It was eleven degrees this morning, and the wind was not as hungry as yesterday, so we were able to log four beach miles. Alas, the cold drained my iPhone camera’s battery within 15 minutes. Because of that, I still have yet to capture an image of a Cape Cod coyote.
After two miles, we turned back, and a coyote was on a dune cliff above us, 100 yards away. He’d come out of the twisted trees, studied us, and then descended the fifteen vertical feet with ease. Samwise and Emily longed to join him as he crossed to the water’s edge and led us back the way we’d come. He skipped along with nonchalance, making me wonder if he had any idea of how he thrilled the three of us. His was an air of casual grace; he sauntered as the tide licked the beach. Every couple of minutes, he’d turn to look back at us. With that glance, Emi and Sam looked to me, pleading for permission to run.
“Not today, my friends. Gentle. Always gentle.”
It’s gratifying to see those words land with them, to witness how they hold onto respect for fellow four-footed souls. Once prey-driven dogs from Texas, they’ve learned to accept gentler ways.
There was a beloved freedom to today’s outing, and we relished the first long walk since we spent time sunbathing with the fox vixen where the forest and the dunes wed last Saturday. The following morning, we walked in the woodlands again, but only for two miles. The storm had started, and we retreated to the cottage. Little did we know that the nor’easter would leave us snowbound until Thursday morning.
Unfortunately, on Thursday, we could not get over the dunes and the drifted snow to reach any of the local beaches, so we walked in bone-biting gusts at the Herring Cove parking lot.
Yesterday, we endured more brutal winds and made it a mile down the beach before turning back. It was a primal wind, hungry for souls. Yet mine felt a kinship and the need to respond, as it often does, with Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp! These lusty gusts vitalize me. They touch the beast within.
Such conditions forever remind me of the frozen months Atticus and I surprised even ourselves as we chased peaks, often weathering (literally) subzero conditions above treeline, with hikes ranging from five to 27 miles.
It feels like I’ve never been cold since those winters. Today, I wore a thin fleece turtleneck, a fleece hoodie, fleece pants, trail shoes, without socks, a baseball cap, and gloves. It was fine.
Skipping socks serves a purpose. It reminds me of what Samwise and Emily are experiencing during the more extreme conditions. If it is too cold to be outside without my socks, it’s too cold for them.
Smaller Atticus often needed his scuba suit and boots, but Samwise and Emily have more heft, and are two to three times Atticus’s size. They handle the cold easily enough without protection. Then again, Atticus could be in those kinds of conditions for as many as fourteen hours.
Our first winter on Cape Cod is a rare one. So much wind and cold, so much snow. My phone’s weather app warns, “Brutal cold continues; a winter storm passing to the east over the weekend can bring impacts.” The extended forecast suggests we won’t be above 33 degrees for another two weeks. And yet somehow, I love our stay here even more.
Tomorrow’s predicted snow is expected to yield 2 to 4 inches, with a slight chance of up to 8 inches. As long as we can get out of our driveway, we’ll be fine.
It feels right that our first winter here would be so extreme and out of character for the area. We’re getting our money’s worth, since we are elemental when at our best. These are experiences to be catalogued and gathered. They are memories that will be with me long after these chapters are over.
As the world, and our nation, particularly, careens dangerously ahead, steered by toxic, hate-filled madmen and narcissists, I find that I need this winter and this weather. We are blessed by the solitude, the coyotes and foxes, the seals, seagulls, and the crows who gather in the trees above us with all their chatter.
“Good morning, crows!” I say with Bombadilian laughter, and they respond with calls I cannot translate, but since they stick around, I take that as a positive. It’s always good to see them, to hear and feel them near us. They are mysterious, sagacious souls, and I consider them a good sign. As long as we have the crows, we can withstand much.
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of Storm.”
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Snow Storm
Thomas Merton
Merton was born on this day in 1915. He’s long been a teacher for this solitary. As a boy, he visited Truro and Provincetown and wrote about them in his autobiography, The Seven-Story Mountain.
With everything that is going on, I often contemplate what he’d think of our nation during these dark times, especially the vile scenes and acts playing out in Minneapolis. He would certainly have much to say, and anyone who has read Merton could guess what it would be.
Merton was connected to Cape Cod in another, roundabout way. He was a fan of Rachel Carson and her work. It was here on Cape Cod that Rachel came into her own with her ocean studies and popular books that preceded Silent Spring. In a two-page letter to Carson, Merton wrote:
“It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself.”
I have been moved and guided by Thomas Merton to the point that we went out of our way on one of our winter/spring coddiwomples to make a pilgrimage to his grave at the Abbey of Gethsamani in Kentucky.
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.”
― Thomas Merton
Onward, dear reader, by all means.
