This morning I drove out to the small parking area between Gull and Higgins Ponds with our black poodle Sam. I don’t usually try to go there in the summer, as parking is very limited, but that morning I was the only one there. It was a lovely, brilliant October day, temps in the high 60s, the sun so bright and broken on the surfaces of the ponds that it hurt my eyes just to look at it.
There were no birds on the ponds, not even any of the eponymous gulls on Gull Pond. In fact I didn’t see, or hear, any animals, birds or otherwise, on or off the ponds. The town is shutting down – even out here in the woods. Only two of the houses on the ponds appeared to be still occupied. The floats and rafts have been removed from the public beach at Gull Pond, so that the shoreline looked as remote and untouched as a lake in northern Maine.
I was struck by the silence, and by the nearly complete absence of human presence on such a lovely day. The sloping, pine-clad hills seemed like a vast, empty stage, brilliantly lit, but with no actors. I could sense the vanished life, the ghosts of summer, so recently gone – that seasonal layering of casual memories that falls on this place each year about this time. It mingles with over a half-century of such memories around these woods and ponds and the modest dwellings that ring them, like the layering of each year’s falling leaves mingles in the cumulative humus of the forest floor.
I was a small part of the life here one summer decades ago when, as a college student, I was invited to a party of young people at a pond cottage that then belonged to the wife of Eero Saarinen, the famous architect. I remember a long zip-line that had been attached to pitch pines spanning a small cove, so that we could swing out over the pond and fall into its engulfing waters, innocent of knowledge or ambition, hungry for sensation. Even then, though, I sensed that this was a seasonal magic, and a more intense one because of that.
The Wellfleet ponds are still the most intensely seasonal of all places in this town, and over the years I’ve grown to appreciate their off-season gifts even more than those of summer: the empty, silent beaches, the undisturbed waters, the deserted houses that are now vessels of memory, memory both retrospective and anticipatory. They are what they are and have no need of me, who am myself but a wandering solid ghost, shadowed by a black dog.
And I think, Is all this just for me – for those of us who remain after the summer crowds are gone? Is all this seasonal beauty, all this relaxed, expansive setting of woods and water just for us? Of course not. If the tupelo leaves turn red-and-gold-spangled, if the beeches turn butternut brown, if the Virginia creeper turns skyrocket-red and the swamp maples a stunning purple-scarlet and there is no one here to see them, are they beautiful? Of course they are. Nothing demonstrates the indifference of the natural world to human priorities more than the gratuitous, extravagant beauty it creates at all times and in all places, for anyone who is or is not there to appreciate it. I am reminded that this is, after all, nature’s world, and we just live in it - some of the time.
