Contrast and Response
January seems grim and contained. This is not the time to expect life to declare itself. Even local human circumstances are such as to prove a kind of gray waiting. While the rest of the world retires in Florida, counts change in New York, or struggles with vast new shifts and divided aims, Cape Cod stays down, and holds on. The population is five times less than that of the summer. It is the barren, exposed peninsula it used to be, with the exception of the new woodlands and all the cottages. We are linked by highway and modern communicatory apparatus with the rest of the continent, but in this season there is a feeling of diminished wants. The human pulse begins to rise in April or May, when people paint and refurbish their motels and cottages in preparation for the great migration of vacationists. Now the economy subsists more on expectation than fulfillment. The human squirrels have stored away their acorns. The forage is thin in January for all inhabitants.
The weather roams still, with our surrounding waters. Why live here but for the reason that there is always an element of sufficient grandeur? Although the sea might not be visible for the motels and trailers before your eyes, a few miles, or a few yards, brings its untouched enormity into view. The sky is wide, and the ocean waters are still breathing loud or low with fruitful magnitude. They are at the end of every road. And when the foghorn bawls from Chatham like a lost cow, we know that there are still headlands and ships, the uncalculated and the unknown.
On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak forests, or thickets—they are scarcely more than two feet high, as well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in, sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.
The sea beyond is full of long waves that take the low sunlight of late afternoon and swoop and fall with it. They come in from the distance and then rise as they approach the shore, showing their marbled, curved surfaces, to pause at the crest and plunge down. A stiff north wind holds them back a little. Manes of spray whip back at their cresting and when they fall the spray rises up almost vertically. Just inshore, where the breakers fling in their prows along the sloping beach, the waters foam with constant movement, in and out, all bubbling and shifting with a turbulent milk, whose surface looks opalescent—colors of blue, green, and pink bordered by heavy pearl. And what a sound! A thundering, a loud fermentation, with an occasional great soft clash of waves like cymbals, the long surf roaming and lunging in the evening light for miles and miles. From where I stand on the cliff top I can see a little group of men and children jumping and throwing sticks and stones into the surf. They run back and forth with its rhythm, playing touch and go with it, running to keep warm in the wind, playing as if they had to, dancing for the surf’s thunder. They laugh, shout, hurl driftwood into it. They jump and wave their arms as the water reflects their images, just on the fringe of an immense, terrible beauty, responding with an antic kind of love.
The sea provides a cold, unfathomed latitude in the tightness of January. On land too there is a kind of under-rhythm of things allowed, or rather a special winter pace and timing, each life with its relation to the cold. The thin light and air seem to define the leeway. Thick snow showers slant in. Sky, hills, and shore are blotted out. There is nothing to be seen but the naked trees, the oak leaves like tattered old flags holding against the wind that kicks the flakes ahead. The storm abates into gusts, and occasional sweeps of snow with blue patches blown clear in the sky. At each advent of this blue clarity, with sharp spun strands of light coming in from the sun, the birds respond. Snow swirls. Wind seethes. There is nothing to be seen but a tree sparrow or a chickadee at the bird feeder. Then the blue patches show again and the earth clears to vision. A flock of juncos fly in, or a blue jay glides through; a red-tailed hawk screams in the sky. It is as if they were all puppets dancing for their master light.
Special response is as much a part of winter as extreme reaction or withdrawal. I see this in the birds. I hear it in the yawing creaks of a pine, in dead leaf stir, wind speech, in their collaboration. I feel it in the quality of the season, its rigid shocks, its holding hard and letting go, its suspense and trigger edges, the obedience it calls for, the inertness and tight compliance.
Within the temperature range permitted it, life now shows many hairbreadth balances. Some marine animals “deactivate” during the winter—the equivalent of that coma and lowered metabolism which is called hibernation in the woodchuck or the chipmunk. If no ice blocks are in the way, and I can walk out over the offshore flats, I find periwinkles still holding on to rocks or driftwood, but obviously slowed down almost to a stop. On the other hand, common rock barnacles breed during the winter months as far north as Delaware and New Jersey, sending out eggs which will hatch in cold sea water into free-swimming larvae. And there is a red crab in Boston Harbor which stays active throughout the winter.
When it gets abnormally cold, shellfish “supercool.” They have a freezing nucleus and will survive if not suddenly jarred.
Adaptation to ranges in temperature varies enormously. Some plants and animals die when the temperature drops beyond a certain point, and others when they are released too quickly from freezing temperatures. Some animals avoid the cold by migrating, or they are able by specialized habits to eat and survive as permanent residents.
The conditions of life in its natural environment, whether land or water, vary from place to place, although the sea, for example, is less extreme and difficult than is the land. Such conditions may show dramatic contrasts in areas that are fairly close together. Because of the influence of the Labrador Current, the waters to the north of Cape Cod are colder than those to the south, where they are influenced by the Gulf Stream. As a result, there are some species of marine invertebrates which exist on one side of the Cape but not the other.
The frog, a cold-blooded animal whose tissues approximate the temperature around it, lies in the cold mud, sometimes in blocks of ice, an intrinsic part of winter. The blue jay, on the other hand, is less helpless, and is able to forage above the ice and snow. Like man, it has an internal temperature of its own, regardless of the weather; although man is without the insulation of feathers or fur. A thing apart, I run to my house, my city, the tunnels of my society, in order to escape the cold. I wonder, though, whether this mental animal, a great experiment in complexity, is not as perilously balanced as any simple organism, a mussel or a clam, in the extremes of temperature and environment.