The outermost house

Our whole English tradition neglects smell. In English, the nose is still something of an indelicate organ, and I am not so sure that its use is not regarded as somewhat sensual. Our literary pictures, our poetic landscapes are things to hang on the mind’s wall, things for the eye. French letters are more indulgent to the nose; one can scarcely read ten lines of any French verse without encountering the omnipresent, the inevitable parfum. And here the French are right, for though the eye is the human master sense and chief æsthetic gate, the creation of a mood or of a moment of earth poetry is a rite for which other senses may be properly invoked. Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.

One reason for my love of this great beach is that, living here, I dwell in a world that has a good natural smell, that is full of keen, vivid, and interesting savours and fragrances. I have them at their best, perhaps, when hot days are dulled with a warm rain. So well do I know them, indeed, that were I blindfolded and led about the summer beach, I think I could tell on what part of it I was at any moment standing. At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool—cold even—and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward the dunes, now a point toward the sea. For twenty feet a humid and tropical exhalation of hot, wet sand encircles one, and from this one steps, as through a door, into as many yards of mid-September. In a point of time, one goes from Central America to Maine.

Atop the broad eight-foot back of the summer bar, inland forty feet or so from the edge of low tide, other odours wait. Here have the tides strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted festoons of ocean vegetation—with common sea grass, with rockweed olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled green leaves of sea lettuce, with edible, purple-red dulse and bleached sea moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long. In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering—for their very substance is water—and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into the burning air. I like this good natural savour. Sometimes a dead, surf-trapped fish, perhaps a dead skate curling up in the heat, adds to this odour of vegetation a faint fishy rankness, but the smell is not earth corruption, and the scavengers of the beach soon enough remove the cause.

Beyond the bar and the tidal runnel farther in, the flat region I call the upper beach runs back to the shadeless bastion of the dunes. In summer this beach is rarely covered by the tides. Here lies a hot and pleasant odour of sand. I find myself an angle of shade slanting off from a mass of wreckage still embedded in a dune, take up a handful of the dry, bright sand, sift it slowly through my fingers, and note how the heat brings out the fine, sharp, stony smell of it. There is weed here, too, well buried in the dry sand—flotsam of last month’s high, full-moon tides. In the shadowless glare, the topmost fronds and heart-shaped air sacs have ripened to an odd iodine orange and a blackish iodine brown. Overwhelmed thus by sand and heat, the aroma of this foliage has dissolved; only a shower will summon it again from these crisping, strangely coloured leaves.

Cool breath of eastern ocean, the aroma of beach vegetation in the sun, the hot, pungent exhalation of fine sand—these mingled are the midsummer savour of the beach.

II

In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.

The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep, that I trudge through it as through snow.

The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.

Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” Tabanus costalis, stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however, I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from mosquitoes.

Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed. Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed, has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.

On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep, finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller, sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny, sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.

“June bugs,” Lachnosterna arcuata, strike my screens with a formidable boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary black wasps scratch themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon flies.

The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea; heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.

III

I have spoken in another chapter of the melting away of bird life from this region during April and May. There was a time when the all-the-year-round herring gulls seemed the only birds left to me, and many of these were immature birds or birds whose plumage was then changing from immature brown to adult white and grey. One cold, foggy morning late in May, I woke to find the beach in front of the Fo’castle crowded with these gulls, for a number of hake had stranded during the night, and the birds had discovered them and come to feed. Some fed on the fresh fish, findings being keepings—I saw various birds defend their individual repasts from late arrivals and would-be sharers with a show of wings and a hostile cry—others stood on the top of the beach in a long, senatorial row facing the sea. The maturing birds were of all tones of white and brown; some were chalky and brown, some were speckled like hens, others were a curious brown-mottled chalky grey. The moults of herring gulls are complicated affairs. There are spring moults and autumn moults, partial moults and second nuptial plumages. Not until the third year or later does the bird seem to assume its full nuptial and adult coloration.

When I first open my eyes on a bright midsummer morning, the first sound that becomes part of my waking consciousness is the recurrent rush and spill of the summer sea; then do I hear a patter of tiny feet on the roof over my head and the cheerful notes of a song sparrow’s home-spun tune. These sparrows are the songbirds of the dunes. I hear them all day long, for I have a pair nesting on the seaward slope of this dune in a clump of dusty miller. My building of the Fo’castle has given them something to sit on, something they can see the world from, and on its ridgepole they perch, singing at life in general with a praiseworthy persistence. The bird really has two songs, one the nuptial aria, the other the domestic tune; it sings the first in the nest-building, egg-laying season, and the second from the close of the honeymoon to the silence in the fall. I was amazed this year at the suddenness of the change. On the afternoon of July 1st I heard the birds on my roof singing aria number one; on the morning of July 2d they had turned the page to aria number two. The songs are alike; they resemble each other in musical “shape,” but the first is much more of a warble than the second.

On throwing open my door on the dunes, the morning sea, and the vast empty beach with its coast guard paths, I find the house being stormed by swallows—they are picking up the half-torpid flies that have spent the night on the shingles and just buzzed off—and on looking north and south along the dunes I see swallows everywhere. The grass glistens in the early morning light, the slant of the sun picks out the ripening spears, the graceful birds swim close above the green. Most of these birds are bank swallows, Riparia riparia, but I often see barn swallows, Hirundo erythrogastra, and tree swallows, Iridoprocne bicolor, scattered in among them. A little after seven o’clock they melt away. Through the day stray birds come foraging, but the swarm is a morning affair. The bank swallows (the bird with whitish underparts and a dark band across the breast) have nests north of Nauset Station in a clay stratum of the great bank; the tree swallows and the barn swallows live farther inland near the farms. Some say that the bank swallows nest in these dunes. I have never found their nests in this living sand, but the swallows may manage it, after all. Time and again have I been astounded at the manner in which animals use this sand as if it were ordinary earth. Not long ago, on the top of big dune, I found that moles had tunnelled a surface of live sand for six or seven feet.

The common tern, Sterna hirundo, here called the mackerel gull, dominates both the beach and the summer day. Three or four thousand of these birds are nesting in the region; there are nests on the dunes, and whole colonies on certain gravelly areas in the marsh islands near Orleans. All day long I watch them flying to and fro past my windows, now sailing with a favouring wind, now battling into an opposing breeze; I see them going along the breakers long before sunrise, white birds flying past a rosiness of eastern sky and an ocean still blue and dark with night; I see them pass like spiritual creatures in the dusk. There are crowded days when I live in a cloud of their wings and the clamour of their cries.

Sterna hirundo, the common tern—Wilson’s tern, some call him—is indeed a lovely bird. His dominant colours are pearl-grey and white, his wings are bent, he is from thirteen to sixteen inches long, and he is marked by a black hood, an orange-coral bill tipped with black, and bright vermilion-orange legs and feet. To my ear, the bird’s call has a cawing quality; it is, indeed, a cawing screech with an “e” sound and a high pitch. Harsh though it is, it is not disagreeable; moreover, it is capable of wide emotional variations. Going south on a recent day along the dunes, I arrived at the place where the parent terns, homing from the sea, were crossing the sand bar on their way to their nests, and as the birds came in sight of their mates and their fledglings, their cry changed its quality, and took on a kind of wild, harsh tenderness that was touching to hear.

On Monday morning last, as I sat writing at my west windows, I heard a tern give a strange cry, and on looking out and up I saw a bird harrying the female marsh hawk, of whose visits to the dunes I have already told. The sea bird’s battle cry was entirely new to my ear. “Ke’ke’ke’aow!” he cried; there was warning in the harsh, horny cry, danger and anger. The greater bird, flapping her wings as if they were spreads of paper—the winging of this hawk, near earth, is sometimes curiously like the winging of a butterfly—made no answer, but sank to earth slowly, wings outspread, and rested for a long half minute on the shell-strewn floor of the sand pit forty feet back from my house. Thus perched motionless, she might have been a willing mark. Scolding without pause, the tern, who had followed the enemy down into the pit, then rose and dived on her as he might have dived on a fish. The hawk continued to sit motionless. It was an extraordinary scene. Regaining level wing just above the hawk’s head, the tern instantly climbed and dived again. At his third dive, the hawk took off, flying ahead and low across the sand pit. The battle then moved into the dunes, and the last I saw of the affair was the hawk abandoning the hills and flying south unpursued far out over the marsh.

Watching the hawk thus a-squat on the sand in a summer intensity of light, with the grey sea bird angrily assailing her, there came into my mind a thought of the ancient Egyptian representations of animals and birds. For this hawk in the pit was the Horus Hawk of the Egyptians, the same poise, the same dark blood-fierceness, the same authority. The longer I live here and the more I see of birds and animals, the greater my admiration becomes for those artists who worked in Egypt so many long thousand years ago, drawing, painting, carving in the stifling quiet of the royal tombs, putting here ducks frightened out of the Nile marshes, here cattle being herded down a village street, here the great sun vulture, the jackal, and the snake. To my mind, no representations of animals equal these Egyptian renderings. I do not write in praise of faithful delineation or pictorial usage—though the Egyptian drew from his model with care—but of the unique power to reach, understand, and portray the very psyche of animals. The power is particularly notable in Egyptian representations of birds. A hawk of stone carved in hardest granite on a temple wall will have the soul of all hawks in his eyes. Moreover, there is nothing human about these Egyptian creatures. They are self-contained and aloof as becomes folk of a first and intenser world.

So completely do the thronging terns dominate the beach that they will often gather to chivvy off a human intruder. I am often chased all the way to Nauset. Three made for me yesterday afternoon as I was going north at two o’clock, trudging the hot and heavy sand.

It is an odd, a rather amusing experience to be thus barked at and chivvied along by birds. Down the beach they followed me, keeping pace with me and stopping when I stopped, their swallow-like tail feathers fish-tailing out as they manœuvred close above my head. About once every half minute one of the three would climb twenty or thirty feet above me and behind, tread air for a second or two, and then swoop directly down at me with a scolding cry, the rush ending in an up-lane scarce a foot above my head. So soundly was I scolded, and so constant was the sharp clamour, that one might have thought that the birds had found me pirating eggs and nestlings. As a matter of fact, I was miles away from any nest or nesting place. Those who disturb terns actually on their nests are chivvied by dozens in just such a manner, and are even struck, and struck vigorously, by the birds.

I suspect the marsh hawk of being on her way to raid these nests. Madam Hawk has probably been sitting on eggs of her own, for I have seen little of her since she gave up her daily forays sometime in the spring.

From mid-June to mid-July, the terns are at their best. Their eggs are hatching, the fish are running, and all day long the parent birds are going back and forth between their nests and the sea. When I open my door at sunrise, the terns are already passing my house, flying twenty or thirty feet above the curling, oncoming seas. Hour by hour they pass in two endless streams, one going fishing, the other bringing home the catch; hour after hour they pass—thousands of birds an hour when the fishing is good and near at hand. Returning birds, almost without exception, hold silvery fish crosswise in their bills, and, unlike the crow in the fable, a tern can cry out without dropping his prize.

The great majority of these birds are males bringing food to their mates and the new-born young. The catch usually consists of three- and four-inch sand eels, but I occasionally see birds flying bow-down with tinker mackerel. Sometimes a bird passes carrying two “eels,” holding the pair as best he can.

A week ago, just after two o’clock on a bright afternoon, the birds suddenly came streaming from everywhere to the surf along the dunes. Skates had again driven in a people of “eels.” It was high tide; the seas gathered and broke, the heaviest shaking the beach. Into the curling baroque crests of the waves, into the advancing slopes of the gathering green swells, into the race and flow of white seethe and yellow sand, the bright air rained down birds on the now doubly imperilled and darting prey. The air was cut with wings and pierced with eager, hungry, and continuous cries. The birds make plummet dives and strike up jets of water from the surf. The harassed fish moving south, the terns followed after them; an hour later, through field glasses, I could see the thing still going on just north and seaward of the shoals.

Piratic jaegers, Stercorarius pomarinus, Stercorarius parasiticus, apparently never trouble these Eastham birds. I have seen but one jaeger on this beach, and that a solitary bird who chanced to pass the house one morning last September. Cape Cod neighbours, however, tell me that jaegers are numerous in the bay, and that they harry the terns who fish the shoals off Billingsgate.

Almost every day, in the full heat of noontide, I go down to the lower beach and lie down for a while on the hot sand, an arm over my eyes. The other day, in a spirit of fun, I raised my arm toward a passing tern—the returning birds fly scarce thirty feet above the beach—and to my amusement the creature paused, sank, and hovered above me for a few seconds scarce ten feet from my hand. I saw then that its under plumage, instead of being white, was a lovely faint rose; I had halted a roseate tern, Sterna dougalli. I wriggled my fingers; the bird responded with a cry in which I read bewildered indignation; then on it flew, and the incident ended.

This year a number of laughing gulls, Larus atricilla, accompany the terns fishing, the dozen or so gulls keeping to themselves while flying with their neighbours.

The most interesting adventure with birds I have had this summer I had with a flock of least terns, Sterna antillarum. It came to pass that early one morning in June, as I happened to be passing big dune, a covey of small terns unexpectedly sailed out at me and hovered about me, scolding and complaining. To my great delight, I saw that they were least terns or “tit gulls,” rare creatures on our coast, and perhaps the prettiest and most graceful of summer’s ocean birds. A miniature tern, the “leastie,” scarce larger than a swallow, and you may know him by the lighter grey of his plumage, his bright lemon-yellow bill, and his delicate orange-yellow feet.

The birds were nesting at the foot of big dune, and I had disturbed their peace. In the splendour of morning they hung above me, now uttering a single alarmed cheep, now a series of staccato cries.

I walked over to the nests.

The nest of such a beach bird is a singular affair. It is but a depression, and sometimes scarcely that, in the open, shelterless beach. “Nest building on the open sand,” says Mr. Forbush, “is but the work of a moment. The bird alights, crouches slightly, and works its little feet so rapidly that the motion seems a mere blur, while the sand flies out in every direction as the creature pivots about. The tern then settles lower and smooths the cavity by turning and working and moving its body from side to side.”

I have mislaid the scrap of paper on which I jotted down the number of nests I found that morning, but I think I counted twenty to twenty-five. There were eggs in every nest, in some two, in others three, in one case and one only, four. To describe the coloration of the shells is difficult, for there was a deal of variation, but perhaps I can give some idea of their appearance by saying that they were beach-coloured with overtones of bluish green, and speckled with browns and violet-browns and lavenders. What interested me most, however, was not the eggs, but the manner in which the birds had decorated their nests with pebbles and bits of shell. Here and there along the beach, the “leasties” had picked up flat bits of sea shell about the size of a finger nail, and with these bits they had lined the bowl of their nests, setting the flat pieces in flat, like parts of a mosaic.

For two weeks I watched these “leasties” and their nests, taking every precaution not to disturb or alarm the setting birds. Yet I had but to pass anywhere between them and the tide to put them up, and when I walked south with coast guardsmen, I heard single cries of alarm in the starry and enormous night. Toward the end of June, a sudden northeaster came.

It was a night storm. I built a little fire, wrote a letter or two, and listened to the howling wind and the bursts of rain. All night long, and it was a wakeful, noisy night, I had the “leasties” on my mind. I felt them out there on the wild shelterless beach, with the black gale screaming over them and the rain pouring down. Opening my door, I looked for a moment into the drenching blackness and heard a great roaring of the sea.