The road to the bay leads off at the town hall, passing an old windmill which still has its grinding machinery in place. I entered it once, long ago, to see the dusty chutes, the empty bins, and the stones in their cheese-box cases of ancient and mellow wood. Locust trees inclose it, and song sparrows perch on the arms that have not turned for years. I heard one as I trod the dusty floor, his mating song entering through a broken pane. Beyond the mill, the road passes a scatter of houses, crosses the railroad track, winds between the ponds of Eastham, and then comes to an open mile of sandy fields and pitch-pine country extending to the bay.
The road descends, for the bay rim of the outer Cape is lower than the ocean wall. North of the road, it is but a bank at the end of fields. Accustomed to the roar of the ocean beach and to the salt wind in my ears, the quiet of the bay fell strangely about me. There was no surf, scarce a lakelike ripple; masses of weed, shaped in long undulations by water waves, lay heavy on the beach; forty miles across, earth-blue beyond blue water, and mounded and separate as so many isles, appeared the highlands of Plymouth woods and Sagamore. A few ducks were feeding more than a mile offshore, and, as I watched, a solitary drake rose from the broad marshes to my right and flew off to join them.
The Eastham Moors
The quiet of the bay, the subdued easterly blowing across the fields, the belt of winter weed, the glint and warmth of the sun, the solitary bird—there was a sense of old times dead and of new times beginning—recurrence, life, the turn of the sun’s wheel, always the imperative, bright sun.
I walked along the beach to the mouth of the “herring” brook. The stream is but a clogged gully of clean water running down to the sea through the sandy open meadows. Arriving at the shore, it spills out over the beach and trickles down to the bay. Low tides wash at the trickling rills and cover them; high tides climb the beach and enter a pool which has formed at the mouth behind a dam of weed. Yesterday, the low course tide had scarce touched the edge of the barrier and had begun to ebb an hour before my coming. Between the dam and the high-tide mark of the day lay a twenty-foot interval of beach traced by flat rillets seeping from the barrier. I looked into the pool. The “herring” had been in, for there was a dead one lying on the bottom of weed, a golden fish silted over with fine mud.
Suddenly, on chancing to look bay-ward, I saw a small school of “herring” just off the mouth of the brook and scarce more than fifteen feet from the motionless rim of the tide. There were, perhaps, fifty or a hundred fish in the school. Occasional fins chopped the quiet water. “Herrings” of Eastham brook unable to enter the pond in which they were born, barred from it by a dam of Nature’s making. As I stood looking off to the baffled creatures, now huddled and seemingly still in deeper water, now huddled and all astir in the shallowest fringes of the tide, I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish the earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?
The tide ebbed, swiftly shallowing over the flats, the “herring” vanished from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell when they were gone or the manner of their going.
Returning to the outer beach late in the afternoon, I found the ocean all a cold jade-green sown with whitecaps, the wind rising, and great broken clouds flowing over from the east. And in this northern current was a new warmth.