I
From a Distance
The Pilgrims who reached Cape Cod in 1620 had heard of it before. It got its name in 1602 and had been touched on by European seamen at least a century before that, and so when the Pilgrims “... fell in with that land which is called Cape Cod; the which being made and certainly known to be it, they were not a little joyful.”
Their coming had taken a long time, and they had passed over “a tedious and dreadful” sea; but as Bradford’s history relates it further: “... they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”
“And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruell and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to ye top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main barrier and gulf to separate them from the civil parts of the world.”
Now, nearly 350 years later, that lone land reaching out into the mighty ocean seems to be full of the “solace and content with respect to outward objects” which the Pilgrims lacked. Roads, gas stations, shopping centers, and a continually increasing number of houses, proclaim it as human territory, another populated home ground from which we have to go far to be separated from civilization. The simple, raw existence which the Pilgrims not only endured but anticipated has been replaced by a world of goods, which is not to say that we do not have to have a fortitude of our own, made inevitable, in great measure, by the very abundance we have achieved.
The Cape Cod of 1620 was more or less the same in its general outline as it is now, although the original woodland has been cut down, or burned over, to be replaced by less varied trees, much of the topsoil has eroded and blown away, and the shore line altered in the course of natural change. Superficially at least, it has been tamed, and in most areas the primal, unknown wildness is hard to imagine. The last thing you would expect to find on pulling in to a parking lot above a Cape Cod beach would be desolate wilderness, though if there is one, wilderness being in short supply these days, it would be well worth the effort to discover; but the sea, from which we are separated both by its vastness and the difference between water and air, could answer the description, and also the sands that define its limits.
Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, stretching for forty miles from the tip of the Cape at Provincetown to the end of Monomoy Island is not undiscovered country. Many men have walked it. Planes skim over it in no time at all, and the beach buggies bruise it with impunity. Still, the marks we make on it are all erased in time. The sea and sand insist on their own art. The beach is in a continuous state of remaking and invites discovery. It was first called “Great” so far as I know, by Henry David Thoreau. Otherwise it has been known for a long time as the Outer Beach, the Outer Shore, or in more familiar terms as the Back Side. Now it forms a major part of the new National Seashore Park—in the process of establishment—and is therefore not owned by individuals, or the towns in which they reside, but by the people of the United States. It is under national protection and possession at the same time, so how we approach and treat its future is a very great responsibility, which is appropriate enough.
The beach, standing out against the sea, is a further limit to America before it shelves off into the Atlantic depths. For most travelers it means the end of a highway, a place of summer sands. It is in fact one end of a whole continent of roads, of communications, of the vast and intricate business of human passage. In a sense it used to be the other way around. With all the known parts of the civilized world behind them, the Pilgrims found in this beach not an end but a beginning, whatever it might entail, and that of course, is why they went there.
This is an age in which we are able to ignore or bypass the “tedious and dreadful” highway of the sea—city dwellers, road, rocket, car, and plane makers that we are—to the extent that we too may find it again for the first time. The beach, lying by the sea and sea invested, is always ready for a new kind of attention in a new world. That is the nature of the place. Cape Cod itself, now and ultimately, is at the disposition of the sea rather than human enterprise.
The Cape is a narrow peninsula, a little terminal arm jutting out in to the Atlantic, constructed of loose material left by the last glacier some 20,000 years ago. Its upper part, starting beyond High Head at Truro and forming the Provincetown hook, or hood, is of recent origin. It lacks the cliffs that stand over the beach from a mile or so north of Highland Light to as far as the Nauset Coast Guard Beach at Eastham, and for the most part has a history of deposition and accretion rather than removal. It was formed by storms, tides, and currents, piling in sand and other materials from the shore to the south, over bars and reefs of glacial debris. The sand is still packing up around Race Point, as it is also adding to the shore south of Nauset to the tip end of Monomoy Island, while storms take it away from other parts of the shore line. Within living memory a large island called Billinsgate, on which there was a lighthouse and at one time a “Try Yard” for whales, disappeared under the surface of Cape Cod Bay. It now appears as a shoal at low tide and is otherwise covered over by water, although the rocky lighthouse foundations still show above the surface in all but the highest tides. On the Bay side the shore line has been filled in in some areas, while it has receded in others, revealing for example, the bones of horses and cows in the bank at the head of a beach, which were once presumably, some distance behind it. Many a cottage owner after a storm has found his living-room floor with nothing below it but the tide.
Over the centuries great changes have occurred in the nature and extent of marshlands, inlets, ponds, estuaries, and beaches. No year, or even month, goes by without some alteration in the shore line. These changes, not always obvious, sometimes violent and immediate, are not such as to threaten the physical existence of Cape Cod for many thousands of years to come, but they are of the kind that accentuate its close relationship to water and tides and weather. As the map makers are well aware, it is not a static piece of land. It moves.
The trunk of the Cape starts out from the mainland and then that slender curving arm juts up and out into the water with a kind of brave assertion beyond the continental limits; but it is the shape and sweep of waves and sands, of molding and at the same time of pulling away that strikes you most about it, as if it were a conception to be made or discarded, standing out in its trial. The whole physical earth, in spite of its apparent constancies, its orbital speed, the speed of light, the regularity of the tides, the fine, exact balances to life, is subject to rhythmic change, or in a deeper sense, to re-creation.
From 20,000 feet up, Cape Cod looks very much as it does on topographic maps, its heights and depths eliminated, a flat level land of sandy margins and wide green patches emerging out of the sea. In fact, with all its glacial lakes and ponds—between three and four hundred in number—its streams, marshes, bays, coves, and inlets, it might seem to consist as much of water as of earth. On a clear day at a lower altitude, skirting or passing over the shore line, you can see configurations of sand, the slopes and curves of the shoals, the white swirls and scallops under water made by currents and tides. The sea sparkles, and explodes with light where the sun strikes it directly. The spilling waves make small white accents along the shore. Tilting in the heights, you get a sense of mobility on a great scale. All the close, pressing impressions of locality are replaced by the roving of the waters, the islands of the mapped world floating there, the height and weight and emptiness of the sky.
However far their ageless impunity may reach, the world’s argument is that Cape Cod and its Outer Beach are under human guidance, surveillance, and authority. Those who come there bring their own distance with them. If we are not yet world-minded, we are world engaged. This is not a cast-off, self-sufficient countryside any longer, and it has lost most, if not all, of the look of a bleak, cut-over, and yet habitable seaside land that it had in the nineteenth century, when the inhabitants still depended on the sea for their livelihood, when you could smell the fish and hear the sermons on its shores.
An estimated 300,000 people visit the Cape during the summer, or even more, depending on the tides of economy and change, but after they have gone there are 80,000 year-round residents left, with more to be expected in the future. So, in spite of its stretches of comparatively uninhabited sands and its wooded areas, the Cape is caught up in the human scheme of things, and we can hardly avoid looking at it with modern eyes, for good or ill. We own it, and that is the way we are inclined to see it, not for its sake but ours. All roads lead to a Cape Cod beach, or to Los Angeles, or Yellowstone. Every place is invested with human importunity, and the crowd will tell you where you are.
Drive down any of the great concrete highways of the nation in the heat of the summer along with thousands, or millions, through a landscape whose scale affected our ideas of size to begin with, and you realize that Americans have an affinity for distance—which is also a capacity for laying the distance bare. We have learned this from our continent. We have learned how to exploit, turning the native, active riches of a great land into passive objects of our will, and we have taken a greatness from it for our own. While we have transformed our surroundings, we ourselves have been transformed without being altogether aware of the debt we owe.
Abstracted, in the summer months especially, to the terms of the contemporary world, some of Cape Cod’s more crowded areas have a familiar, continental look. They are covered with asphalt, cars, motels, cheap housing, shops full of grotesque souvenirs with no relation to the place they serve, and they amount, when you come right down to it, to receiving grounds for power, made by a conquering civilization. Will it be the same on the moon? The great scale is in us, the effort and the risk of desolation.
The beach’s openness is nearly filled with bodies, lying everywhere, or sitting, talking, absorbing the sun, or dashing suddenly into the relatively cold water, shouting, jumping, and splashing there, and then returning, flesh in warmth and radiance, performing the blessed ritual of doing nothing.
This hot surface, this wide open brilliance of sand, water, and sky is a summertime release for those in want. We claim it, and fill it with human demands; and yet it keeps its distance, resisting our bland assumption of authority.
Clouds like heaps of spun silk float up across the sky. The low waves splash along the sands, very lightly to the ear. Surfcasting rods are lodged in the sand, leaning out toward the water. Offshore, a white tern rises fluttering after a dive into the water, and a herring gull, large and deliberate by contrast, beats low over the surface. Behind all the crowd and the voices, hanging over like the intense and heavy sun, is a stillness, a suspension. Perhaps it is the soul of summer, that gives a provision of relief for those in want; and if we wait and watch there might be more to this beach and sea than what we came for. Waiting, in fact, seems to be its essence, since it gives no answer to what it is, being a wide, surface brightness, a tidal beat, a sounding whose monumental depths are concealed, suggesting too, that we might wait for it forever and know nothing.