Ipswich
Dunes
From
the Atlantic Monthly.
The
Equinoctial on the
BY
FRANK BOLLES.
The
dunes of
An
early morning train from
The Equinoctial was at its height. It was an hour when prudence bade one stay in the house, but when that which makes a man happy amid the rough revelry of nature said: Go, give yourself to the storm. The sea could not be seen from the house, for the dunes stood in the way, but the wind, the breath of the sea, told where it lay. The wind was charged with rain, hail, cutting bits of sand, the odor of brine, and the roar of the billowy battle beyond the dunes.
What
are dunes? They are the waves of the
sea perpetuated in sand. They were changing and growing at that moment as they
are at every moment when the winds blow. A ridge forty feet high, eastward of
the house, was hurling yellowish sand into the dooryard and against the
buildings. From its top could be seen a hollow beyond, and then another ridge,
from the crest of which a sand banner waved in the wind. That ridge surmounted,
a broader hollow was seen beyond, containing lagoons of gleaming water and
thickets of richly colored shrubs and a few stunted pines. To
right, left, and ahead, other ridges rose like mimic mountains. Some of them
had been cut straight through by storms, and showed plainly wind stratification
on their cut surfaces. Wading through the pools, from which a few black ducks
rose and flew swiftly out to sea, I gained the third ridge, which was the
highest of the dunes. Beyond was another hollow, then a fourth dune, then a
beach strewn with seaweed, shells, and wreckage, and finally half a mile of
snowy breakers, boiling and hissing on their rhythmic journey shoreward.
At times the eye seemed to reach further out to sea, but at once the
rain, foam, and driving cloud masses closed in on the waves, and sky and ocean
were combined in an attempt to overwhelm the dunes. Walking upon the beach was
like wrestling with a strong man. Looking through the stinging rain was a1most
impossible. Not far up the beach was the wreck of a small schooner. It was half
buried in the sand, and just within reach of the waves. Streaming with rain, my
face smarting from the flying sand, and my breath exhausted, I gained the wreck,
and sought refuge in its interior.
The vessel's ribs rose high into the air and a part of her sheathing had not yet been beaten off by gales. The waves struck this wall of plank, and sent shiver after shiver through the broken hulk. Inside, the wind had little effect, and the water that came in was that flowing downward from the beach, as great waves broke upon the sand and then swept round over the wreck's buried side. Peering through the gaps between the timbers, I looked down into and across a raging mass of water. It was much like a shipwreck without the fear of death. Dozens of herring gulls, now and then a black-backed gull, and every few minutes small flecks of black ducks, flew past athwart the gale. Sometimes a gull would face the wind, and fly against it steadily, vigorously, yet never advance an inch. The ducks looked as though they were flying backward, so oddly balanced were they. After nearly an hour of watching I waded ashore, followed my tracks back across the sand hills, and gained a comfortable stove-side, in the weather-beaten house. The noonday meal of fat-pork, boiled corned beef, cabbage, clams, soda biscuit, doughnuts, mince pie, and coffee, seemed in some degree a reasonable complement to the gale.
Early
in the afternoon, in company with two friends, -a bird-watcher and a
mouse-hunter, I faced the storm again. We walked northward rather than eastward,
keeping within the hollows of the dunes, and not climbing to their windy crests.
Rain fell in torrents and in larger drops than in the morning. It whipped into
foam the pale blue and green pools between the sand-hills. Gusts of air struck
these pools "from ever-varying angles, the cliffs and passes of the mimic
mountains making all manner of currents and eddies in the wind .
Ruffled
by these gusts, the poo1s changed color from moment to moment; sometimes being
white with foam and reflected light from the sky, then varying through every
shade of blue and seagreen and ultramarine. The coloring in the miniature
valleys was exquisitely beautiful. In some, the yellow sand, over which lines
and ripples of purple sand were laid, curved from every side with the most
graceful lines downward from the ridges to a single tinted mirror at the centre.
In others, where the valley was broader, lagoons filled with tiny islands were
fringed with yegetation of striking shades. The clumps of sturdy poverty grass, (Hudsonia
tomentosa,) covered much of the ground, its coloring, while it was wet by
the rain, varying from burnt umber to madder brown. Over it strayed scalp locks
of pale yellow grasses, restless in the wind. Next to the pools and under them
grew a dense carpet of cranberry vines, yielding shades of dark crimson, maroon,
and wine-color. Lines of floating cranberries edged these tiny lakes, or shone
like precious stones at their bottom. Between the lagoons and on their islands
dense thickets of meadow-sweet and leafless wild-rose bushes formed masses of
intense color, the shades running from rich reds through orange to gleaming
yellow. The rain glistening on these warmly tinted stems, made them unnaturally
brilliant. On the shores of some of the lagoons, or forming small conical
islands in their midst, were white heaps of broken clam she1ls. The shells when
disturbed seemed to be embedded in fine black soil, like that left by
long-extinguished fires. When these shell-heaps were first explored, they
contained bones of many kinds of fish and birds, including fragments of that
extinct bird, the great auk. They also yielded broken pieces of roughly
ornamented pottery, bits of copper, and stone implements of the Indians who had
made the
As
we approached the largest of the lagoons, which covered several acres, black
ducks began to appear, flying in all directions. They rose not only from the
large lagoon, but from many smaller pools, hidden among the net work of dunes.
Over a hundred were in the air at once. Crows, too, and gulls joined in the
winged stampede, caused by our coming. One flock of crows flying towards
Our
walk ended at the Ipswich Light, a small beacon placed on the edge of the dunes
as a warning against their treacherous sands. A bit of land near it had been
reclaimed from the desert, and gave promise of being a garden in a few weeks.
The rain was at its fiercest here; and beat upon the lighthouse as though it
would wash it from the face of the earth.
As
the wind blew the sand grass, its long blades whirled around, drawing circles in
the sand with their tough tips and edges. These circles could be seen from a
long distance, so deeply and clearly were they cut. Sometimes a long blade and a
short one whirled on the same root, and
made
concentric circles. The geometrical correctness of these figures, rendered them
striking elements in a landscape so chaotic as the dunes in the Equinoctial.
Scattered
about over the sand, were small star-shaped objects about the size of a silver
dollar, and brown in color. They looked at first glance as though they might
have been stamped out of thick leather. Whether they were fish, flesh, or plant
was a question not readily answered by a novice. They proved to be a kind of
puffball, common in such regions as the dunes, and singularly well adapted to
life on shifting sands.
Through
the long night of the 21st the wind wailed around the house, and the sound of
the waves came up from the sea. Long before sunrise I was awakened by the
quacking of domestic ducks, in the inlet just in front of my windows. Fog and a
gentle east wind ruled the morning, and the fog made queer work with outlines
and perspective among the sand-hills.
Not
far from the house there once stood a fine orchard, many of the trees in which
had attained a generous size considering their exposed situation. But the dunes
marked them for destruction. The greedy sand piled itself around their roots,
rose high and higher on their trunks, caught the tips of their lower branches,
dragged them under its cold and deadly weight, reached up to those higher; and
as the trees began to pine, hurled itself against their dry leaves, twigs, and
branches, then set to work to wear away the trunks themselves. Rising through
the fog, these remains seemed like tortured victims stretching out distorted
arms for pity. Only a few of the trees retained branches having green wood and
twigs, and these were half buried by recent inroads of sand. They reminded me of
the fate of men caught in quicksands and drawn down inch by inch to their death.
Tracks
in sand are almost as telling records as tracks in snow. Skunks had wandered
about over these ridges in force. They do not find their food among the hills,
but on the shore; where the carrion of the sea is left by the tide. The ocean
edge is usually strewn with dead fish, seabirds, and shellfish. Around these
remnants are to be seen the tracks of gulls and crows, or the birds themselves.
That morning the upper air was noisy with crows coming back from their night
roost. They soon scattered along the beach, feeding. For some reason the ducks
had dis- appeared from the lagoons. A few flew past up the coast, but the
greater part seemed to have already moved northward.
It
was upon these sand-hills that the
Near
another pool a dozen or more horned
larks were feeding on the wet ground. This bird is one of the most ,beautiful I
know. In the pool caddis worms were crawling about in cases made, not of grains
of gravel, but of sections of scouring-rush, which they had found to answer all
practical purposes. This is an instance of the use of ready-made clothing to
oppose to nature's usual demand for custom-made garments: These caddis worms
were the first water-life which I had seen stirring this spring. Later in the
day I saw tomcoddies, or mummachogs, swimming in a ditch, but they are active
all winter. Another sign of spring was the track of a white-footed mouse, (Hesperomys
leuL-opus,) found by the mouse-hunter on his morning round.
Standing on the
crest of one of the dunes next the sea, and looking through the fog across
lagoons filled with islands to other dunes of many outlines, varying from
pointed peak or bold bl uff to long, graceful ridge, it was impossible to retain
true ideas of size and distance. 'I'he proportions of pools, islets. bushes..
and cliffs, corresponded so closely to ~hose which would have marked lakes,
islands, groves, and mountain peaks, that, for all the eye could tell,
Winnepesaukee and the
During
the forenoon the fog crept back to the sea, the sun came out, and the landscape
appeared in new colors and proportions. Lakes shrank to pools, mountains
dwindled to sand-ridges. The sand itself grew pale, and many of its most
brightly colored plants lost their briliancy as they dried. This was strikingly
noticeable in the Hudsonia tomentosa, which
changed from rich brown tones to sage green and gray. Ducks were replaced by
.numbers of red-wing blackbirds; and all day long the “flick, flick, flick,
flick, flick," of a pigeon woodpecker rang from a tree on
In
the afternoon we rowed across the shallow inlet to the island which is what
geologists call a drumlin, and sailors and farmers a hogback. It is a gently
sloping hill of gravel, whose longer axis is supposed to indicate the direction
of the glacier's advance at that point. The length of the island from northwest
to southeast is a little over half a mile, and its height along its backbone is
one hundred and forty feet.
A
sunny old farm house on the low land at the end of the
island nearest Coffin's Beach, was pointed out as the birthplace of Rufus
Choate. Beyond it was a fair view of
The
view northward across Castle Neck and the mouths of
Inland
the sun made the haze golden instead of gray, and we could not see many miles.
In
The
stone walls on
At
sunset, after our row back to the sand-hills, I climbed the highest dune, and
took a last look at the singular panorama of blue lagoons, pale yellow ridges,
wind-cut bluffs, buried trees, and foaming breakers. It certainly was a unique
landscape, and one fascinating for many reasons, but it had something sinister
in it. The ocean was covered by a thin fog; the east wind coming from the waves
was chilling, and it brought confused sound of roaring
waters and shrill-voiced gulls. The sands forever shifting, seemed treacherous,
the sea restless, and the wind which stirred them full of discontent.
There
are many who find rest in the restlessness of the sea, the dunes, and the winds.
Perhaps my lack of sympathy is hereditary. Rather more than two hundred and
fifty years ago a father and son were fishermen upon these perfidious coasts. In
the great storm of