April
Deeper News
I read in the papers that spring is beginning to show its vast capacity in the nation behind us, with tornadoes in the west, and floods to the south. The way is being cleared with a violence.
And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale, carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness. The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but that—a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an “incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned, four survived, and one is missing.
They were returning to Boston with 38,000 pounds of fish, after fishing west of Georges Banks. During the night, through a thick fog, a thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour wind, high waves, and heavy rain, the radar stopped working and the crewmen were unable to see. The “Back Shore” bar, on which the trawler ran aground, is an old graveyard for ships. Modern equipment has cut down greatly on losses, along with some of the old safeguards against them. Many lighthouses are no longer manned by lighthouse keepers and their families. Great beams of light swing out over the dark sea and back again with inanimate, unmanned precision. Members of Coast Guard rescue crews may no longer be men born and bred here who know every inch of their beaches. In fact, they are more likely to come from a different state, and to be stationed temporarily on the Cape, so that a man hunting for a wreck may not have too exact an idea of his location.
During the afternoon, after I hear the news and drive to see the wreck, a southwest wind blows over the cliffs that stand above the Wellfleet beach, and clouds swirl up across the blue emptiness. Cars line both sides of the road. A thin trickle of people walk along the heights, sands held by yellow grass and purple patches of bearberry, and there are others far down the long beach where the trawler lies, heaved over to starboard.
From morning news accounts and a scatter of talk the story of the doomed ship and the rescue comes to me a little, from under its nighttime shroud of fog and heaving waves. After the radar quit and the vessel ran aground on the sand bar, the crew made a futile effort to get her off. Then the radio failed. The ship was being knocked around in the thrashing darkness. All attempts failed to put dories overboard. And the seven men went into the pilothouse, where they stayed for some five hours. When day broke, the tide was changing and the seas seemed bigger than ever. The men were battered and exhausted. The trawler’s decks were awash, and they thought she was beginning to break up. The captain then ordered the crew over the sides, at which time the ship was some 600 to 700 yards offshore.
A local family, a man, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter, proprietors of summer cottages above the beach, were wakened at four forty-five in the morning by two coastguardmen who had seen the wreck and stopped in to use the phone. While one of the men drove along the heights and trained the spotlights of his jeep on the wreck, the other, accompanied by the family, walked down to the shore. The fog had lifted a little and they could see white spars rocking above the water, and what looked at first like debris, being washed back and forth against the shore. Forming a hand-to-hand chain, the four rescuers then managed by just standing out far enough in the icy water to pull three men in. More Coast Guard personnel came later and rescued the fourth. The survivors were terribly numbed by the cold. One of them had to be forced into walking so as to save his life. “How much further?” he kept mumbling, as he stumbled around in the sands, held up by the mother and daughter. Later, the flesh of these survivors was found to be black and blue from the pounding they had taken on board the ship and in the surf, flung against the sands.
Two other crewmen were found dead on the beach. Another local resident saw one of them where he lay at the bottom of a ladder that reached down the cliff: “A big man, between thirty and forty. He had coveralls on, but no shirt.”
His wife says: “I’ll never complain about the price of fish again!”
There are plenty of fish in evidence, all for free, although not a single one is taken away. The boat’s catch must have been broken into and scattered by the surf. Every ten yards or so along the wide, shelving beach are dead fish, lined up as if they had been placed there—a market display, for no taste but dissolution. Gray haddock cleaned by the fishermen’s knives. Rose fish, pinkish, orange-red, a sunset color, with fringed fins, and enormous jellied eyes rimmed with white, like goggles.
A hatch cover floats loose in the water, and a pair of yellow, oiled fisherman’s overalls lies on the sand.
The boat, which was shoved and lifted by the seas until it now lies a few yards off the beach, is just ahead. We curious onlookers walk toward it in growing silence. The surf waters are breaking on the beach beside the strong, humble craft, inactive, done, pounded down. I can make out her name, Paulmino, along the bow. She is banked over hard, and the waves, still fairly high, back and fill around the stern. They well up, then ease away again. Where water sloshes amidships there are tattered nets and bobbing cork floats. The steel masts stand with ropes and stays unbroken, and the high, white pilothouse is intact, where they spent their terrible night.
I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death, or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that no mortal fear escapes.