Coast Guard Beach - Cape Cod

The inland Nauset marsh trail was submerged under a foot of water at high tide so we went to Coast Guard Beach instead. Sometimes you don’t choose a path in life, the path chooses you. We were meant to see the tremendous waves that day. In terrible grey weather with gale force winds, we stood in awe. The sea looked massive, like a Himalayan mountain rising with the cascading white sea foam and waves crashing like avalanches. The waves’ mammoth scale indicate deep ocean floors, with not many breaks. The next day we would learn 200 feet of beach frontage was wiped away from the beach, only leaving the inland sea grass sand dunes to remain.

Thoreau wrote about the power of the sea and mused how he would go “dumpster diving” by reclaiming booty from shipwrecks on the beaches of cape cod.

“I heard of one who had recently picked up twenty barrels of apples in good condition, probably a part of a deck load thrown over in a storm…. Some years since, when a vessel was wrecked here which had nutmegs in her cargo, they were strewn all along the beach, and for a considerable time were not spoiled by the salt water. Soon afterward, a fisherman caught a cod which was full of them.”

“We also saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valuable cord and buoy, part of a seine, with which the sea was playing, for it seemed ungracious to refuse the least gift which so great a personage offered you. We brought this home and still use it for a garden line. I picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked of juniper,—all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world,—that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man would not be man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances; but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.”

Thoreau was drawn to the characters of the cape. These people were salty and tough. Not only did they have to work the land to survive, but they battled the sea to fish, or to ship their goods in and out of the cape. Their daily life were tales of odyssey.

“I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who was expected home in the beginning of the winter from the West Indies, but was long since given up for lost, till his relations at length have heard with joy, that, after getting within forty miles of Cape Cod light, he was driven back by nine successive gales to Key West, between Florida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course for home.”

Were it not for similar rocky seas experienced by the pilgrims 400 years ago in chatham that repelled the Mayflower from their original destination along the Hudson river, the course of American history may be drastically different. Since they couldn’t reach their original destination within the virginia commonwealth, the non-puritan passengers (whom the puritans brought as indentured servants) proclaimed their freedom since they were not settling in the agreed upon virginia territory. To prevent mutiny, the puritans presented the mayflower compact, an agreement that all the settlers follow community roles and regulations for the sake of order and survival. “The Mayflower Compact was important because it was the first document to establish self-government in the New World. It remained active until 1691 when Plymouth Colony became part of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Mayflower Compact was an early, successful attempt at democracy and undoubtedly played a role in future colonists seeking permanent independence from British rule and shaping the nation that eventually became the United States of America.”

Many stories and lives have been shaped by dramas out in the oceans. Fate on the water is fickle, sometimes it leads to shipwreck and opportunistic beach combing, sometimes it leads to crews blown off course, and other times it ushers the beginnings of democracy.