VIII
A Landscape in Motion
There are a number of elevations on the Cape from which it is possible to see both sides, getting above intervening houses, trees, or hills. On the same Wellfleet Plain where Camp Wellfleet was located the moraine tilts all the way down from the cliff above the Outer Beach to the shores of the bay, and reaches of land and water come into view from all directions. One plane leads to another by easy transitions. The cliff tops shine in the wind above the steady pouring sound of the waves and the dancing of molten gold and silver on the sea. Beach grasses glitter. The land ahead is full of coarse scrub oak and green patches of bayberry moving toward dark green woods of pitch pine and clusters of houses, reaching the sheltered shores of the bay beyond them, with salt marshes, gold and red; water-shining, brown tidal flats, and a rim of blue water on the distant horizon.
It is a stunted land, not overhospitable to life by the looks of it, although flocks of chickadees bounce gaily through the scrub as if giving it their free acknowledgment. As the autumn progresses the reds change to brown, plants darken or die down, shrubs lose their leaves, and the grasses bleach. In all seasons it is a place of low growth, ready in its hardy way to receive what the wind and sun can send it. The sky is very wide overhead. You can see from one tidal area to another—almost from one climate to another—standing on the bare ground. In scale the view approximates what you can see from high in the air.
A plane shows you a much wider panorama, while diminishing the land, eliminating the size of locality and local things. It takes you high enough to see the curve of the earth, the concrete highways like ribbons across the country, the thin lines of roads and streets, the checkered fields, patches of lakes, and sprawling cities. A jet plane cuts across time. You can run after the sun as it falls on the other side of the world and almost catch it, following the mountain shadows over America, and since you pass time in that sense, not able to go faster than the speed of light, but crossing the rhythmic stations of earth and sun, I have felt it as a longer journey than that involved in a car or train. What might ordinarily take days is reduced to hours, but when we landed I have felt the days in me as much as the hours. We bypass the clock. We go from low to high, bridging a gap between the individual and the universe, leaving earth’s confinements for indefinite space, but local time is still inside us.
On the ground, obviously enough, you limit the horizon by the extent of your vision, and the horizon in turn limits you, but land and water are held by their relationships to space and to each other. Apparently all climatic cycles are world-wide; and the immediate, local weather is in part dependent on the weather behind and ahead of it. In the same way the only limit to the landscape is the globe itself. Its reaches go out of sight, if not of universal measure.
This seaside country often gives you the feeling that the sky is the limit. One opening beyond the trees, another mile revealed, and the earth and sea from the top of a dune, the world you stand on, may become exalted in its scope. Perhaps people climb hills and mountains not only to get to the top, or as an activity in its own right—reasons often given in answer to questions that may be of no great value—but to join the range of the world, to be up and outward bound, and above all to have a sense of the unities in and beyond them. A greater landscape means a new communion.
I once climbed a small mountain in Maine with a group of Sea Scouts. We stopped just below its summit, where there was a bowl surrounded by rocky heights and slopes and holding clear, cold water, the size of a small pond. The boys stripped and went in swimming, and all their excited yelling as they jumped in and out of the water resolved along the rock faces and deep crevices into echoes that rang and choired—heard from above—like Te Deums in a cathedral. And far down and around for hundreds of miles were the houseless mountains flaming with color.
One of the boys asked: “How many acres do you think there are?”
For all its matter-of-factness, his question brought us in touch with massive distance, an over-all light and wind above the great carpets of color, a landscape running with power, having a latent silence, a prodigious weight and matter.
Mountains or seashore make for revelation. So on this sandy, tilting peninsula sight can keep on going. On one side the head-on majesty of cliffs, beach, and open sea, and on the other, calm low headlands facing sheltered waters, two different environments, with the west wind blowing over and the clouds flaring and shifting in the sky. You are in the lap of the waters, the balance of the tides, and in the arms of the weather.
Each patch of ground, varying in the degree to which it is receptive to organic life, is a complexity of substance and influence. The weather that circulates over it, and in terms of light, relative moisture, and varying temperatures invests it too, has its seasonal constancies but it is always in a state of change. Cape Cod feels much of the time as if it were two-thirds wind, and people with touchy nerves might well think they were being pushed by it in directions they were unable to go.
The Cape has a maritime climate, somewhat milder than the mainland. There is no use exaggerating its mildness since it can feel as cold or colder than the rest of New England when the northwest wind takes its uninterrupted course through the ribs of the land and sears its way along the shore, but, in general, annual temperatures are slightly higher. In central and western Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York State, the average number of days between the first severe, killing frost in the autumn and the last one in the spring has been estimated at 180-210. For Cape Cod, on the other hand, this is 120-150, the same that prevails in a thin coastal belt south of the Cape to Virginia and North Carolina where it widens and starts west across Tennessee.
The waters to the south, in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound, have a higher annual temperature than the waters of the open Atlantic along the Outer Beach and in Cape Cod Bay, a southern extension of the Gulf of Maine. On the other hand the waters north of Cape Cod, though cooler during the summer, tend to be warmer during the winter, because of the depths of the Gulf of Maine and their heat-carrying capacity. Cape Cod Bay, and Buzzards Bay have more sea ice than any equal area on the coast of the United States with the exception of Alaska. Sustained cold during January and February often results in weeks of pack ice stretching off into the Bay as far as the eye can see, at least from the level of the shore. This extra touch of the Arctic off the Cape is due mainly to a combination of cold winter winds from the continent and shallow water.
The difference in average water temperatures between one side of the Cape and the other may have its effects on the local weather. During the fall especially, when cold air moves over the waters of Nantucket Sound they may be covered with fog, whereas it can be bright and clear over the Bay, only a few miles distant. The normal kind of fog occurs when warm, moisture-laden air moves over cool or cold water, and is quite common in spring and summer. When a cold, dry air mass, on the other hand, moves over warmer waters it may result in what is called “Arctic sea smoke” a kind of wispy, steamy fog in turbulent, rolling air, rising to ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the water.
During the winter Cape Cod is also subject to rapid changes in temperature depending on whether the wind comes from the northwest, with cold, dry, continental air, or from east and south off the ocean, the latter being seldom below the freezing point.
The tip at Provincetown has much the same temperature as the sea island of Nantucket. On the other hand the town of Barnstable on the lower Cape may have an average summer temperature which is slightly warmer than Provincetown and a colder temperature in winter, since it is that many miles closer to the interior. I have driven down the coast from Boston several times during snowstorms when an area as close to the Cape as Plymouth was completely covered with snow; and as I drove south the storms turned to heavy flakes of wet snow on the near side of the Cape Cod canal and then to rain as I went on.
The sea’s capacity to store up solar energy means that it exercises a moderating influence on the Cape, which is warmer during the winter than the mainland and cooler during the summer. Also, there are less thunderstorms on Cape Cod during the summer months than on the mainland, and the annual rainfall is likely to be lower because there is less showery precipitation, although local residents might be justified in thinking that water was on them much of the year in one form or another, as fog, salt spray, rain, or humidity.
The late fall and winter is often characterized by cold, raw windy days, with the temperature just above freezing or at the freezing point, and the air is loaded with moisture from the sea and sometimes smells of it. During heavy storms the wind drives the salt spray inland with great force, depositing coats of salt on houses, telegraph poles, and wires.
During the winter the Cape seems at times to be caught and tossed between the weather of the sea and that of the continent, but in general the principal air masses during fall and winter come from inland and in summer from the southwest. Winds from the north and west usually bring in continental polar air, which is dry and cold, though it may also arise in part from pacific maritime air. The source regions for many of the storms of early spring and early fall are the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Most of the severe spring storms, sometimes coming after a fairly mild winter, are the so-called “coastwise southeasters” which blow up the coast from off the Carolinas rather than from the west. They can result in blizzards because their coastal, maritime air if drawn into a low from the continent is cold enough to make snow.
Such simple generalities and fact sampling is not to suggest, like the Chamber of Commerce, that more people ought to come to Cape Cod, but that it is a land like all others, which is influenced by the forces beyond it. It is no more gripped, pulled, and let go by the weather than most other areas. In fact its temperature made it a good place for the first English settlers to find. Think of the Middle West in July, or January, for extremes! Yet Cape Cod has a special place in the wind, an outside hold on the roaming of the seas and the advent of the air.
The tides that rise and fall along this ocean-going spit of land are just as varied in their way as the weather, but more predictable. They accentuate the difference between one part of the Cape and another, and they are responsible for some of its physical characteristics. Great tidal ranges on the north side expose wide salt flats at low tide and allow the development of broad areas of salt marsh in sheltered embayments, whereas along the shores of Nantucket and Vineyard sounds, where tide ranges are much smaller, the marshes and more exposed flats are less extensive.
In Cape Cod Bay and eastward to the coast of Maine the average tide rises and falls about nine feet, but in Nantucket and Vineyard sounds the range is up to four feet at the most, being as little as two feet off Woods Hole and in some of the salt ponds. The time of high water varies also. It occurs four hours later on the north side of the Cape than at Buzzards Bay.
The Outer Beach is an area of transition so far as the tides are concerned, and their range drops steadily from nine feet at Race Point to four feet at the end of Monomoy. These diverse tides, all along the shores of the Cape, are a product of its very shape, and of the coast from which it juts out, astride the submerged continental shelf, whose shallow water also affects them.
It is the nature of waves—and a tide is a wave of a special kind—to move more slowly in crossing shallow water, rising at the same time to a greater height. Waves expend the energy of their motion when they increase in height, an effect which can be observed as they heap up before breaking as surf on the beach. So the tidal wave moves in from far offshore starting with relatively low ranges, some two or three feet at Sable Island off Nova Scotia, with similar readings in Bermuda and the Bahamas; but when it reaches the outer coast of the Cape it is augmented. To the southwest of the Cape the increase is only moderate, the figure for the entrance to Buzzards Bay being three and one half feet; but moving north it gets much higher. To reach the shores of the great embayment of the Gulf of Maine, formed where the coastline drops away north and east of the Cape, the ocean’s tidal wave must first cross the shallow waters of George’s Banks, a passage that requires more than three hours (which explains the later time of high water in the Bay). In the process the tidal height increases to the nine-foot figure, a reading which is true of Provincetown, Plymouth, and on up to the coast of Maine.
So the Cape lies between two tidal systems, created and separated by its geography. On the south side, incidentally, there is a complex pattern of tidal movement caused by the fact that both systems meet. Tidal waves enter the sounds between the Cape and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from two directions and pass each other. The combined effect of this “interference” results in rapid changes in the time and height of the tide between Monomoy and Woods Hole. Off Nobska Point one tidal wave movement is high, while the other passing it is low. Their interference results in the smallest range of tide (one and a half feet) to be found along the south shore. A similar minimum tidal range occurs off the southeast corner of Nantucket.
I am neither a trained scientist nor an accomplished sailor. I am inclined to use facts for unfactual ends and do not have enough knowledge of the wind not to be tipped over at any time, but if you feel complexity and admire mathematics while in a state of comparative ignorance then perhaps you have some claims on knowing. Most of us have had a hand in observing the weather or gauging the levels of the tide. Weather guessing or complaining is second nature, and on the beach, or by means of the pilings on the wharf, you can guess the tidal range quite easily or judge whether the tides are in or out. On some level below that we have air and tides in us that know the energies of earth from past acquaintance, but we are much too ready to mistrust these depths and to let other authorities do our work for us. Perhaps our natural senses are becoming atrophied. In any case, we do not seem to be sure whether it is the energy of the head or of the heart that we should use for our purposes. But put yourself in the middle of the weather and within the reach of the tides and they sometimes begin to roam in concert in as many ways and to the incalculable extent that you have responses stemming from your brain. All the distant swelling and swinging, the synchronization and intermoving of the waters, becomes as real and immediate as the repositioning of the sun and the changing of its shadows. The over-all wind; the light that shines on the beach grass, moves over the pebbled ground, and sparkles the sea, or turns it into a blazing white cauldron; the knowledge of cold massive depths in one place, warm shallows in another, come into feeling as both unified and infinitely complex. I may fail at mathematics but be an unconscious mathematician, judging galaxies by the ways of light before my eyes.
At my feet, as I sit on the sandy ground on the cliff top, there is a hole made by a spider, neatly defined at the top by a little rim of grasses. Rabbit dung lies here and there. There are a broken puffball, dried leaves, and seeds; and the wind has blown so constantly over the level and open parts of the ground as to take away loose sand and leave a surface of pebbles, which are more or less stable, while mounds and hillocks are held together by shrubs and grasses. These are evidence of a poor community, holding down as best it can, though it is open to migrants and migration all the same.
What lies underfoot changes in a few hundred yards toward vegetation which is a little more protected, and less exposed to violent light and dessicating wind, with low oaks and pitch pines, wood floors, with a certain amount of decaying litter, graduating upward in the quantity of organic life, but the open, exposed, diminished look of this environment also suggests its inherent mobility with all the other component parts of this running world, taking original light and shadow from the vast sky.
The crow with its ragged wings banking away over the tree-tops, the rabbit hopping into a thicket, the fish that school unseen in the salt waters, the man who watches, are all manifestations of a complexity of association and alliance that stops on no single shore. Like our restrictions with respect to the horizon, we only see, we only live, a fraction of the possibilities allowed in so great a range; and being restricted, we oversimplify, cutting life and land down to size ... a poverty that makes for poverty.
I hear the steady pouring sound of the depths behind me and I see and feel them rising and falling, taking their inexorable passage around the Cape. The wind whistles through and like the in and out of breath lifts and subsides. Field crickets trill monotonously and faintly in competition with the wind. Crows call. Seeds blow along the bare ground. A winged seed flies by, next year’s fruition if it lands, this year’s providing, perhaps destined to skim out over the surface of the sea. A flock of snow buntings swings back and forth, twittering high in the air. Gulls circle in the distance above a garbage dump hidden by the trees.
In this landscape, here and out of sight, is a mutuality of response, through the sea with its thousands of miles of variety constantly in motion, and the land besieged by the sea, with dry and infertile soil, but in a web of tides and climatic influence that keeps its character actively in tune. Like the buntings, or a flock of sanderlings spinning, sun reflecting, diving through the heights above the shore, the opportunity of grace and power is always waiting for its use, and nothing that lives and participates can be called insignificant, from the cricket to the crow. Diversity is the rule, and each form is exceptional in its employment.
Through any part of the earth there is a placement, the appropriate condition for plants, animals, the soil, and its constituents, to maintain themselves. The optimum is that there shall be full use within any given range of opportunity. The more diversified a living community is the more healthy it is, not only in numbers, but in complex relationships. Even a “poor” seaside environment proves this by the very demands it makes for survival. The plants that adapt themselves to it do so by means both various and precise. Even sand grains have a relationship to each other in the rhythmic order of wind and waves. The life that comes to these shores, winging in, trying to take hold, blown out, taking semipermanent residence, has its own affinity for place, an organic knowledge of its own part in the physical world. It belongs to an innumerable company with exacting tasks.
Each life proves the need of all others. In a miraculous way, as each natural form is miraculous, the single is also manifold. The rabbit, as it nibbles grass, calls in the hawk. The spider is related, in its reproduction and survival, to the insect it eats. The soil requires microbes to break it down. The growth of plants is directed toward capturing the energy of the sun. Life calls life in the context of earth, water, and sky.
Throughout the wide landscape are a succession of environments, with communities adapting to constant change, characterized by so much mutual attraction and repulsion, so many delicate balances, such a variety of response to influence inside and out that there is hardly a stopping point for attention. We study particular environments so as to predict and understand the behavior of animals, the reaction in plants to variations in the intensity of light, or to relative moisture, or to the chemical constituents of the soil. Each place has its character, its complexity, and bounds.
But environment is more a characteristic of range than a separation in its own right. All migration says so. The division between a pond and its surrounding woodland is fairly distinct. A pond is an entity unto itself. So is the division between salt water and fresh. But the frog that lays its eggs in a pond may travel through the woods during the summer. The salmon, the alewife, and the shad reproduce in fresh water and grow up in the sea. Eels do the opposite.
In a sense each area has its representative, like the water birds, from petrels that spend most of their lives over the open ocean, to fresh-water ducks dabbling among the reeds. There are herons adapted to spear fishing in the shallows; terns that dive for fish in surface waters; others that swim after them under the water. Some of the adaptations are so precise that if the particular food supply of a species is endangered, so is existence of the bird itself.
On the other hand the very distinctness of each species, sharp-billed, webfooted, with gliders’ or divers’ wings, seems to impart range to countless others, those which exist and have existed, those which may develop in a vast and unknown future. The difference, the space, between a gannet and a dovekie, a great blue heron and a frigate bird, proves all the depths of opportunity.
As I look out on the waters to east and west, to north and south, I either see or envisage banks of fog far offshore, warm summer squalls, biting cold air, torrents of brilliance in the sky, leaping and ponderous deliberation in the waves. Warm air meets me from the Bahamas, cold air from the Arctic, and the migrants pass me as they travel in between. This earth, regardless of man’s construction of it, is always re-relating its contexts, playing out new themes ahead.
In this distance, near to far, there is force, and its limits, a counterbalancing as well as intermingling in the land, weather, and tides, and in almost hidden terms the concurrent response of countless inhabitants: the seed makers and dispensers, the hole diggers, the fliers, scuttlers, and divers, those that swim, crawl, or walk. They take part in range after range of consumption and growth, of trials and failures, with endless patience, sudden quickness, flows of energy, going through death and the travel-round of reproduction. They are dancers in a realm that knows where all its leadings are.
There are dynamic secrets underfoot. Lives dawn of which we are entirely unaware. Can we bring ourselves down to their great participation, waiting through dawns, attending the sun, hiding under the reality of wind and storm, where obedience means praise? Here is that universal guarantee of novelty and increase which we try so narrowly to imitate, substituting our simplicity for its complexity, our distressed communality for its balanced crowds, our greed and invention for its terrible provenance. Lord have mercy on us!