These creations appear and melt away. Then follows imperial morning, the light succeeds, and I wake to this world and believe it equally.
I work at making a home here, imagining and building it, like a sketch of a life in this single room, one board thick, but my dreams insist I have another life, and no home here that matters. Between this side and the other one there is no easy connection: every night the rules get changed and this world blows away; the wind whisks dust of sand through my sleep, erasing everything I know, thrusting me down a dark corridor that spills me out, spinning, into deep space.
With our daily routines we reinforce an order, but my true mind knows there is no time, no space, no cause or effect, no beginning or end, and everything I call my own has been created out of whole cloth, all illusion. I work at making a marriage, letting eros lead me past fear, learning partnership and simple liking, living side by side—but in sleep I inhabit a solitary kingdom. Try telling your dreams to another person and that gulf appears. You find yourself on another shore wildly waving, shouting, repeating yourself, as your listener’s eyes glaze over.
The steps creak underfoot; I stand at the door and my shadow falls on the floor in front of me. Light streams through the windows, washing the stained sink, the dented aluminum kettle, the scarred counters and tabletop, in a glow so intensely revealing it seems to glorify whatever it touches. In this moist air each object stands apart from its surroundings, haloed in reflected light. Molecules of water suspended in the air make every surface shimmer; colors are deep, saturated. The world shines, acutely particular, with cracks of use: a blotch of rust etched into old porcelain, the dull, reverberating whiteness of a china plate, littered with golden crumbs. Steam curls from the lip of the kettle, which holds, reflects, absorbs light in its battered surfaces, and I pour out a mug of hot, sweet, milky tea for Bert, drain the last of the coffee into my cup, and call him to come and take a break.
He appears around the back corner of the shack in jeans and a white t-shirt, the shovel gripped upright, looking like a true son of the working class. “Hold out your hand,” he tells me, smiling, and places something cool and hard in my palm. It’s a huge blueglass marble, almost as big as a ripe plum. Its surface has been scratched and pitted by sand. “It was buried in the side of the dune: look, you can see the sky in it,” he says. “It’s like one of those mirror balls people put in their gardens.” I hold it up—a fish-eye bending light into itself so the whole sphere of this world collapses into one small, scarred blue globe. A shaft of sunlight flashes deep within its blue heart, revealing a swirl of motion where the ground arches up to meet the sky’s dome.
As I look in, seeing how the grass and clouds are now touching one another, a deeper reflection swims to the surface, growing slowly sharper, like an image in a crystal ball. “Look,” I tell him, bending closer, “We’re in there too.” Small and distant, our faces peer up as if from underwater. We lean our heads close and gaze back at ourselves floating below the sky.
We sit on the bottom step together, looking out across a scene we love. The view before us is of a nearly empty world—sky, sand, and water reflecting light from all their surfaces, holding no image between them. But in this austere, mineral world are scattered patches of green. Grasses wave their heads on a breeze, their leaves opening and closing, roots holding on to bare sand. The dark knot of the bayberry, seven stories of branches crossing in air, casts its shadow network on the ground, and the dusty miller thrusts itself upward in woolly clumps. Roses open to the sun, perishable and many-folded, with dark, complicated petals. Bert rests his hand on the back of my neck, and begins kneading the muscles along the top of my shoulders. I breathe in his clean, sweaty, man smell, taste his breath that smells like tea. The marble sits in my palm, heavy, round, compressing a world that moves when this one does, layer on layer of light folding images in its surfaces. This day I entered so slowly now wraps me like another kind of dream, a mirage of light and bird song, of sand-colored grasshoppers that feed at the grassroot, green leaves and little yellow flowers. A dream the dreamer will believe fully for a while, however long it lasts.
I could write time on the back of a leaf. The leaf opens and drinks in light, pulls water up from the root, breathes oxygen into the air. Pulling up dream water, the leaf unfurls; it withers and falls, then again it swells and opens. We breathe that light gladly; we eat the food of time. That same sun that split the clouds at dawn, whose early heat sent me down the hill for water, shines past this earth continually, knowing neither night nor day, a star burning in the bluest reaches of space where we hang suspended, tangled in a web of leaves and branches, peering out at a changing sky.
NINE
Beach Rights
Down on the beach the terns are crying, convinced that every shadow threatens their eggs. The bare-swept beach infuriates them; with no refuge from sun or tides, they are exposed, seeing everything, seen constantly. Again and again, they rise off their nests to attack the sky with trembly wings, and subside uneasily. When the marsh hawk sails overhead they scream in outrage, mobbing her until she wheels out of sight.
The sun has been up for hours. A white haze hangs over the water, and heat currents rise along shore, shimmering the air. Tangled lumps of rockweed and matted sea lettuce festoon the upper beach, sending up a rank odor of salt and vegetable rot as the sun broils them.
We found four dead kittiwakes on the beach this morning, spread out at intervals over a mile and a half: pretty little birds, a species of arctic gull, white and pale grey, with sharp black wing tips. They’ve wandered far out of their normal range to come here. They should be up by the Gulf of St. Lawrence or beyond, nesting on cliffs above a rocky coast. They’re off course by a thousand miles, give or take a few hundred. Russ Wilson, one of the rangers, came down the beach in his jeep as we stood puzzling over one of the bodies. He told us the kittiwakes have been dying of a fungus infection: park rangers have found more than a hundred dead ones along the back shore. Perhaps the climate here is not healthy for them, or they were sick already and that took them off course. Either way, it’s the wrong place, wrong time.
The beach is a livelier place these days, peopled by several contentious tribes. Sanderlings run back and forth with the waves, scuttling along the surf line with what one of my guidebooks calls “pathological dedication.” Then a score of them will take flight, wheeling off at our approach, like a flower opening in midair. We saw a piping plover scooting along in the jeep tracks, pecking into wrack and seaweed, disappearing and then popping back into view. Sparrow-sized, all grey and white except for his black collar and yellow legs, he appeared determined, in a small way, modest but unyielding, but what he was about I didn’t gather. Probably looking for sea worms or fly larvae, for which I wish him all the luck.
Whales have been spouting offshore all week: finbacks playing in the waves, sometimes five or six of them together at once. Yesterday we watched them for more than an hour until a fishing boat cut in close to shore and they took off for deeper waters. They swim to the surface, spout, and dive, showing a flash of fin or tail as they fold their enormous bulky selves back into the water; sometimes they seem to float on the surface, gently rolling over and back. Even at several hundred yards offshore, their playfulness is obvious, that huge, lively buoyancy and energy. Where do they come from, what world, which quadrant, that they should be here with us on an ordinary day, whole families of them at ease? Stormy Mayo, from the Center for Coastal Studies, said he’s never seen so many here before: the whale watch boats go out from Provincetown and the whales swim out to meet them, swimming right up to the sides. From Long Point to High Head, people are seeing schools of finbacks, a bounty of finbacks, and nobody bothers them at all.
By early June the terns have established their colonies along the back shore. They return every spring from South America to nest here, where the offshore bars offer good fishing and the unbroken beach suits their exacting standards for privacy. All day we glimpse them at the edg
e of our vision, in constant motion, hovering over the water with fast, shallow wingbeats, constantly crying as they circle and swoop over the shallows, then fold their wings to plunge headfirst into the water to seize a sand eel or a minnow.
The terns are birds of air and sea, excitable and nervous, unhappy on land. Maintaining a fragile balance at the edge of the tides, their existence is hazardous at best, and never more so than when they are nesting. They seem to know this and take it to heart, violently protesting any intrusion into their territory. Their nests are mere depressions scratched out above the tideline, offering no protection from storms or predators. An ocean storm at high tide can wipe them out. Their eggs look like small pebbles, and the chicks, when they hatch, are tiny, the color of dry sand, and given to hiding in wheel ruts for shade on hot afternoons, where they are liable to get run over.
This year they have settled a little to the east of Snail Road, down toward Thalassa. We’re just as glad to have them at a distance. The past two summers they nested right in front of Euphoria, and we had to cut a wide detour behind them in order to reach the water. Still, they would fly up in outrage every time we appeared on the crest of the hill, and charge straight at us, screeching. As we headed down the beach, the birds followed us, scolding and fluttering overhead; often one, then another, would climb high into the air and turn to rush at the highest point, which happened to be our heads, swooping twenty feet or more before shearing off just short of scalp hair.
Their anger was so exorbitant we had to constantly remind ourselves of our good will—we were not out to steal eggs or chicks, or even to walk any closer to the nests than we could possibly help. I wished them well, I told myself, as cries of murder rang in the air. Still, some smallness in me wanted to cry back at all their crying, at its endlessness, its uncompromising insistence that everything done here pertains to them. Do they own the beach? It seems they cannot rest with less. They fly back and forth over the water and the bare swept sand, saying over and over that we are detested, that our mere being here threatens them, that it does no good to mean well, that there is no meaning well that matters except to disappear from here entirely.
Now that there are eggs, the park rangers have roped off the tern’s colony and posted signs to keep off traffic. Rangers come by twice a day now to count the eggs and assess their progress, an attention the birds appear to appreciate not in the least, judging by all the clamor. When the chicks begin to hatch out, the beach will be closed to vehicles. This always provokes a lot of outrage on the part of fishermen and other off-road vehicle owners, and rekindles the usual debate in the local paper about beach rights and public access, an argument based on the assumption that no place on earth can be called accessible unless you can drive to it.
When the chicks begin to hatch, the parents grow more belligerent than ever, quarreling among themselves and chasing every other creature from the nesting area. Gulls fly over the nests, chuckling, seemingly oblivious to the discord, and are harried along by the outraged terns. The arrival of the marsh hawk upon the dune ridge sends them into a state of hysteria. We watch from a distance, sometimes with field glasses. At high noon they’re up when they should be down, most nervous when the sun is high. I’m imagining fried eggs, and no wonder, but they settle back only to fly up again, twisting in the air, small angry knots of protesting creation.
We watch them, wheeling in their tight dives, zigzagging erratically over the shallows. However high-keyed and even irrational their dispositions, the birds themselves are a wonder. They are all subtle response, exquisite, instinctive followers of currents. Over and over they rise off their nests to attack the sky with trembly wings and subside, and rise again. Delicate and graceful, ardent and bright, they circle tirelessly over the water and back, searching for fish. From beneath, their bright white bellies gleam against the sky; then they fold their wings and dive, plunging head first into the waves and pulling up at the last second to graze the surface of the water, emerging with a shiny silver sand eel dangling from their beaks.
Where have they come from, these terns, these ill-fated kittiwakes, these finbacks and plovers, and the sanderlings who scan the water’s edge so anxiously? What currents have they followed to find this shore? It’s the season when migrants come to stay, when claims are pressed, the sensitive business of raising the young in an uncertain world, but we see only an arc of their circle, only a moment of their lives grazing ours. They come from north and south, following ocean currents and star trails, the crests of mountain ranges and tug of the earth’s magnetic field; they come here to begin their tribe again, and then they are off on further journeys. Where is their home but wherever they are?
The terns arrive from South America after flights of a thousand miles. It seems outrageous, on the face of it, for them to come here and pick out a piece of territory and drive everyone else away. The claims of these migratory species ask us to redefine, or expand, our notion of home. We are accustomed, once we get past the purely legal matter of property rights and monied interests, to define home ground as something validated by time as well as space; a history of habitation, cultivation, in a particular spot seems to justify a deeper claim. But these seabirds appear out of the sky, on one arc of a voyage compassing thousands of miles, and lay claim to whatever stretch of beach best suits their needs, an utterly practical attachment which ends as soon as the need for it ends. They come from far away, on the arcs of great circles, but they belong here, if only for a little while, because they need to be here. To put against all odds, the terns have only their extraordinary vehemence, their persistence, and those incessant, high-pitched cries. Yes, they do own the beach. And when we enter their space, with or without design, they fly at us out of the sky, crying accusation. They are right: they want to live.
TEN
Beach Roses
We’re knee-deep in June, June for Juno, queen of heaven and goddess of fertility. Now leafy shadows cover the bare earth; bees hum in the unfurling blossoms of beach pea and rose. In the woods along the highway, on hillsides above Pilgrim Lake and at High Head, the shadbushes raise white showers of petals into the air, and birds gobble the berries down their throats. It’s spring in full throttle, at high tide, coming to a head, getting up speed, and busting out all over. Big breaths of it fill us with invisible flower particles that fly out again in swirls. The fire in the sky gets into our veins and makes our hearts go fast as hummingbirds’, splurging life energy.
Flying toward the solstice, we rise into that meeting with light. Within a few days everything north of the arctic circle will be bathed in twenty-four hours of sunlight. Here we’re getting about fourteen hours, a minute or so more every day, pure energy from a star, burning down on us, quickening the life within a seed, an egg, a stony planet.
Spend, breathe, burn. All this excitement makes me hungry. I sat down at the table and devoured a huge meal before heading out this morning: thick brown bread topped with baked beans, a fried egg, and ketchup, all washed down with strong black coffee—what I call cowboy breakfast. Bert looks at my plate and shudders.
On my morning tour, a morning when nothing is happening except what always happens, when footprints made in the night by wild, free-living creatures appear fresh and new, and green things poke themselves up out of the sand as if for the first time, the world seems lucid, nearly intelligible. It’s a day as clear as any in creation, seeming like the beginning of the world, which it is. Adam and Eve would recognize this limpid light, and wish they could start all over. Down by the pump, beach roses crowd the path in their first bloom, sending up a scent so sweet and lush it almost has weight on my tongue. Beach peas swell modestly inside their pale green pods, and the seaside goldenrod forms tight nubs of blossom along its stems.
The path curls up past the pump, around and down again, into a blowout where the wind has scooped out a circle of hard sand behind the first dune. This is the beach of about 1934, closed in by building sand: nothing grows here; the sand is packed hard, and r
aw, salty winds blow across the top of the dune, alive with old sea smells. Two big metal hulks, parts of a ship’s boiler that washed up years ago, sit rusting in the sun, their pocked, burnt-orange hulls taken up, molecule by molecule, into the air. Hollow, big enough for a child to stand up inside, with square holes cut out of their sides, they squat on the sand, silently burning, and seem to watch me as I pass.
Crossing Snail Road, I double back inland along the vehicle track kept open by Art’s Dune Tours. The track runs parallel to shore behind the outermost line of dunes. Sheltered in this valley, there is a profusion of green these days. Woody shrubs of bayberry, rose, and beach plum form little thickets on the lee slope, and along the marsh floor meadowsweet, steepletop, and sheep laurel rise to audacious heights of two or three feet, launching themselves into space. To my right, along the slope of the second dune, bearberry spreads an evergreen carpet across the sand. Lichens and poverty grass form little mounds, and the warm dusty scent of the pitch pines lifts up out of the valley.
And here, loveliest of all, sprawled across the path, its flowers full and heavy on the branches, all flushed and sweet and pink as dawn, appears the resident genius of the place, Rosa rugosa. Rosa rugosa means “wrinkled rose”—the flower is also called salt spray rose, wild rose, dune rose, seaside rose. With its flat, silky blossoms, shaggy yellow centers, and dark green leaflets as creased and soft as washed cotton, it is our local beauty. The rugosa blooms straight through from June into September. At once hardy and sweet, growing right up out of the sand, no other flower seems so much an emblem of this place. It grows in salt air, in poor soil and harsh winds, fastening itself to the land as if these conditions were what made it. Yet in fact, the beach rose is an immigrant, a piece of flotsam, no less than those metal hulks that lie staring on the sand. A shipwreck flower from the Orient, its seeds washed up on shore from some capsized Japanese freighter or fishing boat, took root and learned to flourish here and then to thrive. So still, an emblem of the place.
The Salt House Page 6