by Philip Hoare
The next day someone had hauled out this sea-deer, this antlered seal, and impaled it on the spikes of the metal railings. It hung there by its neck, dangling as a warning, the way farmers nail dead owls, wings outstretched, to barn doors. I wanted to relieve it of this indignity, to take it down from its cross, but I hadn’t the strength.
So I waited to see what happened next.
The following day it reappeared on the shore, as if it had climbed down overnight. It was accompanied by a carrion crow, tentatively but intimately pecking away at the flesh, performing the last rites. I wished the bird well, and a good breakfast.
I’d forgotten about the carcase when, a week later, I came across its remains in the surf. By now the body had been reduced to a single strand of vertebrae, picked clean by crabs and gulls. It was down to its essential scaffolding, its skeletal beauty twisted like the ghost of a horned sea serpent lolling in the water. The stubby antlers sprouted from the bulbous, rough-edged rings on the forehead; caught between them was a scrap of fetlock-like fur. Skeins of grey flesh still hung about the skull, scrappily attached to the thin white bone. I had to have it, this grotesque piece of flotsam, something to add to the pile back home, the fragments of blue-and-white china, the clay pipes with the bloom still on them, the shards of misty sea-glass, the chunks of green-glazed medieval pots, the stones pierced with holes.
Using a bit of driftwood to hold down the spine, I pulled at the antlers, twisting and wrestling with them as with a bull. It occurred to me, as I did so, how easy it might be to detach a human head. With a stagger, I succeeded in wrenching off my trophy, my prize for having watched so patiently. I had to gouge out a gelatinous eye before stuffing the skull into a plastic bag and tying it to the back of my bike.
I rode away from the beach, passing walkers who wouldn’t guess at my cargo. Back home I opened a hole in the warm brown earth and buried the head up to its antlers. They stood proud of the soil like a pruned rose bush. I piled rocks on top to guard against predators and went back indoors to wait till the antlers sprouted and grew like branches, and as below the surface the skull grew roots which became bones, its lost vertebrae, femurs and ribs all restored, ready to rear up out of the earth, a resurrected, a newly-grown deer of my own.
HEGAZESTOTHESHORE
The runway is spattered with coloured lights, a constellation fallen from the sky. I’m led out into the sharp night air, and take my place beside the pilot. He tells me to slide my seat forward and strap myself in. The dual controls move over my lap, operated by a ghostly co-pilot; incomprehensible dials and LED displays tick and flicker on the console. The plexiglass windows shake with the propellers as we taxi onto the airstrip. We stand ready for takeoff, behind a huge airliner, the kind in which I’ve just spent six hours getting here. But these last few miles seem the most difficult.
The little plane follows the behemoth, drawing courage from its slipstream. The pilot mutters into his microphone, the runway clears and the wings wobble. Suddenly we are rising over the dark city, made darker by the sea at its edge.
I have to catch hold of my breath, like a child on Christmas morning. I want to turn to the pilot and say, Isn’t this amazing? But he just stares ahead, wearing his white pressed shirt, quietly suppressing his ecstasy. Everything falls away, all the houses and streets and offices and institutions, leaving only the black water.
The airstrip lights vanish, replaced by winter stars. Orion lurches over the horizon, lazily rising into position, echoing Cape Cod’s fragile shape in his starry frame. The night is so clear, made clearer by the cold, that I can see through the Hunter’s spaces to the stars he has swallowed, the stars that are being born. We’re astronauts for twenty minutes, inside the sky, flying into another system. I look up and down: there’s no difference above or below. The sea is full of stars; the stars are full of the sea.
Out of the blackness ahead a line of red lights appears, trembling, beckoning us down. It is a tentative landfall: the only thing below us is sand. We return to earth with a bump. For all I know we might have arrived on another planet. Then the pilot turns round in his seat and says, ‘Welcome to Provincetown.’
These past few days the bay has been filled with mergansers. They’re saw-beaked, punk-crested birds, forever roving over the sea in their search for food or sex. Just offshore, three males arch their necks in lusty splendour, fighting over a female. Pat says black-backed gulls sometimes take them. Pat is my landlady, although sealady might be a better term. She’s lived here for seventy years. She knows this place as well as her own body. It is through her eyes that I see it.
Close up, red-breasted mergansers are even more extreme: big, pugilistic, as though they’re cruising for a fight. I see the detached head of one rolling in the tideline. I pick it up, running my index finger along its velociraptor teeth. This winter beach is no place of innocence and play, but a site of carnage and slaughter.
From my deck I hear the forlorn calls of loons drifting across the bay. In the mid-distance is the rocky, guano-spotted breakwater. It was built to protect the harbour, but it was soon colonised by cormorants. They’re despised for their droppings that dribble like fishy porridge, and for their supposed depletion of the fishermen’s catch; so greedy that they dislocate their jaws to swallow fishes whole. Only Pat sees them for what they are: sentinel creatures she has drawn over and over again, kayaking out to the breakwater and tethering to a lobster buoy, Zeiss binoculars in one hand and a black marker pen in the other.
Pat – who resembles a bird herself, with her shock of silver hair, intense brown eyes and high cheekbones – channels these charismatic spirits. Haughty of our disdain, they pose in portrait after portrait, a cormorant lineage, each profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince. Clamped to the rocks by their claws, heads bent to preen or raised to the sky, they hold out their wings – to cool their bodies as much as to dry their feathers – casting shadows of themselves. Some saw the crucifix in the shape they threw, a symbol of sacrifice; others discerned something darker.
In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s young heroine takes Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds from a library shelf on a winter’s afternoon, and hiding in a curtained window seat, loses herself in descriptions of ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ in the Northern Ocean, surrounded by ‘a sea of billow and spray’ and the ‘marine phantoms’ of wrecked ships.
Bewick’s engravings of ‘naked, melancholy isles’ echo Jane’s abandonment as an orphan, ‘an uncongenial alien’. Later, when she meets Mr Rochester, she shows him three strange watercolours she has painted. One portrays a woman’s body from the waist up, seen through a vapour as the incarnation of the Evening Star; another depicts an iceberg under a muster of the northern lights, overloomed by a veiled and hollow-eyed head. In the third allegory, a cormorant perches on the half-submerged mast of a sinking ship. The bird is ‘large and dark, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart’. Below it, ‘a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’.
The double-crested cormorant’s binomial, for all its Linnaean rigour, is resonant of such gothic airs. Phalacrocorax auritus conflates the Greek for bald, phalakros, and korax, for crow or raven, with auritus, the Latin for eared, a reference to the bird’s breeding crests. Its common name also reflects the same allusion, if not confusion, as a contraction of corvus marinus, sea raven – until the sixteenth century it was believed that the two species were related. Indeed, like ravens, cormorants have a noble antecedence: James I kept a cormorantry on the Thames, overseen by the Keeper of the Royal Cormorants who hooded his charges and tied their necks to stop them swallowing their prey. Bewick called them corvorants and thought their tribe ‘possessed of energies not of an ordinary kind; they are of a stern sullen character,
with a remarkably penetrating eye and a vigorous body, and their whole deportment carries along with it the appearance of the wary circumspect plunderer, the unrelenting tyrant’; he noted that Milton’s Satan perches as a cormorant in Paradise, a banished black angel on the Tree of Life.
The cormorant, whose darkness is implicit in its ability to dive one hundred and fifty feet into the sea, predates any tyrannical monarch; its pterosaur pose evokes the reptilian past of all avians. But to some modern eyes, the cormorant is all too common: a scavenger, a sea crow, or, in the careless calling of the American deep South, the nigger goose. According to Mark Cocker, British anglers call it ‘black death’, and demand its execution. But all name-calling reflects only on ourselves: we name to know and own, not necessarily to comprehend. We don’t even have the right words for ourselves.
Like other animals, cormorants have been forced to share the human stain. Far from eating ‘our’ fish, the prey they take is of little value to us. Rather, they appear to be attracted to objects that we discard. In 1929, E.H.Forbush, the indefatigable state ornithologist of Massachusetts – a man who acted as a defence attorney for such accused avians (even though he himself ate some of the species he studied) – noted that a cormorantry off Labrador was embellished with objects the birds had salvaged from shipwrecks, diving like Jane Eyre’s bracelet thief to retrieve penknives, pipes, hairpins and ladies’ combs. Their finds decorated their nests as if they were making their own artistic comments on our disposable culture.
One autumn morning, after a terrific storm that had swept over the Cape and depressed my spirit with its violence, I woke at dawn to find the sea in front of Pat’s house filled with cormorants, hundreds of them. Driven off the breakwater, they’d gathered in a dense raft, avian refugees in an abstract arrangement, each sharp upturned yellow bill, white throat and sinuous neck creating a repeated rhythm, a crazy cormorant expressionism. A scattering of sea crows, marks on the water.
Some perched on the rotting remains of the old wharf, its stanchions reduced, storm by storm, to forty-five-degree angles sticking up out of the water. I watched as the birds rose and fell as one with the swelling waves. Later, I saw them further out. They’d found a source of food, and as the sun glinted on their bobbing bodies they were overflown by herring gulls, a flickering grey layer to their inky black shapes. It was a frenzied, silent scene, watched only by me.
Most mornings, I walk down the beach to meet Dennis and his dog, Dory. Dennis is handsome and everyone loves him. He’s sturdy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a trim beard; he reminds me of Melville. When we get off the whalewatch boat it takes us three times as long to get home, because he stops so often to talk to friends and acquaintances in town. Dennis was once a teacher; he did his national service in the coastguard, but has loved birds ever since he was a boy growing up in Pennsylvania. He came to Provincetown by chance, and stayed. Everyone’s a washashore here, like the soil itself, brought as ballast to these unstable sands; even the turf came from Ireland, to be laid as lawns for the gracious gardens of the East End.
That morning, as Dennis and I walked towards each other, I saw a bird crouched on the rocky groyne in between us. It had tucked its head into its wings; I presumed it was preening, or sleeping. But as we drew near, Dennis took up his binoculars. Something was wrong. He gestured at me with open hands and then at the cormorant, which slipped off the rocks and into the water.
The bird’s bill was lashed to its back by fishing line, and it was tugging pathetically at the monofilament. We followed as it swam parallel to shore. It wanted to return to the land, confused by what had happened to it, as if it might peck off its trusses. But each time we approached, it went back to the water. Dennis was not optimistic. ‘It’ll just keep swimming out – or it’ll dive,’ he said.
I waded into the sea. Dennis ran further up the beach, staying close to the bulkheads to keep his profile low. I tried to splash the cormorant ashore. It worked: the bird made for the beach and Dennis dashed towards it, unafraid of its flapping bulk.
Suddenly there it was, in our hands. A startling sapphire circle around a green cabouchon eye; a fractured sharpness, staring back unblinking. Up close, every feature took on the definition that Pat had drawn: the yellow-tipped bill and its hooked tip, the matt black wings. Primeval enough from afar, this near the bird looked even more like an archaeopteryx on the beach; evolution in our fingers.
Any bird exists apart from us: unmammalian, and therefore uncanny. Yet I could imagine myself a cormorant mate, entranced by this handsome fellow, building a nest on the rocks, proudly holding our bills in the air in celebration of our cormorantness. We took the bird to the deck of a beach house under construction, where a workman produced a knife. Swiftly, Dennis cut the line and pulled the hook from the cormorant’s mouth. Blood trickled out, bright and fresh against the black feathers. Dennis was promptly pecked on the thumb for his trouble, drawing his own blood in turn. I unwound the bird’s bound wings. In a second it was free, half running, half flying back to the water for its lunch.
After a day of louring greyness, when the town seems bowed down by the low pressure – ‘Everyone I meet says they have to go home and sleep,’ says Pat – I retreat to my studio in the timber house. Its double gables rise over the beach like some Nordic chapel or a barn raised by settlers, held up by a pair of cinderblock chimneys. I sleep in its eaves, in an attic like a chandler’s loft or a ship’s prow. At night I climb up to my platform bed via a wooden ladder, ascending to my dreams, descending in the morning, clambering down backwards the way I would at the stern of a boat.
The house is a fragile and sturdy construction, built to withstand three hundred and sixty degrees and three hundred and sixty-five days of weather. In the winter the wind worries at its windows, with their layers of glass and screens, grooves and latches, a complicated, ultimately ineffectual system of defence. No one wins against the wind, not even these wind’s eyes. Running in front of the house is the deck, a wide wooden stage over which Pat lays a path of threadbare yard-sale rugs to stop its splinters from entering her bare feet. They lend the boards a tattered luxury, like some trampled boudoir. Stirred by the wind and rain, they take on a life of their own, rucking like a ploughed field out of which ever-larger splinters sprout as spiky seedlings.
The whole house is still partly tree. The knots in its walls have fallen out over the years, leaving spy-holes and escape routes for whatever creeps and scratches about inside. There are so many compartments, cupboards, stairs and crawl spaces – so many spaces within spaces – that there could be colonies of creatures living under its eaves. Even as I write this, I discover a narrow staircase which I had never seen before in all the years I’ve been staying here, hidden in a cupboard and leading to the top floor like some secret escape route. And when I open the built-in linen closet on the first floor, a cat hisses at me, leaps up a shaft and disappears into an interior where, for all I know, an entire community of feral felines might reside. I sleep with bare boards next to my head, stamped with the timber merchant’s marks,
MILL 50 MILL 50 MILL
W.C.
L.B. ®
UTIL 3/4 W.R. CEDAR
and occasionally silverfish run up and down the western red cedar, their filigree antennae feeling their way like tiny lobsters, while mice scratch in the eaves. I feel the weather and the sea through the wooden walls and the way the day arrives and the night leaves, and there’s sand instead of biscuit crumbs in my sheets. Sometimes the whole house becomes a woodwind instrument played by a demented child. Doors rattle, urgent spirits seeking admission. Timbers creak as a ship caught in ice; articulated chimney cowls squeak like weather vanes turning in the wind. The house reverberates as though remembering how it was built, an echo chamber resonant with everything happening outside and everything that ever happened within. It may be inanimate, but it makes me more alive, this big beach hut. How could anyone not feel that way, knowing that out there is the sea, and all land is lost to the horizon?
The front hits us, head on. The waves, which yesterday lapped the footings of the house, turn over themselves in their remorseless assault on the bulkhead that acts as a buffer between the house and the sea. Town regulations, designed to allow the shifting sand its sway, mean that even the most luxurious decks and dining rooms are temporary arrangements. Pat’s house, now in its sixth decade, was built to be part of rather than apart from the water; in stormy spring tides the sea actually runs right underneath it, disdaining its foundations. By the end of the century all those exclusive properties and ramshackle shacks alike will yield to the waves. ‘The truth is,’ the philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote on one of his visits to the Cape, ‘their houses are floating ones, and their home is on the ocean.’
Directly in front of the house is a raft tethered by a chain to the sea bed. It’s another stage, a four-foot-square island of performance. In the winter seals lounge on it, their doggy heads and flappy feet held in the air to keep warm. Summer visitors think the raft is built for human swimmers; they soon realise that it’s covered in deposits from its other tenants, the eider ducks that take up winter leases, and for whom it is a safe perch even when it rocks wildly in high seas.
Pat and I watch a duck and drake circling the float as if sizing it up. The male makes the first move, followed by his partner. They stake out their separate corners, like a couple seeking their own space. Another male appears with his mate; she is allowed on board, he is rebuffed by the first male. It’s a stand-off. There follows a ritual puffing up of chests and fluttering of wings, like a contest on the dance floor. The inevitable compromise is reached, and the newcomers are admitted. Soon, in the niceties of eider choreography, a third couple arrive and the same rite is observed. All their gestures and cooing, which seem quaint to our anthropomorphic eyes – as if they were saying to each newcomer, ‘No room, no room’ – are in fact grim and determined expressions of potential violence and struggle for precedence.