There is nothing quite like the night patrol of the Cape in all the seaboard world.
The stations on the Cape stand on an average some six miles apart, and house a crew of eight men together with the life boat and life line cannon used in case of a wreck. The men upon patrol, however, do not walk from station to station, but to a halfway house built in some more or less sheltered nook upon the bank. A man going south from the Highland station for example, leaves a kind of brass ticket to be collected at his southern halfway house by a man coming north from Pamet River; a man going north from the Highland exchanges tokens with a man coming south from Peaked Hill.
In summer the night patrols go smoothly enough, though it is something of an experience to walk the beach through a midnight thunder squall. The wild flare of lightning upon the confused and foaming sea, the organ-like note of the drenching rain, the echoing of the crashes in the solitary dunes, all these are the very properties of romance. But when the bitter northern winter descends, each patrol is an adventure in itself. It may fall to your lot to step out of the station door into a February night, cold as the circle of the pole and overhung with great unsullied stars, a night when the long crumbling line of the bank stands clear against the sky, and the frozen sands are good walking under foot; it may fall to your lot to force your lonely way through the full fury of a northeast storm when the wind is blowing a gale and a tremendous sea is thundering unseen in a dissolving dark of snow.
In the depth of winter the steep bank becomes a glare of coated ice and sand and snow strangely intermixed. Sand covers snow till the new surface seems a secure part of the land, and then a new snow hides the deceit from view. It can be extraordinarily treacherous under foot.
For days, for weeks even, if the weather is miraculously good, the surfmen may accomplish their patrols without untoward incident, but any night the luck is liable to change and adventures begin. A young friend, walking the beach, head down to a bruising sleet, suddenly finds himself trapped between the ice cliff and the tide, and with the breakers sweeping to his encumbered shoulders, fights for his life there alone in the tremendous dark; another just escapes the fall of a great ice-rooted mass of the headland by running ahead of it into the sea, and tells of it, laughing, too, at the morning’s mess; a third slips on the fantastic path up the slope to the halfway house, and fights his way with numbed fingers to the top. Life in Nature is far more a matter of purest melodrama than the world believes.
There are dreaded nights when a certain north wind blows directly down the Cape carrying everything before it, flying sand, fragments of ancient wrecks, cobbles that have rolled out of the bank and been caught up by the wind as they fell, barrel staves, and stinging spume.
It was the privilege of the writer to spend a part of last winter living and patrolling with the Coast Guards of the Cape, and on one occasion to go patrolling “through the sand.”
THE WRECKS OF THE CAPE
The Blizzard Nor’easters that blow ships directly on the sands have strewn the southern shoals and the off-shore bars with wrecks which the shifting sands hide, reveal and hide again.