Labor Day was late this year, but even last week there was a touch of fall in the air. In town there was a sense of the last dance: people lined up at the ATMs outside the bank, a steady stream of cars at the dump over the weekend. On Route 6, the highway traffic, like the migrating shorebirds, all heading south.
We took a walk this morning out High Toss Bridge Road - the old dirt road that forms the boundary between the marshes of the National Seashore on the right and the subdivisions off Old Chequessett Neck Road on the left - sampling the quiet wonders of the season, the fruited tangle of the year. There were the long, lanky stems of blue chicory, lilting flocks of goldenrod, glowing corals of honeysuckle berries, black umbels of viburnum fruit, the tight feathery pink spikes of smartweed. The colors of autumn are to the colors of spring as oil paintings are to watercolors. Spring’s are all ephemeral pastels, full of fragile promise. Autumn’s are saturated, nostalgic, imbued with a sense of promise fulfilled.
The sounds of the seasons are equally distinct. Each day now, the tick, tick, tick, tick of the crickets grow more prominent and insistent. The varied swirls of spring and summer birdsong morph into the regular, implacable racket of autumn’s insect choir.
We found an abundance of beach plums on the flat rise above the marsh. Curiously, it was the short, stunted, half-dead bushes with shriveled brown leaves that held the thickest clusters of berries, whereas most of the large, healthy, dark-green glistening bushes had little or no fruit. Along the path beside the marsh we came upon am enormous, branched apple tree strung with hundreds of small yellow-red apples. We tasted them and found them slightly tart, but edible. Coming back on the road, there was an ancient-looking pear tree with a few dozen fruit, freckled butter-yellow with dark rose blushes, that tasted supermarket sweet. Out on the marsh four white-bellied kingbirds perched like large sparrows on a dead shrub, flitting up and down.
This, we suddenly realized, as if we had forgotten, is why we live here, why we scramble to make a living, choose to give up economic and job security in order to live in a place we love. This, we thought, makes all politics irrelevant, blocks out the static din of the herd of presidential candidates hawking their promises and panaceas on the airwaves more than a year before the next election. But then, of course, we remember it was politics – specifically, the vision a half-century ago of a few Massachusetts politicians – Congressman Hastings Keith, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, and Senator John F. Kennedy – who established the Cape Cod National Seashore half a century ago and made this morning’s walk possible.
