The Equinoctial on the Ipswich Dunes

THE dunes of Ipswich in Massachusetts lie in a somewhat secluded and peculiar spot. Facing the open ocean between Plum Island and Coffin’s Beach, the Ipswich shore presents a strange aspect to the passing world, seaward, skyward, or landward. It is a rough bit of desert, made into odd shapes by wind, tide, and river. From no point of view is it commonplace.

An early morning train from Boston landed me on March 21 at Ipswich station. Rain fell in a determined way upon the earth, the snowdrifts, and the rushing Ipswich River. In a rickety buggy drawn by a lean horse I started for the dunes. It was a five-mile drive over a rolling glacial plain and windswept marsh land. As the sea was neared the wind became stronger and stronger. The buggy swayed from side to side ; the lean horse, stung by rain in front and whip behind, staggered feebly on against the storm ; and birds, waves, sand, trees, marsh grass, the face of the water, — everything, in fact, which could move, — either fled before the gale or writhed under its blows. At nine o’clock I reached a lonely, storm-battered house, half concealed among the sand - hills. 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 the 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 almost 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 flocks 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 sandhills, and gained a comfortable “ stoveside ” 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 pools 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 to 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 vegetation of striking shades. The clumps of sturdy 舠 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 clamshells. The shells when disturbed seemed to be embedded in fine black soil, like that left by long-extinguished fires. When those 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 Ipswich River and its sand-hills one of their principal camping-grounds. This region has given to relic-hunters bushels of arrowheads, stone knives, and hatchets.

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 network 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 Cape Ann later in the afternoon numbered eighty-three birds. Our walk ended at 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 higher 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 pliable 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, sea birds, 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 disappeared 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 Ipswich sparrow was first shot in December, 1868. The bird is much like the grass finch in contour, and in behavior when approached by man. Its coloring is that of the savanna sparrow, only several shades lighter. During the March migration the Ipswich sparrow is readily to be found among the dunes. Startled by my coming, three of them stopped feeding on the edge of a small, clear lagoon, and flew up the steep side of the sand-hill above it. This was dotted with clumps of coarse yellowish grass; the sand itself was a shade paler than the grass, and the sparrows’ plumage toned in with both so perfectly that when the birds alit it was almost impossible to see them. One dropped down behind a bunch of grass, and ran along swiftly, with his head pointing forward, until he gained the cover of a larger growth of grass, then stopped and raised his head slowly above it, and remained motionless, vigilant.

Crouched among the grass in a hollow I watched him, my glass leveled at his head. Five minutes may have passed before he gave a sharp “ chip,” ran at full speed down the bank, and flew back to his feeding - ground. 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 scouringrush, 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 舠 mummichogs ” swimming in a ditch, but they are active all winter. Another sign of spring was the track of a whitefooted mouse (Hesperomys leucopus) 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 bluff to long graceful ridge, it was impossible to retain true ideas of size and distance. The proportions of pools, islets, bushes, and cliffs corresponded so closely to those which would have marked lakes, islands, groves, and mountain peaks that, for all the eye could tell, Winnepesaukee and the Franconia Mountains were there in all their beauty. 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 brilliancy 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 Hog Island.

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 farmhouse 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 Essex River, with its gleaming flats dotted with clamdiggers, Coffin s Beach, Annisquam Harbor, and the shores of Cape Ann made dim and mysterious by the east wind’s veil of haze, a pledge of returning storm. The view northward across Castle Neck and the mouths of Ipswich and Rowley rivers to Plum Island was not only beautiful, but interesting by reason of the distinctness with which it mapped the dunes. As line upon line of white-edged breakers rolled in upon the shore, they seemed to turn to sand and continue their undulations across Castle Neck to our inlet. Bits of blue shone between these sand-waves. They were the mimic lakes of the caddis worms and the Ipswich sparrows. Bits of white were on the sands of the beach and the flats along the inlet. They were flocks of gulls feeding. So still was the air that now and then the uncanny whining of one of these birds came up to us. Inland the sun made the haze golden instead of gray, and we could not see many miles. In Ipswich, Hamilton, and Essex many drumlins could be seen, one of which, Heartbreak Hill, was especially conspicuous. The outlines of these hills seemed restful and placid. The marshes between them were straw - colored, and cut into arabesques by meandering tide rivers of blue.

The stone walls on Hog Island were apparently being swallowed up by the earth. The boulders also appeared to be sinking below the surface. One stone wall had sunk so that its top was almost level with the ground. In the fields at the base of the hill tunnels of the common field mouse (Arvicola pennsylvanicus) ran in every direction. The mousehunter, in order to prove beyond a doubt that these sturdy mice, and not moles, were responsible for the tunnels, dug one of them out of his cave and produced him struggling.

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 sounds of roaring water 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 December 15, 1636, the father was claimed by the ocean as its own. The son gave up the sea, and grew corn by the ponds of Chebacco. Before he died he moved out of sight and hearing of the ocean, and for many generations none of his descendants lived within tide-water limits.

Frank Bolles.