It was a frenzied, silent scene, watched only by me.
Most mornings, I walk down the beach to meet Dennis and his dog, Dory. Dennis is handsome and everyone loves him. He’s sturdy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a trim beard; he reminds me of Melville. When we get off the whalewatch boat it takes us three times as long to get home, because he stops so often to talk to friends and acquaintances in town. Dennis was once a teacher; he did his national service in the coastguard, but has loved birds ever since he was a boy growing up in Pennsylvania. He came to Provincetown by chance, and stayed. Everyone’s a washashore here, like the soil itself, brought as ballast to these unstable sands; even the turf came from Ireland, to be laid as lawns for the gracious gardens of the East End.
That morning, as Dennis and I walked towards each other, I saw a bird crouched on the rocky groyne in between us. It had tucked its head into its wings; I presumed it was preening, or sleeping. But as we drew near, Dennis took up his binoculars. Something was wrong. He gestured at me with open hands and then at the cormorant, which slipped off the rocks and into the water.
The bird’s bill was lashed to its back by fishing line, and it was tugging pathetically at the monofilament. We followed as it swam parallel to shore. It wanted to return to the land, confused by what had happened to it, as if it might peck off its trusses. But each time we approached, it went back to the water. Dennis was not optimistic. ‘It’ll just keep swimming out – or it’ll dive,’ he said.
I waded into the sea. Dennis ran further up the beach, staying close to the bulkheads to keep his profile low. I tried to splash the cormorant ashore. It worked: the bird made for the beach and Dennis dashed towards it, unafraid of its flapping bulk.
Suddenly there it was, in our hands. A startling sapphire circle around a green cabouchon eye; a fractured sharpness, staring back unblinking. Up close, every feature took on the definition that Pat had drawn: the yellow-tipped bill and its hooked tip, the matt black wings. Primeval enough from afar, this near the bird looked even more like an archaeopteryx on the beach; evolution in our fingers.
Any bird exists apart from us: unmammalian, and therefore uncanny. Yet I could imagine myself a cormorant mate, entranced by this handsome fellow, building a nest on the rocks, proudly holding our bills in the air in celebration of our cormorantness. We took the bird to the deck of a beach house under construction, where a workman produced a knife. Swiftly, Dennis cut the line and pulled the hook from the cormorant’s mouth. Blood trickled out, bright and fresh against the black feathers. Dennis was promptly pecked on the thumb for his trouble, drawing his own blood in turn. I unwound the bird’s bound wings. In a second it was free, half running, half flying back to the water for its lunch.
After a day of louring greyness, when the town seems bowed down by the low pressure – ‘Everyone I meet says they have to go home and sleep,’ says Pat – I retreat to my studio in the timber house. Its double gables rise over the beach like some Nordic chapel or a barn raised by settlers, held up by a pair of cinderblock chimneys. I sleep in its eaves, in an attic like a chandler’s loft or a ship’s prow. At night I climb up to my platform bed via a wooden ladder, ascending to my dreams, descending in the morning, clambering down backwards the way I would at the stern of a boat.
The house is a fragile and sturdy construction, built to withstand three hundred and sixty degrees and three hundred and sixty-five days of weather. In the winter the wind worries at its windows, with their layers of glass and screens, grooves and latches, a complicated, ultimately ineffectual system of defence. No one wins against the wind, not even these wind’s eyes. Running in front of the house is the deck, a wide wooden stage over which Pat lays a path of threadbare yard-sale rugs to stop its splinters from entering her bare feet. They lend the boards a tattered luxury, like some trampled boudoir. Stirred by the wind and rain, they take on a life of their own, rucking like a ploughed field out of which ever-larger splinters sprout as spiky seedlings.
The whole house is still partly tree. The knots in its walls have fallen out over the years, leaving spy-holes and escape routes for whatever creeps and scratches about inside. There are so many compartments, cupboards, stairs and crawl spaces – so many spaces within spaces – that there could be colonies of creatures living under its eaves. Even as I write this, I discover a narrow staircase which I had never seen before in all the years I’ve been staying here, hidden in a cupboard and leading to the top floor like some secret escape route. And when I open the built-in linen closet on the first floor, a cat hisses at me, leaps up a shaft and disappears into an interior where, for all I know, an entire community of feral felines might reside. I sleep with bare boards next to my head, stamped with the timber merchant’s marks,
MILL 50 MILL 50 MILL
W.C.
L.B. ®
UTIL 3/4 W.R. CEDAR
and occasionally silverfish run up and down the western red cedar, their filigree antennae feeling their way like tiny lobsters, while mice scratch in the eaves. I feel the weather and the sea through the wooden walls and the way the day arrives and the night leaves, and there’s sand instead of biscuit crumbs in my sheets. Sometimes the whole house becomes a woodwind instrument played by a demented child. Doors rattle, urgent spirits seeking admission. Timbers creak as a ship caught in ice; articulated chimney cowls squeak like weather vanes turning in the wind. The house reverberates as though remembering how it was built, an echo chamber resonant with everything happening outside and everything that ever happened within. It may be inanimate, but it makes me more alive, this big beach hut. How could anyone not feel that way, knowing that out there is the sea, and all land is lost to the horizon?
The front hits us, head on. The waves, which yesterday lapped the footings of the house, turn over themselves in their remorseless assault on the bulkhead that acts as a buffer between the house and the sea. Town regulations, designed to allow the shifting sand its sway, mean that even the most luxurious decks and dining rooms are temporary arrangements. Pat’s house, now in its sixth decade, was built to be part of rather than apart from the water; in stormy spring tides the sea actually runs right underneath it, disdaining its foundations. By the end of the century all those exclusive properties and ramshackle shacks alike will yield to the waves. ‘The truth is,’ the philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote on one of his visits to the Cape, ‘their houses are floating ones, and their home is on the ocean.’
Directly in front of the house is a raft tethered by a chain to the sea bed. It’s another stage, a four-foot-square island of performance. In the winter seals lounge on it, their doggy heads and flappy feet held in the air to keep warm. Summer visitors think the raft is built for human swimmers; they soon realise that it’s covered in deposits from its other tenants, the eider ducks that take up winter leases, and for whom it is a safe perch even when it rocks wildly in high seas.
Pat and I watch a duck and drake circling the float as if sizing it up. The male makes the first move, followed by his partner. They stake out their separate corners, like a couple seeking their own space. Another male appears with his mate; she is allowed on board, he is rebuffed by the first male. It’s a stand-off. There follows a ritual puffing up of chests and fluttering of wings, like a contest on the dance floor. The inevitable compromise is reached, and the newcomers are admitted. Soon, in the niceties of eider choreography, a third couple arrive and the same rite is observed. All their gestures and cooing, which seem quaint to our anthropomorphic eyes – as if they were saying to each newcomer, ‘No room, no room’ – are in fact grim and determined expressions of potential violence and struggle for precedence.
Eiders are another of this shore’s animal spirits. They preside, like the cormorants and the seals, imbued with their own inscrutability. The raft is their portal: I imagine them diving off it and coming up in a willow-pattern world to reassume their imperial presence, shrugging their lordly wings as they do so. They may be the largest of the ducks, but they’re also the fastest bird in level flight, able to fly at seventy miles an hour against fierce nor’easterlies. They are endlessly interesting to me, seen from my deck or through my binoculars. Their heads slope down to wedge-shaped bills, redolent of Roman noses or a grey seal’s snout. Their black