Monomoy

Natural History, Sept, 2005 by Scott Weidensaul

Sometimes, a place you've heard about but never visited takes on an almost mythic quality, and so Monomoy was for me. For years I'd heard about this remote and wild group of shifting islands in Nantucket Sound that had once been part of the mainland, forming an eight- or nine-mile-long peninsula that jutted south from the "elbow" of Cape Cod. Now almost all traces of Monomoy's more settled past were said to have vanished beneath the dunes. The surrounding waters were dangerous. Today--or so I imagined--only birds came to call.

Such preconceptions, romanticized by distance and a lack of firsthand experience, seldom withstand close scrutiny. When at last one goes to these places, the daydreams are replaced by a more pedestrian reality. When I finally visited Monomoy, I knew that there was no way it could measure up to my expectations.

Except that it did.

It was a calm day in the middle of September, with a heavy fog over the sound, so that the run down from Chatham was cold and dreary, the swells looking oily in the gray light. No one on the boat said much on the way out.

But as the captain throttled back, signaling that despite the wall of featureless white we must be getting close to South Monomoy, we emerged from the mist into soft sunshine. Before us lay a long, low ripple of sand, golden white in the hazy sun, with dune grass like brushstrokes in a Japanese painting. Flocks of shorebirds rose on fast wings, calling, but my eyes were on the water.

All around us were seals--not the pudgy little harbor seals I am used to seeing, but huge gray seals with heads like horses, Roman-nosed, massive, each seven or eight feet long. The seals were everywhere--dozens of them on the beach, caterpillaring into the surf with blubber rippling, and dozens more swimming around the aluminum skiff that would land us.

We waded ashore, and the kid with the skiff gunned the outboard and planed back through the curious seals to the big boat, now once more enshrouded in the mist. With the boats gone, the outside world vanished, and the enchantment was complete. I felt like a child playing hooky--not from school, but from my own century.

A fierce spring storm in 1958 bulldozed the channel that first severed the peninsula from the mainland. An infamous blizzard in 1978 split the new island into three, and after that Monomoy became a vastly wilder place, in ways both concrete and spiritual: recognized as a place apart by animals as well as people.

Gray seals, hunted for bounty in New England waters as late as the 1960s. finally gained federal protection in 1972. A decade later, they began to appear in increasing numbers in Nantucket Sound. At first they were merely seasonal visitors, but they soon became successful inhabitants.

The islands also serve as a landing spot for thousands of migrating birds.

When we arrived, it was past the peak of the fall shorebird migration, but there were still hundreds of sandpipers and plovers resting and feeding on Monomoy. As we ambled along the beach, they rose and fell before us, an undulation of wings and movement that lasted for hours. Higher, against the pale green-gray dune grass, stood four buff-breasted sandpipers, the color of fresh biscuits, with buttery legs. They stood poised for a moment, then sprang into the pellucid-air on long wings, making a quiet little trill as they flew south, out into the ocean and the waiting fog.

Today the channel separating Monomoy from the mainland may be closing again. If its storied isolation ends, how will its character change? There will be more visitors. The seals. could find their patience tested. But in the end, the keenest loss may be the one that nurtures the daydreams, the Monomoy that lies somewhere, out there: splendid. empty, and remote.

SCOTT WEIDENSAUL lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul, which is being published in November by North Point Press.