Old Plymouth Trails Part 6

Nor can you take from the things of the sea this life-giving essence, once they have attained it through growth during immersion in its depths, though perchance, as Emerson sang, "they left their beauty on the sh.o.r.e, with the sun and the sand and the wild uproar." The sh.e.l.l on the mantel shelf of the mariner's inland home may be unsightly and out of place. But put your ear to it. Out of the common noises of the day, it weaves for you the song of the deep tides, the murmur of ocean caves and the croon of the breakers on the outer reef, and dull indeed is your inner ear if you cannot hear these things, and at the sound see the perfect curl of green waves and smell that cool fragrance which comes only from their breaking.

To the marshes in summer come the farmers from far inland, making holiday for themselves while they work. They cut the short salt hay that seems so stiff and tough, that is so soft and velvety, in fact, and pile it on their wains and take it home to the cattle that like it better than any English hay that they can cut from the carefully tilled home fields. Indeed the cattle ought to like this hay. It is soft as the autumn rowen, and mixed with all the delicate, fragrant herbs of the marsh. The tang of the sea salt is in it, and no man knows what delicate essence borne far on the wandering tides to the flavoring of its fibre. No matter how long you may leave this hay in the mow you have but to stir it to get the soft rich flavor of the sea and breathe a little of that salty vigor which seems to go to the seasoning of the best of life. I have an idea the cattle love it for this too, and as they chew its cud inherited memory stirs within them, and they roam the marshes with the aurochs and tingle with the savage joy of freedom.

Out along the rocks to seaward at low tide go the mossers and with long rakes rip the carragheen from its hold and load their dories with its golden-brown ma.s.ses. Then they bring it ash.o.r.e and spread it out in the sun as the farmers do their hay, that it may dry and bleach. Just as the salt hay, touched for a brief happy hour at each tide with the cool strength of the sea, retains the flavor of it always, so the Irish moss that grows in the depths and is hardly awash at the lowest of the ebb, overflows with it and is so bursting with this fragrance of the unknown that no change that comes to it can drive it out. When the wind is off-sh.o.r.e and you may not scent the sea, when the sun bakes the hot sand and dries the blood so that it seems as if the only way to prolong life is to wade out neck deep in the surges and there stay until the wind comes from the east again, you have but to go to the leeward of these piles of bleaching carragheen to find it giving forth the same cooling fragrance which the tides have made a part of its structure. You may take this moss home with you and cook it, but the heat of your fire will no more destroy its essence than did the heat of the sun, and in your first mouthful of the produce, which may in appearance give no hint of its origin, you taste the cool sea depths and feel yourself nourished as if with some vital principle.

It is no wonder that under the glare of the midsummer sun people forsake the arid uplands and the vast, heat scorched plains of the interior and find renewed life and vitality on the borders of the Atlantic seaboard. The sea in the beginning was the mother of all life and we do not know what forms of future perfection she is now nouris.h.i.+ng as filmy protoplasm in her depths. She gives us cool fogs to the reopening of our shrivelled pores and just by walking along sh.o.r.e we are touched by this vivific principle which gives such riotous life to all things. There is a saying among Eastern Ma.s.sachusetts farmer folk that if you will bathe three times in the salt water during the summer you will not feel the cold of the coming winter. Thus is the old myth revived and the modern Achilles may find invulnerability beneath the Styx, nor need his heel be left above the tide for his undoing. And the sea has more than that to give us, more than physical well-being and invulnerability to the arrows of the winter winds. Out of the green depths come still the mysterious and the unknown and up over the blue rim sail day by day argosies laden with romance. Thus it has always been nor can the peopling of many lands and the finding and exploring of all continents and islands check this. However it may be with the cattle it is this which gives tang to our salt hay and touches the reviving coolness of the spray and the east wind with the rainbow magic of dreams.

CHAPTER XIII

FIs.h.i.+NG "DOWN OUTSIDE"

In the beginning of things were the cunners, known along Ma.s.sachusetts Bay mainly as perch. Names are good only in certain localities. If you ask a Hingham boy how the cunners are biting he will be likely to throw rounded beach stones at you, thinking he is being made game of. Down at Newport, R. I., they catch cunners and if you talk salt-water perch to them it is at your peril.

Elsewhere they are chogsett, or peradventure burgall, but everywhere they are nippers and baitstealers, and the trait which makes these names universal is the reason why in the beginning of things were the cunners. For the first bait of the first fisherman that ever threw hook into the North Atlantic was taken by a cunner. There are today forty million, more or less, North Atlantic fishermen who will corroborate this testimony with personal experience. It may be that the first hook was taken by some other fish, but the cunner got in ahead on the bait. The cunner is not very large. He rarely tips the scales at a pound, but he will eat his own weight in bait in a day and he is numerous and pretty nearly omnipresent.

Wherever the salt tides flow, whether it be up the sandy stretches of a clean bottomed cove, along the mud bottom of the creek, or amid the red-brown tangle of kelp on some ledge awash a mile off sh.o.r.e, there comes the cunner, suiting his color chameleon-like to that of the bottom.

On the mud he is brown, on the sand gray, but if you wish to see handsome creatures you must pull them from some bottom where the red kelp grows. Then their rich bronzy reds will make you forget their bait thievery and love them for their beauty.

If you will go back to Dombey and Son and read the description of Mr. Carker you will realize that d.i.c.kens must have been fis.h.i.+ng off the ledges of some English headland when he planned that gentleman and his characteristics. In whatever mood or from whatever side Mr. Carker approaches you it is his teeth which dominate the situation. I am convinced that every time d.i.c.kens tried to make him otherwise he found another cunner tugging and drew him up.

Judging by Carker it must have been good fis.h.i.+ng for cunners. Like Carker this fish comes to you teeth first. His mouth is so full of them that they stick out like quills on the fretful porcupine.

Nature, which gives each tools for the trade which he most loves, made him a bait-stealer extraordinary with these.

The beginner who fishes in the salt sea does it almost invariably with a pole, whether from cliff or dock or from a boat. Experience brings the desire for the hand line. The farmer's boy who comes down for the salt hay tucks his long birch pole into the bottom of the wagon and the trolley tripper comes to the beach with his split bamboo. Down in Maine years ago the pinkies used to sail equipped with numerous short poles whereby to trail for mackerel.

In the day of your grandfather and mine it must have been a sight to see the crew of a pink-sterned chebacco boat dancing from pole to pole flipping the number ones aboard when a good school struck in. Of course, all that is a waste of energy and of wood. A hand line is the more intimate and serves the purpose better. A man is not really a salt water fisherman till he has learned the use of one. Then let him go forth. Through that line shall flow to his nerve ganglia deep sea knowledge galore. By it shall come to him in time all creatures of the vast deep.

Lovers of deep sea fis.h.i.+ng grow best from small beginnings. They yearn from tide flats to the spar buoy in the harbor channel, thence through Hull Gut to the rocky bottoms about the Brewsters.

After that the sirens sing to them from every wash of white waves over ledges far out to sea, caution drowns in the temptation of blue water, and they fish no more except it is "down outside."

They who dwell on the very rim of this deep sea, at Marblehead or Nahant, at Coha.s.set or at Duxbury never know the full depth of its lure as do those who must win to it from the Dorchester flats or the winding reaches of the Fore River. To these latter only is the perfection of desire and the full joy of fulfilment. You can leave the shallow bays inland only when the tide serves, hence gropings for a tender on the beach of starlit mornings, the chuckle of halliard blocks in the rose of dawn and a long drift in the pink glow of morning fog while the boom swings idly and the turn of the flood drifts you eastward. Little wayward winds, too lazy to make a ripple on the gla.s.sy surface of the water or stir the sail, play strange tricks with this morning fog. They carve chasms in it and open tunnels down which you see far for a moment, then they wind it like a wet sheet about you and you may not see the bobstay from your post at the tiller.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Outward Bound in Plymouth Harbor]

They bring you sounds and scents from afar. You know you are abreast Grape Island now far you scent the wild roses on the point. Another breeze brings faint odors of the charnel house from Bradley's. A stronger chases it away and you have a whiff of an early breakfast, brown toast, fried fish and coffee, at Rose Cliff. The chuckle of oars in rowlocks tells you that the old fisherman is astir at Fort Point and the man with the new motor boat over at Hough's Neck is giving it a little run before breakfast, with the m.u.f.fler off, as usual. A gull goes over, flying low. You do not see but you hear the soft swish of the wings. By and by the sun shows through a rift in the fog and you begin to move before a faint air from the southwest. A half hour more and the shreds of fog are melting upward into the blue of a clear day, the wind fills your sail and you are sweeping eastward with wind and tide round the Sheep Island bar.

The Argo, bound eastward for the golden fleece, bearing Jason, Hercules, Theseus and the other Greek heroes, carried no higher hopes and no greater joy in the dangers and mysteries of the sea than does many a keen-bowed sloop or broad-beamed cat bound "outside" on a fis.h.i.+ng trip. It is neither the goal nor the gain that counts. It is the spirit of the quest. The golden fleece looms eastward over all such prows. In the tide rip of Hull Gut, where current meets current at certain turns of the tide in such fas.h.i.+on that "the merry men" dance gleefully, is a dash of adventure, and if you come through with a c.o.c.kpit half full of water and your clam bait afloat so much the merrier. Thus you are baptized into the sect of the deep sea rovers and the leap of the mysterious green dancers into your boat is the coming of Neptune himself. Henceforth his trident is at your mast head, a broom wherewith to sweep the seas as Van Tromp did. The conquerors are abroad.

You may bother about the skerries that skirt Boston Light if you will. There are cunners big and ravenous at the base of s.h.a.g Rocks or along Boston or Martin's ledges. I dare say there are flounders skimming the sand to the east of Hull, but you will hardly care for these if you have Neptune aboard. His spirit will bid you jibe your sail to that freshening west wind off Allerton and bowl down the coast parallel with the long stretch of Nantasket sands. Again at the spindle on Harding's Ledge you may catch cunners; perhaps a stray cod. A cod! There you speak a magic word to the fisherman from the tide flats far inland. There is the golden fleece for which the Argonauts of the land-locked harbor set their prows to the eastward in the starlight. A pull on the sheet and it is full-and-by to the southeast, with Minot's Light looming gray dead ahead in the gray wash of breakers. Black-headed gulls swing across your wake, and in their laughter rings a wild note of sea freedom. Thus the Vikings laughed as their boats wan to seaward outside the black cliffs.

The cod is the solid citizen of the sea. In some localities they call him the ground keeper, and he seems to be that--a sort of land owner of the sea bottom. Just as ash.o.r.e most substantial success comes from land-holding, and those who own the earth are almost invariably financial magnates also, so the cod is a banker.

Some people, not financial magnates themselves in all probability, have given this substantial dweller of the under-water plateaus undignified names. They call him pilker, scrod, groper, etc. This is pure envy. When he bites it means business. There is none of the bait-stealing tomfoolery of the cunner, none of the dancing hilarity of the pollock. It is just a steady down tug that makes the line cut your fingers and likely takes your hand under water.

If he is a good one you will need to sit back and snub the line over the gunwale in that first plunge which follows the stab of the hook. Then it is a steady, muscle-grinding pull to get him up.

It is a stogy, heavy resistance which he offers. To lift him out of his depths is a good deal like explaining to a middle-cla.s.s Englishman something that he does not wish to comprehend, but by and by, leaning perilously over the rail, you see his tawny bulk coming up through a well of chrysophrase lined with the scintillant gold of the imprisoned sun. A lift and a swing, and he is aboard. He may weigh anything from a few pounds up to a score.

Cod have been caught weighing 150 pounds, but not in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay of late years.

A half-mile to the east of Minot's and southward to beyond Scituate harbor runs an irregular ridge along the sea bottom at a depth of six to ten fathoms, while to the east and west is deeper water. Something like a half-mile farther eastward again you will find another, both probably moraines of sand and gravel on the sea bottom like those one finds ash.o.r.e. These ridges the fish seem to frequent rather than the valleys between, and if you will ease your sheets and, setting your boat's prow a little off the wind, drift slowly along these ridges, you will be able to cast your lines among the best of the summer society. The cod go into things only on the ground flood. It is a way substantial citizens have.

You will need to let your sinker strike bottom and then lift it a little, but not too far. A greased lead dropped will show you a variety of bottom. Here are rocks, about which especially the cod congregate and where sometimes giant cunners dwell, there is a sandy stretch which is beloved of the big flounders, which when hooked make a gallant though unsteady fight before you get them up.

I am always sorry for the flounder. He looks as if he might have once been a fish of respectable, perhaps even beautiful shape and proportions, that had met with an accident. He is a sh.o.r.e frequenter, especially when young, and I cannot help thinking that in antediluvian days when mastodons were plentiful and went wading they stepped on the flounders. A flounder is shaped just as if he had been run over by an Atlantic avenue truck. His eyes moved over onto one side of his head, fleeing hand in hand to escape the wheel. His mouth was mashed fairly and seems to be perpetually e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. "Help, murder!" and one side of him is still white as snow with the fear of the affair. He ought to be in a cripples'

home, but he is not. Instead he is as jolly as a sand man and amply able to take care of his wreck of a body, which is flat indeed but fat. Necessity is the mother of invention. When the flounder sees food that he wants he falls upon it and holds it down with ease while he devours it. A slender fish would have no such chance.

At this time of year come roving northward from unknown feeding grounds outside the Cape the haddock. There are people who call the haddock "scoodled skull-joe," probably in derision because he is such a dapper fish. He is so silvery and neat that the black stripe down his side seems to give him the effect of being clad in the very latest thing in summer trousers. The Banks fishermen who sail from Gloucester and are probably more intimately acquainted with the personal affairs of fishes than anyone else, say that the haddock, though now reformed, has not always been what he should be. The haddock, they say, was once such a young sport and conducted himself in such unseemly fas.h.i.+on that he was in danger of h.e.l.l fire. In fact, the devil, searching the Grand Banks for whom he might devour, took the shameless youngster between his finger and thumb and held him aloft in glee, saying, "You for the gridiron." But the agile haddock, skilled in getting out of sc.r.a.pes, squirmed loose and fled in the depths of the sea. In proof of this adventure if you examine a haddock's body just behind the gills you will see the marks where the Old Boy's fingers scorched him, the scars remaining to this day. I am not sure whether this fable teaches us to be good or to be agile.

With the cod, as often most intimately with him in the boneless codfish box, come the hake and the cusk, both rated as inferior fish, though it is hard to see why. The cusk in particular is esteemed by the fishermen for their own use above any other fish that is taken from the trawls on the banks. Go down into the forepeak of any Gloucesterman and ask the crew, while they "mug up," if they like baked cusk. You will see their mouths water and their eyes s.h.i.+ne in appreciation of the suggestion. Yet the cusk is hardly a beauty. In fact, the first man who suggested eating him must have been hungry or else adventurous beyond the common run of men. If you will take a bilious looking eel and compress him lengthwise till the becomes a stubby bunch, put on him a pair of yellow goggle eyes that stare madly as if at ghosts, and seem, withal to be sadly afflicted with strabismus, you will have the beginnings of a cusk. Then he must have a broad fin that begins at the back of his neck, promenades his spine to and including his tail and returns beneath him to the spot where some people wear neckties. That is a part of the paraphernalia of this denizen of the deep sea. Often when brought to the surface this peculiar fish will swell up with imprisoned air until he is enormously fat and covered with blisters.

The cod and the flounders, cunners and pollock will make up the bulk of your catch as you drift along these under-sea moraines, though now and then a freak may come to your hook in the shape of a dogfish or a skate. These are to be looked for and welcomed.

Once the horse mackerel struck into Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. These weigh a thousand pounds apiece and take live fish of considerable size on the fly. In those days a deep-sea fisherman, hauling in a respectable cod, was likely to find adventure enough with the situation suddenly reversed and a horse mackerel hauling in the line with the fisherman, on the end of it.

It is leviathans of the deep like these that Jason Theseus and their companion Greeks bear in mind as the Argo drifts and the catch steadily grows. By and by the low sun flares red through surly clouds of nightfall. The sea is getting up and it is a long sail up the coast to the lee of the outer light. Then with darkness gathering and a head wind and tide the real glory of the day comes. Out of the black west blows half a gale. The waves curl in ghostly phosph.o.r.escence and the merry men dance wildly in Hull Gut. It is a long and dogged fight to win through these against the swift tide to the comparative safety of the shelter of Peddocks, where you catch the back wash that helps you well along the lee of Prince's Head.

And so the Argonauts sail westward again in the pitch blackness of the gathering storm. They know the harbor floor as they know the floors of their homes and can as well feel their way. What if the falling tide leaves the flats bare and they may not win to the mooring, but must lie at anchor off the channel edge until morning shows gray through the rain? They have won the golden fleece of adventure from the blue sea to eastward and sailed home with it.

CHAPTER XIV

VOICES OF THE BROOKSIDE

For two hundred years the water has rippled over the sill on which once firmly set the gate to the old milldam. Of the mill, save this, no sliver of wood remains, and even the tradition of the miller and his work is gone. We merely know that here stood one of the grist mills of the early pioneers, a mill to which the neighbors brought their corn in sacks, perchance upon their shoulders, and after the wheel had turned and the grist was ground, carried the meal off in the same way. Thus rapidly does the smoothing hand of time wipe out man and his works.

But still the water ripples over the old, brown oak sill, and he who listens may hear the brook telling a story all day long in purling undertones. I fancy its language a simple one, too, but its words of one syllable tumble so swiftly over one another that, in spite of their liquid purity of tone, I never quite catch them.

It is the brook's rapidity of utterance that troubles me. I am quite sure, always, that if I really got the syllables and wrote them down I should, with study, be able to translate it all. It ought not to be half so difficult as these hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions on stone and brick buried in a.s.syrian ruins for ten thousand years, more or less, and now blithely put into modern speech by the Egyptologists.

The brook writes for me, too. On every placid pool at the foot of some race of ripples it mixes Morse-code dots and dashes with stenographic curves, all written in white foam on the smooth black mirror of the surface. Nor does it end there, so eager it is to call its message to my notice. Through the quiver of sun and shade it sends heliograph flashes to me on the bank, making again the dots and dashes of the Morse-code alphabet, yet still with such lightning-like rapidity that my dull eye fails to read. Only the foam writing gives brief opportunity for one to study the characters and decide what they mean: Sometimes there it is not difficult to find words in the Morse-code and phrases in the stenographic curves though I have no more than a word or a brief phrase before the current rearranges the puzzle and I must begin all over again. I doubt not many brookside idlers have done as much as that. I fancy many a summer couple, say a brave telegraph clerk and a fair stenographer, have worked out as much as "I love you" and "G.o.d bless our home" long before this.

After all, the brook is shallow and it is probable that it prattles merely the gossip of today and yesterday and the days gone by. Yet even so it might give me the story of this mill that so long ago stood upon its bank, something of the talk of the miller and his customer and the events of their time, matter I can get from no printed book nor from the tongue of man now living.

Could I but get this I should have a rare book indeed, for nothing is so vivid to the reader as the true story of the plain life, the words and deeds of folk who lived a hundred or more years ago. The plain tales of Boswell, Pepys, Samuel Sewall, will live when all the series of six best sellers that have ever been are drifting dust.

The brook tells me more of nature than it does of man, perhaps because it has known man for so short a time, though I should say shows rather than tells. A hundred forms of life live in it and on it, while through the air above float a thousand more, or the evidences of them. Downstream come the scents of the flowers in bloom above. Just a week or two ago the dominant odor among these was the sticky sweetness of the azalea. It is an odor that breathes of laziness. Only the hot, damp breath of the swamp carries it and lulls to languor and to sensuous dreams. Mid-August is near and though here and there a belated azalea bloom still glows white in the dusk of the swamp its odor seems to have no power to ride the wind. Instead a cleaner, finer perfume dances in rhythmic motion down the dell, swaying in sprightly time to the under rhythm of the brook's tone, a scent that seems to laugh as it greets you, yet in no wise losing its inherent, gentle dignity.

The wild clematis is the fairest maiden of the woodland. She, I am convinced, knows all the brook says and loves to listen to it, twining her arms about the alder shrubs, bending low 'till her starry eyes are mirrored in the dimpled surface beneath her, and always sending this teasing, dainty perfume out upon the breeze that it may call to her new friends. Long ago the Greeks named the Clematis Virgin's Power, but our wild variety is more than that.

It is the virgin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Geese on the Sand Spit at Plymouth]

To smell the perfume of the clematis on the lazy wind and to watch the myriad people of the brook is joy enough for an August afternoon. Bird songs come to me from the trees overhead, far and near, some of them melodious, others songs only by courtesy. Down stream a red-eyed vireo preaches persistently in an elm top.

Across the pasture I hear the rich voice of an oriole stopping his caterpillar hunting long enough to trill a round phrase or two from the apple-tree bough. A flock of chickadees, old and young, comes through, nervously active in their hunting and with voices in which there is a tang of the coming autumn. Up in the pines a blue jay clamors with the same clarion ring in his tones. I do not know whether the different quality is in the air, or in the birds, but I am sure that after the first of August is past I could tell it by the notes of these two even if I had lost all track of the calendar. A black and white creeping warbler comes head first down a nearby tree, and then sits right side up a moment to squeak the half-dozen squeaks which are his best in the way of melody. Like a fine accompaniment the brook's voice blends with all these, mellows and supplements them till in the woodland symphony there is no jarring note. Nature has this wonderful faculty for soothing and harmonizing in all things. She will take colors that placed side by side in silks would cry to heaven for a separation, and combine them in a flower group, or sometimes indeed in a single flower, so skilfully that we accept the whole as beautiful without a question.

While I enjoy these things an eddy of wind brings from down the stream the fresh, moist smell of the water itself, and running through this I note just a suggestion of musk. All the other scents and sounds have been of a soothing quality, especially in combination with each other. In this suggestion of musk is something which bids one sit up and watch out. By and by I see the beast, a muskrat, steamboating his way up the rapids like a furry Maid-of-the-Mist, or perhaps I should say a submarine, that navigates the surface with but little bulk exposed. Presently he proves himself a submarine by diving in a shallow. I see his paws stirring up mud and presently again he comes to the surface with a fresh-water clam. Clams in August are good, though I confess I have never tried the freshwater variety. The muskrat knows, however, that these are good. He sits up on a rock, washes the mud carefully from his catch, opens it as readily as if his incisors were a knife, smacks his lips over the last of its contents, peers into the empty sh.e.l.l as if he hoped to find a pearl, drops them and bustles on his way. I do not know his errand and I doubt if he does, but I know it was an important one by the way he goes on it.

The pa.s.sing of the beast, however, upset the life of the shallow, amber pool. The mud of his digging had no more than cleared away before the under-water creatures of the place, jackals on the lion's spoor, came forward, eager to feast on the remnants of his meal. Bream, sunning themselves on the shallow margins of the other side, give a sinuous swish to their tails and dart up. A yellow perch poises, slips forward a yard, poises again and then thinking the place safe, comes forward for his share. In beauty and intelligence the yellow perch is easily the king of the brook waters and I can but admire his coloring, not only for its beauty but for its protective value. His dark back makes him almost invisible from directly above. Should you get a glimpse of his side you might well think it but the ripple of sunlight and shadow in the water, so well is this simulated by the broad bands of green and yellow which run from the dark back down the sides. It is only when he turns far on his side and gives you a glimpse of red fin and white belly that he is plainly visible, and only desperate need will make him thus turn.