in the peace of the earth gloom and hear from far below the great reverberation of the sea.