Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [107]
But in 1938 a huge hurricane ripped out root systems, shifted dunes, and dumped sand and soil over much of the peat. There was nothing unnatural about the storm, of course. It was simply a particularly severe natural event, one that transformed already slowly shifting lands. But it cut the acres of good cranberry bog enormously, leading to a certain dilemma: The tribe’s elders care intensely about maintaining the common lands as a natural habitat. But they also want the berries to thrive. Soon after the tribe finally attained federal recognition in 1987, elder Gladys Widdiss said she hoped that Cranberry Day would only become a stronger tradition, a nearly official day of tribal homecoming.
When Bret Stearns, head of the tribe’s Natural Resources Division, drives me out to the common lands, the ocean beyond the dunes is silvered and glassy, the road quiet save for the occasional locals pulling out their boats from a nearby marina before the weather truly turns. The undulations of the common lands make them at once wide open and constrained, expansive even as most sight lines end in a nearby sandy dune or thicket of coastal vegetation. Today few if any Wampanoag live in the gray, shingle-sided, broad-windowed homes—many of them on three acres of land, costing $2 million each—that loom at the edge of the five hundred acres of dunes.
At first I see only shades of brown in the bogs; under the gray sky they seem faded, in a going-to-winter kind of way. Between the dunes three-sided grass spreads out like a minuscule prairie. Ferns stand motionless, waiting for breeze; there are thick, determined patches of bayberry and wild cherry and oak. More bracken flanks the bogs; where an oak does stand alone, it grows low and sprawling, forever clutching the sand against ocean wind. The common lands are dunes and pothole bogs, vines and twisted trees, vegetation wrestling over lobes of sand, and sloping, sandy soil, and flats of peat. And after a while, the colors begin to seem quietly insistent. The reds are like ocher and rust, the browns those of leather and wave-wet sand. The most brilliant are the greens: brush as dark as ivy, vivid bunchgrasses brighter than the day should allow. These aren’t the crimsons or scarlets or tanager yellows of the New England forest autumn. But as we wander the bogs between the dunes, even the ocean quiet, I realize that this is one of the loveliest places I’ve been.
The lack of wind turns out to be lucky. I’ve worn sneakers to the bog, which is as ill-considered as it sounds; the first time I step on what seems like a firm tussock, I smoosh down, ankle-deep, into an instant watery hole in the peat moss (later, in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, I’ll see a horse’s old bog shoes—broad wooden disks nailed to the bottoms of standard iron horseshoes). “We do most of our work here in the winter,” Bret says. “Lots of people hunt out there before then, going for deer and waterfowl—some rabbits, though those are pretty spare—and we want to leave them in peace until the season’s over. Besides, our main work is cutting out the other plants, giving the vines air and light.” He pushes grass aside, revealing a patch of cranberry. Cranberry vines grow flat on the ground, budding thickly into four-inch stolons, or uprights, that look something like sprigs of giant, dark green thyme. When the plants bloom, the blossoms droop like a crane’s neck—their English name may be a corruption of “craneberry.” But now the blossoms are gone, and some have been replaced by bright red fruit, distinct as small