Ever the optimist, I tried to convince myself the glass was half full. Maybe the stinky muck on my legs and feet would serve as a natural sunscreen for my legs (it didn’t), or better yet, an emollient for the spider bite I received on my hand while trying to clear cobwebs out of the kayak (it wasn’t).
I scanned my situation. The sun was shimmering bright across Pleasant Bay. To the east, the dunes of Nauset beach. In the middle of the estuary, the forests of Pochet Island. By the launch and the rest of the western land, the backyards of rich people’s vacation homes overlooking the cove. Present day Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod was called ‘Monomoyick’ by the Indians. Monomoyick sounds kind of the way it feels… Monomoyucky, but it actually means great bay.
It is at these points in life I’m reminded of why I would’ve been a terrible scientist had I perservered with it. Darwin once reported finding the seeds of seventeen species of plants caught in the mud on a duck’s webbed foot. He hypothesized, the first marsh grass seeds probably arrived at the Galapagos from a migrating shorebird’s muddy foot. Darwin’s power of observation and making ecological connections was incredible.
My powers of observation are not as profound and often misguided by my intrinsic desire to live as cheap as possible and then further clouded by my lack of foresight which leads me to mucky situations. As I balanced myself and seated myself in the kayak, I was trying to recall how I literally got stuck in this situation.
With the best of intentions, we rented the summer cottage because it included 2 kayaks and 4 bikes as part of the deal. I rationalized to myself, since the cost of kayak and bike rentals in Cape Cod is worth hundreds daily, just the daily use of these conveyances would justify the cost of the vacation rental. In my calculations, however, I didn’t realize the logistical complications of launching kayaks.
Since our rental house was set a mile inland from the nearest shore and the roads were gravel, there was no easy way to portage the kayaks to water. During summer season, parking is limited to residents only at town launches. We would have to load 2 kayaks onto the car, drive them to a launch, haul them to the water, lock them up somehow, return to the house, park, return to the launch site by bike, lock the bike to a tree, kayak, return, dock, lock the kayak to a tree, bike home, retrieve the car then come back to fit them over the car and then drive home. Capisce?
We didn’t kayak for several days of the vacation because I was trying to figure out how exactly to choreograph the kayak launch sequence: load kayaks onto car-drive-park-drop off kayak-drive home-bike-lock bike to trees-kayak-lock kayak to trees-bike home-drive back-load kayak-drive home-unload kayaks off car.
With only a couple days left in the rental, I started lamenting the kayaks would go unused. Cruising in the car all around the area, I scoped different launch points, trying to figure out how to lock kayaks and bikes to available trees. There were nice sites to launch kayaks with fancy floating wooden docks, but they all had signs posting the requirement of resident permit parking stickers to park by the launches.
Then serendipitously, we stumbled on an obscure launch at the end of Barley Neck Road in the north side of town, near the northern tip of Pleasant Bay. This launch site was hidden and remote with ample free public parking. We were ecstatic. We praised the good lord and went home and immediately started looking up Youtube videos on how to strap 2 kayaks to the hood of a station wagon. After much early morning jostling, we figured out how to just prop them up 2 kayaks and tie them up with ratchet straps slightly hanging over the sides of the car, and then prayed they wouldn’t fall off.
K. who has a healthy fear of drowning, donned a lifejacket and forced me to wear one as well as we set off into the bay. Unbeknownst to us, we would later form quite an absurd sight since the water was literally 12” deep at deepest point within the bay. At the start of our disembarkation, we spotted a blue heron standing in the middle of the Bay. We assumed it was standing on some aberrant shallow sand bar, and didn’t anticipate the rest of the water would be of similar depth. The whole bay was in fact a shallow swamp. Global warming resulted in the water from the ocean breaching the protective sand dunes at Nauset Beach and had pushed a tremendous layer of sediment into the bay. We could have walked across the bay barefoot. But with all the time invested in launching the kayaks we paddled out till we got stuck in muck and started foundering.
You learn most through mistakes. In this case, we learned a lot. By neglecting to check the tidal charts before launching we learned there’s little water in the bay to warrant the use of life jackets. In bright yellow life jackets, alternating between paddling, standing in the middle of Pleasant Bay, and standing up to dig our kayaks out of the mud, it took us a lot longer to navigate through muck. Consequently, we learned it’s not such a great idea to drink a gallon of water for a trip that will take hours longer than anticipated since it looks quite ridiculous when you start peeing by the side of your kayak boat, in the middle of the bay for all to see. We learned to read the subtle changes in water ripple patterns on the bay that signaled hazardous sandbars ahead. And so on and so forth.
There, with the water ankle deep, you could see the roots of the bay grasses exposed with thousands of mussels clinging to their roots. Were you feeling like Italian gourmet meal, you could literally harvest linguine and mussels in a swamp to table feast. The mud made things very unappetizing however. The thought of all the septic tanks of Cape Cod discharging into the bay and deviant pissing kayakers, made me question whether the mussels would be edible anyway. I was not tempted to harvest the mussel in red tide sauce.
Every once in a while, the herons who had forgotten you were present, took flight like prehistoric pterodactyls and landed at their favorite fishing spots. There they stood in the muck. Serene with long stalk legs, and bony 3 pronged feet, they exerted very little pressure on the muck and seemed to stand gracefully on top of the water, perfectly adapted to their surroundings. Flicking their wings back and forth, extending and retracting them, and raising and lowering the wings, they stirred their prey into activity. With large eyes once they spotted their prey, they would spear the fishes with their long sharp beaks.
We, on the other hand, drifted and foundered aimlessly around the bay, chasing herons around the shallow bay. Without a dock I now knew why they didn’t restrict parking on Barley Neck launch. The town figured those tourists cheap and dumb enough to use the landing deserved pity. Even the blue heron, with its oversized eyes, would glance at us from a distance and feel pity for us. To them, we were the cheapskates of the human race. The strange breed of shameless opportunists who found the cheapest ways to live use bikes and kayaks for free. The clueless tourists who wore unnecessary life jackets and launched kayaks at the wrong time and places with completely inappropriate footwear.
Despite our misadventures, I couldn’t help but feel part of this strange ecosystem. Cape Cod was our open air classroom. During spring semester, we had walked and hopped the moss lined streams behind the Wellfleet backyards that fed into the bay. At that time, we wondered why the fish like herring swim upstream from the ocean to the ponds to spawn risking their lives in low oxygen fresh water ponds. In fall, we came back to find the answer lay in evolution and geological history in the Pleasant Bay.
40,000 years ago, the mile thick Laurentian glacier scraped over mountains and carved out valleys in New England melting in Cape Cod where it met warm ancient coastal gulf streams, leaving in its wake a moraine of sand beaches, ponds, rivers, and bays suntanned people now enjoy.
Fresh water fish in upland ponds were swept down river in melting glaciers to the ocean in annual spring floods. Those fish that were able to survive gradual change in salinity were rewarded by rich estuarine waters with boundless supplies of plankton and small fish. Their eggs couldn’t survive salt water. Gradually fish evolved that could migrate back to fresh water to spawn. Their offspring could lay more eggs in the protected pond, and when ready and strong enough, descend the herring runs and exploit the abundance of the ocean. Animal behaviorists call this a ‘stable evolutionary strategy’ - the fish adapted to exploit the protection of the pond and the abundance of the ocean. The heron would come to the pond and stalk the herring. The cheapskate tourists would come to follow the herons around the bay… What we see today is a reflection of the past.
And every time I come back here I feel humbled like this: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot from the Four Quartets.
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