July
A Start on Cape Cod
I drove to Cape Cod with travelers from everywhere. I came to this narrow peninsula over the blistering, insatiable roads of America with the summer crowd—in my shirt sleeves, with dark glasses to protect my sight—conscious of almost nothing but cars, and casualties... our migrations have them too, like the birds and fish.
I saw an accident so terrible I could not describe it. Machines were flung into the air and smashed. A life was tossed away, a human being crushed like a doll. Human relationships were pathetically severed by the brutality of chance. Then we were allowed to go on—travelers racing down the highway through the blood-boiling heat of the sun. We come in with speed and we go away with speed, and we are both afraid and desirous of it. The human run in its relentless self-absorption seems more abstracted than any other natural force.
The resident population of Cape Cod is some 80,000, and in July the number increases to an estimated 250,000 or more, a kind of barometric rise that is equivalent to what is happening in the earth at large. After Labor Day, when the summer tribe has gone back to the cities, relief comes. You can cross the road in comparative safety. Then, something like apathy pervades the Cape, as if its diminished society were trying to recover from an encounter with enormous odds.
Now I am off the road and back on the 110-foot hill where we put our house—part of a ridge that runs along the glacial moraine about a mile back from Cape Cod Bay. Dry Hill was its local name, and in fact, driving a well, we found a constant source of water only at 130 feet. This evening the yellow light runs liquidly through the oak trees and the pitch pines around us. I can hear the voices of some of my travel companions lifting from the shore, calling, pleading, protesting. A snatch of radio music comes in. A plane drones overhead. The warm air seems to breathe hard, as if to compete with human breath.
I often wonder, when I am back on the Cape again, whether I chose the right place in which to live. It looks bare and scrubby, lean and poor, in comparison with those lands to the north and west of us which are far prouder in their trees. It has been burned over, cut down, and generally abused by man, and most of its healthy trees will never attain full growth because of the salt spray that the winds drive over them in many storms. And the sea, for all its surrounding presence, seems a mere backdrop a great deal of the time, a flatness along the horizon, but it is indomitably there. All the winds, the plants, the shores, the contours of this low land, are influenced by it, and because of it we are carried out into a distance in spite of ourselves. The sea mitigates our insularity.
Cape Cod reefs out into the Atlantic. I saw our house when it was new as a ship above the trees. I imagined a voyage. I recognize that although there are some true fishermen here who sail the year around, the rest of us are summer sailors, with no lasting allegiance or commitment to the dangers of salt water. Yet the Cape provides space for whoever might take the risk or pleasure of finding it. The sea and sky are very wide. The winds blow in from all quarters.
The yellow evening lowers now, through the young, shining leaves of the oak trees, creating new recesses of darkness. Tides of fire hang above the water. There are snatches of bird song through the woods: a robin; the silver pealing of a wood thrush; a towhee; a whippoorwill, starting in on its over-and-over-again, the loud repetitious whistling that makes the night known even as the day hangs on. And finally faint stirrings here and there, easings down, last faint pips and trills before the dark. I am conscious of the tenancy of nature, in which there is more putting forth, more endurance, more population, in fact, than any visitor or local man might ever begin to realize. The great world we live in is no longer one for hide-outs. If this makes for intolerable pressure and despair, it also brings much more into view. Local recognition becomes a general need, and there are more possibilities in it than we have been told. While the human race has been approaching three billions in number, and making ready to put its mark on the moon or hang its hearing aids off Venus, I seem to have spent many years missing, or unwittingly avoiding, almost as many lives and chances close to home. How can I begin to compensate?