Exclusive beach rights are a cheap commodity this time of year. Though real estate prices don’t dip much in winter, temperatures do. In January the Cape coasts are rarely crowded, and an 18° temperature coupled with a northwest wind of thirty-five knots will insure you nearly complete privacy and solitude at almost no expense, with free mosquito control as well.
On such a day, shortly after New Year’s, I managed to make it out to the Bay – past a tangle of phone calls, conferences, children and unfinished tasks – to catch the tail end of the afternoon before it blew away completely on a hard, cold wind that had been scouring the land relentlessly since morning. I went on foot, out across Crowe’s Pasture, a salt-marsh-bordered neck of land in East Dennis that had been an old pasture once but was now a conservation area largely grown up in scrub oak, scraggly cherry, beach plum and viburnum – growth appropriately stark and gaunt at this season.
I followed an old dirt road. A light covering of snow had been frozen hard for several days, but a thin dusting had settled the previous night and had recorded a single set of human tracks during the day. Not wanting to repeat recent discoveries, I left my predecessor’s tracks at the first fork and continued out toward one of the handful of houses that had been built on the neck before the town rescued it for posterity.
Down below the house was the larger of two small ponds in the area, about a hundred fifty yards across and set about that far back from the beach itself. I stepped tentatively out onto its frozen surface, pausing when it snapped and cracked under my weight. But expansion cracks in the ice and bubbles underneath showed me that it was at least five inches thick. I made my way directly across the pond, toward some small dark objects that looked like dead sparrows but turned out to be goose turds. Reaching the other side, I made my way through a drying succession of pond shallows, swamp and bog, all solidly frozen and dusted lightly with snow.
The narrow band of moor and sand blowouts that now lay between me and the beach had been almost swept clean of snow by the steady wind, and it was here that I began to see how hard the freeze really was. The bare, sand slopes were as hard as concrete, and I bounced across them leaving no footprints whatsoever. The wind blew mercilessly here, slipping like a knife into the cracks and crevices of my clothing, trying to pry me open like a quahog.
The beach itself was, if anything, harder than the moors, a smooth, gradual slope barren and empty except for a few frozen slipper shells. These mollusks had been the victims of a Japanese seaweed known as Codium fragile, which has invaded and multiplied in our waters during the past decade, posing a serious threat to shellfish in some areas. Codium is aptly nicknamed ‘Dead Man’s Fingers,’ not only for its thick, slimy, limp fronds, but because of the way it has of attaching itself to shellfish, as it had to the slipper shells, dragging them ashore on the wind and tide, and there holding onto the beach until both organisms freeze or desiccate in the burning wind.
There was also a single line of footprints on the beach ahead of me. But these had been made in another age, an ice age ago, and now lay fossilized by the cold, gathering snow dust in their dents. My own footsteps, like ghost tracks, left no prints for the spring tides to erase. Beach footprints last longest when there is pack ice in the Bay, for then the ice acts as a sea wall, keeping the tides from climbing as high as they might. If a man would leave footprints in the sands of time, let him do it in winter, just before a hard freeze.
The ice had already formed a border some thirty yards wide out in the Bay, and I could see patches of oily green slush forming beyond it at the edge of the vibrating water. Overhead, sullen wedges of Canada geese flew by, bugling metallically, and on a rock several yards out into the soft ice sat a single male eider duck – a handsome patchwork of black, white and green.
The day was getting late now, and I walked west up the beach into the teeth of the wind and a sky becoming molten gold. Further along, on a section known as Devil’s Beach, the shore became strewn with large rocks and boulders, culminating in a twelve-foot-high monolith on the upper beach. I startled a small flock of black ducks that had taken refuge in its lee and took their place.
Huddled against the rock out of the buffeting wind, I watched a small flock of gulls out at the edge of the receding tide. Beyond them the Bay seethed and heaved whitecaps, a sea of wild horses. The gulls stood calm and unruffled before the fierce wind and the fury of dark water. They seem to possess a supreme nonchalance, an almost insolent indifference toward the violence of the shore, as though they were not held in the teeth of a forty-mile-per-hour gale, but were beachstrollers in June.
The nonchalance is, of course, a mask. Gulls are no more immune to the rigors of winter than other birds. I find their stiff carcasses thrown up on the beach, nonchalant no more. I have noticed, in fact, that more often than not they seem to come to more violent ends than other birds. Whether I come upon their bodies along the marshes or on the dunes or along the shore, they almost invariably lie in grotesquely contorted positions. They look like things smashed and flung down, instead of simply dead. Inland birds – sparrows, robins, and even some hawks that have succumbed to cold, hunger or disease – these I nearly always find with wings carefully folded, forming smooth, stream lined, almost weightless packages of death that might blow across the land like leaves.
But gulls are more like the dogs, cats, raccoons and skunks one finds mashed on the highway by some passing car or truck. Their bodies are not only twisted but driven into the sand, matted and frozen inextricably into it. Do they die in mid-flight? Does the wind blow them awry if they turn wrong? They look as though they had been slapped down, flattened in an aerial instant by the hand of some pride-wounded divinity.
Yet these gulls, assembled in loose flocks on the lower beach, did not look as if such a fate awaited them. At least they did not seem to accept earth’s harsh terms with mere abject resignation. If anything they seemed to sport with it. Casually facing the gale, one would occasionally open his wings and, without beating them, lift over the heads of his fellows and descend again. Then another would do the same, and another. There they were, ballooning lazily and gracefully over one another, using the fierce energy that planed down land and water to play leapfrog on the edge of destruction.
A hundred yards offshore, a flock of white-winged scoters beat westward into the wind, bodies stretched out, keeping low in the green troughs of the waves, wings beating rhythmically and in unison with intense purpose and great effort. ‘Keep close, keep together,’ they seemed to say, as though life were a matter of grim discipline. The hard lines of the day did not contradict them. Everything seemed to press life down into lower and lower profiles.
On the western horizon one of the Cape’s violent winter sunsets began to play itself out. Above the serrated turbulence of the waterline, the air itself became visible and shimmered horizontally with wind and cold, much as it rises in vertical waves off a hot pavement in summer. To the north clouds were breaking up, tinted incongruously with soft pastel shades of blue and pink.
It was intensely lovely to watch, but the beach and stones had an unnerving, pre-human aspect, and it was not just the cold that forced me to move again before the show was over. I climbed the bluff and walked among a string of empty summer cottages, boarded blind for the winter. If I had looked a little more closely I might have seen the foundations themselves weathering. I could easily have believed that men had left for good, and that I was only a relict or guardian spirit looking on, if the biting wind had not kept reminding me of my flesh-and-blood reality.
Heading inland again, I did meet one man, a hunter, a figure clad wholly in white – white jacket, white pants, white gloves, white hood – invisible against the snow until he emerged suddenly quite near, startling me. So inhuman he looked, not an inch of flesh showing, that for a brief moment I wondered if he might be out for me, the last of my kind. But he was after other game, rabbit or pheasant, and with a brief nod from behind silvered ski glasses, he passed silently and harmlessly by.
I made my way quickly back across the frozen pond, sliding before the wind, the ice whooping and cracking behind me as though reprimanding me for such childish fancies – then up the hill and back down the dirt road through a dead landscape bathed in light like blood. A nearby church bell clanged five o’clock like a warning.
When I returned home my wife asked me where I had been. I was hard put to say. ‘On the beach’ hardly seemed adequate. I felt that I had gone farther and been gone longer, and that there was some nagging meaning to the whole strange excursion that I could not quite grasp. Yet there seemed nothing definite I had learned or discovered from it – unless it was how willing the imagination is to indulge itself in trying to fill up such an empty and whitened world.