A writer's world and legacy in Cape Cod cont'd...

But aside from being a writer and naturalist, Hay is a stalwart conservationist. As the key founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in 1954 and its president for 25 years, he helped secure 80 acres of salt marsh to use to educate the public. Later, as one of the early presidents of the Brewster Conservation Committee, he was largely responsible for convincing the town to set aside vast stretches of salt marsh as conservation land along Route 6A. Those close to Hay say he continues to serve as the environ-mental conscience of his community.

“He is the leading light in this area,” said Admont Gulick Clark, a local historian and one of the museum’s original founders. “What we have now is in large part due to John Hay’s hard work.”

Nancy Church, the education director for the museum, called Hay, “a constant force and the philosophical focus of the museum.”

Now in his late eighties, Hay is finishing another book that blends his life as a naturalist with recollections about home, “and the plan-et as I have observed it,” he said. It begins following the Second World War when Hay and his wife Kristi moved to Brewster, then a town of 900 residents, and purchased an abandoned woodlot called Dry Hill for $25 an acre. The couple has since divided most of the 60-acre parcel into conservation easements. Their modest ranch house rests at the end of a long ascending driveway that cuts through a forest of pitch pine and oak. Most mornings Hay writes in a study a short walk from his house. He no longer drives because of failing eyesight and must read with a projection machine.

In the summer, when the population of Brewster swells creating what he has called “a kind of crowded loneliness,” the Hays leave for their home in Maine. There inside an old barn, he leaves a window open for the swallows while he writes in an old horse stall.

“When I think of the gentle swallows that occupy the barn loft in Maine for much of the summer, while I work below, I think of how they steady my mind,” he has written. “As for me, I know a company of swallows…has always added more to my interior space than I knew existed before I entered their world.”

Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1915 and raised in New York City where his father, Clarence Hay, was an archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Hay spent his summers on his grandfather’s farm along Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. It was there among the rolling lawns and gardens that the young man’s interest in nature began to stir. “I had a tree house and learned a lot about white pines,” he said. “But it was really just being in all that space that got me. I really didn’t get into the nitty gritty of nature for many years.”

His grandfather, John Milton Hay, had served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and later as secretary of state under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. He published poems and also wrote a ten-volume his-tory of Lincoln. Though Hay never knew his grandfather, his writings unleashed in the young man a love for the rhythm of language.

John Hay in 1954, dismantling the tent that had served
as the first Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Photo: Grace McCandless

In 1960 Hay’s parents donated the 1,000-acre farm to a local conservation society and to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1987, Hay’s mother, Alice Appleton Hay, deeded her family farm in Ipswich to the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations, a land conservation group. The farm had been in the Appleton family for nine generations.

Like his grandfather, Hay spent his early years as a journalist and poet, but longed to go beyond. “I wasn’t getting very far writing poetry and book reviews, so I thought, ‘how could I expand all of this to make sense?’” His walks along Stony Brook, the migratory route by which the alewives travel up from Cape Cod Bay to the inland ponds to spawn, provided him with his true subject–the mystery and rituals of nature.

“It was in March, in comparative ignorance of their lives and habits, that I started looking for the alewives,” Hay wrote in the opening of The Run, published in 1959. Today this literary meditation on the annual run of the fish is considered a classic of natural history literature. Combining his skills as a journalist with his insights as a poet, Hay gathered much of his material by taking prodigious field notes and talking with long-time residents.

“The old timers knew the land because they lived there and it meant something to them because they had some roots in it,” he said. “They knew the tides and the winds and when the alewives spawned. People since then have a very short range as far as their curiosity is concerned.”

Then in 1964 he published The Great Beach, about the Cape’s outer beach, for which he was awarded the John Burroughs Medal, the nation’s highest honor for natural history writing. During the same period, Hay was working to expand the museum and protect the salt marshes surrounding it. A few years later, he became the head of the fledging Brewster Conservation Committee. “I didn’t know a thing about town government and how to behave,” he said. Still, Hay was able to persuade the town to acquire more than 200 acres of salt marshes by eminent domain after noting how in Connecticut, “50 percent of the salt marshes were being lost to development and pollution.” Now, he said, “the lawyers have all gotten into the process and all sorts of fights go on. We could never pass something like that today. It’d be impossible.”

He referred to a salt marsh, as “this astonishing breathing apparatus,” and reveals his exaltations in “The Way to the Salt Marsh,” one of the essays that appears in his latest book of the same name. “The marsh lies in the arms of the sea,” he writes. “It is covered in wintertime with thick, coarse, brown grasses like the heavy coats of a prehistoric animal.”

But Hay was sad to report that the Cape Cod land rush and subsequent housing boom is affecting the health of the marsh-lands he has labored to save. “In Paines Creek across from the museum there used to be this small stand of phragmites, the plant that thrives in semi-polluted places, and in recent years it just keeps growing,” he said. “And I’m told that one of the upland ponds has hardly any oxygen in it and they still want to put a development there.”

He shook his head. “We think we can just ruin a marsh and rebuild it. And I suppose you could build a marsh if you really went at it, you could grow the grasses and so forth. But the development of a marsh is a very long term arrangement and we haven’t got a thousand years.”

He worries too about the wildlife and how “all the suburban houses came in with an enormous amount of domestic cats; they came along and killed the ground nesters–the ovenbirds, whippoorwills, grouse, bobwhites and thrushes. Now there are so few that people aren’t even conscious of their presence anymore.”

But Hay’s persistent tribute to nature, its great mysteries and its ability to renew itself remain his central theme as a writer and advocate of the natural world. Though he abhors the destruction of nature in the name of progress, he continues to stand as a consummate sharer of its gifts and teachings. “Even in the winter when it looks dark, brindled in color like a day that is as dark as evening, it never sleeps,” he writes about a salt marsh near his home. “We can thank the marsh for all its transformations, and above all, for its constancy.”