CHAPTER ITHE LAND
Cape Cod had its Age of Romance in a half-century best placed, perhaps, in the years between 1790 and 1840. Then certainly the picture of it was charming: a picture unblemished by the paper-box architecture of a later period, or the alien hotels, the villas, bungalows, and portable-houses of to-day. Then roads, with no necessity laid upon them to be the servants of speed, were honest native sand, and, gleaming like yellow ribbons across hills and meadows, linked farm to farm and went trailing on to the next township where houses nestled behind their lilacs in a sheltered hollow, or stood four-square on the village street. As if by instinct, the early settlers from Saugus and Scituate and Plymouth, accustomed as their youth had been to the harmonies of Old England, hit upon a style of building best suited to the genius of the country. And if, consciously, they only planned for comfort and used the materials at hand, the result, inevitably, bears the test of fitness to environment. Their low slant-roof wooden houses were set with backs to the north wind and a singularly wide-awakeaspect to the south. The watershed of the roof sometimes ran with an equal slope to the eaves of the ground floor; but as frequently, yielding barely room for pantry and storeroom at the north, it lifted in front to a second story. And in either case the “upper chambers,” with irregular ceilings and windows looking to the sunrise and sunset, were packed tautly into the apex of the roof. Ornament centred in the front door—a symbol, one might think, of the determination to preserve, in the enforced privations of pioneer life, the gentle ceremonials of their past; and however small or remote, there is not such a house to be recalled that does not thus offer its dignified best for the occasions of hospitality. The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm, wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution. They were built to a smaller scale than those of Newburyport or Salem or Portsmouth; and the Cape Cod aristocrat seems to have been content with two stories to live in and a vast garret above to store superfluous treasure. There was not a jarring note in the scene; and the old houses, set in neighborly fashion on the village street or approached by a winding cart-track “across the fields,”with garden and orchard merging into pasture, suit to perfection the gentle undulating configuration of the land, which is never level, but swells into uplands that recall the memory of Scotch moors or some denuded English “Forest,” and sinks away into meadow, or marsh, or hollows overflowing with the warm perfumes of blossomy growth.
And everywhere there is color: in hill and lowland, in circles of swampy bush, in salt creek and dune. Even the motorist, projected through the country with a slip, a flash, a change too swift for the eye to note its intimate charm, is caught by the cheerfulness of green and blue and dazzling white, and more blue, the blue of salt water, clasping all. One may concede at once that it is a country adapted to the pleasure of summer folk, if they be not set upon taking their pleasure too seriously where there are neither mountains to climb nor big game to hunt, and the soft air does not invite to endeavor. But the wind sweeps clean from ocean to bay and picks up in passing resinous scents of the pine; sands reflect magic lights of rose and pearl; the townships to the north, as Robert Cushman reported of Plymouth, are “full of dales and meadow ground as England is”; and the long sweep of the outer shore, south, east, and north, is extraordinarily varied and broken; deep inlets cool the air of the warmest months, islands that yesterday were not and to-morrow may be destroyed by the tides interlace the coast with shallow lagoons where children sail their boats, bluffs carry the eye out to the clear distances of the ocean, and there are harborswhere, on a misty day, buildings loom like “tower’d Camelot.” Tides rise and fall in the salt rivers that wander through marshlands to give changing beauty to the scene; lakes tempt the fisherman; and for more ambitious sport one may put to sea and return at night, whether lucky or not, with the fine philosophy engendered by a ravenous appetite and the sure prospect of excellent food to stay it.
But perhaps the ultimate charm of the Cape is that, like a child, it is small enough to be loved. For the native-born, returning here in middle age, there is the delight of coming back to little things that memory had held as stupendous: a dim foreign township that used to be reached in a day’s journey with “carryall and pair” is only five miles distant by the Lower Road; the Great Square proves to be within the swing of an hour’s stroll; the “cap’n’s” a modest mid-Victorian mansion with library and drawing-room that had the remembered vista of Versailles. Yet, in their degree, this charm is free to the stranger. The Cape has a whimsical and endearing smallness: its greatest amplitude can boast but a few miles; and the most tortuous wood road that promised a day’s excursion through an uncharted wilderness will soon show you, from some gentle eminence, the true north to be reckoned by the curve of the bay.
It is such a jaunt inland to the woods that should invite the traveller, in any season, to forsake his motor-car for a sober “horse and team” as the better equipment to circumvent obstacles of unbridged stream or fallen tree. If even as he threads thecrowded village street he can occupy his imagination with the leisurely past that matches the rate of his progress, his pleasure will be the greater; and the effort prove not too difficult when, as of old, poplar and willows shade the road and elms droop impartially over gray homesteads and the passer-by, or behind decent screens of shrub and hedge houses blink with a modest air of being sufficient for all desirable comfort. Farther afield wayside tangles of wild rose and cherry, and scented racemes of the locust-tree, in their season, make the air sweet; or in a later month, bright companies of orange lilies are drawn up at attention by the rail fence that has worn to a beautiful silvery hue, and Joe Pyeweed nods at thoroughwort in the swamp. Fields of warm-toned grass roll down to the blur of willows in a meadow; in pastures intersected by crumbling stone walls stalwart purple and white blooms rout the fading mists of succory. And there on the outskirts of the village, hills are dressed in homespun woven of sparse grasses and crisp gray moss buttoned down with clumps of bayberry and juniper, adorned in summer by the filmy lace of the indigo-plant, and in autumn with a lovely cloak of dwarf goldenrod and asters.
Far to the north, now, lies the silver shield of the bay; inland, beyond the hills, deep-set in wooded banks is a glint of blue water, and near at hand a farm guarded by the spear of a pine that tops the roof twice over. The road dips sharply to a brook that bubbles along with a force that once turned millwheels, and rises again in a graceful curve to a hill where stands a weather-beaten house as if a-tiptoe to survey in the meadows of the farther view the secret beauties of a lake. A few miles more, and there, among the wooded uplands that make the watershed between sea and bay, lies a network of interlacing roads: “blind roads” where scrub oaks and pines lash the traveller and the horse proceeds with a careful foot among the springes of a vigorous younger growth; narrow tracks that lead to thecul-de-sacof a cranberry swamp or a woodlot where the axe has been busy with its work of denudation; or long arched aisles of green, with here a little bay a-dance with ferns washing out into the woodland, and there a vista of hills opening through mullioned windows built by the straight trunks of the pines. And here are the great ponds with bold sandy bluffs and curves that cheat us into believing them larger than they are. They are pictures of security as their waves sparkle in the sun and break idly on the miniature beaches, but quick squalls may come cutting down from the hills to lash them into a sudden ugly fury that bodes ill for any stray craft plying these waters, where, even to-day, there is never traffic sufficient to disturb the pleasing atmosphere of solitude. On a wooded shore there may be a shooting-lodge or a bungalow, a pier with a few boats bobbing at anchor on one lake or another; but for the most part they seem more remote from man than when Indians followed the forest trails and beached their canoes under a shelving bank.
THE SHORE ROAD
THE SHORE ROAD
THE SHORE ROAD
There are riches enough for all who love the land: for those who come to play, and those who come chiefly to refresh their memory of the past; for those of the fine old stock who live here year in and year out on the modest competence inherited from seafaring ancestors; and those who fish, or farm, or engage in the important modern industry of ministering to the “summer people.” The quality of the riches, as in any community, may vary with the individual. But save among a negligible few of the idlers—where there is a sinister strain of vice in a “petered-out” neighborhood, or a foolish and incongruous display among some visitors—there is a recognizable inheritance from the men who settled the land: an atmosphere of simplicity, a sturdy instinct of judging one for what he is rather than for what he has, a predilection for healthy pleasures. It is folk of this kind whom the Cape attracts—plain people, if you will; and it is perhaps significant that potent as the land might be to stimulate the imagination, it is only the beguiling “foreign” atmosphere of Provincetown that has fostered anything like a School.
Cape Cod: a sandbar, one may have the more excuse for judging, as the land lifts to the wind-swept plains of Truro. There is a change in the aspect of the Cape as it turns due north to brace itself against the thunderous approach of the Atlantic. Straight and defiant, it holds its own to the Clay Pounds at Highland Light, the Indians’ Tashmuit, and then, littleby little, the ocean pushes it back and folds it over in the graceful curve of the tip at Provincetown. From the frayed edge of Chatham on the south shore—broken as it is into deep bays with outer shoals and beaches that may alter their whole contour in a winter’s storms—and on the north the snug village of Orleans where the by-roads are the prettiest, we enter upon a new country. It may be remarked in passing that Orleans offers something of martial interest to the traveller there: for at Rock Harbor on the bay was fought the famous Battle of Orleans, an engagement of 1812; and at Nauset Harbor, in the Great War, a German submarine, with some idea, apparently, of defeating a tow of empty coal barges, planted a stray shot on the sandbar at its mouth to the considerable alarm of cottagers in the vicinity.
At Nauset Beach we look out over the ocean, and turning, see behind us the Harbor that lies there as if bent upon offering every variety of inlet—bay, lagoon, cove, and salt river threading the marshes—that may be crowded into a small compass of miles. In its progress it all but meets the equally erratic inlets of Chatham, and also the waters of Cape Cod Bay, with the result that any breeze there is from the sea. To the south stretches the Beach, a low straight wall of sand between Harbor and ocean, moulded by the Atlantic, worried by its storms, yet somehow withstanding the impact, and linking up at the sharp apex of Chatham with the sands of Monomoy that, again, are in line with Nantucket Shoals and the Island. It needs a wary seaman to know the safeentrance to Vineyard Sound. To the north the shore rises steadily to the great bluffs at Highland Light—the Norsemen’s Gleaming Strands, a name best appreciated by the seafarer proceeding, on a fair morning, to the port of Boston, when the hours spent in running by that line of golden cliffs may be the pleasantest of his voyage. And wherever one may penetrate to the coast—unless one has the enterprise of Thoreau to tramp along shore, he must return to a town and take the next road eastward—there is always a difference in the scene. Perhaps at no point is it more lovely than at Wellfleet, where the bluffs curve gently to a promontory and the surf, touched by a stray shaft of sunlight, breaks into crystal and jade. In and out, they trend away again to the north; and the sea at our feet, forward flow and backward clutch, even on a cold day of spring sounds the whole gamut of blue, light, dark, bewilderingly mingled, out to the intense purple of our farthest reach of vision—literally, the Purple Sea. There is little break in the line of bluffs, but sometimes one of the valleys, that now begin to cut transversely across the Cape, persists to the coast; and one of the prettiest drives is to Cahoon’s Hollow by way of a typical Cape Cod wood-road, winding up hill and down, with vistas of blue ponds glinting through the trees. The road debouches on dunes, covered with a low, shrubby growth; and everywhere there has been an amazing quantity of the wild cranberry covering acre after acre with its glossy green mat of leaves. The land billows down to the water’s edge, yielding flashingglimpses of blue water long before we reach it, and rises then on either hand into deeply indented cliffs.
The country, as we follow the main road inland once more, swells into rounded hills that seem under bonds to crowd as many of their company as possible into the narrow confines between sea and bay. The deep valleys among them conceal many snug homesteads built there by the First Comers; and the atmosphere is indescribably pure blending, by the winds that always blow, the bracing qualities natural to ocean and upland. It is easy to share the enthusiasm of a physician travelling this way who exclaimed: “It’s the best air in North America.” The hills now merge into high moors that narrow to the Clay Pounds where Highland Light finds a firm foundation. One overlooks both sea and bay and walks poised aloft as on a roof-tree. Thoreau is master there, and has written discursively of flora and birds and humans, and, with the wonder appropriate to an inlander, of the sea. In truth “a man may stand there and put all America behind him.” As for the name, a triangular plot of some ten acres composed of a blue clay cuts transversely through the sand; “pounds” is variously explained as a corruption of ponds or as suggested by the pounding of the surf. The land slopes up from the inner bay to the great shining bluffs that are singularly bold and picturesque, with escarpment and overhang, bastion and turret built by their architect, the sea. Below them on calm days the polished surface of the Atlantic breaks into foam on the ivory beaches.But in winter there is a different story of savage surf and an ocean that flings up its spume near two hundred feet to the starved grass of the upland. Such clamor is unbelievable in the pearly haze of summer; but even then an infrequent nor’easter may whip the Atlantic into a hungry rage as if to send it leaping over the puny barrier that divides the outer uproar from the gray dogs of the bay that are showing their teeth to the gale.
Provincetown is a story in itself. The village, with its ingredients of old Cape Cod and a large proportion of handsome, gentle-mannered folk from the East Atlantic Islands, is curled comfortably about the edge of its harbor. It has been said that Provincetown has the “privilege of turning to look at itself like a happy child who has donned a long train,” and there is an evening picture of the “circlet of lights with a background of slender spires and hills, a friendly beacon shining over the narrow spit of land at Wood End.” Picturesque and picturesque: one wears the words threadbare—picturesque in summer, with the flicker of shadow and sun, sharp-cut, exotic, the brightly dressed folk thronging the streets or hailing one another from the windows above; picturesque, with a difference, in the less exciting atmosphere of winter when the town is comfortably full of its own people busy about their affairs, which more often than not means preparing for the harvest that summer is to bring them. The harbor is a picture at high tide or low, with the boats anchored in the roadstead or moored to the wharves; or thesun slanting across the sandflats where a dory is stranded by the tide, and its master, dark-ringletted, slouch-hatted, a red kerchief knotted at his throat, a red flower in his shirt, strides shorewards with his catch dripping in its creel. The fish-wharves make a painter’s fingers itch to be at work, and many are those who respond to the impulse. No small part of the vivacity of the summer scene is furnished by the artists and their easels and their colors—artists who express what they see after a method that would horrify the ladies of the earlier era that is our particular affair.
The soil is sand, and it is said that the gardens of the town were imported by returning shipmasters who, in more fertile regions, steved their holds with loam for ballast and dumped it in their own front yards. However that may be, the little gardens are as pretty as in any English village; a vista harborwards through bright plantations of hollyhock is something to remember. And there are many trees sheltering the houses and yards: silver abeles, and elms, and willows,—the old willows “Way up along.” The scene to-day is perhaps unduly dominated by the Monument, which with time may develop a closer familiarity with its environment. Springing from clustering trees on a low eminence above the town, graceful in itself, it is as much a memorial to the indefatigable will of one of the last of the deep-water captains as to his forbears, the Pilgrims. In season and out he worked for its accomplishment, with the result that a colossal Sienese bell-tower, supplementing as it werethe enterprise of Columbus, the Genoan, pins firmly in place the sands of Cape Cod.
The village is bounded by wooded hills, and a drive oceanward brings us to the dunes where the State, year after year, has waged war with the drifting sand of its Province Lands. Life-saving stations and beacons are set at short intervals, and are needed, on this shore, and out there lie the great shoals of the Peaked Hill Bar, the cruellest of all the coast, where ship after ship has piled her bones, and men by the hundred have gone to their death. To the eye, in a crisp north wind, they present only lines of vivid jade-green water set in the wide field of blue; and here sea and shore give such promise of variety as makes one long to watch the seasons through in sun and storm and shrouding mists. The dunes that are no other color than that of sand, ever responsive to the changing mood of the atmosphere, are covered now and then by carpets of growth that run from dull green to the purple of winter; and they and the bluffs beyond them are no more constant in aspect than their neighbor the sea. Far from depressing the spirit, they stimulate keen anticipation of what the hour shall bring forth and a sense that whatever its fruit one shall be great enough to share it. Of all the places one has seen here it is most fitting that man should dare to be free.
From the slender tip of Champlain’s Cap Blanc to Wareham one is never out of sight of water: salt hereand salt there, ocean and inlet and bay; and the great ponds of the uplands, or deep in its swampy covert a lake dropped from the jewelled chain among the hills. In the towns nearer the mainland are creeks and brooks and tiny runlets, flooded cranberry swamps, a ditch choked with the lush growth it nourishes; or near the beach a peat bog may wink unexpectedly from its bosky rim where a colony of night heron have nested to be near their feeding-ground in the bay. And when the tide is at ebb they and the seagulls wheel out there in airy platoons that manœuvre as if to catch the light on their ermine or sleek surtouts of gray. On the drying sands the gulls teeter about like high-heeled ladies on an esplanade until a stranded minnow changes the play and they pounce and cuff and scream like boys greedy for a penny. There are rich harvests for the hungry on these wide reaches of the sandflats, and even a glutton bird could gorge his fill upon the prey entrapped in the fish-weirs that dot the inner coast.
There, at one point, the tide marches out a long mile to the Great Bar and back again, by appointed channels, unhurrying, punctual to the minute, to keep its tryst with the shore. Sailors, unless they have a care to the time, are likely to be “hung up” on the Bar; but for one ashore who looks out to the white line of breaking foam, every moment of the ebb and turn has its special beauty. In bright days the shoaling waters show a lovely interlacement of greens and blue; but when the sky is shrouded in gray, fold upon fold, and the sun, invisible, steps softly westward,their surface is like burnished metal, although a painter’s eye would discern there a pastel of mauves and pink and blue and a whole chromatic scale of green. White sandflats, disclosed by the ebb, are carved in whorls like a shell by the hand of the tide. Inshore plumy grasses fringe them; here and there infinitesimal forms of life stain them amethyst or green. But the wide sweep of them responds to some subtile quality in the day, and they are plains of pearl where cloudy shadows drift, or, in certain golden hours, they burn with color like some jewelled marquetry of the East. A flaming sunset walks them with feet of blood. And day after day they, or the waters above them, surprise us with some new sweet diversity.
A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun—water and sky and the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea—the bay, seeming all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among the hills. Above the beaches, now and again, stand groves of pines, homely thurifers that incense the breeze as it passes. And where the line of shore dips to a lowland, the salt marshes, with their exquisite adjustment to the season, are a treasury of beauty—rich greens flushing and dying to the bronze, studded with haycockslike the bosses of an ancient shield, that challenges encroaching autumn tides.
Winter drains the scene of color, but salt winds cheat the lower temperatures of their rigor, and it is a hard season when snow lies in the meadows through consecutive weeks. Then there are days of brave sunlight when whitecaps feather over the surface of the bay, and ice-cakes churn in with the tide and pile up like opals on the beach: days when the air is wine-clear, and the land is dressed in its best of warm russet brown, and hoofs strike the frozen roads with the resonance of Piccadilly pavements. Then sunset jewels woodland interstices with mellow cathedral light; high on a bluff above the crystal plane of a lake regiments of militant pines salute the dying day; and up in the south, when night hangs the stars low, Orion will be calling his dogs for the hunting. But more beautiful are the gray days in winter when earth meets heaven with the justly modulated values of a Japanese print, and the hills, clothed in the soft fur of leafless woods, crouch under a pale sky; when in swamps the lances of dead reeds clash, and by a stagnant pool stands a cluster of brown cat-tails like candles that have lighted some past banquet of the year.
In spring, long before the tardy oaks unsheathe their foliage, the sudden scarlet of swamp maple flames in a hollow, and we are off to the woods to hunt the stout fresh leaves which betray hiding-places of the arbutus, the mayflower, under the waste of a dead year. Near by, wintergreen in sturdy companiesshoulders the red berries that have eluded hungry winter birds, and graceful runnels of wild cranberry flow through the open spaces. Here pretty colonies of windflowers will soon be swinging their bells, ladies’-slipper and Jack-in-the-pulpit dispute the season’s clemency; and when summer brings red lilies to surprise the eye in some green chamber of the wood, our journey should end at the beach of an inland lake where spicy sabbatia sways delicately in the warm air and genesta grows on the bank.
From spring around to winter, the months are packed with flowers—roadside beauties, shy little creatures of the fields, waxen Indian-pipes in the pine groves; even on the dunes are flowering mosses, the yellow lace of the poverty-grass, the pretty gray velvet leaf of “dusty-miller,” pink lupin, wild grapes and roses crowding a secret hollow where the soil is enriched, perhaps, by an ancient shell-heap of the Indians. And among the depressions of the hills are swamps where a lovely progression, exquisitely disposed as if by conscious art, walks through the year. Color dies hard in these sheltered nooks, and hardly is dun winter lord of all, with stripped bushes huddling like sheep in the hollow, than spring breaks his rule and
“Along an edge of marshy groundThe shad-bush enters like a bride.”
“Along an edge of marshy groundThe shad-bush enters like a bride.”
“Along an edge of marshy groundThe shad-bush enters like a bride.”
“Along an edge of marshy ground
The shad-bush enters like a bride.”
Again the march begins: huckleberry, Clethra, honeysuckle, the dull smear of Joe Pyeweed, the white web of elderberry blossoms turning to fruity umbels that promise homely brews, swinging goldenrod andfeather-grass, the decorative intent of cat-tails that, with certain engaging brown velvet buttons nodding on their stems in a swamp and the firm coral of alderberries, brings us around to winter again.
And there are choristers a-plenty: the remote sweet piping of hylas piercing the velvet darkness of a night in spring, the melodious booming of bull-frogs, the challenge of Bob White; and all the dear homely New England birds, twittering, chirping, chattering, pouring out their hearts in song as they swing with the trees that the wind sweeps into endless motion. And in summer and winter, from north, south, east, or west, the wind brings us news from the sea: the savor of salt, gray billows of cloud and fog, clear stark bright days following one another through a season. The southwest gales of summer beat down ripe grasses in the field and feather willow and poplar with silver; the great autumn gales go trumpeting through the land; the nor’easter sends surf thundering on the outer shore; and there are the soft moist winds that relax the high-wrought tension of humans, and melt the rigors of winter.
The free winds,—and contour, sound, color: with nothing superfluous, yet satisfying and ever present. And from flowers and fruit and woodland and the sharp tang of the sea there is distilled a draught corrective of morbid humors and the wandering will,—a stanch pledge of sobriety.