XIV
The Marsh
The Outer Beach is broken only at Nauset Inlet, where the tidal waters pour through an opening that has frequently changed its width and position, and at Chatham. The Chatham break leads in to the wide area of Chatham Harbor and Pleasant Bay. In both places, but more especially at Nauset, where the marshes and the inland shore behind them are protected by the beach and a sandspit some two and three-quarter miles in length, an unstable, but at the same time fairly constant equilibrium is attained between sea and land. It does not seem obvious that this should be so at all. The sandspit looks only too narrow and fragile, and at intervals it does show evidence that the sea has broken through. Driftwood logs lie on the cuts made between its hummocks, headed as they were when the sea subsided, after it had lifted them in toward the marsh.
Except for the great volume of the beach itself, which is maintained in collaboration with the forces of the sea, it is hard at first to understand why the marsh should not be inundated. Why does that lord the sea not heave in and overwhelm this sandy barrier, flooding over the marshy flats and islands, and wash up permanently against the inland shore?
The shoulders of the low cedar-studded land slope down to the edge of the marsh with a neat, trimmed look and neat houses, seemingly confident of being in residence indefinitely, although I have heard people who live there talking in ways that suggested they were not sure of it. Once see those stormy waters heaving and rushing over the sandspit and you cannot be sure of anything. Looking out at the sea, even from a fairly safe distance, you can find eternal balance and at the same time inundation and disaster. Now that the Outer Beach stretches past the miles of cliffs and is no longer backed up by them, becoming an outlying stretch of sand, its own “protective” power might seem much less clear. On the other hand, when was this beach in anything but a state of flux and change? There is protection in that, even if it is hard to define. The fact is that the relationship between the sea, the beach, and the sandspit, the marsh and inland shore, has been maintained for ages in the past and probably ages to come. In general the volume of sand that is packed along the shore balances what is removed from it, but only in general, for the time being, because erosion takes place consistently over the years and during its course more sand is removed than delivered. Also a standing equilibrium is kept between this deposition and taking away of sand and the conditions offshore: the currents, drift, wave height and direction, the changing shoals and bars. All these states and forces are involved in an extremely complex kind of order, and it is certainly broken and rearranged all the time. A season may show it, or the records of history. In fact, changes occur from day to day.
When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605 he sailed into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old records, the inlet was about halfway down the sandspit behind the beach. Since then it apparently has moved about a mile south, but its entrances have changed now and then, with long periods of relative stability in between, which might be broken at any time and then followed by some new arrangement of forces.
In his Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit, or “beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been pushed back a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the early seventeenth century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging by early charts, of where it is now, and took the form of a long narrow island some twelve miles in length “with several small islands north of it and outlets to the ocean at either end—the northern one at Eastham and the southern lying between the end of this beach ridge and the Chatham shore.”
“In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans water at Nauset, and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near the entrance filled partially with shifting sands.”
The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits literally broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex in 1957. Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of coastal charts shows that Nauset Inlet opened hard against the cliffs on the south side from 1856 (the first good chart available to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941 show that in a single year a spit grew from south to north against the littoral drift and shifted the inlet a mile to the north.”
For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted in two entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently. Other temporary break-throughs can be seen along the spit, varying from 150 feet to a few yards across, extending down its length until it joins a broad, high stretch—almost a long mount—of sand which ends at the present inlet, with North Beach on the other side. This sand is subject to storm flooding and to winds, to being removed and added to, recut and carved by the waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach grass is not able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five hundred pairs of terns have nested there, and are protected.
The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply toward the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where the channel of the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both sides keep changing their lengths and relative position. The sea builds high shoals off and around the incoming tidal channel during one season and it may level at least parts of them off in another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs and bottom of a boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank of the inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank lay over it which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level.
Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957, and afterwards in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing pattern. Shoals and separate spits began to drift, to join and separate, shift and intermingle in curling, curving folds, an interwaving and repositioning of sand materials that would seem to have no parallel in nature.
The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at an average rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme erosion. This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs, and on the whole it is probably somewhat less here than there, although the marsh area is being very gradually diminished in extent. Its wide channels and bays, its marshy edges, islands, and flats, are held in the balance of great forces sweeping along the shore, or occasionally breaking through in violence. Although it absorbs and releases the tidal waters with ancient calm, it seems wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the complex, barely understood forces that build and break along the shore.
The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for centuries have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes, and the black ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under the wide light of dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open water and stirred the matted grass. Like the tides that flood in and fall, like the marsh grasses that grow and wave, then die down and take on their matted winter look, or the marine animals that swim in through the tidal channel and go out again to sea, it is a place of flight and motion. The local animals, crabs, clams, mussels, snails, the salt-water minnows in the ditches, the marsh snails, and numerous others, must go through their cycles of growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife relationships, but the over-all feeling that I have had about the marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated to migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any enclosed stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated look of the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the Bay shore, but it is an isolation bound to the open waters of the sea which run through it and sometimes threaten its borders.
After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh plants and grasses darken. In November the marshes are still russet, umber, and yellow green, but by January they are dark brown with reddish tawny tones in matted grasses having the coarse texture of a deer’s coat. The saltwort plants, so fresh and green and full of salt juices in the summer, have turned dry and white, curled over at their tips so that they have the look of singed wool.
When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to stretch far off toward the shore and the channels between them are partly hidden. Nauset from the landward side, on the other hand, looks as if it were mostly composed of water, especially at high tide. It is both a good country for low-grass lovers like sparrows and those that ride its watery lanes and lakes like ducks and geese.
Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass for short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I have flushed a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh. Horned larks peck in the dunes, tripping forward with a stamping motion of their legs, and then stop, to stand with a backward slant to their bodies. They fly up suddenly with shrill lisping cries; and all the while the deep quacking of black ducks sounds from far out in the middle of the marsh. There are always gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise on the wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse, guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way out and their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for gannets.
Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin heads and bills straight forward so that in flight they become throbbing arrows sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the hummocks of the spit facing the marsh while flock after flock of Canada geese flew in overhead, bugling as they came, close enough so that I could hear the fine high whistling of their wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through their feathers. Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in the marsh, along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks stray back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A black duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to spin as it flies up high and fast and changes direction, like a weathervane.
Quivering, soaring, swinging flights set out over the wide marsh, and the bird fleets ride the waters. The goldeneyes follow one another bobbing along in a channel, along with mergansers and occasional buffleheads, whose white heads or sides suddenly shine out as they round a corner. A rush and glide of water shows brightly in the distance when an eider plows quickly forward. The Canada geese feed over the marsh or on the borders of its channels and ditches, honking low, the sentinel ganders with their proud heads and necks showing above the grassy levels around them. One afternoon when I was walking across the coarse cover of the marsh—which seemed to stretch far off like the pampas, with its indefinite sky and a wide-spread travel of birds—I caught sight of a deer running up behind me, some fifty yards away. It was a doe, with a dun-colored winter coat; and seeing me, she swerved suddenly and headed out toward the middle of the marsh. The waters of January are bitterly cold, but the doe swam a wide channel to get to a small island in the middle, and there she stayed, shaking and scratching now and then, stirring around in an area that became more and more circumscribed as the tide began to rise and the waters widened. I left her a couple of hours later in the gathering dusk, a dark, distant little figure, hunched up far out on the marsh. Deer can swim for several miles, even in icy waters, so she undoubtedly swam back after I was safely out of the way, perhaps after dark when the tide started to go down again. Still, I was troubled by what I had caused, and I came back early next morning to reassure myself that she was gone.
When night comes on, the dark flat marsh has a look of absolute secrecy. The cold winter wind completes its isolation. A few last birds may fly up over it, or twist and cry in the wind and then drop down and disappear. What quick movements, starts, flicking actions, what flight there may be left is at last hidden, downed completely, and the wind and surf sounds wash out all else.
There is secrecy and at the same time a desolation in the marsh, the desolation of life pared down to absolute essentials. It offers no luxury but motion in its tidal context, an absolute minimum of redundance. It is a spare unity, even with all its life and light, and the colors that play over it throughout the years, a whole which only accepts those parts which are necessary to it. This marsh is on its own, with ancient standards of simplicity. To find fulfillment in them would be luxury indeed. The lights begin to go on in the houses that stand over its inner shore, as evening advances. A plane drones in the sky. The marsh’s flat, wind-blown darkness is alone, and seems to say that all life is received by those bare standards, that we are all helplessly interdependent and obligated to tides that none of us can turn.