The marsh hawk is not an especially rare bird, and not the biggest one here, either. The great horned owl is more imposing, and people have even spotted eagles in the woods not far from here. But this hawk is important, a part of the place’s story. We look for her return to mark our own, to verify our place in the succession of residents at Euphoria. She is part of our life too. For two summers now we’ve watched her, learned her habits, stood struck still with the beauty of her flight as she threaded in and out among the hills. Her arrival completes a circle we stand just outside of—witnesses or citizens, we’re not always sure. Who holds a true title here? We’re all transients, still squatters when all’s said.
We finished breakfast and hurried outside. First down to the beach to pay our respects to the Atlantic. A path one footprint wide draws a faint white line through the waving green, then opens onto bare sand.
When you get to the ocean there is nothing to do but stop and look at it. It is a cold sea, bright with reflected light; your gaze glances off its surface, skids across the deep closed darkness beneath. You can look and look, without seeing any more. This morning the surf was sending up a dull roar, broken from time to time by the hard thump of a breaker collapsing on the packed sand. Wind out of the northwest stirred the waters into a froth, whipping the hair into the corners of my eyes.
We stood together with our arms crossed over each other’s backs, and watched a big, awkward gull being driven slowly backward by the wind.
“Do you want to walk with me?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I need to go back and look at those drawings I did yesterday. See if they’re doing anything. You don’t mind?”
I don’t mind. We’ve both learned that life in small quarters depends on each of us spending time alone every day, and Bert knows I like to walk in the mornings before I write. We stood leaning on each other a while longer, braced against the wind, then gradually unlocked our arms and moved apart. He kissed me, and we turned to go our separate ways. Bert took the tight winding path up through the beach grasses, and I headed into the wind, going north.
I worked my way down the beach for about half a mile, the wind pushing against me, cold air filling my lungs. I pushed back, leaning into it with each step. Dry seaweed blew down the shore, making little scuttling sounds. The beach was wild, edgy, cold. A little ways up past Phil Malicoat’s, I turned into a gap between the dunes. Behind the first wall of sand the world was quiet again; the sun fell warm on my hands. The grasses stood up straight and still in the sun—new green shoots pushing up into a nest of last summer’s dry stalks. Rabbit scat dotted the edge of a plum thicket. The beach plums were stark and wintry looking, with little leaves opening along their spiky branches.
It’s spring, such as it is. Springtime lags four or five weeks behind the calendar here. The surrounding waters, which keep the air mild, and warm rosebuds into December, can’t forget the injury of winter, and remain a grudging reservoir of cold through June. The sun pours down and the water glares back, then turns a cold shoulder of wave upward. In April the average temperature in town is forty-four degrees, in May about fifty-five—but don’t count on it. If you need to feel sure of spring on Cape Cod, look to the return of the light, which is ordained and measurable, and ignore, if you can, the fickle winds.
I came up behind Phil’s along a sort of path marked by a broken section of old fence running along a ridge. The shack has been opened, but nobody is staying there now. Since Phil died last year it has sat empty most of the time: his family can’t get used to the place without him.
Hunkered down behind half a dune, Phil’s is a grand shack, with two rooms, one with a brick fireplace and the other boasting a big-bellied stove. It also has a flush toilet in a little bathroom underneath, which I found most impressive when we visited him there. It works by gravity; you empty a pail of water into the toilet and it all goes down a pipe and ends up God knows where. Of all the shack owners, only Phil Malicoat ever owned the land he built on. He bought a pie-shaped plot running from the bay side to the back shore in the 1930s for a hundred dollars. (He said he had to borrow fifty.) Townspeople thought he was crazy, buying land no one wanted, but he ended up with bay-front and oceanfront property, as well as all the woods and dunes in between. And when the Park Service drew up plans for the National Seashore in 1961, they found Phil’s land slicing right through the middle. He struck a bargain, selling off most of the dune acreage to the Park Service, and kept the shack to hand on to his family.
Phil liked to walk the beach every morning; however early we came out we would always find his footprints ahead of us in the sand. After breakfast he would drive his old green Land Rover back into town, where he would paint all day in his studio. We miss his wild evening rides, when he’d appear careening over the top of the big dune, gunning down Snail Road and then up the beach, which he drove like a dragstrip, and his two-minute visits to drop off a gift of lettuce from his garden, or in August the inevitable zucchini. He would never stop to talk, or even turn off his engine, impatient to get back to his shack in time for sunset. He was seventy-two, with a bad heart, when a stroke felled him near the end of winter. Now in the mornings, our prints are the first ones on the beach, an honor we never earned, or much desired. Skirting the marsh, with its cranberry bogs and high-bush blueberries, soggy with rain this time of year, I climbed up into the dunes. The sand is loosening underfoot as the sun dries it, scuffing up a finer dust as it changes from brown to ivory. It is as if no one had ever walked there, when the dry wind lifts away your footprints and the herring gulls scud overhead with their prehistoric beaks and astonishingly white, wide wings. The long dune shoulders rise and fall, bare, trackless, and the whole wide landscape seems to flow out in all directions, with nothing to stop your gaze from rolling down the side of the earth. I walked along kicking at bones the wind uncovered, poking my nose into white bits of shell, and green upstarting in clumps. Light and shadows crossed the sand; the dunes tilted up into the turning sky, folding one into another. I climbed them as if launching myself into space, into air so sharp and thin it hurt to breathe. Nothing was holding me. The sweet pitch of a blackbird’s voice rose up from the marsh below.
At the summit, I turned and saw in the distance the pale, still line of the beach molded to the changing water. To the right a jeep trail cut into the sand; two stripes of tire track humped up in the middle, headed straight down the side of the dune and disappeared into a miniature woods of oak and pitch pines. To the left, in the distance, the blue water with its border of white sand, the beach grasses waving together at the sky, and Phil’s shack riding the saddle of the dune, its fine brick chimney pointing to the sky. Further to the east, sticking up behind another dune, I could just make out the slanted roof of Euphoria, looking for all the world like a crude spacecraft hastily parked there.
That is where I live, I told myself. What a small bit of world it is, seen from such a height. A clearing around a little cabin. A room plain and bare, where Bert sits drawing, hunched over scraps of paper on the floor, a stick of charcoal clenched in his fist. But everything is there, our lives, our objects, the spaces our voices form around us. Not the place, but the life it holds, how we move through it, what we do there, what we remember. Four walls and an open door, a living presence within. Without that it is just a dot on the landscape, a still point not to be noticed, a box of air.
My gaze flew out over hills and valleys, and down across the beach. I was up so high I might have been flying, or falling, and as I stepped forward along the crest of the dune, striding east with the wind pushing me, I opened my arms for balance and rose, catching an updraft, and sailed east up along the coast. Ahead of me Euphoria lay half-hidden on its crest; I blew past the woods’ edge, circled over the water and back, wheeled in, and flew onward like a hunting bird, fixed on that central spot. Grey boards, grey shingles, dark glint of windows. I flew on down the other side of the dune and came back to myself again and met my body walking in the furrows of a j
eep trail that curved through pines and bayberry, trudging in soft sand, still heading home.
Cocktail hour. I’ve got a pot of chili simmering on the stove, and a cup of cool pump water by my hand. We sit on the top step gazing out; shadows race across the stony dunes and behind us the shack trembles slightly, holding its shape against all that blows.
Bert is showing me the drawings he worked on this morning. He started them in the dunes yesterday, pieces of landscape abstracted in ink. I recognize gestures of beach grass, and the scratchy, dry branches of a dead bayberry. They’re spare and direct, with graceful lines, small pieces of the world lifted out of context.
“I like them,” I say, turning over a page.
“I don’t know, they might be too pretty,” he worries.
“They’re simple,” I say, “clear.”
“Hmm. You know, there’s simple as in ‘easy’. Take the world as you find it, just render, appreciate everything. I don’t like that. I want something more single-minded. Clear down to the bone.” He stretches out his legs and looks around.
“It just seems there has to be some urgency, or necessity. I’m not sure if these do that.” He squints again at his drawings, then gathers them up to take inside.
“Stir the chili while you’re in there!” I call back over my shoulder. “Stir it with urgency.”
He comes out. “Do I have time to walk down to the beach before supper?”
“Hours,” I say, giving a magnanimous wave and leaning back against the step.
Sitting here, watching him go, I feel a righteous tiredness and a heaviness in my body, especially my legs, after this morning’s long walk across the dunes. Walking in sand is incredibly good exercise. With every step your foot gets partly buried, and in order to move forward you have to dig it out and push off with a rolling motion that uses every muscle from the hips down. My friend Wally Tworkov, who comes to Provincetown every summer with her husband Jack, keeps warning me not to get what she calls “dune legs.” I’m not sure exactly what she means—presumably an overdevelopment of the calf muscles, or maybe a thickening of the ankles from this constant, odd exertion—and I don’t know what I can do about it anyway. She says she’s seen it happen: even to Hazel, the beautiful Hazel, though I must admit I’ve never noticed.
When I visit Wally each spring, she glances up and down my whole body appraisingly. She says it hasn’t started yet.
Bert is walking away across the sand. I watch him go. His backlit shape recedes and darkens as he goes down the path. The sun is still high at five o’clock, but a chill is climbing up from the beach. I see his strong back, his loose stride, as he climbs toward the horizon of dune and sky and disappears over the edge.
She floats up the side of the hill and wheels around, circling the meadow, not making any sound. Her wide wings tilt upward in a shallow V, draped on the air, barely moving. The sun casts a reddish light on the grasses, which seem to shiver, and everything stops breathing. She banks to one side, showing her white rump, the streaked brown of her belly, and the world tips under her and slides, ever so slightly, to the west. She dips out of sight behind the foredune and I wait. Once I would have dashed for the binoculars and followed her flight in and out among the hills, hungrily, as if I could put some sort of claim on seeing her, or as if she could give me something. I was still a tourist here, collecting sightings for the life-list, checking off tidbits of lore and scratching for hidden meanings. Now I just watch her, feeling a kind of friendliness. We see each other. I doubt she can tell me from any other human residents at Euphoria, anymore than I can be sure this is the same hawk who was here last summer. But that doesn’t matter: I like how she takes my presence for granted, assumes we both belong here.
She comes back and holds her course along the crest of the dune. The hunter. Here is a clarity with no ease or sentiment. She is a heat, a pulse, all muscle, heart and sinew, fire in her eye. Bert will see her now if he turns around, our gazes crossing in the air to follow this third, turning point. This looking together from two places must send up a charge, a sort of spark to lift our everyday awareness into a vivid moment of presence. Looking from two places, holding her image between us, things might stop a minute; we might be offered a glimpse into another order.
Pass after pass across the meadow, everything goes quiet before her. The grass is alive; small hearts beat in hiding as she stitches back and forth. In the quiet she listens, then pounces, talons outstretched. She beats the grass with her wings, wrestles the air and rises up with nothing. Flapping her wings lightly, she sinks down on to a bayberry to compose herself. She folds her wings, gripping the branch, and rests, still hungry.
Is this the same hawk who has always been here? Yes. She is a door in the sky, opening to a lineage of hawks, and as we watch her we are pulled through that doorway into the other world.
It’s getting cool. I sit in the shadow of the shack, facing into the northeast, the sun already gone overhead, with food cooking on the stove inside, and I turn my face to the path where Bert will be returning. The marsh hawk is flying up the coast now, following the arc of some long circle. She is flying west into the blaze of the afternoon sky, a dark shape just skimming the hill. I feel my bones, and the good boards under me, and the cold in the sea-wind rising. It’s coming on to suppertime; we’re having chili. I leave her to chase down her bloody feast, and go in to see to ours.
June
I Have Found Out
I have found out in love a little flattery
Turns out much better than assault and battery.
— HARRY KEMP,
Poet of the Dunes, 1952
SIX
Nesting
The redwings down by the pump are squabbling again and chasing one another uphill and down—a quarrelsome household. Just now the female broke angrily through the leaves of the bayberry and darted uphill, flying low to the ground, followed closely by her mate who scolded her in short harsh syllables, then dove down to strike her with his beak, as if that settled matters. They set up housekeeping in the big bayberry bush last week, and since then it’s all been chase and flick, display and whistle, as the breeding season gets underway. A kingbird interrupts his vigil on top of a pine tree to threaten me with an acrobatic tumble through the air when I pass, and the catbird sounds a wheezy alarm from the plum thicket. Yesterday the goldfinch took up his courting from the top of the weathervane. Though they won’t nest until late summer, the male begins his love song early, singing lustily from the highest spot he can find. Warbling from that shaky perch, he’s hopping about in his bright new yellow plumage, turning one way and then another, desperately showing off.
We return each spring with the birds, who come back each year to the same place. When swallows move into the garages in town, preening and twittering, and redwings mass noisily in tree tops alongside the highway, we come too and shake out our nest to begin the season.
When I watch nesting birds, their uneasiness always strikes me first. The demands of the season—its passions if you like—seem to go against the grain with them. They return all full of journeys and long distance, the light of horizons glinting in their sharp eyes. They don’t seem to like each other very much, but to answer some drive stronger than personal preference. This puts them on edge, both attracted and irritated by each other’s presence. The kingbirds who arrive in April to nest in the pine woods are so territorial it’s a wonder the species has survived this far. At first the male attacks the female and chases her away. He has to be convinced that she is not a competitor, his suspicions worn down through sheer persistence on her part, until finally he lets her into the territory and they build a nest. Then she turns the tables, throwing him off the property until the eggs hatch. They somehow manage a brief truce during which they cooperate in feeding their young, a forced accord broken by much arguing and complaint, and flights across the hillside to gaze longingly into the distance, dreaming of another life. Even the mild-mannered song sparrow is given to sudden rages now; wi
thout any warning he leaves off singing and flies at his mate, screaming, even pouncing on her, as she flees in exasperated innocence.
“Where is my good pen?” Bert’s voice comes from the middle of the room, where he is tearing through a pile of papers on the table. How can anything be lost in a room measuring twelve by sixteen? I tell him he has twenty pens and they are all good. I tell him I am up here trying to read my book. There is a warning in my voice, which he misses or ignores.
An observer watching the humans settling in at Euphoria would see us too in an uneasy balance, would notice a pattern of approach and retreat, with frequent skirmishes over territory. Is it possible to have a private thought, a solitary moment? Bert seems to be everywhere. I look up from my book and he is there. When his chair scrapes the floor I start; when I lift a teacup he turns his head.
What we negotiate is small, several, and specific. Bert is an appropriator of space: he likes to spread out, to pile things up in an order not comprehended by lesser mortals. Astonished, I realize that he requires six feet of space in which to read a newspaper—arranging pages, coffee mug, glasses case, around him in imperial splendor. His movements are big, his voice is deep and resonant, he touches things as he passes. I become a defender of small regions, guarding my work area under the back window—a tabletop measuring twenty-four by thirty inches—like sacred ground, but to no avail. The top bunk is my aerie, uncontested because undesired. I retreat there, leaving center stage, the floor below, to my expansive partner. Some afternoons I can hear him breathe.
The Salt House Page 4