Chapter VII
AN INLAND STROLL IN SPRING
I
I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the ticking of my watch. Unable and half unwilling to sleep again, I dressed and went out upon the dunes. When something wakes me thus at night, I often dress and go quietly forth on an exploring expedition. It was mildly cold in my ocean world, a light westerly breeze was flowing in fitful eddies close along the earth, the moon was full and high in a cloudless heaven, the surf was but a wash along the ebb. Staff in hand, I crossed the beach to the good footing along the water’s edge, and walked south at a slow pace toward big dune.
As I approached the shadow of the dune, I heard from behind it, and ever so faint and high and far away, a sound in the night. The sound began to approach and to increase in its wild music, and after what seemed a long minute, I heard it again from somewhere overhead and a little out to sea. I stared into the sky but could see nothing; the sound that I had heard died away. Again from behind the dune and to the west of south I heard the lovely, broken, chorusing, bell-like sound—the sound of a great flight of geese going north on a quiet night under the moon.
I climbed big dune then, the peak of these sand mountains; the moon shadow was dark upon its eastern slope, but the crest was lifted to the light and commanded both marsh and sea. The channels were still as moonlit forest lakes, the sea was a great deep surfaced with a thin moon splendour of golden green. I lingered there till the moon began to pale, listening to the wild music of the great birds, for a river of life was flowing that night across the sky. Over the elbow of the Cape came the flights, crossing Eastham marsh and the dunes on their way to the immensity of space above the waters. There were little flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty, there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings, and once in a while I could see the birds—they were flying fast—but scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.
An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean lingers on the edge of winter. Day after day the April sun pours an increasing splendour on the ocean plain, a hard, bright splendour of light, but the Atlantic mirror drinks no warmth. A chance cloud upon the sun, a shadow, and the sea of an instant returns to February. No shadow of cloud may do the same upon the dunes. Under this April light the mound and landward slopes of the great wall have put on a strange and lovely colour which lies upon them with the delicacy of a reflection in a pool. This colour is a tint of palest olive, even such a ghost of it as one may see in spring on the hillsides of Provence, and it is born of the mingling of pale sand, blanched grass, and new grass spears of a certain eager green.
The birds of outer ocean, the “coots” or scoters, the old squaws, dipper ducks, eiders and widgeons, the auks and their kin, have practically all of them forsaken the Cape and returned to their breeding grounds in the North. After the fifteenth of April these sea peoples are rarely encountered on the Cape. The lakes of Manitoba are theirs, the glacial hillocks of Greenland and the matted grasses of the tundra. The spring migrations here do not fill the air and the hours with birds as do the autumnal visitations. Urged on by their own imperious instinct and Nature’s general will, the creatures have a hurried air, and night flights are more frequent with them than on the southward journeyings.
The first shore birds to pause here on their way back to the Northern country were “ringnecks”—the semipalmated plover, Charadrius semipalmatus—and even as the last shore birds I saw were strays, so were these first solitaries and adventurers. On April 2d, I saw a single ringneck running ahead of me along the upper beach; on the 5th I met with another stray; on the 8th I put up a flock of twelve. I have since encountered flocks on several occasions, and sent them wheeling off above the breakers, uttering their melodious and plaintive cry. The note is much like that of the piping plover, Charadrius melodus, but without the piping plover’s flutelike purity of tone.
Since April 5th a small company of gannets, Moris bassana, have been fishing just off the Fo’castle. Gannets have long been favourites of mine. The word “white,” applied to the plumage of birds, covers a multitude of minor tintings; some birds are yellowish white, some greyish white, some ivory white, some white with an undertone of rose. To my eye, the gannet wears as pure and as positive a white as one may find in nature, and, moreover, the black tips of his wings are a black past excelling. The bird is large—ornithologists grant him a length between thirty-three and forty inches—and he has a way of using his wings as if they were hinged fins. When sea and sky are a pleasant midday blue, it is a charming bit of life and decorative colour to see these creatures diving. They make a famous plunge. The birds off the Fo’castle, as far as I can judge, hover between forty and fifty feet above the sea and are fishing the shallows on a bar. On catching sight of fish, they fall on the prey like arrows from a cloud. The impact of each body strikes a tiny fountain from the sea. When fish are plentiful on the bar, these living plummets fall, climb, and fall again till the whole fishing ground is sown with darts of spray. Like the ringnecks, these gannets are on their way North to the breeding grounds.
Early in March, my friend Kenneth Young of Orleans brought me down a load of groceries in his Ford, and as we stood talking on the porch of the Fo’castle I called his attention to the ducks who were stirring about that morning in the channels and making an unusual noise. “Surely,” said I, “they are not beginning to mate so early in the year.” “Well, not exactly,” said my friend, “but they’re ‘choosing partners.’” Somehow or other, much of the etiquette, of the “tone” of courtship among gregarious birds has been caught in this phrase born of the older dance; it has a flavour of the bowings and noddings, the showing offs, the coy approaches, the coy escapes, the expected pursuits, the endless conversational whistlings, mewings, squawkings, and quackings which cover the primitive tensity under the politeness.
Under this April blue, the great marshes are emptier of life than I have ever known them; no longer do westerly winds carry to my ears a sound of spring and wooing. The marsh ducks have sought their ponds and wilderness lakes, the larks have climbed the sky to Labrador, even the herring gulls are scattering. Though the breeding season of the latter bird does not begin till the first or second week in May, the marriageable are already wandering east to Maine. Hundreds of isles and islets on the Maine coast are as wild to-day as they were when Champlain visited the archipelago, and the herring gull breeds there by the twice ten thousands.
The sand has entirely resumed its looseness, its fluidity, but its colour still tells of winter in a faintest hint of grey. The golden warmth is there and is emerging; the climbing sun will soon exorcise this ghost of cold. Through the winter flows and spreadings of the sand, the new spears of dune grass rise, the leaves rolled into a green poignard with a tip of rhubarb bed and a terminal spike as piercing as a thorn. Other leaves, other spikes grow from the withered fists of the old plant, and what are left of last year’s leaves now crack from brittleness and drop away. Even the oozy vegetation of the flats is sharing in the spring. At dead low tide the streaming eel grass of the channel beds, Zostera marina, reveals new patches of wet, bright yellow-green; these stains dominate the spring colours of my world and are very beautiful to see when the April sun is shining.
Mammalian life was the first to emerge from the sterility of winter—I found skunk tracks on the dunes after the certain warm nights in March—and after the mammals came returning birds. Insect life has scarce stirred, though a few stray unknown flies have made their way into the house. In that kingdom life must begin again from the beginning.
April and the sun advancing, the disk rising each day to the north of where it leaped from yesterday’s ocean and setting north of yesterday’s setting, the solar disk burning, burning, consuming winter in fire.
II
I devoted the entire day yesterday to an adventure I have long had in mind, a walk across the Cape from outer ocean to Cape Cod Bay. As the crow flies, the distance from the Fo’castle to the west shore is about four and a half miles; afoot and by the road, it is nearer seven and a half, for one must follow roads lying north of the great lagoon. The day was pleasant; cool, easterly winds blew across the moors, and it was warm enough when I found both shelter and the sun.
I walked to Nauset Station close along the landward edge of the dunes, out of sight and sound of the sea. All up and down these western gradients of grass and sand the plant life of the region is pushing through the surface drifts and sandy overflowings which crept eastward during winter; green leaves of the beach pea are thrusting up; sand crumbs still lodged in their unfolded crevices; the dune goldenrod is shouldering the bright particles aside. Against the new olive colouring of the dunes, the compact thickets of beach plum are as charred-looking as ever, but when I stroll over to a thicket I find its buds tipped with a tiny show of green.
Arriving at Nauset, I found my coast guard neighbours airing their bedding and cleaning house. Andrew Wetherbee hailed me from the tower; we shouted pleasantries and passed the time of day. Then down Nauset road I went, turning my back on ocean and a rising tide.
The first mile of the road from Nauset to Eastham village winds through a singular country. It is a belt of wild, rolling, and treeless sand moorland which follows along the rim of the earth cliff for two thirds of its length and runs inland for something like a mile. Nauset Station, with its tiny floor of man-made greenery, lies at the frontier between my dune world and this sea-girt waste. Coast guard paths and the low, serried poles of the coast guard telephone are the only clues to the neighbourhood of man.
Desolate and half desert as it is, this borderland of the Cape has an extraordinary beauty, and for me the double attraction of mystery and wide horizons. Just to the north of the station, the grass turns starveling and thin, and the floor of the border waste becomes a thick carpet of poverty grass, Hudsonia tomentosa, variegated with channels and starry openings of whitish sand. All winter long this plant has been a kind of a rag grey; it has had a clothlike look and feel, but now it wears one of the rarest and loveliest greens in nature. I shall have to use the term “sage green” in telling of it, but the colour is not so simply ticketed; it is sage green, yes, but of an unequalled richness and sable depth. All along the waste, the increasing light is transmuting the grey sand of winter to a mellowness of grey-white touched with silver; the moor blanches, the plant puts on the dark. To my mind this wild region is at its best in twilight, for its dun floor gathers the dark long before the sunset colour has faded from the flattened sky, and one may then walk there in the peace of the earth gloom and hear from far below the great reverberation of the sea.
West of this treeless waste the Nauset Road mounts to the upland floor of the Cape and to the inhabited lands.
When Henry Thoreau walked through Eastham in 1849, warding off a drenching autumnal rain with his Concord umbrella, he found this region practically treeless, and the inhabitants gathering their firewood on the beach. Nowadays, people on the outer Cape have their wood lots as well as inlanders. The tree that has rooted itself into the wind-swept bar is the pitch pine, Pinus rigida, the familiar tree of the outer Long Island wastes and the Jersey barrens. Rigida has no particular interest or beauty—one writer on trees calls it “rough and scraggly”—yet let me say no harm of it, for it is of value here: it furnishes firewood, holds down the earth and sand, and shelters the ploughed fields. In favourable situations, the pine reaches a height of between forty and fifty feet; on these windy sands, trees of the oldest growth struggle to reach between twenty-five and thirty. The trunk of this pine is brownish, with an overtone of violet, and seldom grows straight to its top; its leaves occur in a cluster of three, and its dry cones have a way of adhering for years to its branches.
They are forever burning up, these pitch-pine woods. A recent great fire in Wellfleet burned four days, and at one time seemed about to descend upon the town. Coast guard crews were sent to help the villagers. Many deer, they tell me, were seen running about in the burning woods, terror-stricken by the smoke and the oncoming crackle of the crest of flame. Encircled by the fire, one man jumped into a pond; scarce had he plunged when he heard a plunge close by and found a deer swimming by his side.
The thickets were rusty yesterday, for the tree thins out its winter-worn foliage in the spring. As I paused to study a group of particularly dead-looking trees, I scared up a large bird from the wood north of the road; it was a marsh hawk, Circus Hudsonius. Out of the withered tops flew this shape of warm, living brown, flapped, sailed on, and sank in the thickets by the marsh. I was glad to see this bird and to have some hint of its residence, because a female bird of this species makes a regular daily visit to the dunes. She comes from somewhere on the mainland north of the marsh, crosses the northeast corner of the flats, and on reaching the dunes aligns her flight with the long five miles of the great wall. Down the wall she comes, this great brown bird, flying fifteen or twenty feet above the awakening green. Now she hovers a second as if about to swoop, now she sinks as if about to snatch a prey—and all the time advancing. I have seen her flutter by the west windows of the Fo’castle so near that I could have touched her with a stick. Apparently, she is on the watch for beach mice, though I have as yet seen no mouse tracks on the dunes. She arrives between ten and eleven o’clock on practically all fair weather mornings, and occasionally I see her search the dunes again late in the afternoon. Circus Hudsonius is a migrant, but some birds spend the winter in southern New England, and I have a notion that this female has wintered in Nauset woods.
Once Nauset road approaches Eastham village the thickets of pitch pines to the eastward fall behind, the fields south of the road widen into superb treeless moorlands rolling down to the shores of the great lagoon, orchard tops become visible in hollows, and a few houses sit upon the moors like stranded ships. Eastham village itself, however, is not treeless, for there are shade trees near many houses and trees along the road.
All trees on the outer Cape are of interest to me, for they are the outermost of trees—trees with the roar of breakers in their leaves—but I find one group of especial interest. As one goes south along the main highway, one encounters a straggle of authentic western cottonwoods, Populus deltoides. The tree is rare in the northeast; indeed, these trees are the only ones of their kind I have ever chanced to find in Massachusetts. They were planted long ago, the village declares, by Cape Codders who emigrated to Kansas, and then returned, homesick for the sea. The trees grow close by the roadside, and there is a particularly fine group at the turn of the road near Mr. Austin Cole’s. In this part of the Cape, an aërial fungus paints the trunks of deciduous trees an odd mustard-orange, and as I passed yesterday by the cottonwoods I saw that the group was particularly overspread with this picturesque stain. The growth seems to do no harm of any kind.
At a boulder commemorative of the men of Eastham who served in the Great War, I turned south on the main highway and presently reached the town hall and the western top of the moorland country. There I left the road and walked east into the moors to enjoy the incomparable view of the great Eastham marshes and the dunes. Viewed from the seaward scarp of the moors, the marsh takes form as the greener floor of a great encirclement of rolling, tawny, and treeless land. From a marsh just below, the vast flat islands and winding rivers of the marsh run level to the yellow bulwark of the dunes, and at the end of the vista the eye escapes through valleys in the wall to the cold April blue of the North Atlantic plain. The floor of ocean there seems higher than the floor of the marsh, and sailing vessels often have an air of sailing past the dunes low along the sky. A faint green colours the sky line of the dunes, and on the wide flanks of the empty moorlands stains of springtime greenness well from the old tawniness of earth. Yesterday I heard no ocean sound.
So beautiful was the spacious and elemental scene that I lingered a while on the top of the moor cliff shelving to the marsh. The tide was rising in the creeks and channels, and the gulls remaining in the region had been floated off their banks and shoals. The great levels seemed, for the moment, empty of their winged and silvery life.
During the winter, one bird has made this moorland region all his own, and that bird the English starling. The birds apparently spend the winter on these hills. I have crossed the open country during a northeast gale just to watch them wheeling in the snow. Scarce had one flock settled ere another was up; I saw them here and there and far away. I find these Eastham birds of particular interest, for they are the first American starlings I have seen to recover their ancestral and European mode of life. In Europe, the bird is given to congregating in vast flocks—there are river lowlands in England where such starling flocks gather in crowded thousands—and once this starling army has established itself in a region it is theirs completely and forever.
Are the flocks at Eastham the beginning of one of those European mobs? Will the various flocks now inhabiting the moors ultimately mingle to form one enormous and tyrannous confederacy? The separate winter swarms already consist of fifty to seventy-five birds, and I imagine that, if the stray members of each flock were to return to their congregations, these bands might be found to contain well over a hundred individuals. Such a mingling as I speak of may possibly take place; again, it may be that the resources of the region are already taxed to support the present birds; let us hope that this last is the truth. The presence of these rabble blackbirds disturbs the entire natural economy of the region, for they strip every autumnal bush and plant bare of its last seed and berry and leave nothing for our native birds to feed on when they return in the spring.
With spring, the birds desert the moors, pair off, and retire to the village barns and the chimneys of unopened summer cottages.
The hour of flood tide approaching, I left the moors behind and went to the west shore to see what I could of the strangest of all regional migrations.
III
Some five years ago, on a night in early April, I happened to be aboard a United States naval vessel bound coastwise from the southern drill grounds to New York. Our course lay well out of sight of land; the night was springlike, still and mild, the stars thick-sown in a faintly hazy sky. I remember that we saw the lights of a few ships standing in to Philadelphia. Once these had dimmed and disappeared behind, the sea was entirely our own, a vast, lonely, still, and starlit sea. Just after one o’clock I saw ahead of us on the sea a field, a shimmer of pale light, formless as the reflection of a cloud and mysteriously troubled by auroral undulations. We had overtaken a migration of fish moving north along the coast with the advance of spring. The skirts of the sun’s robe, trailing over ocean, stir the deep, and its mysterious peoples move North on the fringes of the light. I do not know what species of fish I chanced that night to see, for there is a definite and populous area of marine life lying between Hatteras and Cape Cod. They may possibly have been herring. As our vessel neared the living shoal, it seemed to move as one thing, there coursed through it a new vibration, and it turned east, grew vague, and vanished completely in the night.
Every spring even such a fish migration, moving through ocean as mysteriously as the force of a wave, breaks against our south New England shore. In colonial times the younger Winthrop wrote of it, telling of “the coming up of a fish called aloofes into the rivers. Where the ground is bad or worn out, the Indians used to put two or three of the forementioned fishes under or adjacent each corn hill. The English have learned like husbandry where those aloofes come up in great plenty.” This “aloofe” of the colonists, better known as the “alewife,” and often and incorrectly called a “herring,” is really not a herring at all but a related fish, Pomolobus pseudoharengus. It is distinguishable from the true sea herring by its greater depth of body and by the serrations on the midline of its belly which are stronger and sharper than those of the true herring—so sharp, indeed, that the fish is sometimes called a “saw belly.” In April they leave the sea and run up our brooks to spawn in freshwater ponds.
There is a famous brook in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which I try to visit every year. I remember the last warm April day. The “herring” brook—it is scarce more than ten or twelve feet wide and hardly more than a foot deep—was flowing freely, its clear brownish waters rippling almost noiselessly in the morning light. The fish were “in,” moving up the brook as thickly massed as a battalion along a narrow road; there were no ranks—only an onward swarming. So numerous were the fish, and so regimented, that I stopped at the water’s edge and easily caught two or three with my bare hand. Through the brownish stream the eye looked down to numberless long backs of a subdued dark lavender-grey and to a fleet of dorsal fins breaking water. The brook smelt of fish. Here and there were dead ones, aground on the edges of the stream or held by the current against a rock; dead things lying on their sides, with opaque, slime-coated eyes, and rock bruises on their sides—raw spots of fish blood red in a side of brown and golden scales. Sometimes the advance seemed stilled till the studying eye perceived the constant individual advance. A hundred thousand had come.
These alewives of Weymouth come up out of the sea, and from Heaven knows just where out of the sea. They run up Weymouth Brook, are stopped by a dam, are fished out in a net, dumped into barrels of water, and carted overland in a truck to Whitman’s Pond. I have watched them follow currents in the pond, once they have been spilled out into it. Then comes, perhaps, a sense of arrival and intended time; each female lays from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand glutinous eggs, these drop to the bottom, drift along the mud, and ooze and attach themselves as chance directs. The spawning females and the males then go over the dam and back to sea, the herring born in the pond follow them ten months or a year later, and then comes another spring and a great mystery. Somewhere in the depths of ocean, each Weymouth-born fish remembers Whitman’s Pond, and comes to it through the directionless leagues of the sea. What stirs in each cold brain? what call quivers as the new sun strikes down into the river of ocean? how do the creatures find their way? Birds have landscape and rivers and headlands of the coast, the fish have—what? But presently the fish are “in” at Weymouth, breasting the brook’s spring overflow to the ancestral pond.
Some remember Whitman’s Pond, others remember the ponds of the Cape. There are “herring” ponds and “herring” brooks on the map of Eastham.
The road to the bay leads off at the town hall, passing an old windmill which still has its grinding machinery in place. I entered it once, long ago, to see the dusty chutes, the empty bins, and the stones in their cheese-box cases of ancient and mellow wood. Locust trees inclose it, and song sparrows perch on the arms that have not turned for years. I heard one as I trod the dusty floor, his mating song entering through a broken pane. Beyond the mill, the road passes a scatter of houses, crosses the railroad track, winds between the ponds of Eastham, and then comes to an open mile of sandy fields and pitch-pine country extending to the bay.
The road descends, for the bay rim of the outer Cape is lower than the ocean wall. North of the road, it is but a bank at the end of fields. Accustomed to the roar of the ocean beach and to the salt wind in my ears, the quiet of the bay fell strangely about me. There was no surf, scarce a lakelike ripple; masses of weed, shaped in long undulations by water waves, lay heavy on the beach; forty miles across, earth-blue beyond blue water, and mounded and separate as so many isles, appeared the highlands of Plymouth woods and Sagamore. A few ducks were feeding more than a mile offshore, and, as I watched, a solitary drake rose from the broad marshes to my right and flew off to join them.
The quiet of the bay, the subdued easterly blowing across the fields, the belt of winter weed, the glint and warmth of the sun, the solitary bird—there was a sense of old times dead and of new times beginning—recurrence, life, the turn of the sun’s wheel, always the imperative, bright sun.
I walked along the beach to the mouth of the “herring” brook. The stream is but a clogged gully of clean water running down to the sea through the sandy open meadows. Arriving at the shore, it spills out over the beach and trickles down to the bay. Low tides wash at the trickling rills and cover them; high tides climb the beach and enter a pool which has formed at the mouth behind a dam of weed. Yesterday, the low course tide had scarce touched the edge of the barrier and had begun to ebb an hour before my coming. Between the dam and the high-tide mark of the day lay a twenty-foot interval of beach traced by flat rillets seeping from the barrier. I looked into the pool. The “herring” had been in, for there was a dead one lying on the bottom of weed, a golden fish silted over with fine mud.
Suddenly, on chancing to look bay-ward, I saw a small school of “herring” just off the mouth of the brook and scarce more than fifteen feet from the motionless rim of the tide. There were, perhaps, fifty or a hundred fish in the school. Occasional fins chopped the quiet water. “Herrings” of Eastham brook unable to enter the pond in which they were born, barred from it by a dam of Nature’s making. As I stood looking off to the baffled creatures, now huddled and seemingly still in deeper water, now huddled and all astir in the shallowest fringes of the tide, I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish the earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?
The tide ebbed, swiftly shallowing over the flats, the “herring” vanished from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell when they were gone or the manner of their going.
Returning to the outer beach late in the afternoon, I found the ocean all a cold jade-green sown with whitecaps, the wind rising, and great broken clouds flowing over from the east. And in this northern current was a new warmth.