These sand dunes were made by the ocean. They are ground the sea gave back, returned from every shore its storms have ripped or currents tugged or tides unraveled, and it is an odd, sometimes unearthly-seeming place. The dunes rise up like monuments; the ocean took thousands of years to build them, but they may be seen, in slow-time, to breathe and move, rising and falling and lapping forward. Now in spring the skittish birds touch briefly and lift off again, leaving scratches in the sand. Waves push up against the shoreline, and beneath the waves, with every beat, a new line of dunes is forming as a sandbar slowly rises offshore.
When the ocean makes land it creates something different from land’s land. No bedrock or heavy humus and clay, no hard-packed soil to clasp the roots of big trees and fold records of time in its layers. It builds with what its currents can carry, piece by piece, and grain by grain, slowly accumulating. The ocean, in its disquiet, can only imagine—that is, bring forth an image of— flux, and so it creates a shoreline that moves in waves, and hills that rise and fall and toss over one another, and take the print of the wind on their surfaces.
From where I’m standing, the landscape presents a peculiar unity. My gaze takes in dunes and ocean, miles of water and sand lapping in either direction. They look like images of one another, though the dunes lie still and the waves keep churning toward shore. This is an illusion, of course; in fact it is the dunes which are moving, some fifteen feet a year, walking south toward the highway, headed for town. The water’s not going anywhere; a pulse moves through it, lifts, and lets it go. In a time-lapse photo, over a season, or a year perhaps, the impression would be reversed: the waves must freeze to an average stillness, a little blurred at the edges, and the slow-moving dunes would be seen to crawl forward, cresting and tumbling over themselves, grain by wind-borne grain. Quietly, in smallest increments over millennia, the wave turns to stone, and the stone dances.
Wet grains of sand are sharp and cold, clinging to the soles of my feet as I make my way down to the outhouse. The clock on the ledge, “Little Ben,” shows a quarter past six. At the bottom of the path I pause to look out across the marsh below, all pale green over grey-shadowed sand, and back into the dunes where a hundred seagulls are stirring from their nighttime roost. They rise and begin wheeling down to the beach, making sleepy grumbling noises as they fly across the sky, the sunrise rosy on their breasts.
Every night after sunset they leave the shore to fly back into the shelter of the dunes. Day turns them and they rise, circling down to the water’s edge, adding their constant motion to its rhythms. Now they lift and begin to turn, veering off to the east, a dark cluster opening, spun outward like a spiral galaxy. Nothing organizes them; the figure unfolds in an instant out of separate bodies, a starflower blossoming, charged with light. They come and they come, lifting my sight after them; now their cries sound across the hills. They are, briefly, one thing, then just as quickly the form dissolves as they spread across the sky and are gone. I feel a chill along my skin, like fear: I look back, and there is no mark where they slept against the side of the dune, a hundred white birds covering the sand. The sky is full of them, and then empty.
The cold of these mornings gets into my bones, I think, when I feel how lightly the world holds us, how quickly we pass through it and are let go. Our whole presence here is momentary; we cling to the side of a dune in our little wooden shack, and call it home. We invent our own story, in its thousand details, accumulating particulars to construct a life, each day remade in its own image. A wave, a ripple, a shape of wind. Does a shack on stilts in sand leave a mark? Or the way we touch each other in the dark? This is our third summer here: I wonder what shape we make, what gesture holds.
I latch the wooden door behind me and turn to climb the path. Little leaves of ivy threaded with strands of beach grass flip and shiver in the breeze, showing their dark undersides to the light. A ripple passes along the hill, a scutter of light across surfaces wet with dew, as the birds tilt white bellies, grey backs overhead, a visible wave taking on various bodies as it moves through the world.
The ocean is waves and the dunes are also waves: are they a form or a motion? Cadences of water and rock echo each other in slow time, while the gulls’ wings make a figure I can only see clearly in my mind, a shape that exists nowhere, caught in the instant of opening, closing. Yet the world is real, repeating its coherent patterns. A pulse thrums through bare matter, arranging visible molecules in its reflection, adding a curve to every line—it beats through us and we’re lifted, carried forward, reeling. For every fall forward is a compensatory holding back, a hesitancy in matter that makes it circle back to complete itself. Straight lines are the mind’s fantasy; the world is round and we move in orbits, revolving away from a center we do not see, and “the way from any point to any other point,” as D. H. Lawrence wrote, “is around the bend of the inevitable.”
Thunk up the stairs; the smell of coffee advancing on the air encourages me that Bert is up and life goes on. “Good morning!” I call, peering in through the screen. A muffled reply issues from the far corner where he stands with a towel over his face. Water splashes in the basin, then the little clink and scrape of razor and mug. “You stay put,” he sternly admonishes the mirror leaned against the shelf. I sit down to brush the wet sand from my feet. A thousand particles, clinging to whatever touches them, travelers from a thousand shores, they fall back into an ocean of sand.
If this world moves in waves, sand is the matter that is displaced, lifted grain by grain, in minutest particles, singly and in droves, to change the structure of appearances. Sand follows motion; nearly weightless, it can blow away or float or be carried along in any movement of air or water. Old eroded crystals, granules of rock, particles of quartz and feldspar, flakes of silica, they are nothing alone. Together they create a landscape. Gathered up, they make plains and pleats, cliffs and dunes, and long sloping beaches where terns and plovers scratch out their nests in summer. Sand grains are very old, worn down from rock into particles, finally nearly irreducible. They are the particular, the acted-upon, material. Whatever force moves through us, without these particulars to gather and adhere, our days are lost, blown away in a motion too great to hold. So too the thousand things: the chill of daybreak giving way to sun, casting deep shadows in our footprints tracked across the sand and back, the tightly gathered petals of the beach rose opening, the woodstove sending its plume of smoke from the chimney.
Bert’s voice comes suddenly from the doorway behind me. “So, how did you sleep up there?” he asks. Any movement in the bunk by either of us sets the whole contraption shaking, but Bert thinks I’m the only one who moves.
“I slept just fine,” I answer him mildly.
“Well, you were flipping like a pancake. I thought the bed was going to come down.” His voice is teasing, inviting response. So the domestic current resumes, with its tug and press: affection and challenge, call and response. The two of us swim in it, rise and fall, and feed in its streaming. This current carries us forward; we’re held in the wave as it breaks and falls. I brush the numberless grains from my toes and stand up, turn, and walk full circle into my lover’s arms.
FOUR
The Edge
The beach goes on forever, a membrane between two worlds. I walk that disappearing line, along the edge of it, where the water slams up on shore and its movement reverberates through my entire body. A billion grains of sand shift underfoot and cold water crashes at my feet, once every seven seconds. This is no-man’sland, where nothing grows, a place of contention and disorder, of broken forms, and litter that stinks in the sun. Here the great beat of the ocean falls back, finding its limit; the waves curl as they hit and burst into particles, tossing molecules of water and salt into the air. The shore thrums softly with each blow, and, sloping downward, dives under water. And in all this beat and surge the victims are casually cast up, things of one world that can’t live in the other.
Bodies float up and begin to rot in the rich
air. A new moon pulled the tide high up the beach last night, leaving long, scalloped ridges of wrack and flotsam to mark its retreat. Shells with their insides gone soft and black, wet crumbling snail meat, and unhatched fish eggs all bloated and stinking in their sac membranes, lie strewn across the sand. A kind of sponge called dead man’s fingers swells and dries pale in the sun, a six-fingered amputee, porous and reeking. The upper beach is studded with debris: nests of driftwood, cans, and dense, salt-rotten boards, bottles ground to a dull sheen by the waves’ thrashing, tangled string and garish shreds of fishnet dyed orange and red, acid yellow, and the dire green of deepest sea caverns. I kicked up a light bulb wrapped in black electrical tape and sticking half out of the sand, a glass mummy loosening its bandages. These things belonged once to the land and were lost. They return strangely changed, with the smell of that other world all over them. A snarled fishing line, trailing a plume of kelp and a plastic detergent bottle, slams back and forth in the shallows; up ahead in the sand, something small and ghostly is burrowing out of sight.
It’s a bright, cold morning down here among the wrecks. I’m walking at a slant, left foot low, right foot high, one side to the water and one leaning upland, heading east and south towards Truro. The high beach is flatter, but the sand up there is soft; here at the waves’ edge is firmer footing. Up ahead in the east, the sun spreads an oily sheen across the water. The sky is pale, with a foam of sea clouds stirred into it, as if someone had poured white paint into blue without mixing them thoroughly. Along the horizon, a thin white line appears, tracing the border of sea and sky, a gap between the worlds where another light shines through.
Past the opening where Snail Road cuts through the foredune, an intersection marked by two posts in the sand and some jeep tracks that end abruptly at the tide line, I press forward into an empty landscape. Three gulls ride high above the waves, their wings barely moving as they float on an offshore breeze. The shoreline stretches away in an arc, following the curve of the earth, and drops down into the sky. Down here only the barest coordinates mark a position—there are no landmarks, everything flat and bright. My hand above my eyes, I scan the front of the sand bar, hoping for a glimpse of whales, but it’s still too early. The finbacks will be here in June.
In late May the back shore is almost empty of life. The spring migrations raced through in April: geese and arctic terns headed to the northern tundras and cold inland lakes of Canada and Greenland. In town their hurried night flights woke us; cries of passage echoed in our dreams. Deeper inland, warblers streamed through the woods, flitting in and out among the spiky branches of pine and beach plum. Blackburnians, magnolias, blackpolls, and Tennessees, they rested, fed, and moved on, followed in turn by our summer residents, the kingbirds, catbirds, phoebes, and swallows, who are gathering now in woods and marshes along the highway. Most of our ocean birds have disappeared—even the herring gulls, who seem otherwise never to forsake our company, have begun scattering to nesting colonies along Monomoy and Long Point. Today a few immature gulls, too young to breed, strut importantly down the beach, meeting up with a company of the smaller, pretty laughing gulls, just in from the Carolinas.
Some birdhouses poking up over the hill were the first sign I was nearing Thalassa: gradually the peak of its roof rose into view above the crest, then came a small dip in the grasses where the footpath winds down the hill, not noticeable really, unless you know how to look for it. The passage of people over sand is ghostly, fleeting. Where Frenchie’s shack faces the beach, thrusting its little screened porch out ahead of it, the dunes open slightly to allow a glimpse of its shingled front. Years ago a sand dune moved in and covered this shack, burying it up to its windows, and rather than dig it out whoever owned it then simply built on top of it, making this the only shack in local record with a basement.
Past Frenchie’s, still shuttered and dark inside, and past Thalassa, with its little pointy roof rising over the foredune, around the bend and beyond the cliff where the beach gets narrow and almost disappears at high tide, some terns were flying, making high, nervous cries above the whitecaps. These were least terns, little sea swallows with black caps, forked tails, and temperaments as quick and tense as bees. They seem to dislike the land, and only come on shore reluctantly to nest, where they exhibit all the paranoia of exile. They began arriving last week from South America, and are getting ready to mate and scratch out their nests on the sand. One would approach the shore and veer off, as if losing nerve, then turn and take it out on his neighbor, wheeling and crying out in an accusing tone. By midsummer their nervousness will flower into a hysteria that will send them diving at the heads of intruders, but today they only followed me complaining, making a quivering company along shore. And when they had had enough of me, they flowed away into the sky.
After the terns I saw no one, just a disconsolate crow jabbing at a reeking pile of eel-grass, and a half-dead skate I nearly stepped on at the water’s edge, a flat, gelatinous carpet heaved up cold on the wet sand. I stopped and poked it with my foot, and it rose up with a shudder, revealing its white underside, its gaping v-mouth gulping the fatal air. From deep covered sockets on top of its head its eyes stared and rolled as the thing with a prodigious effort flipped on the sand, lashed its horny tail and fell back. That must have been the last gasp because the next wave lifted it and it rode back and forth in the waves, its wings flopping uselessly.
My shadow trails me as I walk south. There are no shacks out this far and little sign of life. The beach gets narrow, then wide again; grass grows down to the tide line, then the shore is cut back in a steep scarp sloping upward for a hundred yards. Along the rim where waves have torn at the edge of the grasses, black, salt-soaked roots hang exposed in midair. A plover skids past with a plaintive cry. Where am I? I could be anywhere. The scene is all flatness and falling away—the empty strip of beach running down the side of the globe, and the blue dome of sky curving down to meet it. Past Pilgrim Heights, maybe, certainly not so far as Head of the Meadow. I can’t be sure. What at a distance seems to be a wreck unburying itself turns out, as I approach, to be a tree limb bucked about in the waves, A whale’s carcass rises out of the sand, but as I come closer it becomes a bleached log, salt white, with stubs of broken limbs.
I stop and open my water bottle. The tide has turned, and small waves wash up over the hard berm. Teasing the edge, they sizzle, fizz, and run back down to the water. Behind me, I notice my footprints running at an angle up the beach, swelling and darkening as water rises in them from below. Without my paying attention, the incoming tide has pressed me higher inland as I walked. This visible evidence of change is unexpectedly startling. “Time and motion, time and motion… of course,” I think, to reassure myself.
Here is the point of creation, a beat that has been going on since time began. The present: breaking, moving, clashing, never to be repeated; the world teetering on a point of balance. The waves make old music, tearing at the shore, singing, “you must change, change,” as they press forward on the land, a movement widening, center to circumference, opening until it breaks. Offshore a small boat drifts east with the current; there’s a dragger about a mile down, in close pulling for scallops. Overhead, a pale broad sky floats off into space, not even seeming to touch the horizon.
The sun is high now; I need to think about heading back. If I turn around the scene will all be new, this sheet of sand before me, the endless border of sea and land, and offshore a green curl of wave breaking over the sandbar. You can’t bend time backward; even the way home is another going forward, and the waves never repeat, or rest. One curve leads to another, endlessly disappearing. I walk, balanced on an invisible line that only exists in motion. And wherever I step, waves are tearing the ground away beneath my feet.
The sky is cold; its air is thin. I walk in the sky, bathed in sky, holding onto this narrow shore where the sea approaches and retreats before me. A line of sand grains forms at the shoreline and presses inland, a single line, then another.
I give a moment to looking both ways, but I walk the edge, my head turned toward the path, the line without width or depth. The beach goes on forever and I walk that disappearing line, into time that opens to the pressure of my passing and closes behind me, complete.
FIVE
Harrier
The marsh hawk is back. We’ve missed seeing her these first few days and worried that she had gone off. But this morning she flew in from the west, crossing in front of the windows where we sat eating breakfast. For a moment the air was full of her, a large brown beast, warm and strong with life, charging the space between us with a fierce resolve. “The hunter,” Bert said as she flew close, her wings spread wide. We could see the determined hook of her beak and the small, pale eyes fixed in concentration as she beat steadily westward.
“The” marsh hawk, I said. There has always been a marsh hawk at Euphoria, according to—well, everybody. The landscape seems to require one, this bare hill giving way to valleys spotted with rose and bayberry, and the beach meadow that stretches for miles down the coast, whose high grasses shelter mice, voles, shrews, and other small creatures, a regular rodent buffet in summer. Hawk, mice, rabbits, moles and shrews—they have been entwined here for generations, maintaining a bloody equilibrium on this narrow strip of earth.
There’s no way of knowing for sure whether this bird is the same one we’ve seen the past two summers, but it probably is. She’s a big female, almost two feet long, with a wingspan more than a yard across. She winters in the woods near town, around Clapps or Shankpainter Pond. I think I have even seen her there, hunting along the highway down by Herring Cove. Summers, she nests in the marsh behind Phil Malicoat’s shack— that’s the direction she comes from as she crosses the dunes every morning. She appears rising up from the bog behind us, passes in front of the windows, and flies up the coast along the outer dune ridge. Her routine never varies: always a quick flyover in the morning, intent on reaching some distant spot, and then a more leisurely afternoon call when she pauses to hunt close to home.
The Salt House Page 3