Chapter III: Part 3

This land is mine. The deed is recorded in my name. But I cannot claim to have put it to better use than the animals to whom it is public property. It belongs to the deer, the skunk, the rabbit, and the towhee, who eat, pass through, or take shelter there. With my approach, of course, the whole question of tenure is rudely solved, except for the countless stay-at-home organisms in the ground beneath me. The deer turns once with a large gaze, then bounds away with its white, electric brush of a tail flung up. “Boom!” a partridge thunders up, cuffing leaves and twigs with its wings, and hurtles off through the trees. A crow gives a warning call as it flies overhead. I am allowed the land if I want it, though not much trust is involved. But why should I expect comfort or acceptance, in this open realm of risk? Neither man nor deer was mother to the skunk. It knew its own. Chance meetings will do, for the love I find in them.

On the calendar this is the last day of October, and it has some justice to the title. The lunar months mirror the general character of the year’s transitions. In spite of the fact that all single days are lost in the passage of light and we are left behind, this one seems full of an end and a turn to something else. The local life is making its last forays, before a time of dormancy, hibernation, or struggle to survive. A mourning cloak butterfly beats lightly by, with no other companions to be seen. I find some mud dauber wasps, flies, and a cicada killer, all hibernating in a pile of rotten logs. The woods are full of the intermittent beauty of the last oak leaves, red, with a deep tone in the gray day, and the sumacs still show their shining raspberry color on the surrounding slopes.

The late afternoon is cold and quiet. I regret the shorter day and the need to leave the great air so soon. But underneath lowering clouds is a growing gap of swirling orange toward the west. As the light recedes around us, the sunset begins to show the power and surge of pattern in the sky. Coils and whips of gold at first--bold, bright, far away. Then spun gold behind dark barriers--the ribs of whales, giant minnows, plumes tinted with salmon, the curving timbers of ships, and all things rare and imaginary plunging through an oceanic fire. Also I see golden October going, in fields of last excitement. But what this and many other sunsets say is “Come on!” However you use your days and nights, in speed or muddled preoccupations, come. It will be too late soon for the feast that is now, whose fires are always carrying over to the other side of the world.

_November_

_The Seed in the Season_

The glory goes, and there comes the first sudden plucking out of dead leaves. They scud and sail. They lift and fall to the ground, where they sometimes scuttle unexpectedly like mice.

November rolls into view with cool, solemn, formal consistency. When it rains they say: “I’m glad it’s not that white stuff,” although Cape Cod is not noted for its snow. There is no deep and heavy frost as yet, no northeast gales driving wet flakes at our eyes. A number of Cape Codders migrate to Florida for the winter. Daylight diminishes. As the leaves drop off we begin to see more distinctly between the trees. I find two spotted turtles moving very slowly through the waters of a ditch at one side of an abandoned cranberry bog. In one open field there are a few red-legged grasshoppers, much less active than a few weeks before. An occasional cricket, grasshopper, or spider is spotted and animated by the rays of the sun when it bursts through drifting clouds. Here and there a violet aster or late goldenrod stands in bloom between innumerable plants that are fuzzy with seed. The milkweed still sends crowds of little silk parachutes shining on the wind.

We are now in a genuine country state of which the urban power talks with both scorn and ignorant nostalgia. The summer no longer pounds at our temples. The fall color is gone. There is nothing to look at, and very little to hear except the wind, or a plane in the distance, a car on the highway. To a city lover it is silent and deadly dull.

As to the nostalgia, I doubt that there is much stress any more on the virtue implicit in country living. Since all men now dwell in all places, they question virtue everywhere; but some still talk as though the country were a place for that intangible peace and moral order that they think is lacking in the world. The country, however, is in the grip of a power that has no moral values and is greater than morality. It is false and true. It is benign and it is terrible. It cures and it kills. And I do not suppose that whether or not the earth is made up of human cities can make much difference to it. I am waiting for a deeper tone than hope.

There is no noise or compelling distraction in a field or stand of trees. Still, a forester suggested to me that if trees could make themselves heard, in their internal growth and adjustments, the roar would be deafening. The same thought has been applied to life in the ground, with its countless microorganisms, in a state of continual displacement and turmoil, growing and dying, consuming and being consumed. They too might roar. We have enough at hand and under our feet to make general tumult no surprise.

The point about this countryside is not its isolation but its potentiality. It is in charge of origins. What is more dramatic than the production of seeds in plants and grasses over one small field? The seeds are in uncountable numbers, and each one is a miniature plant, an embryo, surrounded by food and a protective coating. It is an embodiment of force. It eats and breathes, and now goes into a period of dormancy like an animal, ready to germinate in the spring when conditions are favorable. Such facts are part of elementary biology, but they cover up the stir and momentum of the globe.

These seeds, on grass and weeds now growing thinner, drier, more colorless, are not only rich in generation, on their own account, but they provide beyond themselves. The juncos, or snow birds, that come down from the north will survive on a seed diet throughout the winter, with the sparrows, and that sustaining food the mice, preyed upon by fox, weasel, or hawk. The simplest “food chain” suggests the links in many others. In fact there is no fundamental separation anywhere in this common world of life, despite the greatly various environments of water and land that we use to help us differentiate between the species. Winds blow through. Tides lap over. Each plant and animal is proof of general contact and association.

The insignificant seed has energy and sustenance enough to perpetuate many worlds. It makes me look at mere grass with more interest than I did. I believe there are some fourteen hundred species of grasses in the United States, of which I know less than a dozen. There is one grass which grows in many areas of the Cape, through open slopes, pine woods, sandy, run-down fields, that I have heard called beard, or prairie grass. I have walked by it, on it, and through it for years without knowing its name, though its nameless, light-catching beauty often caught my attention. It turns out to be broom sedge (_Andropogon scoparius_), a plant that reaches from here and the Middle Atlantic States south to Texas and across the southeast to California. It is a poor soil, poor forage grass, appropriate to this nonagricultural region. Its stems rise from a bunch of curving, rustling leaf blades, and are covered with tiny florets that go to seed in the fall, little feathery tufts. As the autumn months progress it grows more colorful, deepening to tawny pink, with a touch of purple, before it takes on its straw-colored midwinter hue. The little silky feathery tufts shine in the sunlight like the slightest spits and sparkles on a pool, or tiny plumes of frost, intangibly gentle, sustaining their brightness as the winter comes on. The stems are two to three feet tall, and with their delicate adornments, they stand the year around, stirring, curving forward, nodding back, with the utmost refinement. So I praise what is for me a new discovery, though it has stood near me in its own praise for many years--a country eloquence.

Almost all local preparations are done. The seed is sown and made ready. The time for persistence is coming, when those grasses we take so much for granted will hold our earth together. When the sun warms them, drying on slopes and through old fields, they smell sweet underfoot, a natural, uncut hay.

_The Clouds_

The power of sending on is latent in the seed, but the weather itself is always openly manifest, and when the leaves fall, when the summer nests begin to show up in unexpected places, then it hits us even harder. The northeast winds are beginning to be something to hide from. The sky stares with a wider, colder eye.

When it is cloudy I hear the dull drone of unseen planes far above me, and I think of a world at large that is teeming with meetings and negotiations, losing decisions, waiting on results. The immediate earth seems to shift, tack, and decide according to its clouds, that slant up the sky in fibrous strands, hang deep and low, or lift across the sunlight.

The sun’s rays slant lower between the open aisles of the trees, and there is a keener, icier edge to the light. I walk out through a hollowed, dipping and waving landscape onto gray-green lichens, and dry, sweet-smelling grasses of an old field laced with briars, and the pale blue sky is on top of me with intoxicating height. The vapor trail of a jet plane cuts across the sky for miles, while slower clouds ease and change across the November blue, allowing lazy time for the imagination.

But if to imagine is a dispensation from nature that allows us to take part in her intricate creativeness, then it is no idleness. Rationally, a cloud, whether cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, or a combination thereof, is what it is: a collection of drops of water, or ice particles, suspended in the air. Meteorology as a science must be one of the most intriguing, since its subjects never sit still. I would, if I could, make an analysis of the clouds that are typical of a season, the changes in pace that make themselves known overhead; though the old maritime men of Cape Cod could do a better job. They knew what they depended on, in the way of calm or storm, and predicted what they felt. Subjective interpretation is suspect these days, but it implies a common familiarity for which objective analysis offers no substitute. The sensate imagination, with its head in the clouds, finds interconnections past their specialty and name.

Clouds, collecting moisture from the ponds, lakes, or ocean waters, have many of the shapes and patterns of the land, or head, if you like, that they come from. We can find faces in them, as well as in the dregs of a teacup; but they are the images of an invention that is more fluid than our own. Their texture may cause them to look like scratched, glacial rocks, or they are wooly and fibrous at the same time. They might suggest cocoons or the nest of fall webworms. They hang in snowy shoals or in striated banks. They ripple like the sands at low tide. They look like whitecaps on the sea. They move as slowly and inexorably as fields of ice, or in quick bursts ahead of the wind. They roll in mountainous abundance, or fan out like a river’s long fingers stretching out across a delta.

Clouds suggest seaweed, grasses, wings. Occasionally they remind me of ferns, and of the fernlike patterns that the frost makes on a window, or they resemble some basic structure of a living thing. As plants and animals are united in fundamental physical laws and in their chemical composition, so clouds, for all their evanescence, cannot be separated from the world of life. Clouds are announcements of progress and decline. They show the sky’s adventures. There is more to them than my fancy. The light, the wind, the altitude, temperature, time of day or year commit them to a definite size, shape, and existence. They are images of substance, in a motion which casts everything into its weather, including that human sign on the sky, the jet’s trail, imposing an abstract scar ten miles across.

_The Inconstant Land_

When the clouds cover the sky like gun smoke and the air feels cold and restricting, I am reminded that the character of Cape Cod has nothing to offer an uncertain world except uncertainty. Its trees are not of a size to hang on to, and its dunes shift like the waves. It is a land that men have ravaged with fire, not excluding the Indians who preceded us, and abused without compunction. It is said there used to be great stands of trees on the Cape, hardwoods, hemlocks and pine. The remnants of submerged Atlantic white cedar forests have been found as far as three miles out in Cape Cod Bay, and bog borings have revealed the evidence of timber in some areas where trees now have only a bare subsistence. But during the nineteenth century, judging by photographs and local account, this peninsula was much poorer in trees than it is now, even though our local woods cannot be given credit for much height and dignity.

A man from New Hampshire visited me briefly a few years ago and said: “What in the world are you living here for? There aren’t any trees!” I pointed out to him that we had the sea, but the place seemed poor and flat to him, and he headed back to the mountains and tall timber as fast as he could, though he first chose to have a lunch of seafood, on his way out.

When I bought the land I live on, it had a desolate appearance aside from a long view of the water, but its high wildness appealed to me. It was covered with dead oaks, standing everywhere like stripped spars. They had been killed off by a severe infestation of gypsy moths, and were, in any case, weak, cutover growth to begin with. The local landowners cut the woods down almost completely, then waited, twenty-five years in many cases, to cut them again. Others cut for firewood whenever they needed it. This area is covered like a rabbit warren with tracks made by wagons coming in to take out wood. I talked with a man recently who used to ride on the wagon seat with his grandfather when he was a boy. They liked to pull trees out when the frost was in the ground. Even then the wagon would be so heavily loaded that it sank in almost to the axles, with the horse pulling hard in the middle. The deep ruts are still to be seen. Besides taking out the wood for sale and for their own use, the owners would sell it “on the stump,” letting individuals go on their land and cut.

Since this was a country whose inhabitants often made a sparse living out of livestock as well as fish, the land was also used for grazing. Cattle and sheep kept the brush and ground cover down. Many sandy hillsides were not only bare, but beginning to erode badly.

In his _Cape Cod_, Thoreau speaks of the country between the towns of Barnstable and Orleans on the bay side as being “bare, or with only a little scrubby wood left on the hills.” “Generally,” he writes, “the ploughed fields of the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of salt and Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander’s notions of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and he will not be able, for some time afterwards, to distinguish soil from sand.”

Fire has tormented the Cape, ever since the Indians, who used it to clear areas for corn, or to increase the visibility when hunting game. When the humus on the woodland floor is thin, and the trees not healthy or high enough to provide protective shade, thus retaining moisture in the ground, a severe drought may make them ripe for burning. I have heard it said that fires used to be set deliberately in order to improve the blueberry crop. And a neighbor tells me that he has seen thirty or more fires set by the sparks from a train, chugging down the Cape, as he watched from a bare hillside half a century ago.

Oddly enough, the pitch pine owes a great deal of its present prosperity to fire. It is one of the few trees whose roots stay alive and which comes back after an area has been burned over. Most of its competitors, except scrub oaks and black oaks, are killed off. It is a tough tree, and when it grows to good height with its rugged, wind-whisking look, a beautiful one; but it has its vulnerable points. It is very greedy for light, being what the tree experts call an “intolerant tree,” and it cannot stand competition. Pitch pines that come up under the shade of oaks or even of their own kind, soon die off. They demand their own ground. The oaks, especially the white oak, are much more tolerant of shade, and may in time push out the pitch pine, provided fires are held to a minimum in the future.

The oaks are monumentally persistent. Cut them down fifty times and they will sprout back from the roots, which merely spread out a little further and send out more shoots. These “sprout hardwoods” have poor quality wood. They have fungus diseases, and are subject to attack by insect borers. The general attitude toward them is that they are worthless. Now that they are not much in demand for firewood, the bulldozer, rather than the ax, is their major enemy. But they deserve some admiration for holding their own. The first year or two after cutting, a sprout oak will grow very fast, but then it settles down for a long future, beginning to grow at a slow, insistent rate, taking what comes. This is a windy and salty land, where oaks may never grow to great girth and height, but they seem eloquent about their right to last out the next five thousand years on Cape Cod as well as we, even though thirty feet, or in some areas five, may be the maximum they reach. This is their chosen land.

The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is full of the collaborative music of air and trees. They may be poor trees, low and rangy, subject to great abuse, but in their growth they make the land march between its surrounding waters. The gray oak trunks go in ranks and tiers for mile after mile down the center of the Cape, interspersed by individual pitch pines, or backed up and sided by pines in independent woods that look rounded and bunched in the distance, pocked with dark green shadows. The oak branches thrust up their candelabras of branches and stiff twigs against the pale sky, ready for next spring’s sunlight. The pitch pines stand with scaly, dark brown trunks and thick needles rocking and switching around, authorities on wind, and sandy soil, on impermanence, on taking your chances when and where you can.

Geologists say that this truly “narrow land,” no more than a mile wide in some sections, seven or eight in others, may vanish under the sea in five or six thousand years. Its border of sands is always in the process of roaming and shifting. The Cape has no bedrock. Its rocks are migrants, brought down from the north by moving ice. In spite of the evidence of some once fairly rich timberland and deep topsoil, the Cape does not convince you of any depth and permanence other than its alliance with salt water.

The sea gives and the sea takes away, breaking through a barrier beach during winter storms and roaring into the marsh and sheltered inlet behind, cutting down cliffs a foot or two a year, or imperceptibly stealing inches from a low-lying shore; while it adds new beaches, packs new tons of sand around an outlying spit or shoal. Last year, when I accompanied a group of children on their geology class, we uncovered a burying pit for horses and cows in the sandbank at the head of one of the bay beaches. If there had been a farm in the vicinity, a hundred years or more ago, the sea may well have cut in over half a mile to reach these bones.

The winds sweep overhead, or merely threaten, the beach waters lap gently, or bridle and roar, and the only stability I feel is that of the tides, a lasting balance between the give-and-take of water and land. The Cape’s ravaged past and stunted present seems transmuted into motion. What this spit of land has taught me is an altered sense of the context of time. I once saw a tree either as material for the woodpile, or something with a growth so slow as to pass notice. Now I have begun to see trees moving by the million in a million varied places. Natural change is made up of so many circumstances, the continuum of life in its vast order is so far from being held down by history, that everything requires us to move on into the distance. It may well be regretted, but Cape Cod is not so much a place for traditionalism as a victim of the beautiful and impatient earth.

_The Dead and the Living_

A cautious solemnity is beginning to take hold, although the weather plays new tricks as it alternates between the influences of north and south, east and west. Rain pours over the land. Then, on a warm day, there is thunder and lightning at noon, succeeded by a furious northwest wind after dark, bringing in a deeper cold. The wind hums and roars during the night, and with the sky clear and the stars out, the Cape has a new swept and running feel to it.

On a night of full moonlight, there are glassy shadows between the trees, with a dry surf of air; and if sight brings sound, almost tinkling beams of light from the low moon. New stations, new harmonies of cold are suggested by stiff trees on their low hills and hummocks, standing against persimmon and topaz sunsets, or by a crystal edge on the sunlight.

We have had light frosts, but by the end of the month no consistent, freezing weather has been reached. Then on the thirtieth the temperature drops to 20 degrees. I notice a flower, Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming, all by itself in a field of matted grass. During the night the surface of the ground is frozen hard ... a cap of reality at last, with no more lingering. There is a genuine glittering clarity of cold, in cloud, and branch and stone. Out on the bay the low waves look as if they had a harder push and pull to make, imbued with new heaviness. A boy shows me the frozen body of a red-legged grasshopper, perfectly preserved for a little while by a power to which its only adaptation is death. What still stands above ground now faces poverty, and primitive recalcitrance.

There is a kind of ice sludge being nudged in by the tides along the shore and through rippling purple waters of tidal inlets. There are ice circlets around the marsh grass. Thin ice sheets form at the rim of fresh-water ponds.

The inland world seems either subdued or facing survival’s icy stare, and even self-sufficient human society looks ready to draw in and hole up for the winter. But since Cape Cod is surrounded by the sea, it has another depth, another range, where other populations roam while the rest of us wait and shiver. Above water, the more visible migrants are those wintering sea birds--auks, scoters, black ducks, eiders, old squaws, brant and Canada geese--that feed along the shore, in sheltered inlets, or in waters farther out, depending on their habit.

In my locality Canada geese and black ducks are swimming through peat-rooted grasses off Paine’s Creek where the terns were fishing two months ago. A line of white-winged scoters flies low over the heaving waters of the bay. I watch two black ducks in the sky, approaching from the north. They are coming over at high speed downwind with wings beating hard. Then more ducks fly up across inlet and marsh, taking off to windward. They swing back for a short stretch, then up again, as if to hold position, like travelers reconnoitering, then fly on and out of sight.

Two miles or more from shore I see points of spray going up from the surface of the water, and above them many large white birds continually turning and diving, from a considerable height. These are the gannets, that appear off Cape waters in the autumn after they have nested on their island territories in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The immature, first-year birds, which can also be seen diving for fish, are almost totally black. They are usually not with us for long, since they pass to winter feeding grounds, which may be as far south as the Caribbean.

Anyone who has seen them crowding their nesting grounds on Bonaventure Island off the Gaspé Peninsula, will know, from close observation, how spectacular these birds are. They allow tourists to come almost as close to them as chickens in a yard. Thousands of pairs nest at the top of high cliffs or along their ledges above the water, each with its established square foot or two of nesting territory. A loud, rattling cry goes up, out of a multitude of hoarse croaks and groans. I felt a great sense of pressure and establishment in this bird city, this singular society with its consistent behavior and ceremony. The pairs greet one another bowing, or with heads raised and the long thick bills fencing. Their stiff carved heads are always in motion, always in response to one another. It is a pressing, elaborate spectacle, ancient and authoritative.

Gannets are awkward landers. They come in stiffly and do a kind of top-heavy tumble when they hit the ground; but as ocean flyers they have no superiors. When I see them again silently gliding over the waters off the Cape, I greet them for their earth-honored mastery. At a distance they might be mistaken for herring gulls, but they are much larger, and their long black-ended wings are typical. When you see points of spray going up far out on the water, and white birds diving, you have unmistakably seen the gannets.

Earlier this month, during an easterly storm, with pouring, blinding, deafening wind and rain, a few gannets were flying close to the shore off Paine’s Creek where the water was a little calmer and the atmosphere less overcast than farther out in the bay. The birds flew low, since the fish they were hunting were in shallow water and presumably close to the surface. On this stormy morning they flew in an almost leisurely way over the surface, flapping their wings and gliding. They would turn casually and dive, their wings half spread. Then they rose and flew steadily on with power and ease, their wings feeling the stiff wind, using it like the ancient professionals they were.

Now the north wind is blowing hard in the late afternoon. There are slate-gray cloud masses in the sky, with a steely light where the sun rays through, and the temperature has dropped to about 40 degrees. Offshore over rocking, ponderous, gray waters, I can see the crowds of gannets following a shoal line in the distance. They catch the light from the sun when it strikes occasionally through the clouds, intensifying their whiteness and turning the water green. They seem to drift and turn continually, their arrowed bodies plummeting down, the splashes appearing against white bordered waves. As I walk inland the sun goes westward behind massive clouds and the gannets, far out, high and white, keep diving with exact abandon.

The intermittent sunlight wheels in to brighten the yellow grasses and make the sand sparkle. To the north it is as if the sky were moving down from its Arctic limits and announcing new themes, with iceberg clouds, and high walls of cold against which the sun strikes new fire, while the wind rushes down to make the message felt. A flock of sharp-tailed sparrows lands on the sand, the marsh-side of a dune. They fly up into the stiff, cold air, and then drop down into a small hollow for protection. They stay there for a while under the great force of wind and blown sand, not closely knit so much as spread out in what looks like a perilous unanimity. If one sparrow should stray even a foot away from the rest, in their over-all, though loose, pattern, I feel as if it must be irretrievably lost, blown off, and separated. That which holds the sharp-beaked, yellow-headed little birds together is in their senses. They intercommunicate as one flock and form. It is a control--as lightly manifested as the sparrows themselves, but as powerful as the elements against which they stand.

_December_

_An Old Place, an Old Man_

When the feel of winter comes, in November or early December--though by astronomical calculation winter does not start until December twenty-second--when the first hard seal is set on the ground, and we are settled in with a new plainness, then it is not difficult to bring back yesterday and its country living. Winter’s role in the year’s wheel is an arresting, for the sake of renewal, a sleep, or half sleep, for later waking. It has its own suspense and violence, its roars and silences, like the other seasons, but in general its order is of a different quality, having an inwardness and resistance, a bare, gray need to keep things inside and hidden down. This is the time of year that shows a plain connection between human beings and their land.

I see last leaves whipping around the hollows off an old Cape road, or walk through the now more oblique rays of the sun that yellow the sandy ground held by thin, waving grasses, gray beach plum or bayberry bushes, and I recognize what has been left behind.

Here, surrounded by open slopes, is an abandoned house site, now a cellar hole, walled by square blocks of glacial granite. Orchard grass, timothy, and redtop still engage the old domesticity. Inside their circle you can see where children played, water was fetched and carried, chickens fed, and voices raised. There are yucca plants close to the foundations, and a rose or two. I transplanted such a rose a few years ago, and with added nourishment it turned from a slight, single-petaled flower to a great bunch of pinkish-purple fragrance.

Unlike some abandoned farm sites in other parts of New England, there is nothing left here to show what the inhabitants did. There are no harrows, stone bolts, yokes, or farm implements, not even any pots and pans. The stones are left, and the faithful grasses, and beyond them the crunchy, gray deer moss, and beard grass of indigenous fields. It was a small place, of bare subsistence. Whatever the qualities of the people who lived there, they left simplicity behind them. Not too far away, a bulldozer is making a desert with giant scoops, high-tension wires are marching by, and a plane rips the air overhead. We are encroaching in our oblivious fashion, without delay. The new domesticities may occupy only a tenth of an acre each, but they engage all lands. The old domestic wildness cannot be replaced. It was a lodgment limited by need, gray outside and dark within, perhaps unbearably close and confined at times, but with a knowledge of its earth.

It seems to me that as the world has grown outward in recent years, even I, a comparative newcomer to Cape Cod, have lost some local life to memory. When you live in a place for the first time you see behind it to its roots and grain, before the storms of circumstance blow you away from it. I remember a few old men who seemed so representative of the old Cape that it will never be the same now that they are gone. The loss is of a country speech, the flavor of a flesh and blood nurtured on locality. What has replaced them can be defined in terms of California as well as Cape Cod, which means no detriment to either, for what we are now obliged to consider is locality in a wider field. But those old men were born as we may not yet be born, sturdily, in custom and resignation.

Nathan Black died in October 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He was born in 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a near neighbor. His land abutted mine, and since he was the proprietor of the Black Hills Barber Shop, I could walk down through the woods to get my hair cut, for the price, in a trillion-dollar world, of fifty cents. He was a heavy man, with bright brown eyes, and a head of curly white hair. He fitted the open Cape Cod weather, or the weather fitted him. I am not sure of the distinction. Nearly ninety years of change, of natural cataclysm, of both peace and abysmal war in the human world, had left him in the same place, with the same measure, outwardly at least, of stability.

When he left his place, or the customary orbit of work and old friends that constituted his life, perhaps to drive out on a new highway or to the chain store, he may never have stopped being surprised. I remember his looking at me with a kind of amused questioning--but no alarm--and saying something about no one belonging here any more. The new population didn’t quite make sense to him.

In the way of old countrymen who knew their boundaries, he was tough and unforgiving in his role of landowner. He had his rights, “By gawly!” and he would know when someone did him wrong. He held on hard, and I suspect there were neighbors who felt the possessiveness too strongly, but this being none of my business, I will go in and get my hair cut.

The shop, with a tool shed under the same roof, where “Nate” used to grind knives and axes, stood, and still stands, across the yard from the house where he was born. There are some other gray-shingled, outlying buildings on both sides of a dirt road that runs through scrubby woods and hollows, dry hills sloping down to marshy bottom land ... wood-lot country. One December day I rapped at the door, and he put his jacket on and walked across the yard with me, where two white ducks were parading and some red chickens giving the frozen ground a going over. The old man bent down a little and spoke to his dog Bonnie, a cream-colored spaniel, which had just wagged up to him: “Did you get it?”

Then, to me: “I lost an egg. Picked up five eggs, out of the hen yard this mornin’, and came back with four. Maybe there was a hole in these old pants of mine.”

The barber shop was small, long and narrow, but he had a stove in there that kept it warm. There were some old magazines on a bench against the wall, with a black Homburg hat hanging on a peg. It had been given him by an old customer, a wealthy man who had lived on the Cape during the summer and had come in to have his hair cut for many years before he died. There was a photograph on the wall of the two of them with an inscription underneath that read: “Established 1884. A satisfied customer is our best advertisement.” They were standing out in front of the shop, smiling in the sun.

“Feller came here yesterday and I had to clip him in the kitchen. Shop was too cold,” Nate said.

The calm of the place was comforting. It came, I suppose, from an acceptance that emanated from him, and brought in many old friends, who would sit down to say: “Nate, just thought I’d come over and pass the time of day.”

Whatever he had to say about other people never left them without the honor of human circumstances. “Pretty close, he is,” he would say with a little laugh, or “I guess he had a shade on” (a Cape Cod expression for being drunk). “Guess you can’t hold on to nothin’,” he said about some local theft, in a way that insisted on not being roused beyond necessity.

His origins were out of a kind of history of which there was very little left intact except himself. He once showed me a tintype of his mother, a handsome girl named Bridget Malady, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1862. His father, Timothy Black, was born in Yarmouth, on the Cape. At the age of ten he signed on as a cook aboard the packet which sailed between East Dennis and Boston, and seems to have spent a good deal of his life on intermittent voyages at sea. He was also in the butchering and slaughtering business with his two sons. In the autumn they used to butcher eighty-five hogs or more, at the rate of three a day. And in some rough but related way, Timothy Black started his son in the barbering business. Nate remembered how his father used to cut his hair in the kitchen, long before the Black Hills emporium was established: “I used to sit there while he was sort of pummeling at me on the back of the neck. By gol! I sure did cringe when he was chopping me with those women’s scissors.”

While I, seventy or eighty years later, was sitting in the barber’s chair, getting more expert and calmer work done on me, I assembled a little of the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an expedition to the post office or the store took up a large part of the day. That was the time when you could hitch the horse up to a post and stop for a long chat, “having the capacity to waste time” as I heard a Texan phrase it about some of his countrymen in the western part of the state. People walked between their houses--there are foot paths still showing--on barren hills. They had small herds of cows that foraged on the sloping fields. Families used to picnic together by the ponds, and there were barn dances on Saturday nights, which were sometimes the occasion for a rip-roaring fight. I have heard it said that Nate Black was the strongest fighter in the region, when outraged beyond his normal patience, but he would reveal none of this prowess to me.

The Black family also held dances in their kitchen. The father of the house played the violin. On such occasions they would have plum porridge suppers, or they served crackers, milk, and raisins, and sometimes hulled corn.

He was of a piece with his surroundings. I think of many things he talked about while I was having my hair cut and they all meant the gray, sea-girded land, and a human closeness to it. I think of the deer that ate his beans, of his duck that was carried off by a fox, of foxes being reduced in population by the mange, of a watering place for horses by Cedar Pond in East Dennis (a beautiful pond with ranks of dark cedars backing it up, and now being encroached upon by house lots); and he talked about the big eels waiting to eat young herrin’ (or alewives) at the mouth of a pond, and of sounding the depths of Round Pond here in West Brewster.

And then there was his dog which had to be chained up because it got so wildly excited chasing rabbits through the woods that it was constantly lost, having once been picked up nearly ten miles away; and the coon that climbed a tree after a hen; and his little granddaughter wanting to shine a flashlight through the window one night and take a picture of a coon she saw outdoors, because it was “such a pretty-looking animal.”

There also come to mind the fishing boats all-over white with screaming gulls, that he once spoke about with real excitement, and, of course, the yearly work on his cranberry bogs ... he and his tart and lively wife used to pick them together; and the shifting price of cranberries, and his wood lots, and who was after him to buy some of his land.

“Yes yes” he would say, in the Cape Cod fashion, and always, when a customer was leaving the shop: “Come again.”

His wife Emily died two years before him. Some time before that I stopped to talk with him when he was scything the family plot in Red Top Cemetery, which lies at the junction of two country roads, on a little hill or high knoll up in the sky and the ocean winds. He told me two women had come up one day while he was there and said: “What a nice place!” He and his wife are buried there, in a place which has no more permanence than any other, but for them and by them had the simple power of acquaintance.

_Night in the Afternoon_

If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and stars never fail us.

The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I am not one to disparage such banalities.

“Good morning.” “What’s good about it?” Dead oak leaves hang like wet rags in the cold rain. After the rain stops there is a cold moisture suspended in the air with its own whiteness. There is a silence everywhere, except for a chickadee’s harsh split trills nearby, the low tone of offshore waters, and the indiscriminate sound of engines on roads or in the sky. The woodchuck, the box turtle, and the chipmunk are asleep. There are no insects above ground to catch the eye. The day shortens, and we who are always calling for more sunshine, pleased at the idea of some perpetual, impossible comfort, are obliged to confront night in the afternoon. Life is quiet, stripped of redundancy. There is a new restraint about our depopulated local world, and at the same time new openings afforded. At least the season seems to offer another quality for interpretation. Perhaps, for example, because the trees are bare and the ground devitalized, we are to look up and find the sky.

I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness through the ground, but overhead the infinite dome almost resounds. It is blazing, bounding, soaring with the means and light of existence. I am not troubled at all that I look out from an unimportant planet dependent on a common star, and am only able to see a few light-years away, each light-year being a distance of six million million miles. There is sight past sight. The strongest telescope is still an extension of the human eye. Our measurements themselves are a form of participation in that fantastic distance, which may not make us any less lonely, but we have a mind in space; and since men calculate, by observation of the heavens and of their earth, that the laws of life are the same as far and farther than they can see, then they have hearts and blood there too. I stand here on the cold ground, and take sensual note of the universe.

Then I move back into my domestic hole to do a little hibernating of my own. A winter withdrawal sets in, when outer resources escape me. I am drawn inward to human want and its frustrations, to common egotism or inertia. The December days progress almost remotely. Who cares about the secrets of that cold and darkening earth outside? Our problems are sufficient unto themselves.

But there is a natural complex of greed, a provision for appetite, that brings men and earth to mutuality. Manifested by the weather, it sometimes puts us out of doors to understand real fortitude. Instead of easing on toward January, December begins to tug and roar. It snows all day and there are north winds of from thirty to forty miles an hour driving the snow against our houses, suggesting an extra struggle we might not be quite ready for. Then it warms up to 2 or 4 degrees above freezing, and the following morning begins with a cold rain and sleet falling down with hissing, disheartening force. The temperature drops. The sleet turns to snow, driving in violently from the north, hitting the trees like bullets. The sky closes in. There is no horizon. The wind swirls. Trees rock and bend. This is a storm with a great rush of savagery, setting wild, grim traps for the unprotected. “Now,” it says, “I have you. Try some adventures in this.”

There is ice or cemented snow along the tree trunks in the direction of the storm, so that by sight and feel I know the wind is from the northeast quarter, without need of instruments. My hand tells me where the present power is coming from.

When the snow and wind let up a little, I head for the shore and find signs down, gutters yanked out, and telegraph wires dangling across the road. Salt water ahead of me is churning, tossing white spume against the open shore, while the wind seethes, whines, and howls with growing intensity. The feeling of conflict is everywhere around me--a hurling and letting go, a bend and give, a clash, a holding against insufferable strain. The sand on the upper beach is whipped into stinging strength. The sea is almost boiling, its racing, conflicting edges spray-lined. On top of an exceptionally high tide, great waves run in over a sheltered inlet, sending their combers farther toward the land. All points of contact and withdrawal, rise and fall, seem to be concentrated in this monumental turbulence, a force that is almost uncontained. Is it a replica in violence of the normally unseen stresses and strains lying under a peaceful season, or a life? Our bodies are made of air and salt water, in their components of hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. A storm should be our organic companion. But this cold screaming fury makes me take refuge behind a wall. Man may have overcome the elements, but not his elemental frailty.

Out over the gray and white waters, hovering against the wind in an almost idle way, are several herring gulls. And, at the mouth of the inlet, riding calmly on the roaring, running tide, facing up against a thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind, is a loon--close-reefed, well fitted in all respects to weather the worst.

_Two Encounters_

After the storm a hard cold sets in for many days. As a rule our Decembers are comparatively mild, with the days alternating between light rain and cool sunshine. Now the very great plunges of the cold, driving the frost deep into the ground, freezing the pond waters, starting a rim of pack ice around Cape Cod Bay, comes as a surprise, something not known before. The weather bureau, explaining the cold as being the result of a vast Canadian high-pressure system, speaks of its unusual “fetch and intensity.” Ten degrees above zero is not severe as compared with conditions in other parts of the world, but this unseasonal extreme is a local reminder of the earth’s potential, and just how much we depend on the normal rhythms of the year. We gasp with cold, turn up the heat, and think that cataclysm is a small thing to the universe.

The cold around us creates a different earth. It demands a readjustment of the senses, as though it were ready with amazing new suggestions. One sharply cold morning when snow lies fresh on the ground I stop by the cemetery where the Blacks are buried, on my way to town. There is something about this day that asks attention. It sings. Pure crystalline masses creak underfoot. The tune of the cold finds an edge on my bones. Pines, stiff cedars, locust trees, hard ground and stone, all share in resonance, being forged and tempered by the cold. The little graveyard hill is a tympanum, or sounding board, very highly pitched, so powerfully taut, being plucked very lightly by the air with sharp whispers and twanging sounds being sent across the snow, that it might be ready to send one chord, incomparably new, into the whole sky.

I start to go away, but a tiny, almost casual trill separates itself from the vibrations of the cold. I keep listening and in a few seconds see a bird rounding the branch of a cedar tree, not twenty feet away. Working in and out of the branches, coming in to view and then disappearing again, is a flock of purple finches, eating cedar berries. The males are washed with a raspberry color that keeps appearing through the dark green masses of the tree like intermittent lights, hints of fruitfulness in the winter’s containment.

Suddenly, surprisingly, a light brown, speckled veery appears on the open branch of a locust. This summer bird, out in the glittering cold, seems to have a startled, wildly timid look in its eyes. Its slim body hesitates, with the problem of aloneness perhaps, or direction, or food in this white earth that has cut so cruelly into its subsistence. Then it flies off into a wood of pitch pines, and I hear a low sound, the mere snatch of a thrush’s warbling.

Just by stopping for ten minutes instead of hurrying on, I have been put into a new relation with the morning, and have seen a singularity and sacredness to all its parts. It could happen in Moscow or New York.

A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me.

I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies ... every now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm. On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping, flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of the building--dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart.