The great beach

A Change in History

The history of Cape Cod is fairly well known. I say fairly well because I do not see how it is possible to recapture the deep complexities of what was present and now is past, although there is enough past left in us to provide great confusion about the times we have to face. Many tourists run after “charm” or what is “quaint,” terms which are slight enough to admit that they have very little to do with the dark realities of three centuries. Now we come and go in great bounds, from great distances. Motion and change make our constancies. We are in no need of staying put. We are attracted by the starlight in the heavens we have created for ourselves. We look on the earth’s great flowing beauties with an inclined eye. For all its “conquest of nature,” perhaps because of it, our civilization has a tenuous hold on the waters and lands it occupies. We are in danger of being overlords, not obligated to what we rule.

We do not “visit” in the old sense of the word, stopping in for fish chowder, or rum or a cup of tea, nor are we customarily invited in because we are tired and out of our way. There is no time for that, and besides there are too many of us.

The new human plantings do not fit the old outlines. Cape Cod is now subject to a population spreading out as a result of the tremendous growth of cities and towns. It is predicted that the number of winter residents will increase by forty or fifty thousand in the next twenty years, and the summer visitors to the Great Beach may pass all bounds eventually. As the speed of transition has been increased between one era and another so has our individual speed, in arriving and departing. When you buy a piece of land on the Cape you do it as an investment, as a kind of fluid security, not for its own sake or something too priceless to let go. There are always other places to move to. Each man used to be his own nomad, now nomadism is supplied to all of us by the mechanics and riches of society. During the tourist season the average length of visit per person has been estimated at three days, enough time to sense the breadth of things if not the circumstances.

If we are all to be itinerants, wasting and leaving, or suburbanites, Cape Cod will have a hard time keeping what open beauties it still displays, even with the National Park, which has saved a great deal of it from the seemingly unalterable army of bulldozers in the nick of time.

The record, written all over the Cape in the form of cut-over woodland and wasted topsoil, does not say much for human foresight at any time, with or without the bulldozers. In that respect we have not changed, though we are not as dependent on the locality we live in as we used to be. Food and resources come from afar. Still, all places, regardless of the human adventure, have their underlying tides, their own measured and perhaps measureless pace, and they shade their inhabitants in subtle ways. We continue to be affected by what we can neither transform nor avoid. No amount of dry ice stops the hurricane. We have no barriers to keep off the arctic air. So those of us who live here still complain helplessly about each other or the weather, while ghosts of penury and puritanism still haunt the local houses.

The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period of my own, was filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the cliff above the beach, a majority unoccupied but with a house here and there showing a little more substance to it, the evidence of a year-round resident. With some exceptions, they were bare in appearance and devoid of individuality. No uncommon effort had been made to give them much distinction. In the winter and fall they lost whatever color by human association they might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed, pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of exposed wood, and since they were not in Florida they could not borrow any youth from the sunshine. Their spirit was old before they were built, and in that respect indigenous to the seashore. The bare coast and the gray waters seemed to hold them in contempt, or at least indifference, and they became as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of pretension, whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their own little plots of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia and scrub oak, joining the general economy of the landscape, no blowing leaves and limbs above them, no spreading lawns around. Whoever might live in them after the mild, money-making season could be gripped by the real weather without interference.

Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in antiques, even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is no alternative if we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there ever be such a thing as an antique rocket? But there is still a flow of age, a distant sense of things that it is possible to find, hanging like mist over an inlet, booming like the sea over the far side of a hill.

You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas, a single-track road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon or a stage, during the years when it took two days to get to Boston and the sea route was the preferred one. Even with the jet planes droning overhead and the cars grinding gears in the distance and the about-to-break sound of the future in the sky somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as the outline of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half one afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented, washed out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost with definition.

In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the houses were located here and there along the old highway, or dotted around in sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the wintertime you are very likely to meet no one, since there are comparatively few year-round residents. Once the place was full of local need, local talk, or tragedy. What wrecks now occur along the treacherous offshore bars can usually be taken care of by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the area quickly in a jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was no radar for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the wrecks that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer lifeboat crews composed of men from neighboring houses, with a boat kept ready in a hollow above the beach, ready to be launched out to the rescue, in terrible seas that were a common part of existence.

In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns had between three and four hundred sailing ships between them and a majority of their men went out to sea. In a great storm occurring in October of 1841 the town of Truro lost fifty-seven men, being already burdened with a large population of widows, and on the day after the storm nearly a hundred bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most of them were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast gale screaming and the sea sweeping their decks.

The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy have been responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks in the past, and taking the measure of the storms that strike the coast, it is hard to see how there could have been as many survivors as there were, even with the gallantry and local experience of the amateur lifesavers. Many ships ran aground too far offshore to be reached, and were pounded to pieces. The death-dealing power of the offshore sea in these storms seems unparalleled. The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche. It chews and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming waters plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of unapproachable violence.

Many of the lights that welcomed sailors, or warned them off, are now gone from the headlands and from houses along the shore that no longer have to worry about their men any more than they have to worry about themselves. The mackerel fleets are no longer thick on the horizon. The wharves are gone that used to take in the mackerel at Wellfleet on the Bay side. No one eats salt mackerel any more that I know of. I have a friend who spent his boyhood in New York State who was given salt mackerel to eat on Sunday mornings. It had been soaked in milk overnight, having been taken out of a “kentle,” which was a small wooden keg, the top wider than the base, about a quarter of a barrel in size. His observation was that it was much too salty a dish for his taste.

The talkers at the livery stable, the central store, or the barbershop are also gone, as well as the sea captains who retired at the age of forty-five or fifty to become big men in their communities. The horses, truck gardens, fish heads, rum and rum runners are gone too, and what old men still whittle boats for the tourists on the beach? The ancient marvels who used to gather Cape Cod moss on their backs, telling hilarious stories about chicken stealing, cow “dressing” (manure), boundary disputes, occasional romantic murders, and hard days at sea no longer seem to be available for reference. What a lot of solid objects seem to have gone from the world!

Perhaps I have left history behind too soon, saying, in effect: “Choose what age you like. You may find yourself in another.” Perhaps it is no fault of mine.

During my autumn and winter walks I did find a lasting pleasure in recognizing old things, reconstructing neighborliness, even from a distance, learning to see the silence—the growth and shape of things, the riches of “slow time.” The ponds especially, in the Wellfleet and South Truro regions, protected by the woods around them and the land leading up to the cliffs above the beach, were clear and deep and seemed to reflect quiet habitation over a long time. The water lapped on sandy shores in the sweet, airy winter stillness, broken by the loud, bright braying of blue jays. Coon tracks were sharply etched on the shallow margins where they had gone fishing for fresh-water mussels that left meandering traces on the pond bottom. On the far ends in the shadows there were occasional ducks, like blue-winged teal, mallards, or scaups.

At Gull Pond in Wellfleet one January day there were scarfs of ice along the shore, and out in the center herring gulls flew up and settled down on open water where a light cold wind broke across the surface. Wavelets were continually pushing and jostling broken ice so that it made a high singing, almost bell-like sound.

Around these ponds were crows, evidence of owls, wintergreen leaves to taste, and wind whisking through the pines, or oaks still carrying dead leaves. I heard the odd little hornlike note of a nuthatch as it was rounding the scaly plated trunk of a pitch pine. Pale light moved through the woods and across the hollows. Silvery trees bordered gentle mossy roads, their tracks loaded with fallen leaves. It was all in a special Cape proportion, colored silver and gray, like the Atlantic, or the herring gulls, the clouds and the sky, or an old house that suddenly showed up in true style and balance, not to be imitated by any century but its own.

Then I walked out to see the great green breakers roaming in, and to hear their thunderous bone and gut fall across the length of the beach. The sound held and it took away, a monumental assurance of power past all the roughness and directness of the old life, its quiet suspension in the present, and the wrenching of the not-yet born.

What you have to face after all, in this low wooded land, in the continual dip and rise of its contours, is consummate change, the way the beach itself, or the dunes are changing, keeping a general state for a minute, or even a lifetime, but quite beyond catching. Its history is water.

Water created it in the first place. When the last enormous glacier melted back leaving its indiscriminate load of rubble out in the sea, it had also created a profusion of holes, basins, gullies, the “kettles” which are now dry or semidry hollows, bogs, or still holding water as ponds and lakes, and valleys, broad and narrow runs with outlets to the sea. At one time Cape Cod must have been streaming with water like a whale’s back when it rises to the surface. Now many of the original streams, rivers, and ponds are wholly or in part dried out, but without too much imagination you can fill the landscape with water all over again. Scientific exactitude, geologic reconstruction, make it possible to confirm your sense of the place as full of remnant and abiding fluidity. There is hardly a piece of land on the entire peninsula that does not suggest this.

It is water thousands of years behind, water inseparable from the motions of the future, a power roaring in and destroying, pushing, grinding, ebbing back. It is water in the rain; water in the deep, still ponds; water in the underground darkness; in the gentle seaward running streams; in the tidal estuaries and marshes lowering or flooding over; as sleet; or snow; in icy gales full of the howling emptiness of the winter sea, when the cold metal of the wind pounds on your back and cuts at your face, as it sweeps down the semifrozen sands of the beach where the green and white surf fumes in, rolling and churning with impersonal passion.

Even now the history of Cape Cod is a history of enduring weather, of the same exposures. Only our terms are not the same. Some years ago I stood on the high hills of North Truro late one afternoon, watching the suns red path shining and moving across the wide waters of the bay, thinking of sea surfaces moving over the round earth to its poles, and the poverty of the winter world around me, stripped to ultimates, everywhere exposed, and exposed to everything. The round hills were so bare that the little separate houses in the distance, down in hollows or perched on the long slopes, seemed to shiver. They glittered like so many frost flakes in the air. I had just come from Provincetown and seen a dragger unloading its fish, and the fishermen cutting them up with red, raw-meat hands. The wind was shipping up the water. The gulls were crying over the racing, lathered shore.

It came to me that what had brought me here had not so much to do with a feeling for the old Cape, with its churches in their simple New England grace, or clam-digging, beach-combing, old wrecks, driftwood, or fish weirs, real as it was in me, but a great new outwardness, a universal human event. Each man undergoes a series of changes during his lifetime in a sequence of experience that corresponds to that of the world. He has in him the revolutions, the escapes from holocaust, the interspaces of peace, the fact of war, the anxieties, the cry that his being be fulfilled, the never-ending human examination and measuring of things. So I found myself to be “way out,” a Cape Cod term anteceding the Beat Generation, and meaning far from your home base, with very few old promises behind to sustain me. I had to come to terms with an age without age, a locality without location, perhaps a divinity in fires of no precedent or name. Above all I was required to change, to face in new directions.

The gulls floated in the cold air with customary ease. On my way home I saw a great blue heron flying over a marsh and inlet, its broad wings spread out like a cloak, long legs stretched straight behind it, with feet curled up stiffly, head and neck crooked back. Then it landed in shallow water. Its wings folded and it stood straight up, with a surprising, statuesque height and gaze, the long neck and head above a flock of ducks that were swimming and feeding near by, assuming the kind of composure special to a race of herons that would serve indefinitely. The wind ruffled the water, swept over reeds and curving grasses, sending the last light of day roving in splendid colors over the entire marsh.

All the measured lights and shadows of day and night, the tides of the sea and the tides of the season, the response and joint association of all life’s components in that place stayed much the same as they had ever been, in spite of the way we hurled in our roads and relocated ourselves without rest. Its natural order was still there for old expectation to seize upon; though in terms of accumulated knowledge and wants it was more complex than it had ever been, and would have to endure a human association that was itself on the waters of change, holding hard to the mechanics of its coming. Cape Cod had suddenly lost a slow, accumulative history, perhaps in a matter of twenty years, and would be treated like the rest of the world—as it happened, as it would come about under human auspices. Our problem, one of many, might be this: how could we reconcile universal commitment with the inviolable nature of a single place?