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.