9781555534486

Chapter One

An Extravagant

Emptiness

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

. . . . . . . . . .

My mind moves in more than one place

In a country half-land, half-water.

. . . . . . . . . .

What I love is near at hand,

Always, in earth and air.

--Theodore Roethke, "The Far Field"

Enter the bone yard, the domain of the quick and the dead.

The words, like wind or a petitioner's fervent prayer, drifted, insensible, through my mind. I stood on an island with my back to the Atlantic Ocean, at the base of a small sandy gully, surrounded by tidal marsh, thickets of bayberry, and moors of compass grass. At my feet, and radiating outward in a rough circle perhaps twenty feet in diameter, were scores of shells--knobbed and channeled whelks, moon shells, razor and sea clams, mussels, and the occasional chipped scallop fan. For the moment, I was focused on the near sandscape, a spot on a small barrier island over which gulls crisscrossed, dropping their take of the sea onto the packed sand to jar open the shells and expose the vulnerable prey inside. I was scavenging the remains, poking through the unspectacular carnage for shells worth taking back to the mainland, when it occurred to me to take a look around and figure out where I was.

Easiest to say I was at the northern tip of the south island of Monomoy, a wildlife refuge off the coast of Massachusetts, where the arm of Cape Cod bends at the elbow, its joint shared by the towns of Chatham and Orleans. Monomoy lies just south of there, at the confluence of Nantucket Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. Its name derives from a Wampanoag Indian word, which has been translated variously as "deep black," "mire," and "the sound of rushing water." In contemporary, colloquial usage, however, "Monomoy" refers to three islands, two of which form a barrier spit, reserved as a wilderness refuge for wildlife. The third island of the barrier complex is Morris Island, attached by bridge to mainland Cape Cod at Chatham and used as the administrative post from which the U.S. Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the refuge. Yet, if you were to consult an ordinary map, you might not find mention of any of these places. Frequently, even in atlases that show the narrow slip of land stretching south of Cape Cod and northeast of Nantucket Island, the islands' various names--"Monomoy," "Monomoy Island," "Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge"--will be omitted, perhaps because for nearly fifty years, the barrier-island complex has been devoted more to birds and animals than to humans.

It is one delicate edge of one great sea--from the mainland, a half-hour ride by boat to the south island. The destination: eternity. Here, in an island microcosm--a little tract of dunes, barrier beach, freshwater and brackish ponds, tidal flats, and salt marshes--something of wilderness still reigns. The place is given over to the governance of the natural cycles of seasons and migrations, daylight and dark night, full tide and ebb; and what is wild has ascendancy here, even in human law. Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, the formal name given by Congress to the island sanctuary, was acquired by the federal government in 1944 for a wildlife sanctuary; and in 1970 lawmakers designated the island preserve as wilderness space "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain."

But the land itself needs no human legislation to declare its feral state. One sure sign is the natural indifference to individual death: In the wild, the living are too intent on survival to tarry over the dead. Thus, to walk any part of the islands is to stride among ruins and remains. Change, the first fact of life, and death, the final passage, are apparent everywhere: in the stripped and sun-scorched skeleton of a deer, fallen in the compass grass; in the mayhem of gulls that nested here and discovered death in the bayberry; in old beams of buildings once part of a port village, rotting now to slivers under the unforgiving sun, wind, salt, and restless sand.

Day after timeworn day, natural necessity rules here. Winds carry the driven birds to these shores for safe nesting in summer and rest in their long autumn flights, a full circle of faithfulness to imperatives no one wholly understands. Under the hot midsummer sun, deer rest in tall grass or amble without alarm through the moors to feed. From the sea and the Sound, the waters bear the eel grass in, and in its roll and snarl, a moon shell lies cradled, riding the foam, emptied of life. What once had substance and harbored a living thing--a predatory snail--is now turned to other uses, a skeleton suggesting something more: temporary shelter, perhaps, for a hermit crab; or if held in human hands, a tool for tuning to hidden currents, a symbol impressed upon the imagination, the symmetry of a thing coiled and complete--a single life, one pearled and sand-brushed shell.

The dunes create their own spirals, turning in upon themselves. The shores shrug under the lift and heave of the sea. The wave crests, like great hands wringing, twists rocks and pebbles, till all collide and fracture. In the hurl and thud of the breakers, everything once thought stable in its turn tumbles into tens of thousands of pieces, as grains of sand fall from boulders of granite--simultaneously, the unraveling of a continent, the creation of a world.

Listen then, and hear the voice of the wind, the whistling sand, and hushed surf. Heed the territorial imperatives--the reprimands of gulls, the declarations in the beach grass, and, in a sudden stillness that follows, the last long breath of the departed: Enter the bone yard, the domain of the quick and the dead.

* * *

From my vantage point, in that late summer--or early fall, adopting the birds' seasonal timing--of 1991, Monomoy looked like heaven, mostly untouched and certainly as unspoiled as it is possible for open land so close to millions of people to be. And there was this: Monomoy at least occupied a point on my internal map, a place in a physical landscape and in the cartography of the imagination, one that I could pinpoint, visit, describe, and study.

For one thing, it was small--about 2,750 acres, give or take the hundred or so acres of sand constantly eroded and redistributed by the sea. In scope and terrain it was manageable enough that human visitors in decent physical condition could walk the perimeter of the island in a day. A rigorous, healthy hike, to be sure, padding ten to fifteen miles through sand the entire way; but it was possible. And for the most part, there was only nature to take into account--a harmless wilderness made comprehensible through the lens of island isolation and the stresses that seclusion in nature entail. To travel there seemed somehow to entail little more than a frank and gentle human act, an admission of longing for a deserted place with the sea all around and the vast sky overhead. On Monomoy one could still pace an extravagant emptiness.

One could be quiet. And fathom the wind, the waves, the birds. And watch the day unfold and the creatures of the place working out their vital, tangled destinies. It was heady comfort to turn one's back on the civilization that lay only a channel's breadth away, look out over the waves of the Atlantic, and imagine the whole, far-flung world that lay beyond, safely out there, out of sight. It was tempting to forget that the insubstantial desert on which one stood was also a threshold inward, for the lay of the land within the self was not as simple to discern.

As I heard the words repeat, again, like a chant or a breaking wave-- Enter the bone yard, the domain of the quick and the dead --I could not say for sure whether I was thinking about the space of sand on which I resided for the day or the animated dust I occupy for a lifetime, with a history of certain specters as companions.

Enter the bone yard, the domain of the quick and the dead.

It could have been a metaphor for the island. Then again, it might have meant me.

* * *

For some time I have wanted to tell the story of Monomoy and its slow accretion in my life; but, for years, I was not yet ready for the deep, internal archaeology the narrative might require, and I had not achieved the elemental perspective only time can grant. I could not disclose what lay at the core of either the place or the life. For a while, I did not know how to capture the island, its import, or its fate apart from the artifacts of my own past and evolving present--so indistinguishable had Monomoy become from my own constructs of meaning. Even now, I know that unearthing the island means uncovering buried significances in myself, for Monomoy overwhelmed, transformed, and redeemed me in ways I will be discerning for a lifetime.

But one must start somewhere.

For nearly fifteen years, I lived at one edge of the North American continent and called Cape Cod home. This peninsula of sand and kettle ponds, pitch pine forests, and dune beaches bearing on the broad Atlantic is Massachusetts' farthest reach into the sea. But when first I arrived, it was, to me, simply the point at which the land left off and there was no farther to run. It was not until years later that I realized that the uneasy sands of my own torn heart and interrupted destiny were being swept in the unforeseen direction of love and healing--by the place and its various worlds of sand and water, shadow and light. By that time, it was too late to leave without loss. By then, the place had become home. I had come to Cape Cod over a long overland route that carried me from the Midwest to Massachusetts, taking thirty years of life in the going. Looking back, it is hard to describe which tracks led where--family, schooling, career, loves. All the facts under certain lights become fictions, or at least stories kept alive only in the telling.

I was born and baptized Martha Ruth Mulder, the sixth of seven children in a quietly but deeply disrupted, secretive family. From the clearer point of the present, I can lift many memories to the light and turn them now, slowly and deliberately, casting half-lights like unreliable truths; but that is private work, reserved for the deep self and chosen intimates. Besides, everyone on the way to somewhere else has come from trouble of one sort or another, big or small. Details tend to obscure the point--people on the move are always fleeing a fate that no longer suits them for the unknown territory of change and fresh starts.

So it was that I, a child of the prairies and lakes, left Chicago for Michigan, and later, abandoned Michigan for Massachusetts, ostensibly to accomplish an education in theology, but primarily--or at least, additionally--to escape the circumstances of my birth and my family of origin. I left terrain that had been harsh frontier for my forebears two and three generations earlier and set out on my own hard and solitary pilgrimage, settling at last on Cape Cod.

For nearly twenty years, I have filled my days as a journalist, columnist, and now college professor, leaving the brown hours of evening and the brief, blue dawns free for wandering in nature. My self-imposed exile has taken me entirely beyond the reach of old connections to a new name and another family, born of the natural world.

In nature I found not only healing, but also instruction and, gratefully, self-transcendence. True things, it is said, come wrapped in clues that keep their meaning hidden, except to enlightened seekers. But whatever else the bliss of true understanding may be, it is elusive--usually hard-won and unexpected when it comes. I do not presume to guess that what I have arrived at is enlightenment; it is closer to Theodore Roethke's "still, but not a deep center." The more I have learned, the fewer words I have to describe faithfully what insights have greeted me like blessings along the way.

I only see that I came to rest--like one of the myriad migrating birds--on Cape Cod and stayed there for a decade and then some, taken in for a time by my own anguish and released at last by the beauty and grace of a safe harbor by the sea. I became enraptured by the particulars of the place--the habitats and their creatures; the slow trace of ordinary days, when weeds and wildflowers, insects and birds embodied the routines I came to count on.

During these years, I have spent a great deal of time in near-solitude and silence. I chose to live among--but not with--my own species. Almost alone, except for uncaring nature crowding all around, I spent untold hours with only the constant companionship of a dog--in the early years, a gentle Irish setter mix, and now, a golden retriever who not one moment too soon has achieved adulthood.

Still, for all this time, left to my own devices, I have enjoyed shaping a life that could hardly be called a lonely existence. I had work to do, inside and out; and I did it. Beyond that, I took the remaining sweet time--all my unhindered, uncounted hours--to acquaint myself with nature, and week after week to write in the corner of a newsprint page the little designs of my life.

After all this roving, through the days and weeks, seasons and cycles, I still cannot disclose the great ordering of my own small life or any other's. I know only that I departed from one place of land and water to arrive at another. The wayward years have not revealed to me the secrets of what commands the universe--or why. But I have come to see that I walk in the same light that awakens a box turtle, impelling her to trundle off, away from water and across roads and other human dangers, to nest as her ancestors have for millennia. My thoughts rise through the same air that the great blue heron consumes with wings, mounting up, out of the marsh; and my heart befriends the same currents the osprey navigates, crafting the ancient circles overhead. All these pilgrims--and their kin coursing in earth and sea--have become to me brother, sister, father, mother, and they announce my true home, the domain of the open heart.

It is tempting to dramatize the long walks all creatures make, and in prettying up the distances, to diminish what went into the years, and all that was lost. But in my own experience, the truth is more subtle, as slow as the growth of trees or the continent grinding down. Real transformation takes time and renders you as vulnerable as an amphibian taking on legs to replace what earlier had been the advantage of a tail.

I, too, know what it means to lose gills to gain lungs.

It is part of what it takes to move "in a country half-land, half-water." After a while, you begin, blessedly, to disappear, even from yourself, by fitting inconspicuously into the backdrop of sea and sand that encompasses everything on the edge of steady ground. In time, with luck, you glimpse what skills--and mercy--will be required of you, and what will be granted, so that you might start again, more freely, to live.

* * *

I had lived on the cape less than a year, barely accustomed to my new home and work, still in a vagabond state, when I decided to sever one of the last great bonds to my past: my birth name.

Even as I was sloughing off-the old set of connections, I was casting about for the new. In seeking a chosen name, "North" came almost without effort. The sound was similar enough to my birth name to make the vocal shift insignificant, and the word itself--its literal meanings and its mythological resonance--seemed rich and full of mystery. I was drawn to the name as I had been pulled all my life by the far North Country--the white birch and pine forests of Minnesota's Boundary Waters and farther, the sub-Arctic regions of the Hudson Bay.

As a child I had imagined escaping from my parents' house to a score of safer places, protected from even the known intruders simply by means of an inhospitable climate. Other children dreamed of the adventure of space or expeditions to parts of Africa and South America that in the middle of the twentieth century still seemed remote and romantic. But I had other plans.

Displayed on my bedroom wall was a National Geographic map of the world, and all along the northern and southernmost extremities I placed colored tacks to indicate the places I wanted most to explore: the Poles, northern Canada, Hudson Bay; Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland; Australia, New Zealand, and the Falklands. Year to year the relative merits of one destination or another might change, but the sites--and their far-flung locations, mostly to the north or to climates given to cold and snow--never varied.

In fact, I have never traveled beyond Ontario, have not yet made my way to the Earth's once-impenetrable frontiers. I have spent most of my life exploring the hinterlands of the hidden self, and when the time was right, I made the North--the mythological direction governing birth and death; the body and nature; growth, creativity, and silence--my own.

To discard one's birth and family name in favor of another is an uneasy affair at best, and to accomplish it, I looked to worlds beyond the human. I wanted the sounds of a place and the power of a totem to attend me into the new existence I was structuring for myself. One night, shortly after I had decided on a first name, the Scottish words "caird" and "cairn" came to me without prompting. I pulled down a dictionary and studied the definitions--"caird" from a Gaelic root, meaning a wandering tinker or gypsy; "cairn" with an ancient connotation of sepulcher or grave site, and in more contemporary usage, as a term indicating a pile of stones marking a change in direction. Either word and all the meanings would have worked, but in the end I chose "cairn," perhaps for no other reason than its less harsh sound.

Weeks passed before the loon-- Gavia immer --flew into my consciousness; and, in time, I assumed a form of the bird's name, Tavia, and asked its blessing.

The morning after the black and white diving bird surfaced in my ephemeral, internal sight, I rose from sleep and crawled out of the sheets, my feet meeting the cold planks of the wood floor in what was then my coastal home. In the spare light of an autumn dawn, I drifted downstairs, and still groggy, leafed through a field guide to eastern birds. There, in the opening pages, were color plates devoted to the loons, some species specially ornamented with an occasional bright throat patch or head color. But the bird that had visited me was the common loon. "Large swimming birds with daggerlike bills, may dive from surface or submerge.... Sexes alike," the guide read. "Voice: In summer, falsetto wails, weird yodeling, maniacal quavering laughter; at night, a tremulous ha-oo-oo . In flight, a barking kwuk . Loons are usually silent in winter."

In the legends of North American indigenous peoples, the loon is variously credited with creating the Earth with mud or embodying the Creator's first incarnation, magically transforming from sound to shadow to the form of this most ancient of birds. Considered by ornithologists to be among the oldest of the avians, loons have a history stretching back ninety million years. Fossil evidence found in central North America in the nineteenth century demonstrates that birdlike creatures, strikingly similar to present-day loons, appeared about the same time as Tyrannosaurus rex --140 million years ago. And as Homo sapiens encountered the birds, tales of the loon's magical qualities were infused into oral traditions and depicted in prehistoric art. In native mythology, loons still occupy a place of reverence, being the bearer of shamans to the world of spirits.

That cold morning in the month of my birth, I knew my totem had come, and I draped the sound of its softened Latin name-- Tavia --over me as a central and centering presence, reminding me at once of the dreams and hopes of the child I had been and the hidden depths of the fate that lay, unfulfilled, before me. For nearly fifteen years--hardly any duration at all compared to a bird older than recorded time--I have carried the loon, camouflaged in my name; and I have borne its spirit in my heart. The bird still skims through my mind with its odd postures and awkward flight. Sometimes silent, sometimes calling--it issues different songs in different times, in seasons and cycles governed by internal designs.

But mostly it moves in the fluid backdrop of phantasm, its low-slung form ghostly in the riffled waters. Now I know the loon so intimately that seeing it is like making a quick move in front of a lightly clouded glass and catching an indistinct, obscure reflection. The bird has surfaced in me during times of intense, fleeting joy and just before tragedy strikes. And occasionally, it has been the harbinger of the hardest passages, plunging out of sight just before word of a death reaches me. I ordinarily do not speak now of the times when the loon appears in my dreams, its song primordial and melancholy, full of a primitive loneliness and deep sorrow, its cry an unfathomable madness and healing solitude. You learn to live with your own wilderness, however it opens before you. Some things you keep to yourself. Certain revelations do not belong to any fragmented, personal history; they are history itself. They bear a wisdom so old that it carries you, and those who float for a time with you, over the waters of memory, on infinite lakes, whose source and completion are never found.

Flight brought me to the farthest shore of the continent, and here at the water's edge, I began to acquaint myself with the narratives of my own experience, to learn how much more there is to life than the struggle and survival of the body. Along the empty outer beaches of Cape Cod and its barrier spits, I have been instructed by the graces of nature about what it means to cherish a place one knows as home.

The lesson in its simplest form is this: To love a place is not so different from loving a person.

To love a place, you have to know it.

You have to leave yourself long enough to arrive somewhere beyond.

The philosopher who pointed out that love is where you live, and how, was on the right track. It is, after all, easy enough to love from a distance, in the abstract--to respect humankind, for example, or revere the Earth. It's the specifics that trip you up--or, under a different light, illuminate the finer points of what it means to love. Loving individual persons involves participation--in their particular existence and the shades of their temperaments. It means daily association--the unfolding toil, order, and joy of a life--sometimes disappointing and sometimes exhilarating.

Love requires allegiance and diligence, endurance and devotion. Places ask that of us, too. And what we first may be able to feel only for a place--a sun-strewn beach, a darkened thicket, a breaking wave--we may, with time, promise to other creatures and even ourselves. Until then, the land will cradle us.

* * *

During the years I visited the island on day-trip getaways, I envisioned Monomoy as a sanctuary. Later, during the summers I lived at the empty keeper's cottage by the extinguished light, I knew the place as a natural haven, a reclaimed island Eden, suspended outside of time and freed, somehow, from the ghosts of anyone's past or the erosions of personal history and hurt.

But, of course, it was never paradise, or hadn't been, anyway, for the long time humans had viewed it as a resource worth taking--a place to live at the edge of the sea, a limited territory with apparently limitless potential for hunting, fishing, and birding. Once humans directed burned-out barks and wooden ships, and later, dune buggies and skiffs, toward the shore, the era of the Island Garden on Monomoy ended.

I first visited Monomoy as the last decade of the century dawned, at the close of a fifteen-year period during which hostilities over the federal takeover of privately owned land in the refuge had, for the most part, ebbed. The abandoned lighthouse, keeper's quarters, and nearby storage shed had been refurbished in the late 1980s, just a few years before my arrival. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of "private" camps--owned by the government but leased for private use to the original land owners--had dwindled from thirteen to one. The last surviving shack rested on the shore of what once had been the island's sole commercial port--Whitewash Village, in the Powder Hole harbor of South Monomoy. And, in spite of storms, hurricanes, and human vandals working mischief elsewhere on the island, the two-room, tar-paper-and-wood cabin stubbornly endured until the close of the twentieth century. It was held, until 1999, under a life-use lease by its longtime owner, the gentle matriarch of a New Bedford, Massachusetts, family that had summered on Monomoy since the early 1930s. Diana Poirier, 94, died in late 1998, and as was stipulated by law, her cottage was scheduled to be dismantled by officials of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Under provisions of the Wilderness Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service is authorized to remove the human remnants on the island and to restore a sense of untouched, wild lands.

By the 1990s, human visitors to the refuge already had become uncommon during much of the year. The early nineteenth-century buildings that stood locked and empty seemed to be all of a piece with the other skeletons exposed to the elements--birds, animals, ships' timbers, rust-flaked parts from motor vehicles, and concrete foundations for stations once used by the U.S. Life-Saving Service and the Coast Guard. And though the rotting remnants seemed bleak reminders of mortality and human transience, neither the symbols of decay nor the fossils of defeated human enterprise impressed me as tragic, or even finished. By then, I had lived for more than ten years near the ocean, and I knew that you cannot learn to love the sea if you are squeamish about death--or, for that matter, about the brutal contest for life. What goes on, goes on; and some things cease. So it was nothing startling to find that, on Monomoy, dry bones were as commonplace as twigs. The message scrawled in the unquiet sands became clear soon enough: Everything, in time, returns to dust--or here, to sand.

I came to know Monomoy during years when the refuge was, in one sense, at its best--seldom toured by people, remote and peaceful in comparison with the crowded New England seaboard stretching for two hundred miles north and south. Comparing Monomoy's Powder Hole with Manhattan, or Hospital Pond with Boston Harbor, the refuge's barrier beaches and dunes seemed as stark as desert.

But for all the emptiness of the place, Monomoy was--and is--more than touched by the human hand. True, nature is always working its demolition and reclamation projects in the sand, and the sea remains as ever that "well-excavated grave" that the poet Marianne Moore sensed it to be. Even so, humans have been vying for territory here for centuries, trying to gain the upper hand on the harmonious monotony of nature. The Monomoyicks, who belonged to the Algonquian family of nations, were the first to inhabit the stretch of land and among the last to see their identity as synonymous with the place, which they called Munumuhkemoo , an Algonquian word meaning "there is a mighty rush of water" or "the sound of rushing water." Later, European adventurers landed--often less by choice than by ill-luck in navigating the treacherous waters around the point and along the shores--and had their own names for a place so battered by the sea. The Vikings reportedly encountered Monomoy as part of early exploration, and later European adventurers, in attempting to chart the area, dubbed parts of it as "Point Fortune," "Batturier," "Tucker's Terror," "Point Care," and "Ungeluckige Haven." In all the names sailors and ships' captains bestowed on the island, the common theme was its unforgettable, dangerous character. In 1606, a ship carrying the explorer Samuel de Champlain broke a rudder on uncharted shoals, and the crew took refuge on Monomoy until repairs were finished and the ship could return to sea. From then on, the French explorer would describe the island's tip as Cape Batturier, "a bank on which the sea beats."

For all this, people kept haunting the shores and even tried periodically to wrest a living--or, at least, survival--from the fugitive isle. Early historical records show that in 1711 an early settler, William Eldredge, opened a tavern at Wreck Cove on the western, or Nantucket Sound, side of Monomoy, "for the entertainment of sailors making a harbor in the vicinity." In 1729, the Irish immigrant ship George and Ann barely survived its four and a half months at sea, during which exhausted stores of food and water, disease, and, ultimately, mutiny claimed more than one hundred lives. The few survivors were rescued and taken to Wreck Cove, where they stayed the winter before pressing on to Ulster County in New York. In time, Chatham farmers used the expanse of inland Monomoy as pasture, and in the nineteenth century, a small harborside community, Whitewash Village, flourished for about seventy-five years along Nantucket Sound.

Most recently, the U.S. government has left its mark on Monomoy. The U.S. Life-Saving Service--later, the U.S. Coast Guard--maintained as many as four lifesaving stations from Chatham to Monomoy Point during the late nineteenth century. Then, during World War II, the federal government used the isolated strand as a strafing range. At last, as the war was nearing an end, the Department of Interior laid claim to the place, purchasing private land with the power of eminent domain. Life leases were granted to those whose dwellings still stood, but as time and storms devastated the camps, the owners were forced to leave so that the wilderness character of Monomoy could be restored.

People who knew the islands--or lived summers in dune shacks or shore camps--never really accepted the idea of relinquishing their interests or vacating the land. The hunting that had depleted large numbers of deer and birds was ended, for example, but even within the last twenty-five years, poaching has been a problem from time to time. And while the land has reverted to something akin to wilderness, the human presence is always there, in the shallows and along the shores. Shellfishermen still comb the tidal flats, harvesting soft-shelled clams, and dig offshore for quahogs; professional and amateur ornithologists return each fall to the ponds and moors to glimpse migrating birds by the thousands; eco-tours continue to circle the refuge, looking for seals and other marine mammals; and boaters and sunbathers persist in using the beaches, even when their presence might disturb nesting or endangered birds.

Nevertheless, when I arrived in the mid-1990s for the first of three extended summer stays at the lighthouse on the southern of Monomoy's islands, the place seemed almost pristine, and I saw laid out before me a mostly unspoiled sanctuary of natural intricacy and balance. I did not have then the advantage--or cynicism--that can come with a long association with a place that both the government and the public find desirable. I did not realize that there had been trouble in paradise before and that soon enough there would be again. In 1996, a year after my last sojourn on the island, federal wildlife officials were embroiled in a conflict with animal rights advocates over the government's mandate to use necessary "management practices" to enhance the diversity of bird species in the refuge, which in this case meant destroying eggs in nests and poisoning the gull species that were overrunning the island. An estimated 2,500 birds--mostly great black-backed and some herring gulls--were killed that year with bread cubes that had been laced with poison and placed in nests. Several hundred birds flew to the mainland, to die in freshwater ponds in Chatham, where it was impossible to keep the public completely at bay. People all over Cape Cod, and eventually from around the country, were outraged by what they perceived to be the birds' suffering and by what they viewed as an intractable attitude on the part of officials of the Fish and Wildlife Service. In response to public protest, the use of poisons was suspended the next year; but 250 birds, including four black-crowned night herons, were shot, and eggs in nests were smashed. In 1998, federal officials attempted to make the island more compatible with nesting piping plovers and terns by eliminating the coyote--a relative newcomer to the island. Coyotes had extended their territory over Cape Cod during the previous decade, and in 1997, signs of a single coyote, and possibly a pair, were turning up on Monomoy. The coyotes presumably had swum from the mainland to the north island and eventually to South Monomoy. To prevent the animals from denning permanently on the island, one of the pair was shot and killed the next summer.

The intent of the federally mandated management program administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service had been to enable piping plovers and terns to nest on and inhabit Monomoy in greater numbers. That end was realized with dramatic success after only one year. But it came at a very high cost. The image of the agency had been tarnished in the public mind. Many people simply did not understand or accept the notion that human management was needed in a wilderness refuge, and they regarded the federal government's actions as interference, not intervention.

By the close of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, Monomoy had been reconfigured once again as a landscape of bitter contention and a fragile, uncertain peace. To many, it had become, anew, a microcosm of the uneasy alliance between humans and the wilderness, the cynosure of our anxious motives in tinkering with the natural environment. Yet, contrary to what many people on both sides of the Monomoy controversy believed, it was not a simple matter to tell the culprits from the crusaders. Wildlife biologists found themselves ironically acceding to--indeed, endorsing--the culling of birds and animals they might elsewhere have been called upon to protect; and animal rights activists, bent on saving gulls, in time resorted to reprisals against Fish and Wildlife officials. Whatever innocence the island refuge might have embodied was eclipsed by squabbling and territorial jealousies--not of birds, but of the supposedly more sophisticated and evolved mammals: feuding humans.

Meanwhile, the natural forces that had shaped Monomoy continued to sculpt and resculpt the barrier islands. In the six millennia since its formation in the wake of the last ice age, Monomoy had been at the mercy of the battering surf and storms that sweep in from the Atlantic, and no human uproar would change that fact or its implications. Nature on its own guaranteed that Monomoy would never be a completely stable island environment. The erosion of land to the north carried sand down the arm of outer Cape Cod and eventually to Monomoy itself, continually reshaping the sand mass. Still, generation upon generation of migrating songbirds and shorebirds found the islands constant enough to serve as a regular stopover point on their southbound flights, thousands of miles long, to wintering sites in Central and South America. Razor clams and sandworms in the dense, dangerous intertidal zone went on with their existence, putting down feet like roots in the flats; and along the shore, beach grass thrived or failed, obeying the authority of the wind and sea, as the moving sand drove the island inexorably south and west.

Monomoy, which had been crafted by debris pressed ahead of great continental ice sheets and the rising sea level caused by their melting, rode out every change. For an island formed at about the time that early humans half a world away were discovering the advantages of farming, clustering into towns, and domesticating animals, the passage of time--with a decade more or less, a species more or less--was inconsequential. Who and what lived on Monomoy, how they came, and when they departed--all these were simply insignificant waves that meant nothing outside of the human calculation of time and distance, meaning and history.

Still, the last decade of the millennium was for me the beginning of ten years of wandering in a small wilderness, and it would change me for good. It is not that I found myself in the sparse wilderness of Monomoy, but rather that I lost myself there, in the intricate elegance and uncompromising energy of nature. To the island I brought, without thought, all my unanswered questions--what it means to be human, where I fit into the formula of nature and life, and how to understand meaning or affirm purpose, especially in a context of overwhelming suffering and loss. From my time apart I was expecting not answers but, perhaps, reprieve. On Monomoy I ceased asking why and turned instead to inquiries about what, how, where, and when natural mysteries revealed themselves. These questions focused my concentration on details that explained more about the communities of life around me and their connections to me than abstract pondering had ever done. Once my world was charged with an awareness evoked by hawks and voles, darners and mantises, beach pea and dusty miller, my human concerns receded to a more tolerable, even trivial, burden.

Now, with that exodus achieved at last, I am still. I sit in a simple, small, inland room, trying to make sense of an island and its influence--as place, as metaphor, as fact--in my own life and in the shared history with others of my time and species. It is almost ten years since I first approached Monomoy, five since my last summer sojourn there. I tell myself that space apart should give me a different outlook on things, and it does, since I am able now to rest in a candor and innocence that would not have been possible half a life or half a decade ago. I have come to know enough of brokenness and reconnection to trace the navigable bar of my own short, urgently human life, using shifting emotions for a space on which to stand and, finally, to report the stories. Only now can I give an account of the place--a barrier spit, severed from the mainland by the sea--and the narrative of my own internal territory, circumscribed by the loss, loneliness, and strength that a solitary pilgrimage brings.

The unreliable words themselves impede discovery. We hear the sounds, but the meanings evade us: mother, father, trust, tomorrow. Bird, animal, betrayal, love. Present, family, history, home. Still, as signals, these fragments may be the only hints we have, shards of a past, or evidence of a present, both so hard to hold.

And so it happened that during the early day trips and later, through the three, longer, summer stays on the island, all the language I brought with me was refined by Monomoy light and retired into syllables shaped by the silence of wilderness. In the swell of the evening tides, cradled in the arms of the wind, I heard the still, small voice of nature's law: Enter the bone yard, the domain of the quick and the dead. Enter, and live.

Thus, with no better compass to guide my passage, I looked to the island and followed its course, breaking the large tales into smaller pieces, sensing in the fragments some unseen, yet intuited, whole. In it resides the one natural, personal story worth remembering and retelling--the chronicle of survival: lives receding into narratives, ideas into words, thoughts into sounds, despair into sorrows, grief into longing--and, in time, into hope worth having.

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By Monomoy Light

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