The Undiscovered Country!

Our book today is The Undiscovered Country, yet another splendid production of the late great soul of Cape Cod, John Hay. As I've written before, these end-of-summer days always remind me of the Cape for some reason, even though I've known that blessed little hook of land in all weathers and all seasons. End-of-summer in New England is the practicum of beauty under siege: heat and humidity still rule the days, but the wind that whispers the trees at night is no longer quite so lazy or aimless, and the reliefs it brings feel increasingly watchful in their mercies. In late August the days are still hot and the sky is still a burnished blue, but if you pause near the edge of a pond or listen to the bird-chatter in a hedge-row, you can hear shorter, sharper notes being sounded: a less forgiving season is approaching. Maybe that's why this stretch of days at the end of August and the beginning of September always call the shores and clapboard houses and salt marshes to mind: because the many beauties of the Cape are all so intense that they feel fleeting. You want each hazy afternoon, each foggy morning, each protracted, glorious sunset to last forever, and you know they won't. There's a quietly penetrating melancholy that suffuses every Cape Cod moment for those with the disposition to feel it.

Hay had that disposition, in abundance. All his books are rife (sometimes - in fact often - over-ripe) with it. For his entire adult life, he was a passionate observer of the Cape in all its moods and especially all its wildlife. And he was able to access an ecstatic wonder over all of it, which he conveys in his frequent Thoreauvian arias, like this one on a favorite subject, fish:

They have mastered the universe of water that covers the major part of the planet. I have met only a few of their twenty thousand species, but each of these has illuminated the place I found them in. They pout, wiggle, and dart. They hang in glassy eyes of water, or in a downstream current. We see them, in their scaly reflections of water and sunlight, shining past our capacity to see. There are silver-sided minnows sailing straight over the brilliant sands; marsh killifish making quick dashes across the bottom of salt-marsh ditches, to disappear in puffs of mud; and in the seas beyond, the mackerel with rippled patterns on their beautiful fusiform bodies, slipping and flashing through the waters.

He's self-deprecating always in his prose (less so in real life, to put it mildly), and he's immensely respectful of the personalities of all the wildlife he encounters. "Being constantly aggravated little creatures," he tells us about that homicidal minuscule speck, the shrew, "they will, I suspect, attack almost anything. I was once faced by a shrew that, as I walked by, slipped out of leaf cover to hold its ground, twittering angrily, and I was the one to withdraw."

All Hay's books are beautifully written, but it's at summer's end that I notice how often he himself seems to feel the melancholy I'm describing. His prose becomes sadder and a bit more brittle when he contemplates the turn of the season, especially this turn of the season:

Beyond the sands, the granite-gray surfaces of the waves line out, whipped by the wind, while the leaden stream of the outgoing creek reflects the last golden light. Gulls lift and dip down into its waters. While the land begins to hunker down and accommodate to the arctic, the offshore waters protect their passions, keep sending in their signs. I found a fishlike cluster of creamy eggs as I walked down the beach, a little glistening ball I could not identify, left by the tide. Life floats in to prove my ignorance, if that ever needed any proof. But out reaching is never finished. These flat lands are like broad wings, stretching toward the cold sky, beyond the grain of the immediate, worlds without end. What should I do, if there were any choice, but fly?

The Undiscovered Country was written in 1981 when the author was in the middle of a fairly frightening health scare. The worst didn't happen, and Hay went on to write half a dozen more wonderful books. But none is quite so beautifully elegiac as this one, and it's this one I nowadays take down from the shelf when bully August finally begins to weaken and September with its change of season is finally sniffing the night air. In all likelihood I won't get to the Cape this season, but Hay's books make it easy to go there at any time.

 

the Cape at summer's end

Travelers in Venice have been known to comment that the fragile, surrounding wonder of the place makes them feel like they're walking around inside a dream. The northeastern shore of America has a place that elicits the exact same feeling - a place William Sargent succinctly describes at the beginning of his book Shallow Waters:

On the East Coast of North America the flexed arm of New England juts far out into the open Atlantic Ocean. This is Cape Cod, famous for its beaches, its history, its seafaring way of life.

Despite the impression given by the crushing crowds of summer tourists, most Americans (to say nothing of most people on Earth) never get to see Cape Cod, and most of those who do visit (usually in the canned, overpriced chunk of Hell known as the week-long family vacation) never really get to know the place. Cape people are protective about their hugely-visited twist of land, so they'd probably have it no other way - but the place itself is yielding of its marvels, to the patient, to the observant, and to the lucky.

I've been lucky with the Cape: I've known it for years and years, from Sandwich to Orleans, from Falmouth to Truro, from the inlets of Buzzards Bay to the sedate streets of Harwich, and from the Great Beach to Provincetown. I've known it in all seasons, in all weathers, in all frames of mind, and - greatest luck of all - in some of the best company. I've prowled its used bookstores, stalked its tidal pools, sailed its coastlines, napped in some of its pretty little houses, rowed its marshes, and drank in its sunsets, and yet every time I've ever spent any time there, I've encountered as many new things as known things, because nobody can ever completely know Cape Cod. That's another part of its endless charm.



Those used bookstores are, naturally, jam-packed with books about the Cape - a year of Stevereads entries would only scratch the surface of that cottage industry - and it's this time of year that, wherever I am, I start taking them down from the shelf and re-reading them. Because there's a secret to the Cape that those thundering hordes of summer tourists don't know: the place is at its most glorious in the fortnight after Labor Day.

All its seasons have their splendors, of course: summer is gloriously sybaritic, spring is a patchwork of subtlety, winter (my own personal favorite) is full of sharp beauty ... but it's this time of year, the last lingering days of summer, that most accentuates the magic of the Cape. The crowds have mostly gone, and the natural world of the Cape briefly reasserts itself before the cramp of winter shuts things down. The days are still warm and bright, but the evenings have that first sweet foretaste of bite in them.


Almost all Cape Cod books tacitly acknowledge the fact that you have to know all the seasons to really appreciate the place; almost all of them dutifully take in all four seasons as they spin their stories and anecdotes. Probably the single best-known Cape Cod book is Henry Beston's The Outermost House, but I have three others in mind today, starting with the aforementioned William Sargent's fact-filled love letter to Pleasant Bay (which I once got to know quite well while based in a cozy little house full of nautical nick-knacks in Orleans), where he spent an endless stream of summers and blustery autumns. Sargent's book is the most scientific of our trio today, full of pleasantly-presented facts and figures about the Bay's natural world that our author knew so well. He straps on wetsuit and gear and glides in amongst it, often with fascinating results:

Stopping to rest on a sandspit that juts into the main channel, I stir up sediments to attract minnows out of the green depths. Now I am surrounded by a cloud of silversides and confronted by a friendly puffer fish (Spaeroides maculatus). As I reach out to scratch his belly, which will make him puff up and rise to the surface, I start to laugh at the ludicrous sight.

Suddenly, I have the distinct feeling that my foolish antics are being watched. I look up. Only inches from my faceplate is the snaggle-toothed grin of a shark. Granted, it is only a three-foot dogfish, but I beat a hasty retreat back to the shallow eelgrass beds.

Sargent's book was published in 1981. Twenty years earlier, that Cape Cod institution John Hay (whose books are all well worth hunting down at your local library) wrote his own year-long account of life on the Cape, Nature's Year, and although it's got a few too many windy-philosophizing sections for my tastes (as does The Outermost House, come to think of it), it's also got lots of careful, loving detail:

The U.S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted, salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea - whelks, surf clams, or scallops.

But the single best book on Cape Cod was written before Hay. Readers of The Atlantic Monthly i the 1940s were regularly treated to colloquial, winsomely inviting essays written by Wyman Richardson about his cozy little Farm House on Nauset Marsh and the homely adventures he and his kith and kin had there over the course of many seasons. In 1947 those essays were collected into a book called The House at Nauset Marsh, and that book, too, is eminently worth your time to search out, especially if you yourself have never been lucky enough to get to know the Cape. It perfectly captures the tone and feel of a more hands-on less developed Cape that's now almost entirely faded under the pressure of modernization, and the spell it casts starts on the first page:

You can got to Eastham, on outer Cape Cod, and live in the little old Farm House at the drop of a hat. The pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire are always ready without fear of frost or storm. You can drive up the land, stop the car by the kitchen door, and unload your gear. You can look out the south windows over the nearby grassy hills, over the bright blue waters of Nauset Marsh to the darker blue glimpses of the sea beyond the dunes, and draw a deep breath.

Through natural history observations, family outings and mishaps, and even a little philosophizing (but always done with a refreshingly flinty Yankee sensibility), The House at Nauset Marsh draws you in and encourages you to take many of those deep breaths. Reading this book is the closest you can come to imbibing the salt-air relaxation of Cape Cod without actually being there. In fact, so deeply does the book work on you that its tired, happy ending will make you homesick for a place you've never been:

First one person and then another yawns, stretches, and departs for bed, until at last only the Old Man himself is left. Finally even he gets up from his chair, takes his last weather observation, checks up on the kitchen stove, and puts out the lamps. Being the last to go, he can enjoy the luxury of leisurely undressing before the warmth of the dying fire. By slowly turning around and around, he thoroughly toasts himself. At last, however, he can procrastinate no longer. He puts up the fire screens, dashes rapidly into his bedroom, and takes the desperate plunge between the ice-cold sheets.

Through the open living-room door, he can see the dancing lights and shadows and hear quiet sounds as the fire burns down. From the pantry comes a barely audible scratching, indicating that the pantry mouse is busily engaged in finding himself some supper. Outside, there is a slight rustling as the breeze stirs the cedars, while the sudden barking of a dog suggests that Mr. Fox is bothering someone's chickens.

Rest now, little Farm House. Your flock is safely in bed and sound asleep. Thank you for the wonderfully good times you have given us.

Good night.

The nights are already arriving earlier, and soon the Cape will be almost empty of tourists. The waves will pound a little harder on the shores of Nauset Beach, and the humble creatures of Quanset Pond will dig deep into earth or lair and sleep the worst of the winter away, hoping for spring. I've walked the beaches around Provincetown and Longnook Beach and Megansett Harbor in the cold pit of winter, dogs going before and after me, the rime of salt ice on my face, and I've loved it. But still, there's a magic to this time right here - the Cape at summer's end - that no other season quite affords. A part of my heart goes there these days, no matter where I happen to be - and good books like these help with the rest.