The runway is spattered with coloured lights, a constellation fallen from the sky. I’m led out into the sharp night air, and take my place beside the pilot. He tells me to slide my seat forward and strap myself in. The dual controls move over my lap, operated by a ghostly co-pilot; incomprehensible dials and LED displays tick and flicker on the console. The plexiglass windows shake with the propellers as we taxi onto the airstrip. We stand ready for takeoff, behind a huge airliner, the kind in which I’ve just spent six hours getting here. But these last few miles seem the most difficult.
The little plane follows the behemoth, drawing courage from its slipstream. The pilot mutters into his microphone, the runway clears and the wings wobble. Suddenly we are rising over the dark city, made darker by the sea at its edge.
I have to catch hold of my breath, like a child on Christmas morning. I want to turn to the pilot and say, Isn’t this amazing? But he just stares ahead, wearing his white pressed shirt, quietly suppressing his ecstasy. Everything falls away, all the houses and streets and offices and institutions, leaving only the black water.
The airstrip lights vanish, replaced by winter stars. Orion lurches over the horizon, lazily rising into position, echoing Cape Cod’s fragile shape in his starry frame. The night is so clear, made clearer by the cold, that I can see through the Hunter’s spaces to the stars he has swallowed, the stars that are being born. We’re astronauts for twenty minutes, inside the sky, flying into another system. I look up and down: there’s no difference above or below. The sea is full of stars; the stars are full of the sea.
Out of the blackness ahead a line of red lights appears, trembling, beckoning us down. It is a tentative landfall: the only thing below us is sand. We return to earth with a bump. For all I know we might have arrived on another planet. Then the pilot turns round in his seat and says, ‘Welcome to Provincetown.’
These past few days the bay has been filled with mergansers. They’re saw-beaked, punk-crested birds, forever roving over the sea in their search for food or sex. Just offshore, three males arch their necks in lusty splendour, fighting over a female. Pat says black-backed gulls sometimes take them. Pat is my landlady, although sealady might be a better term. She’s lived here for seventy years. She knows this place as well as her own body. It is through her eyes that I see it.
Close up, red-breasted mergansers are even more extreme: big, pugilistic, as though they’re cruising for a fight. I see the detached head of one rolling in the tideline. I pick it up, running my index finger along its velociraptor teeth. This winter beach is no place of innocence and play, but a site of carnage and slaughter.
From my deck I hear the forlorn calls of loons drifting across the bay. In the mid-distance is the rocky, guano-spotted breakwater. It was built to protect the harbour, but it was soon colonised by cormorants. They’re despised for their droppings that dribble like fishy porridge, and for their supposed depletion of the fishermen’s catch; so greedy that they dislocate their jaws to swallow fishes whole. Only Pat sees them for what they are: sentinel creatures she has drawn over and over again, kayaking out to the breakwater and tethering to a lobster buoy, Zeiss binoculars in one hand and a black marker pen in the other.
Pat – who resembles a bird herself, with her shock of silver hair, intense brown eyes and high cheekbones – channels these charismatic spirits. Haughty of our disdain, they pose in portrait after portrait, a cormorant lineage, each profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince. Clamped to the rocks by their claws, heads bent to preen or raised to the sky, they hold out their wings – to cool their bodies as much as to dry their feathers – casting shadows of themselves. Some saw the crucifix in the shape they threw, a symbol of sacrifice; others discerned something darker.
In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s young heroine takes Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds from a library shelf on a winter’s afternoon, and hiding in a curtained window seat, loses herself in descriptions of ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ in the Northern Ocean, surrounded by ‘a sea of billow and spray’ and the ‘marine phantoms’ of wrecked ships.
Bewick’s engravings of ‘naked, melancholy isles’ echo Jane’s abandonment as an orphan, ‘an uncongenial alien’. Later, when she meets Mr Rochester, she shows him three strange watercolours she has painted. One portrays a woman’s body from the waist up, seen through a vapour as the incarnation of the Evening Star; another depicts an iceberg under a muster of the northern lights, overloomed by a veiled and hollow-eyed head. In the third allegory, a cormorant perches on the half-submerged mast of a sinking ship. The bird is ‘large and dark, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart’. Below it, ‘a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’.
The double-crested cormorant’s binomial, for all its Linnaean rigour, is resonant of such gothic airs. Phalacrocorax auritus conflates the Greek for bald, phalakros, and korax, for crow or raven, with auritus, the Latin for eared, a reference to the bird’s breeding crests. Its common name also reflects the same allusion, if not confusion, as a contraction of corvus marinus, sea raven – until the sixteenth century it was believed that the two species were related. Indeed, like ravens, cormorants have a noble antecedence: James I kept a cormorantry on the Thames, overseen by the Keeper of the Royal Cormorants who hooded his charges and tied their necks to stop them swallowing their prey. Bewick called them corvorants and thought their tribe ‘possessed of energies not of an ordinary kind; they are of a stern sullen character, with a remarkably penetrating eye and a vigorous body, and their whole deportment carries along with it the appearance of the wary circumspect plunderer, the unrelenting tyrant’; he noted that Milton’s Satan perches as a cormorant in Paradise, a banished black angel on the Tree of Life.
The cormorant, whose darkness is implicit in its ability to dive one hundred and fifty feet into the sea, predates any tyrannical monarch; its pterosaur pose evokes the reptilian past of all avians. But to some modern eyes, the cormorant is all too common: a scavenger, a sea crow, or, in the careless calling of the American deep South, the nigger goose. According to Mark Cocker, British anglers call it ‘black death’, and demand its execution. But all name-calling reflects only on ourselves: we name to know and own, not necessarily to comprehend. We don’t even have the right words for ourselves.
Like other animals, cormorants have been forced to share the human stain. Far from eating ‘our’ fish, the prey they take is of little value to us. Rather, they appear to be attracted to objects that we discard. In 1929, E.H.Forbush, the indefatigable state ornithologist of Massachusetts – a man who acted as a defence attorney for such accused avians (even though he himself ate some of the species he studied) – noted that a cormorantry off Labrador was embellished with objects the birds had salvaged from shipwrecks, diving like Jane Eyre’s bracelet thief to retrieve penknives, pipes, hairpins and ladies’ combs. Their finds decorated their nests as if they were making their own artistic comments on our disposable culture.
One autumn morning, after a terrific storm that had swept over the Cape and depressed my spirit with its violence, I woke at dawn to find the sea in front of Pat’s house filled with cormorants, hundreds of them. Driven off the breakwater, they’d gathered in a dense raft, avian refugees in an abstract arrangement, each sharp upturned yellow bill, white throat and sinuous neck creating a repeated rhythm, a crazy cormorant expressionism. A scattering of sea crows, marks on the water.
Some perched on the rotting remains of the old wharf, its stanchions reduced, storm by storm, to forty-five-degree angles sticking up out of the water. I watched as the birds rose and fell as one with the swelling waves. Later, I saw them further out. They’d found a source of food, and as the sun glinted on their bobbing bodies they were