I drove down to the parking lot at Nauset Light the other day to check out the surf. Carrying binoculars and a small backpack, I headed north, staying on the firm lower beach. The tide was about an hour and a half past high and the clean beach was laced in delicate overlapping loops of crushed reddish seaweed.
The sea itself was as calm as it ever gets: one-to-two-foot waves were gnashing and noshing at the lower beach; gentle predictable seethes of foam slid smoothly along the sand; the surface of the ocean was calm enough for a canoe, a blue silky molten sheen, gently heaving like a large water bed in a seaside house. It was as if the whole Atlantic were kept pressed gently down by the weight of the soft, heavy, saturated hazy air of a late autumn’s afternoon.
I looked up toward the bluff where, not that many years ago, a paved road ran along the top of this cliff. Now the road is gone, and instead, just below the brow of the bluff, I could see a dozen or more bank swallow holes – a colony of nesting burrows where cars once rode along what is now empty air.
I walked on, not seeing much, not expecting much, just glad to be out here walking again among the big things. Not only the beach but the bluff itself had a clean abstract appearance, nearly blank. Only the blackened, moribund clumps of bushes on their way down to the beach and the U-shaped formations of sand falls provided any variation to the light-orange-rusty slopes. So regular and uniform the beach appeared, so artificial, that it might have been the work of bulldozers: a broad twenty-six-mile highway cut for a beach interstate.
That may seem a strange way of describing this wild beach, but it brought to mind again that old conundrum of the difference in the appeal of what we perceive as natural and what we see as artificial, and why we value the natural more. It’s not mere aesthetics. In many ways this beach is as abstract and regular and barren as a seaside copper pit. Is it merely the presence of the sea beside it that gives it beauty? I doubt it. There are places like the South Dakota Badlands and the La Brea tar pits, which are undeniably ugly and lack an ocean, but still possess a natural appeal for us.
I think our preference for natural scenes, beautiful or not, goes back again to the arbitrariness, the capriciousness and the isolated context of so much human activity in the landscape. Consider controversial projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, whose proponents until recently touted it as “essential” to the economy, until plummeting oil prices made it politically obsolete. Or the bankrupt Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound, a multi-billion dollar enterprise whose future is now in doubt due to the pullout of several major backers and partners. By contrast, nothing in nature is ever abandoned because of economic downturns or political changes or the loss of financial backing.
In this age of flux and fragmented identity, we may come to appreciate as much as anything the history of a place like this beach, its reach into a past before human alteration and into a future beyond it. In nature we seek an enduring identity in which we can rest our knocked-about souls and psyches and which, gratefully, does not depend on us, or, as Wendell Berry put it, is not subject. We love nature’s beauty, its steadfastness, its profound integrity, but perhaps even more, we love and need its aloofness, its separateness from our own fickle and shallow-rooted enterprises.
