Nature is Never Spent

Friday May 14, 2021

Last weekend, my wife and I drove a 1997 camper van 300 miles to Cape Cod. It seems blogworthy somehow.

A colleague at work was telling me the other day that there’s a psychological explanation for the illusion that time accelerates as you get older. Basically, our perception of time is related to the number of new impressions or memories that are being stored in our brains. If nothing unfamiliar or unusual occurs, time seems to speed past.

I’m getting the opposite sensation now after less than 24 hours on the road. A strange elastic sense of being unmoored from hours and days and weeks…

So far, everything has gone off like clockwork thanks to my wife’s meticulous planning. Nothing has been forgotten, google has chosen the fastest route, avoiding traffic where possible, politely informing us of unavoidable delays in advance. It’s a bit later than anticipated as we pull into the deserted parking lot at Duck Harbor, but still enough time to stretch our legs and bake the frozen Stewart’s pizza before wandering the dunes to watch the sun set into the bay bathed in a wash of bronze and gold.

As twilight descends, we pull up stakes and head across the Cape to the Atlantic side. Once, years ago, we were flying from London to JFK, and our plane took the great circle route, connecting the dots between England, Iceland, Greenland, and Nova Scotia, heading down the east coast as evening descended. Looking down through scattered clouds, we saw Cape Cod like a massive flexed left arm extending into the sea, catching the last rays of the sun.

This fleeting image lodged itself in our imagination, and resurfaced years later when the ‘camper weekend’ opportunity presented itself. We would drive to the inside of the forearm, watch the sun set into the bay, then relocate to the wrist — the ‘utter east’ to watch the sun rise the following morning!

This ‘stealth camping’ plan depends on our assumption that the national beach parking lots will be deserted in the off season and that the midnight closing time will not be enforced. This seemed reasonable enough from the comfort of home, and sure enough no one is in sight as we pull in and jockey the camper around so that our bedroom window overlooks the surf. But I check the locks twice before turning in and sleep fitfully, waking when the wind picks up and rattles the awning.

5:00 am and I can’t sleep anyway. I dress and leave the camper to find the sky overcast, the wind become raw. Hard to know if the sunrise will be worth much. My wife has opted to observe from her vantage point under the quilt.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep or the slight disorientation brought on by the onslaught of fresh impressions, but long-dormant memories are surfacing in my mind as I trudge through the gray sand toward the muffled booming sound of the combers.

When we were teenagers, our church youth group camped at the beach in Fire Island state park. After a few hours of swimming and beach volley ball, we unpacked the cooler boxes containing our picnic. I remember feeling ravenous and exclaiming ‘chicken salad sandwiches! Oh yes!’. I had failed to maintain the teenage air of slight boredom and detachment, allowing a note of unguarded enthusiasm to creep into my voice. ‘Chicken salad sandwiches, oh yes’ instantly became a meme, and I was mocked mercilessly the rest of the trip.

Not that I remember this bothering me too much. Strange though, to think of my earlier enthusiastic self at such a distance of time as to be almost unrecognizable. As I say, enthusiasm was masked carefully by most of my peers, but was not entirely absent among my friends.

A notable exception being Tim, the red-headed son of a phlegmatic German cobbler and a vivacious Jewish graduate of Columbia University. Among Tim’s many enthusiasms were bicycle riding, cliff climbing, classical music, Dostoyevsky, Chaim Potok, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

We used to glean the local landfill for discarded bicycles, strip them for parts, and construct more-or-less operable 10-speeds, with which we roamed the locality on Saturday afternoons, trespassing in the Shawangunks looking for cliffs to climb.

Perhaps this is where I developed my taste for the illicit enjoyment of nature at the boundaries of legality, but in any case my first introductions to Dostoyevsky and Potok occurred during rambling discussions of the human condition, the problem of innocent suffering, or universal guilt conducted while balancing along railroad tracks, or sitting with legs dangling over a recently scaled precipice.

At one point we listened to all the great violin concertos in order to judge for ourselves which one was the best. As I recall, it was Mendelssohn.

Tim moved into our neighborhood when I was in 9th grade, and we were inseparable through our high school years — the others called us ‘Tim and Tom’. Only much later I learned that his younger brother had died tragically a few years prior of a brain tumor at the age of 10. At the time that I knew him, his father had left the family, unable to process his grief.

The sky has slowly lightened as I have been standing here. There is a brownish smudge at the horizon where I imagine the sun will rise.

Each successive wave comes a little higher on the beach, the tide must be coming in. The surf makes a kind of oomph sound as it curls over, trapping a pocket of air which breaks the surface moments later in a swath of bubbles, then flattens out hissing onto the sand.

There is a rattling sound of pebbles, as each wave retreats, seeming to trip the next incoming wave as it rises to curl over, making that peculiar oomph… some of the waves curl in that classic postcard way, some just seem to break up chaotically into multiple pyramid-like angles. I’m trying to catch a perfect curl with my phone camera, but it seems impossible to predict. Does a wave that runs especially high up the beach have more energy when it retreats, piling the following wave higher? Is it the opposite, a smaller wave offers less resistance and allows the following wave to run into shallower water before tipping over? None of my theories is borne out by observation, and I give up, just clicking on every wave. Digital photography is free anyway.

After a while my back is stiff, and I’m getting cold. Looking out to the horizon, it looks like not much of a sunrise. No glowing neon pink moon-sized balloon rising from the water as I remember from my high school days.

I stoop to pick up a few of the pebbles. On closer observation, each of them is unique, black with white stripes, translucent gold, a kind of violet gray. I pocket a few for my wife’s beach-combing collection, although I know from experience that they will fade disappointingly as they dry. Who knows how such a variety of rocks ended up here to end their days getting worn down into sand? Unless you looked closely and took the time to notice, you would think all of them were the same.

As I trudge back over the sand to the camper, fragments of one of Tim’s Gerard Manley Hopkins poems return to my mind.

‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God…

…generations have trod, have trod, have trod…

…And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil….

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.