© 2024
Local NPR for the Cape, Coast & Islands 90.1 91.1 94.3
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Dead Deer on the Beach Suggests a Choice of Fates

When I arrived at Le Count Hollow, the slope had been cut several feet up from the bottom by recent storm waves. It was an hour past high tide, and the waves, all foam and milk for several hundred yards out, had the hollow, grinding roar of a receding storm surf.

Along the upper beach there was a nearly continuous ribbon, or river, of rockweed and kelp, from a few feet to several yards wide. Rockweed, as its name implies, grows on submerged rocks. Where does so much rockweed grow off our sandy shore? Where was it all ripped from?

Walking north, I seemed to swing between extremes of perception: one moment I was plodding with my head lowered, in intense examination of the multi-colored river of wrack and litter at my feet, toting up the items among it like some drudge of an inventory clerk. The next moment I felt as if I were embarked on some unplanned pilgrimage, chasing haltingly after some vision of the eternal present. I felt caught somewhere between the clean, sleek, shelving slopes of the immense glacial scarp to my left, and the continuous, gathering, overlapping, hollow roar of the breakers on my right. A flock of gulls rose repeatedly into the air ahead of me, toward the misty destruction in the far distance. The beach seemed a place where novelty and perception would become unnecessary, and where abiding, constant grandeur might suffice.

There was little else to see: no boats on the water, no ducks in the surf, no shorebirds on the beach. The slopes seemed remarkably clean of vegetation on this passing, as though this entire stretch of bluffs had undergone some active erosion since I had last been here.

When I reached Newcomb Hollow the tall blue clay outcrops were all wet and rubbery to the touch, like whale skin.      

I was about to climb up to the parking lot when I spotted, about two hundred yards to the north, a fairly large object lying on the upper beach. I plodded toward it. At first it seemed to be a log of some sort, but as I got closer it appeared furry - a seal, perhaps. 

When I came to it, though, I saw it was a deer - a good-sized animal stretched out and half-buried in the sand. It lay on its side with its right hind leg extended gracefully behind, as though in the act of running. But its head was bent backwards 180 degrees and in its mouth was a sprig of rockweed. The eyes were intact, but the gulls had been at its torso, exposing the rib cage, through which I could see the dark green mass of entrails. The genital area was eaten away beyond identification, and the exposed muscles of the flanks were striated, a cold, marbled grey-blue and ivory.

There were no other marks on it. It appeared to have been thrown up by the last tide and its limbs were not yet stiff. It may have been chased into the surf by dogs or coyotes and drowned. Deer will sometimes flee into the ocean to escape predators the way that whales seek the beach when injured or ill, to avoid drowning. Both, perhaps, prefer a larger, more abstract danger to a smaller, more immediate one. And both remind us of the implacable terms of existence, of the nature of the physical world in which we live, from which there is no escape, only a choice of fates.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.