VII
Barren Grounds
The oceanic landscape reaches across the round earth, over a curved horizon, and that may be one reason why men keep returning to it. The sea attracts the experience of distance. There is still some vicarious adventure to standing on a cliff, breathing the far-ranging air and imagining ships hidden by mists on the horizon, or unknown lands beyond that, or even remembering lands once visited. Over there is where the great passages of history have gone by.
As recently as fifty or sixty years ago, man and sea were involved in a more personal alliance on Cape Cod, and its seamen once voyaged around the world. At the same time there were some local inhabitants who considered it a major expedition to go from one side of the Cape to the other. The fishing, shipbuilding, and voyages to foreign lands that was more characteristic of the Cape before the Civil War than after it gave what might have been a too narrow community, concentrated only on its own affairs, a healthy connection with the rest of the world.
Since the Second World War Cape Cod has been filled with relative outsiders, many of whom have been transported, not necessarily through any fault or wish of their own, to stations around the globe. A place that once went out for its sustenance now waits for the world to come to it.
One of the few people I met during my off-season walks on the beach turned out to be a man who had retired from the city. The open air may have been conducive to revelation, because he told me a great deal about his life during the ten or fifteen minutes I talked to him. It turned out that the place where we stood had some significance in his own history. He looked out to sea from the edge of the cliff and pointed out over the water to show me the general region where transports used to gather during the First World War on their way overseas. He had been on a Navy escort vessel.
“This country,” said he, “is waste,” as he talked about war, small business, rough competition, lumbering, and all the size and circumstances of the men and societies he had met and fought and endured. Through a life-long experience of waste—or waste space—and all his tired compliance with authority and anger against it, he had saved room in him for voyages. He told me that he had come to live near the sea so that he could walk along the cliffs and the beach whenever he wanted to, and to look out, I guess, when he wanted to with a relatively free command view of destiny.
After I left him I met another reminder of war, spread out for several miles along the tops of the cliffs. It is now within the boundaries of the National Seashore Park, and one day, when the beach grass takes hold of its denuded areas, it will no longer be recognizable as a military reservation, but when I first walked through it Camp Wellfleet had just been formally disbanded. Although it was completely deserted, its buildings and some of its installations were still intact. It had been an antiaircraft post, and not of primary importance to a coast which was not likely to be attacked, but I have heard local residents speak of the constant, annoying sound of practice firing, which made the walls tremble and the dishes fall off the shelves, and for several years after the war ended fishermen used to protest that their boats were in the line of fire.
The camp was in what geologists call the Wellfleet Plain. It was on these bare levels above the beach that Guglielmo Marconi built his wireless station and sent out the first transatlantic message in January of 1903. The year before, he had built an elaborate structure with twenty masts, and this had blown down in a heavy onshore wind. The successful message, which took the form of an exchange between Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain, was sent from only four masts, which had more stability in Cape Cod weather. It is typical of the Outer Beach that although Marconi transmitted waves that crossed the world, the sea has had the last word. On the day I walked through nearly sixty years later there was nothing left of what he had constructed but a few fallen bricks on the face of the cliff.
Marconi’s towers were long gone, but the Camp Wellfleet lookout towers and firing range were still more or less intact, and the place only lacked occupation to make it come alive again. The public had been kept out of the area for many years, but now I could walk in on a winter’s afternoon and not meet a soul. I passed a sign saying: MILITARY RESERVATION NO TRESPASSING, not without vague qualms, and memories of my own months in an Army camp, half-expecting the sound of “Halt!” to ring out.
“Yessir. Yessir.” I said to myself, starting to prepare my excuses to some ghost of past authority.
There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that fell on bare gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks. Bareness was something the Army brought to all its posts, so that a bunch of grass was considered unnecessary, or tended for dear life. The Army city, once a humming, purposeful anonymity, was now completely silent and alone, but for me it still kept some of the power of its restrictions, arousing old apprehensions—that tightening of the stomach at facing some new unknown. The bare white barracks were still intact, and the power lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or latrines. There were off-limits signs on empty streets.
I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order, with its own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the feelings of frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered the routine, the rote-mindedness which often passed for efficiency, the utter helplessness that many soldiers felt during wartime, and were obliged to accept, about being part of something huge, anonymous, even reckless and uncalculated, an ignorance of which they themselves were ignorant and to which they had not been invited. I also remembered the unassuming friendships you could make in the Army, the directness with which men accepted each other.
A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the ground. They were interruptions of a nature that did not concern me very much as a draftee in an Army camp, although—more than most—we were exposed to the wide nights and their stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn, and the extremes of heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to Army life that allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted and oversimplified—he was not his own agent—and at the same time he acted for the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him, equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands. When he protested, he was protesting against the passage of all the nights on all the waters.
I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after dark saying he had something of great importance he had to speak to me about. We went out and talked in the company street, standing on the sandy grounds between the buildings, conscious of a towering night with flashing stars. He talked desperately, on and on, about the life he had been planning before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about the job which had now been denied him, the business he was going to establish, and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business was it of the President of the United States to start a war and send him into it?
It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach grass that holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for the sea to roam on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall and the sands to shift and blow. It is inevitable, at one time or another, that each of us should stand on these barren grounds. The gloom of the sea puts all other darkness and gloom in jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable. It carries light over the earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is overbearing and restless and at the same time as strict and balanced as its tides. Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because then it stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns us, the desert without illusion.
Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of the cliff for several miles. Watchers could look out from their transversing positions over the coastline and the sea and signal the accuracy of the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile targets over the water. I climbed two of the towers that still had ladders. They were in fair condition, but clearly not too long for this world of wind and spray, of ice, rain, and snow, and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows were broken, the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors, with boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered how many young men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this lookout over the dark sea. Some of those on duty had left their names behind, probably after the war was over, judging by the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and they also left the names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls, or would-be girls, the signs of need in wastes of order.
Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact, with empty cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground outside. A strand of barbed wire made a little clanging sound of unused warning as I brushed by it. Toward the far end of the reservation, on the Eastham side, I passed another off-limits sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags located in a little hollow on the very edge of the cliff; they were beginning to slide down the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking down on the beach where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only sentinels, facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at a faster rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal weight of one war had gone, but the knowledge and power it let loose had sent us on, committing us to our human ends in the most inclusive and at the same time isolated sense, universally vulnerable.
The wind sent dark clouds of ruffled waters along the sea surfaces, surfaces that tilted and flew, stretching away and disappearing, and the sky light, feather gray in the rain, reflected everywhere. The long surf line sounded with the crash and rattle of stones. The vast flow went on unhindered, restless and controlled, delivering and holding back, a nay and yea sayer at the same time, passing all experiments, accepting all possibility without a care. How could the sea do anything about reassuring mankind as to whether or not we would survive our own acts and commitments? Did man make war, or did war make him? Perhaps we love the sea for its denial of us.
Sitting on the sandbag, I thought of the GI who had last been there, manning a gun now replaced by missiles and rockets—bothered perhaps by the cold, penetrating wind, feeling useless, waiting for his discharge from the Army, wishing he were somewhere else, not knowing beach grass from seaside goldenrod, or one gull from another, but knowing the sea, with its one sound.