WHEN THE SAND IS FLYING
I was staying at the Race Point Station on the back shore of Provincetown. It was close upon eight o’clock at night, the lamps were lit, the living room was still, and at the end of the cleared and covered dining table a surfman off duty was reading the day’s paper and puffing a quiet pipe. It was so quiet I could vaguely hear the scratching of the pen. Suddenly this quiet world woke to a faint sound, the sound grew of an instant to a dull and hollow roaring; a whirl of unseen sand swept like sleet against the northern panes.
“There you are,” called my host through his door, “the wind’s changed, and if you go on patrol to-night you’ll find some sand flying. Hear that?”
A fierce, crystally patter of sand was striking at the pane; the hollow roaring had become a wintry howl. Presently I noticed that other sand storms had given the northern windows an opaque surface of ground glass. At the Race and several other stations there are sets of windows which must be renewed every single year.
Then slowly, very slowly midnight came, and I dressed to go on a patrol in an old suit with socks pulled over the trouser ends, a watch cap, and my old navy pea jacket snugged round me with a poilu’s army belt. The sand takes the surface from oilskins. My fellow patrolman, Mr. Morris, was clothed in one of those excellent navy wind proof suits which are ousting oilskins from the Cape; the jumper has a hood attached to it and the whole suit has a kind of polar explorer air. After looking to see that he had his flare light signal safely tucked away, Morris threw open the station door.
The night was bitter cold and overcast, and the air was full of the strangest dry hissing in the world. Along the frozen strand, and through the dead beach grass of the inland dunes, loose sand was flying, hissing as it was borne along upon the ground. The wind was thick with sand; invisible sand that blew directly into our faces, struck at our eyes, and set us to blinking, blowing, and weeping; it forced its way into the nostrils, it invaded the pouches of the ears, it gathered in the crease of one’s lips and set one to chewing out grit, one’s eyes in gritty anguish all the while. Sand and dust of sand began to gather like snow in all the hollow creases of our clothes; sand sifted down into our boots, sand found a mysterious way through our collars and down our necks, grit lodged in the eye hollows, in the eyebrows, and in the short hairs above the ears. And it came to us hissing and stinging, the cold, dry crystals falling upon the face like the myriad blows of some tiny cruel whip.
We walked that night along a spectral sea. A wind had moved the harbor ice out of the hook of Provincetown, and this ice had drifted ashore on the outer side. Here and there a single cake lay stranded on the beach, but the great mass of it had gathered together to form a vague, broad band along the shore. It was afloat, and as the outer breakers dived beneath it and coursed ashore, the ghostly mass rose and fell, churning and groaning in the cold. Now here, now there along it, spectral eyes and slow glows of coldest phosphorescence, appeared, smouldered, and died, and our steps kicked phosphorescent patches in the sand. Presently my companion’s sharp and watchful eye saved me from stumbling over something on the border of the floe. We stooped, sheltered our tingling faces as well as we could, and flashed on an electric torch.
A loon crouched there in the hissing and mysterious night, its breast feathers matted stiff with sand and fuel oil. The oil kills the wild fowl by thousands on the Cape, for it gums their feathers together when they have settled in a pool of it, and allows the cold to strike in through openings of unprotected flesh. The motionless, calm ray of the electric lamp lent an ironic serenity to the vast, wild dark, and the dying creature lifted its eyes to the white ray, dark uncomprehending eyes awaiting something incomprehensible and dread.
We hurried on, and, coming to a wide turn, found ourselves exposed to the full fury of the sand. A wind with never a lull or a whirl, a wind with the directness of a channeled river, roared by us doubling the tiny lashes in number and in force. But we luckily had but a little taste of this, and soon reached the end of the first half of our patrol by Race Point light.
The squat white tower stood close at hand, its placid and unearthly beam glancing along a length of the bordering floe. One could see the cakes rising and falling in great, heavy-laden curves, and the ghostly spurts and tosses of the water in between. Then Morris and I returned to the Coast Guard station with the sand at our backs, shook and slapped and stamped away as much of the sand as we could, and closed the hospitable door of Race Point upon the strident, inhospitable world.
THE SANDS OF CAPE COD - THE FASCINATING AND DESOLATE DUNESTHE SANDS OF CAPE COD“Beyond the broad swath of churning breakers lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas.”THE FACINATING AND DESOLATE DUNESThat furnish the stinging ammunition for the artillery of the wind
THE SANDS OF CAPE COD“Beyond the broad swath of churning breakers lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas.”THE FACINATING AND DESOLATE DUNESThat furnish the stinging ammunition for the artillery of the wind
THE SANDS OF CAPE COD“Beyond the broad swath of churning breakers lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas.”THE FACINATING AND DESOLATE DUNESThat furnish the stinging ammunition for the artillery of the wind