XI
Impermanence Takes Its Stand
Just as the sand bars offshore change shape continually, and the beach loses and gains in volume and elevation, so the plants and trees work so hard to hold on in their shifting ground that they never reach a climax state. They are pioneers. Such a place is open, as all earth’s shores must be, to drifters, like the black stork.
The driftwood that lands on the beach and sometimes piles up in great numbers and bulk on the upper tide level after a storm, could come in from almost anywhere: Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, Maine, or Nova Scotia, depending on how it was transported, by ships or by the sea itself. Years ago, sailing ships traveling along the Outer Cape with cargoes of lumber chained to their decks might encounter heavy seas and be in serious danger of grounding on the shoals, in which case they would occasionally jettison the cargo, which would land up and down the beaches, to be picked up by those famous human scavengers, the “moon-cussers.” Since such lumber was often in the form of planks or studding, it supplied many a family with material for their houses. I can think of at least one house which is largely constructed of it.
Or as it happened not so many years ago, a log jam in a Maine river broke the boom and the logs went careening and dipping down to the sea, a great many landing after a while on the Outer Beach. Huge trunks of trees sometimes appear, carried in by the sea. I have found cherry, red and white pine, cedar, spruce, beech, and even some canoe birch with the bark still on it, a tree not indigenous to the Cape. Mahogany and walnut have been found at times, and a few years ago the cross section of a tree was discovered near Eastham that turned out to be a very hard and heavy wood from Brazil, probably fallen off a ship. Parts of dories, or larger vessels, broken oars; buoys of all colors and shapes, glass floats from lobster pots, branches, logs; boards of many different sizes and lengths, wharf pilings and planks, and dunnage, timbers used in stowing ship’s cargoes, cases of scotch, always, in my sad experience, without the scotch; crates from vessels of all the world, South American, Russian, Japanese, French, and most of the nations you can name; all these and more have been carried by the sea, sometimes for twenty or thirty years, until they were finally landed on the beach. It is wood for the fire, a house, a shack, or a table, and material for any curious scavenger, on behalf of aesthetics, science, or history.
The driftwood is a migrant, to move again soon, unless it is taken off the beach, burned in a fire, or lodged and buried deep above the high-tide line. It may serve temporarily as a place where seaweed and other litter gathers, or where crustaceans might congregate. The birds, if it is an accessible clump of branches fingering over the sands, rather than a log or heavy timber, may peck through it after such tiny animals, their tracks making a delicate tracery running under it and arrowing away. Driftwood migrates like the sand and the birds. It is another aspect of the surf’s swing and draw, its dragging out, its removal and its deposition, part of the constant remolding of this shore.
On the cliff tops too, over the beach and the round horizon, everything goes out and round and returns. A curve is the only rule. As it does everywhere on the Cape, the wind goes across from one direction of the compass or another, streaming with light and moisture, lifts up, lifts you to it, and with long low swoops, sudden breaths and seething, it whisks the waters of the marshes and inlets, rounds their brown shoulders, races through trees and over cliffs clean through across the sea. The land under it, held down more definitely than beach or dunes, also waves as they do.
The heights above the beach, the low dipping slopes and hills, though vulnerable over long periods of time, foot by foot and yard by yard, look unrelievedly intense and bold. They glisten under the open light, the open draws of the sky. There are miles of scrub oak, bayberry, and beach-plum thickets shining as if they were wet with light, or, in the winter months, purple, maroon, and diffused with blue like a mist. This is where the fox and song sparrows gather, and the myrtle warblers. There is a sound of leaf ticking and branches tapping together above the pouring of the surf.
Sandy tracks made by beach buggies claw through wide patches of huckleberry, which have red or bronze leaves and conspicuous red tips to their branches in the fall, and in other areas the ground is held by beach grass and sometimes wide mats of shining bearberry, or hog cranberry, green and purple with bright-red berries under their leaves. Wide patches and hollows of blown sand are growing with Hudsonia, “beach heath” or “beach heather,” which is a soft gray green, and has golden yellow flowers, changing to darkening gold before they die, flowers, incidentally, which have a faint but sweet scent to them. Sometimes they are accompanied by “reindeer moss,” that seems to hold on tenuously, since its gray-green fronds crumble up and blow away, though in point of fact each of these fragments can lodge again in some other area. In the grayest of weather this lichen seems almost luminous, having a sea shine in the rain.
Piny hollows circle behind this spare vegetation, the trees with burnt-orange leaders killed by salt spray, and oaks, often dead at the top, along with a great range of scrub; and until recently when building was curbed by the National Park, new clumps of cottages and half-finished roads appearing all the time in new areas.
The cliff-top landscape is irregular, tilting up and down, dipping back as a rule toward the west but in varied planes. Just above the beach its hollows are scoured out by the wind, almost denuded of vegetation, deep cups with drops below them sheer down to the beach. I have seen the remnants of house foundations in such hollows, or a creosoted pole or two sticking up above the surface of the sand, not too old by the look of them, proving what an ephemeral habitation such a place can be. Where the low growth holds on, sometimes in masses, like bearberry, or in patches like the Hudsonia, it too lacks a certain finality, giving a free, waving look to the surface of things. On the other hand this vegetation is definite enough. There is no fragility to it. It is scraggy and tough. The strong shrubby growth may be held down but it also gives the landscape a symmetry and economy; it does not give the impression of being hit or miss at all but very definite and sure of its place, as sure as wind-struck, salt-sprayed plants can be. Each plant stays rooted from place to place through this sandy earth, being adapted to intense light, drought, and constant winds, holding on hard against being scoured out and displaced, and ready also, to move into new areas. Beach grass, especially, has this ability to move in on newly deposited sand, or where “blow outs” have occurred, areas in which the wind has finally blown the sand out from under the plants formerly rooted there.
So this patchy, heathlike region is held down in substance, temporarily, if not in form, adapted to the constant changes made by the wind. Closer to the cliff’s edge there are likely to be hummocks or mounds, like those of the dunes. A high hummock may be held down by beach grass and have a core of bayberry bushes with only an inch or two of leaves and branches sticking out at the tops. Beach grass, bayberry, seaside goldenrod live in close if embattled communities, at least with respect to the wind. These plants and others may all join in holding such hummocks or mounds together, while the Hudsonia in rounded clumps holds and extends its grounds across the level sand around them.
There are two principal species of Hudsonia by the way, ericoides and tomentosa. Both have been called “poverty grass,” but the name is usually applied to tomentosa, which is the more common of the two. They are not always easy to tell apart. The ericoides, sometimes called golden heather, has tiny spinelike leaves that stand out fairly distinctly from the stem and each other and it is a plant that stays green for a much longer time during fall and winter. The tomentosa is densely tufted, downy, softer in appearance, and it turns gray, or bluish green, being subject to winter kill more readily than the other species. On Nantucket at least this plant used to be gathered, dried, and used for fuel.
The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining ever since.
Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots.
Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success.
We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world.