Sunken Meadow

by

John T Lockwood

Recently I hiked along a roadway towards Cape Cod Bay. It was off-season, of course. Nobody goes to Cape Cod during the season anymore -- it's too crowded. The road, which had bustled with summer visitors just a month earlier, was silent now except for the sound of my boots which scruffed along the rough, sand-dusted pavement as I went. Occasionally, I looked up at the rolling dunes that rose southerly and to my left. Low, dark clouds scudded across the dunes and headed out over the bay, propelled by a strong wind which was blowing overhead, but not at ground level. Above these swift-moving dark clouds the sky was gray in a mottled pattern with lighter trails of smoke wisping off here and there. It was a New English day. The October air was cool rather than cold but its damp feel carried the warning that rain was not far off shore. It was late afternoon, still daytime, yet so dark that the streetlamps would have gone on had there been any streetlamps. The poor light had caused me to forgo my cameras which I usually carry on these hikes. No matter, the beauty of these ugly days on the New England coast cannot be properly caught on film. To the North, a salt marsh stretched off in reedy barrenness to a distant high ground bristling with the rough barked pine trees that grow everywhere God permits them to on Cape Cod. The high ground there at the far edge of the marsh ascends abruptly some twenty feet or so in a steep rampart. Atop it, among the pines, several houses have been built, with big back porches attached to the second floors to afford expensive views of Cape Cod Bay and of the flat marshland immediately below.

Just as I approached the bay beach, I heard the clatter of a pair of bicycles racing up behind me. People who ride bicyles are fond of saying that you can't see anything from a car. They are right, of course, but it is also true that you can't feel anything from a bicycle. A-bike, the air rushes by too fast to convey its smells and sounds. Bicycles make noise. Not so much as cars, to be sure, yet bikes emit a creaking of gears and a whistle of spokes -- man-made, municipal noises that compete with the subtler whispers of nature. I prefer walking, which is quiet and encouraging of pauses, better permitting one to listen and observe. The two bikers rushed past breezily, babbling to each other as they went. Their words dropped off to the ground and died quickly in the wet air. I couild not get the drift of their conversation. They pedalled to a stop in the small parking lot at the bay beach at the end of the road. Bracing themselves first on one foot and then on the other, they looked out briefly and in silence at the Bay which rippled grayly against the deep sand shore. They were a young pair, male and female, probably married or soon to be. With soup-dish helmets and tight black pants stretching to mid-thigh, and yellow-slickered against the threat of rain, they began to circle slowly in a small corner of the parking lot like homing pigeons getting their bearings. The circles gradually grew larger. This is the dance bikers do when they have arrived at their destination, but the only purpose of the trip lay in the going. Just as I reached the end of the parking lot and the edge of the beach, they pushed off purposefully back down the road, their legs -- I noticed the young lady's in particular -- flushed red by the damp. The sound of their tires working the road grew faint as they headed back toward Massasoit Road and from there to wherever. They had gone as far as they could, anyway. Bikes can get you to a beach or salt marsh, but are a burden to you once there. You must either get off the bike and walk, or head home.

In New England, a salt marsh of a certain type is called a sunken meadow. Sunken meadows lie in depressed land, or semi-land, surrounded on three sides by sharply higher ground. The road on which I was walking and the bicyclers were pedalling was laid out on a lip of high ground that continued up from the marsh to the rolling dune country to the south and my left as I faced the Bay. Along the right side of the road was just enough solid land for a few houses to queue up along the edge of the sunken meadow. The fourth border of such a meadow is not the sea as one might expect. Rather, it consists of a thin strip of dry duneland and beach which separates the marsh from the bay or ocean. There is a opening somewhere along this stretch of dune where the marsh is alternately flooded and drained by the sea, depending upon the direction of the tides. At this particular sunken meadow, this last strip of land ran for a half mile or more along the bay and was broad enough to support a line of beach houses and a rough sand road which ran between the houses and the marsh.

In the sunken meadow, the rush and boil of the sea are muted by distance and muffled by the matted grass, which deadens sound. The dune barrier between beach and marsh forces the almost constant outer Cape Cod wind to leap over the low-lying meadow leaving it in a zone of quiet air stirred only by gentler breezes - at least in good weather when the wind comes off the bay. If wind is coming off the oceanside it is here an easterly wind which almost always signals bad weather in New England. This was a bad weather day. The tall, sharp reeds of the marsh rippled like Kansas wheat in the wind that blew through the marsh from the Northeast.

I hiked up the sandy road along the bayside edge of the meadow. The beach houses were all battened and closed for the season. There is something about New England beach cottages that appeals to me in a way no other work of man can equal -- except Vermont covered bridges or old Adirondack boat houses. These were typical. Chimneys poked out of the middles of their steeply pitched roofs, a gray-white stain streaked from the chimney flashings, discoloring the roof shingles on each house. Some of the houses had wooden decks, now devoid of their summer compliment of beach chairs and umbrellas, other houses had outdoor storage sheds secured with large rusted chains and big padlocks. The windows were fitted with either light blue or barn-red shutters and sills, colorfully offsetting the battle-gray armor of weathered wooden shingles in which each house was clad. The houses were surrounded by tall beach grass, its summer green now faded in October to a woody tan. The grass hissed in the easterly wind ruffling in across the salt marsh. A picket line of utility poles manned the bay side of the road just marshward of the houses like a platoon of some occupying army, stretched out behind the crest of the sandy, grass-topped dune to await the amphibious invasion which will some day sweep away civilization from this place and reclaim it for the Atlantic wilderness. All of Cape Cod is under siege by an irresistible naval armada of salt water and salt wind. The Cape cannot withstand the patient enemy in the long run.

I walked over the dune on a thin, sandy pathway that ran through the grass next to one of the houses. I went along the beach a short distance to an array of large stones that had been laid out there in a jetty to slow the erosion of the sand. I sat down. The tide was out but coming in. It still had a long way to go before cresting. The color of any body of water, Cape Cod Bay included, is merely a reflection of the sky. On this day, the water was as gray as slate. I looked out into the bay. I could make out a thin line of sand protruding from the water far offshore. It was Billingsgate Island, or what was left of it. Eighty or so years earlier it had been occupied by a number of beach houses not unlike those lining the sand road above me. Some few wealthy summer vacationers took refuge there from the heat of Boston or Providence or New York or elsewhere. At the turn of the 19th century from the spot where I now sat, armed with binoculars, one could have just made out the features of Billingsgate Island: Coaches and drays, their leather seats basking in the sun of a summer's day parked next to small, wood-shingled houses protected on their seaward sides by eight foot tall wooden wind fences; white laundry hanging from clotheslines and fluttering in the bay breezes; and now and then the tiny animated figure of a dog or person. They were all gone now. After eight decades even the children of those vacationing families would have grown old and joined their parents in the hereafter long since. But more than that was gone.

When I was a teenager in the early 1960's I had hiked to Billingsgate Island at low tide. The constant inward and outward sweep of the tides and the rubbing of the wind had already overcome this outwork of Fortress Cape Cod. I saw there scant evidence of the community which once occupied it. The vacation homes of those gaslight era families were reduced to a stubble of tiny ruins. Sand-filled storm cellars and small piles of disintegrating bricks, were now washed completely over by several feet of salt water at high tide. Soon absolutlely nothing will be left of Billingsgate Island -- dead and gone more so than the Roman Empire and ancient Egypt where the Colloseum still stands and the Pyramids endure.

It was getting dark. The red marker buoy near Billingsgate Island began to blink. This is the only work of man still functioning on the island, to my knowledge. It warns boats bound for Welfleet Harbor of the shallows. A few small drops of rain sprinkled the bay mud in front of me, a puff of cold wind struck me in the back and a line of ripples stirred the surface of the water in a zigzag dash away from shore. The rain which the easterly wind had been promising was arriving. Blowing in off the North Atlantic, it was cold and nasty, like raw meat. I was wearing only a light windbreaker for protection. It was a navy blue jacket that I had been awarded for a speech I had made in Indianapolis concerning computerized accounting systems. This was not exactly yankee rain gear. I decided to retreat from the beach. I hoped that the rain would not hit too hard as my house was about two miles away. I headed down the beach toward the parking lot. I wanted to get to a hard-surfaced road, as the deep sand would slow my progress. The rain hit hard. I discovered that the Indianapolis windbreaker was not waterproof. Rain silvered the jacket and seeped quickly to the skin. Perhaps the rain would not last too long. Perhaps it would.

I decided to head for the beach houses on the top of the dune in the hope of finding some cover. I stumbled up the dune and looked out into the sunken meadow beyond. On the bluff at its far side, the pine trees were swaying briskly in the wind. I could see sheets of wind-blown rain shawling across the marsh. The reeds were dancing crazily this way and that as the winds tugged at them. I made for the nearest house. It had a roofless porch fronting on the Bay. None of the houses seemed to offer any real protection. They were boxes with open decks either fore or aft or both. I stayed with this first house. House-breaking trespasser that I am, I tried the door. It was locked tighter than a drum. The windows were all locked as well. There was for some reason a wood picnic table bench with no picnic table sitting on the bayside deck. I moved the bench up against the front of the house and sat on it. I was in the lee of the house and most of the rain blew by me. I got plenty wet, notwithstanding. My hair was matted and my hatless scalp itched. My blue jeans clung in cold clamminess to my legs. They felt heavy with the rainwater imbedded in them. With the day almost gone, I would be walking home in the dark once the rain let up a bit.

I liked it. Getting trapped out of doors in bad weather reminds me that I am as subject to nature as trees and rabbits, birds and fish. So much of our lives are spent in warm comfort, we forget about cold comfort. There is great peace of mind in knowing that you are as wet as you can get, so it might as well keep raining. I wondered if the bicyclers had made it to shelter before being caught by the squall. They most probably had. They missed the real fun. They had zipped down the road past the sunken meadow without seeing it. They had arrived at the bay and left without having been there. They had gone out but not outside. Now they were back at their cottage or motel room, warm and dry, watching television. I felt rather sorry for them as I sat in the cold wind and the soaking rain on the deck of a boarded up beach house looking out at the forlorn blinking red light that marked the tomb of Billingsgate Island, still barely visible in the darkening murk.

FIN

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24 July 1996