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Title: Nature's year
The seasons of Cape Cod
Author: John Hay
Illustrator: David Grose
Release date: August 1, 2025 [eBook #76613]
Language: English
Original publication: Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1961
Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATURE'S YEAR ***
NATURE’S YEAR
_Books by John Hay_:
A PRIVATE HISTORY
THE RUN
NATURE’S YEAR
[Illustration]
JOHN HAY
_NATURE’S
YEAR_
_The Seasons of Cape Cod_
ILLUSTRATED BY
DAVID GROSE
_1961
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York_
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-8166
Copyright © 1961 by John Hay
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition_
_For Kristi, Susan, Kitty, Rebecca, and Charles Mark--with me on this
journey through the year_
Contents
_July_ _11_
A Start on Cape Cod--An Entry--Other Lands within
the “Narrow Land”
_August_ _25_
A Wild Home Land--The Musicians--A Walk with an
Oven Bird--Toward the Sea
_September_ _47_
Youth on the Move--An Open Shore--Chipmunks
_October_ _61_
Where Is Home?--The Field of Learning--Colors of the
Season--The Last Day in October
_November_ _81_
The Seed in the Season--The Clouds--The Inconstant
Land--The Dead and the Living
_December_ _97_
An Old Place, an Old Man--Night in the Afternoon--Two
Encounters
_January_ _113_
Exposure--Ice on the Ponds--Contrast and Response
_February_ _127_
Secrets in the Open--The Sea in the Ground--Need--Death,
Man Made
_March_ _143_
Restless Days--An Extravagance--Interpretation--Response
_April_ _161_
Deeper News--April Light--“Frightened Away”
_May_ _173_
Declarations--Facets of Expression--Travel
_June_ _187_
The Garden--Room to Spare--The Binding Rain
_July_
_A Start on Cape Cod_
I drove to Cape Cod with travelers from everywhere. I came to this
narrow peninsula over the blistering, insatiable roads of America with
the summer crowd--in my shirt sleeves, with dark glasses to protect my
sight--conscious of almost nothing but cars, and casualties ... our
migrations have them too, like the birds and fish.
I saw an accident so terrible I could not describe it. Machines were
flung into the air and smashed. A life was tossed away, a human being
crushed like a doll. Human relationships were pathetically severed
by the brutality of chance. Then we were allowed to go on--travelers
racing down the highway through the blood-boiling heat of the sun. We
come in with speed and we go away with speed, and we are both afraid
and desirous of it. The human run in its relentless self-absorption
seems more abstracted than any other natural force.
The resident population of Cape Cod is some 80,000, and in July the
number increases to an estimated 250,000 or more, a kind of barometric
rise that is equivalent to what is happening in the earth at large.
After Labor Day, when the summer tribe has gone back to the cities,
relief comes. You can cross the road in comparative safety. Then,
something like apathy pervades the Cape, as if its diminished society
were trying to recover from an encounter with enormous odds.
Now I am off the road and back on the 110-foot hill where we put our
house--part of a ridge that runs along the glacial moraine about a mile
back from Cape Cod Bay. Dry Hill was its local name, and in fact,
driving a well, we found a constant source of water only at 130 feet.
This evening the yellow light runs liquidly through the oak trees and
the pitch pines around us. I can hear the voices of some of my travel
companions lifting from the shore, calling, pleading, protesting. A
snatch of radio music comes in. A plane drones overhead. The warm air
seems to breathe hard, as if to compete with human breath.
I often wonder, when I am back on the Cape again, whether I chose the
right place in which to live. It looks bare and scrubby, lean and
poor, in comparison with those lands to the north and west of us which
are far prouder in their trees. It has been burned over, cut down,
and generally abused by man, and most of its healthy trees will never
attain full growth because of the salt spray that the winds drive over
them in many storms. And the sea, for all its surrounding presence,
seems a mere backdrop a great deal of the time, a flatness along the
horizon, but it is indomitably there. All the winds, the plants, the
shores, the contours of this low land, are influenced by it, and
because of it we are carried out into a distance in spite of ourselves.
The sea mitigates our insularity.
Cape Cod reefs out into the Atlantic. I saw our house when it was
new as a ship above the trees. I imagined a voyage. I recognize that
although there are some true fishermen here who sail the year around,
the rest of us are summer sailors, with no lasting allegiance or
commitment to the dangers of salt water. Yet the Cape provides space
for whoever might take the risk or pleasure of finding it. The sea and
sky are very wide. The winds blow in from all quarters.
The yellow evening lowers now, through the young, shining leaves of
the oak trees, creating new recesses of darkness. Tides of fire hang
above the water. There are snatches of bird song through the woods: a
robin; the silver pealing of a wood thrush; a towhee; a whippoorwill,
starting in on its over-and-over-again, the loud repetitious whistling
that makes the night known even as the day hangs on. And finally faint
stirrings here and there, easings down, last faint pips and trills
before the dark. I am conscious of the tenancy of nature, in which
there is more putting forth, more endurance, more population, in
fact, than any visitor or local man might ever begin to realize. The
great world we live in is no longer one for hide-outs. If this makes
for intolerable pressure and despair, it also brings much more into
view. Local recognition becomes a general need, and there are more
possibilities in it than we have been told. While the human race has
been approaching three billions in number, and making ready to put its
mark on the moon or hang its hearing aids off Venus, I seem to have
spent many years missing, or unwittingly avoiding, almost as many lives
and chances close to home. How can I begin to compensate?
_An Entry_
I had decided to start this book in July, with the idea that this was
the time embodying the full, crowded height of life--the noise, the
color, the jostle of creatures in wonderful variety, just like that
load of passengers getting off the boat at Provincetown to see the
sights. The leaves are fresh. The motions of greed and fulfillment are
in full course. Even so, I hardly knew what riches to snatch at first.
In fact, another bold, heat-heavy day, with its crowds and its pride of
accident, had the effect of making me recoil. I was muttering: “Slow
down. Slow down. Why so thick and fast?”
On my way back from walking to the mailbox just now, I stepped off the
road into the oak trees through which it runs, dropped the newspapers
and the letters, watched and waited. I sat on the upper edge of a
hollow where dappled shadows rocked lightly between the trees, on their
gray trunks, and across the sloping ground. There was a pervading swish
of leaves around me, an occasional stirring at the tree tops. I heard
the slow, dragged caroling of a red-eyed vireo. Filtered light played
on the low growth of sarsaparilla, hazelnut, huckleberry, and bracken,
or dry land fern, with the brown floor of oak leaves in dead but useful
attendance, holding moisture, shelter, and fruition in reserve.
The wood had a climate of its own, cooler, darker than the hot, damp,
wide open world of road and shore. There are climates within climates,
as there are worlds within worlds. Under the bark of a tree the beetle
inhabits a place that has special atmospheric conditions differing from
the woods outside it; and so it is with the woodchuck in its hole, the
ants in their hill. Any place, of whatever size, however endowed in
our scheme of things with grandeur or insignificance, any home, may be
greatly subtle in its variance.
A sweet, plaintive “pee-a-wee,” and a wood peewee, a neat little bird,
black, light gray, and white like a phoebe, but with white wing bars,
flew in quickly and lightly, to perch on a gray limb. The bird would
tuck its head down, and then move it from side to side, looking for
flying insects, repeating its song every five seconds or so. Its tail,
not bobbing like a phoebe’s, twitched very slightly when its head
moved. Then, in brief action, it fluttered out, caught an insect, and
returned to its perch. These little flights covered most of the area
around its tree, almost methodically. Once I heard the crack of its
bill as it chased a fly almost down to the ground, halfway across the
wood. It alighted on a new branch--to try out another base of action?
But then another peewee flew in, perched, and sang at a far corner of
the hollow, and the first one hurriedly flew back to its original perch
as if it had been threatened and was making sure of its position. The
wood seemed strung together by the intangible threads of their motion.
[Illustration]
These were some of the ways by which a wood peewee follows its
destiny, employing its chosen place, attending to minutiae, to duty
and performance. This was appropriate use, measured necessity. And
as the outer earth led to this part of the wood, and it in turn to
the “micro-climates” within it, so the birds drew my attention to the
insects. I had been bitten a little, just enough to remind me, in my
enjoyment, that the place was not unnaturally hospitable; and there
were unseen spider mites that would leave me some inflammations to
remember them by. Now I searched the space above me, aware, through
the flights of the peewee, of the flying life it pursued. Some flies
hovered, rocking lightly in the air, and then swung abruptly to one
side, or dropped away, buzzing insistently. Tiny midges, illumined by
sunlight, waggled between the trees. Moths fluttered down briefly to
touch the pale leaves they resembled.
So I had been filled, as I sat there, with a sense of employment.
I was part of a quiet, steady, structure of action. What better
“security” could I find than that--learning, feeling, that a prodigious
energy held all component parts in place and made them dance. In the
neatness, discipline, almost detachment, of the bird’s little game as
it pursued its subsistence, I saw the working out of natural law in
numberless parallels.
Perhaps there was a law to be learned for _me_. If nature is more than
just a background for human thought and endeavor, then it requires a
special commitment, a stepping down, a silent, respectful approach.
Otherwise we are liable to hear ourselves first, and be put off.
I have been given an entry, but not on my own terms.
_Other Lands within the “Narrow Land”_
To answer the question “Where am I?” seems not to be an easy thing.
“Obviously” this is the vacation land of Cape Cod where the sun sends
the bathers to the beaches and the rain drives them back inland to buy
souvenirs, where the harbors are crowded with pleasure craft and the
highways with cars--an area whose purpose it is to attend to human
distraction. Yet right in the middle of it the action of a small bird
reveals a land of its own; and how many others are there still unmet?
It is very strange to me that I have known so little about what was
around me, and that I took so long merely to make some inquiries ...
about a few names, a few alliances between living things, just enough
to give me a hint or two about the growing we are never finished with.
We live in a common realm about which we are still half ignorant and
half afraid.
A little girl at the beach comes running through the shallow waters
crying: “Something touched me, and it wasn’t Daddy!”
Later on, her mother wonders aloud if crabs bite. She picks one up
and when she gets her answer, screams with pain and anger at all the
“unnatural” and the unknown.
Just the other side of us is not only a bewildering variety but a
space, which we have still to find, filled with an unfamiliar silence,
or random sounds, seemingly disconnected motions, sudden flights that
we witness out of the corner of an eye. When we only assign the word
“purpose” to ourselves, it is hard to understand just what credit to
give that which only stands and waits, or moves from one place to
another. I sit on the beach, moving a little away from a portable
radio that a man has brought to assure himself of his continuous hold
on human affairs, and look out over the hazy surface of the water, past
a long border of waves that lollop on the sand. There is a large bird
standing on a rock not far offshore. I know it as a great black-backed
gull, a scavenger, a predator, which sometimes eats the eggs and kills
the young of other species of gulls whose nesting islands it shares,
and robs other birds of their food ... and that is about all I know,
aside from having watched its splendid, easy flight. So it stands, and
may stand, for an hour or more at a time, sea-surrounded, glaring out
with expressionless yellow eyes. Is it digesting a heavy meal? Is it
waiting for low tide so that its feeding grounds will be uncovered? Is
it greedy, savage, lazy, and bold? All such questions are tentative.
The subject is aloof.
Why is there so much hanging around and waiting, so much suspension
in nature? It comes as an occasional surprise to us timekeepers. In
the gull we suspect obliviousness, and yet it may be prompted by the
demands of a space of water, light, air, stretching before and around
it, in its being, of whose motion and sense we are scarcely aware.
We see very little. I am told that the very sands we sit on are full of
minute organisms. The visible life, perhaps in the form of a few beach
fleas, represents an extremely small percentage of the life unseen,
a condition which has its parallel in the soil. But a short walk or
wade along the shore can give you proof enough, without the need of a
nip from a crab, that the tidal grounds are covered and circulating
with life, a life which in its marine forms might seem small, simple,
primitive, and unallied with much that we landed mammals can understand.
I cannot inquire much of the moon snail, blindly, slowly moving
across the sands under the tidal waters, with its large foot feeling
for a clam. It only reveals itself to me by outward acts and signs
which do not seem to have much variety. A small hole, countersunk in
a shell, is common proof that a moon snail has drilled in and then
eaten the occupant. When you see a “sand collar,” which this animal
forms of sand grains and eggs, you know another side of its existence.
Perhaps that is all there is to it--eating and reproduction--the round
shellfish mindlessly carrying out its destiny. If it says anything
at all to me it is only out of undeciphered darkness, silence, and
original need.
A tiny, shrimplike animal hovers in the water, then darts over my
foot, only describing itself to me by its quick motion, and that is
all I know of it. It suddenly buries itself in the sandy bottom, where
reflected sunlight makes golden nets, that stretch and tremble through
the constantly flowing waters.
The tide ebbs. The sun starts to evaporate the moisture from the top
surface of a big rock, part of a jetty that thrusts out from the beach.
I see a number of dark periwinkles around and under an algae-sheathed,
water-soaked branch that lies there, a source of food for these
browsers and vegetarians. They are a common marine snail, used for
human food in many parts of the world, and usually so numerous and
well known as to be taken for granted. As the water recedes and sinks
below the surface of the jetty, the sun beats down, drying the rock.
Some of the animals stay under the shade and moisture of the stick, but
more begin to move slowly away from it. When these travelers finally
reach the edge of the rock, they start down its shaded face. Their
dark, whorled shells, though an intrinsic part of them, are hoisted,
moved around, almost in a full circle, seeming to slip loosely over
their bodies as they move down. Their black tentacles, like antennae
on insects, wave slightly on their snouts, and their slimy foot works
slowly down. Their motion is a curious combination of probing, oozing,
gliding, and at the same time, holding on, assuring the grip, with a
kind of portentous caution. Since I can easily tip one off with my
finger, I also feel a tenuousness about them, in their relation to this
realm of tidal power with its constant displacements--but adaptability
is probably a better way to think of it. They have lasted, in their
loose wandering, through a period of time which we can only estimate.
They have a special authority. As I watch them it seems to me that no
other action is of any more pressing importance during this moment in
the scheme of things.
These personifications of motion, these strangers, have untouched lands
of their own.
That silent sea at my side is colossal, inscrutable, and holds out
no solace or advice. We only have our toes in, on a tiny section of
its summer shore. Most of us barely touch its surface. Even so, it
offers as much to a traveling human as to a snail. It is still an old
space unexplored, and if we leave the vacation sands and set out on an
afternoon’s sail, we may be following some need of wind and water in
us, some unused acquaintance.
There is a well-known sand bar to steer by in the hazy distance across
Cape Cod Bay. We buck the steely waves upwind, close hauled, half hot
in the sun, half cold and shivering when the water thrashes in over the
bow of the boat. Ropes creak slightly through the boom and the mast.
The wake bubbles. Wood strains through water. The west wind blows stiff
over conflicting waves. The time passes with a certain monotony but for
the craft of sailors and its requirements. There is nothing called for
but to sail, with no other distractions on this immediate flat world of
light, no concern ... and yet we sense some ultimate demand that comes
from this blue giant, whose depths and tricks are still unfathomed.
The flat necessity of it makes sailing its own satisfaction. It becomes
physical. We fly, we feel, we calculate, by sinew, flesh, and bones,
and through the salty blood in our veins. We may be a degree closer to
the black-backed gull.
There on arrival are great white sheets of sand curving up into a
barrier of dunes back of a pebbly beach, where a beach buggy rolls
along scaring up clouds and crowds of terns, and sanderlings in
spinning flight. The jeep stops and teen-agers jump down and out,
crying stridently. We anchor the boat just off the beach. The water is
clear and cold. The dunes are sun reflectors, clean and warm, and we
find whitish-gray grasshoppers on them, flecked like the sand.
Sailing back again in late afternoon, the boat goes fast and free
before the wind over the water now turned green, a blend of sky blue
and the yellow of a falling sun. The bay lies out like an enormous
garden, patched with color and motion, the salt waters full of
latent power, ready with every kind of mood, flowing by and over,
interwrought, crossing time and circumstance. We pass a clanging bell
buoy. Evening comes on. Gold icicles on the water are turning and
softening to shades of pink and purple. It is like striding over a wide
land of peace and plenty, before we tack into the harbor.
_August_
_A Wild Home Land_
What I wanted to do was follow the year around, recognizing that hours,
days, months, or years are as elusive as unseen atoms (even though,
universal law being consistent, we deduce their behavior with some
success). I am not sure where July left off and August began. Summer
flies away from me, like an unknown bird.
Out into August then, while there is time. When I step into it as if
into something new, I sense thousands and thousands of roving lives,
taking their opportunities where and when they can. The day is hot
and shining. The oak leaves, no longer fresh and young, but spotted
with growths, chewed by insects, frayed and scarred, are still tough,
deeply green, harnessing the sun, under a stir and slide of air. Two
big red-tailed hawks sail high overhead, screaming constantly. A blue
jay screams, in a fair likeness. The hawks wheel lower down along the
trees, inside the horizon. Then two little tree sparrows flit by.
Insects drone, stir, and buzz. There is a dragging, rattling sound of
leaves as a box turtle moves slowly along. A cicada chorus rises like a
sudden breeze from the southeast and then subsides. Two black and white
warblers go through the cover of the woods in a quick butterfly flight
together. The “Tock! Tock!” of a chipmunk sounds behind a brush pile,
almost like the end notes of a whippoorwill’s song.
I feel a balance in space between them all: the roamers, hawks, or
gulls, in the sky’s great allowance; the spider swinging on a thread
and making its own web of a world; colorful, elusive warblers through
the trees; the chipmunk on its chosen ground. These sounds, synonymous
with motion, seem to hold them in mutual alliance, round in a lightness
of air that is strict and easy in its coming and release, like the
cicadas; but there is an intensity here that makes my heart beat faster.
A jay jumps down to a branch, cocks its crested head, with those black
eyes full of readiness, and brays. The spider wraps up a captured
moth with rapid skill. A robber fly waits on a leaf with throbbing
abdomen and a look of contained vitality. It is not to be known. I see
the brown, glazed wings folded back in the sunlight, and two black,
sky-light eyes on top of its head. It seems preternaturally lean. It
stays there for ten minutes and I watch it closely, almost suspended
with it in my attention. A robber fly is a tough predator, but to call
it cold, indifferent to pain, careless of life, darkness personified?
Our terms are useless. I do not know. Then my attention is cut, as it
abruptly darts off, swinging in an arc, perhaps to catch a housefly a
hundred feet away.
In the buzz, the running light, the stir of summer, I feel as if
each motion, each event had its own pressing concern. This homeland,
no longer graced with the name of wilderness, is full of wild,
unparalleled desire.
Everyone knows that the month of August is loaded with insects,
although they come under the heading of “bugs,” a menace to human
society. Their fibrous trills are incessant in the grass. Their high,
shrill sounds announce the heated air. Those two species that we hate
more than most, just for their familiarity, the flies and mosquitoes,
drone around us. In the heat of noon our senses are a little clouded.
We may be mumbling something about “the will of life be done,” and it
is being done ... in great part by the insects. The summer rage to
take and to share in taking is carried out in minute detail, from the
tiniest mite in the soil to the dragonfly.
Manifest energy, using its short summer span, fills our surroundings
with its wealth of insects. It has not been long since I was taught
the modicum of knowledge needed to name a few of them, to start in
on a fraction of the 680,000 species that fill the earth; but it was
enough to add to my sight. I had never realized that such foreign and
incredible variety existed so close to me.
A yellow jacket tugs furiously at a dead cricket on the road, like a
hungry dog with raw meat. Delicate aphids waver on flower stalks. A big
striped cicada killer roams through the oaks. Other wasps sip juice or
nibble carrion. Dragonflies dart across both land and water on their
tangential licks of speed. The cabbage butterflies flutter and alight
with pale, yellow wings held together like one thin sail against the
sunlight. Over and under, in and out, flying, crawling, suspended
in plants and in the growth of plants, seizing their time, waiting,
indefinitely if need be, held in chrysalis or egg, emerging, feeding,
adding to death and life in death ... what are these strangers?
There are wasps as red as rubies; flies of a more scintillating,
vibrant green than emeralds; and shiny bronze or golden beetles which
are the envy of human art. If color is life, to make the human eyes
ring and the body respond, they have it, and they also lack it. Some
are so diaphanous as to belong only to the sunlit air, and some are so
dark, as though part of unseen depths, that all color is only a dance,
springing away.
We use up constant, frustrated energy keeping them in check. Their dry
throbbing annoys us. They eat our crops, transmit disease, and drive
us away from our pleasures: although in the bold stare of nature they
are effective employees. We might, slapping a mosquito, recognize their
necessity as pollinators, earth movers, or food, respect the role they
play in decomposition and growth ... then we must turn around and
invent new poisons. Insects are redoubtable enemies. We are never quite
sure which of us is in the ascendancy, just as we are never sure of
what they are.
Still we can look and marvel at their complex detail: these wings like
lace or spun glass; wings cut short and wide or thin as a hair; wings
with the pattern of flowers, or veins of a leaf; bodies round and
narrow, oval or oblong; strange truncated abdomens; huge, compound
eyes; legs impossibly thin and long, or unbelievable in number and
still co-ordinated; heads like alligators; bodies like sticks; false
eyes; false horns; repulsive, intangible, unreal.
Here seems to be automatic, nerve-end response in unreflecting zeros,
whose lives pass with their deaths, but still, on this earth crust they
are affiliated with everything. That which may frighten or startle
a bird, like the eye spots on a moth’s wing, is related to a bird.
Animals are adapted to their environments and the medium in which they
live and act; but so many tricks and curiosities are embodied in the
insects, so many far-fetched connections of shape and motion, as to
leave all particular environments behind.
In their variety they are in balance with our imagination. Don’t
they show as many bursts, tricks, starts, halts, and fires, as
much somnolence and surprise in their color, shape, and action as
we desire in the exercise of our consciousness? Nature is unbiased
in its attention, concentrating equal power on all forms of its
expression. When we begin to conceive of nature in terms of creative
process--continually evolving, fantastically complex, immensely
resourceful--then we recognize our counterparts wherever the sunlight
strikes across the air. We share in a communication.
Last month I noticed a group of small butterflies on the mauve flower
of a milkweed. They were, as I found out, hairstreak butterflies, with
a dusky, grayish-lavender coloration, and little orange patches on
the lower edge of their wings. When the wings are folded, their hind
tips have tails resembling antennae, which may have the effect of a
protective device to confuse a predator. After I frightened them off,
they returned in a little while to rest on the very same flower. Their
color was not the same as a milkweed’s but in tone and value it was
close enough so as to hide them from view at a fairly short distance.
The flower and the animal were united in a sensitive embodiment of
contrast.
A few days later I noticed that the flower was gradually paling. Then,
on the twenty-fifth of July, the last blossoms dropped off, and the
butterflies were gone. An obvious affinity, and a mystery at the same
time, of two forms of life in a unique response to nature’s web of
motion.
It took me a long time to become aware of just how much these
affiliations and responses made up the life of earth, how much of an
elaboration they amounted to. In the past also, when I saw a robin
hop across the lawn, a frog jump into the water, or a tree swallow
glide through the air, I reacted with pleasure or disregard--by
chance, in other words--without realizing just how big a role chance
played in their appearance. In the same sense the obvious upheavals
of a season--drought, or heavy rains--meant little to me beyond their
immediate, local effect. After a while I began to be aware of all the
circumstances that must surround me. One dull day I realized their
unlimited context, and thought how slow and agonizing my own changes
were in comparison.
Expected things happen. But the variations are just as compelling as
the stable order from which they come. This June, for example, was
cold and wet, and the rains continued into the summer months. The
hatching of insects was delayed and the development of some plants and
grasses. Many fledgling tree swallows were found dead in their nests,
a disaster which seems to have been caused directly by the weather.
Aquatic insects are a favorite food of the tree swallows, but in cold,
wet weather these insects tend to remain in immature stages and do
not develop into flying adults. (Swallows chase after their food in
flight.) And, in fact, when insects are few, the tree swallows seem to
be discouraged from looking for them. If such conditions keep up, they
may leave a nesting area to look for food elsewhere.
Our local run of alewives, those inland herring that migrate from salt
water every spring to spawn in fresh-water ponds, seemed to be a little
later than usual; and the young, hatched from the eggs they left behind
them, started down to salt water past schedule in July. If the ponds
are colder in temperature than is normal, it probably affects the young
alewives’ size and chance of survival. They grow larger and healthier
in warm-water ponds because they are started sooner and have a richer
supply of food. A smaller, slightly weaker fish is more easily caught
by a predator.
Because this spring was somewhat off the average mark (and in a sense
there is no average), many of the relationships between plants and
animals dependent on it were altered. Some of the effects, in animal
population or health, might be felt for a long time to come.
Although ice, fire, storms, hurricanes, unusually wet or dry seasons,
and now the hand of man, may alter the local earth almost beyond
recognition and bring its inhabitants to disaster, natural occurrence
has an indomitable will. Its changes outlast all others. Uncounted
lives are sent ahead, balanced always, but with relationships through
time and space that are never exactly the same. A leaf drops earlier.
Frogs start to shed their skins, or migrate locally at a time that
depends on new climactic conditions. Why have I seen so few mole runs
this year? Last year there were comparatively few baltimore orioles.
This year in orange pride they were leaf calling and diving everywhere.
I have seen very few phoebes in our vicinity of late, and scarcely
any bluebirds. There may be more mosquitoes this summer and fewer
grasshoppers than usual. I can inquire, for each species, and find out
what I want to know, if there is logic, and cause and effect to its
behavior; but all are related in a realm that is wider than I ever
imagined.
_The Musicians_
Many Augusts, singing loud, have passed me by without my giving them
a shred of attention. What made the sound? The air, or the trees,
the month itself, embodied in unknown voices? I don’t think I knew
much more than that, although I suppose I was aware of what a cricket
sounded like. Perhaps it is time to find out more. I know now, as I
did then, that at night when the air is soft and cool, a multitude of
separate actions having died down, and when the earth is relieved of
a fire taken to the stars, a plainsong goes up and the night takes
substance in pulsing sound.
When I listen, I see that in detail the sounding of an August night
is not melodious. It is full of clicks, dry rasps, ratchets, reedy,
resinous scrapings, and except for countless populations playing on
one string, disassociated. There is only one phrase for each species
of insect. The over-all sound is occasionally reminiscent of telegraph
wires, mechanically shrill and tense; but in the context of the night,
speckled with stars, it becomes as wide, warm, and luminous as any
symphony.
Having heard of using a flashlight to search for these musicians, I
go out, sometime after eight-thirty, and start training it on sounds,
with complete lack of success at first. Either the sound stops, or the
animal that makes it is invisible to me. A bat flies overhead, chasing
insects. It is known for accuracy, having ears with a receptiveness
like radar, tuned to the finest measurements of space, but its flight
seems frantic. It beats back and forth, around, over and under.
Suddenly it is very close, perhaps a few inches over my head. I duck
at the leathery, fluttering sound, something like the rippling folds
of a taut chute, despite my knowing that only in lingering myth and
hearsay do bats catch in human hair. Then it is off again, with its
violent, erratic flight.
The darkness takes deeper hold. It is full of the loud throbbing, the
insistently high-pitched rasping of the insects, with an occasional
tree frog sounding a contrapuntal “Ek-ek.” Playing my flashlight under
the trees shows up a spider web in beautiful detail. The silk strands
are clear against the black night, their swoops and whorls all held
together by long perfected execution, with the tiny engineer way up on
his round span, his semblance of the globe in its vast waters.
In high suspension, in the larger silences of the sky, all rings well
in consonance, and the pulse of living instruments is with the massed
stars that run out and dive away above all heads, and with the ground,
my heart and ear, my blood and bone.
A persistent light racheting makes me concentrate on one bush, where I
eventually find a green, well-camouflaged, long-horned grasshopper with
orange eyes--a male, since it has no ovipositor on its abdomen. The
females are silent, with the honored role of being courted and invited.
The flashlight seems to have no effect on him. The front wings are
slightly apart, raised up a little, and vibrating ... a kind of
fast, dry shuddering. The sound is a light “zzz,” ending with a
rapid “tic-tic-tic.” This grasshopper is a waxy green. His antennae,
almost twice as long as his body, go up in sweeping curves, and wave,
sometimes both together in a semicircle, sometimes singly in both
directions, as he stops his playing, and begins to move slightly down a
twig. Then I notice a female moving in his direction. Had he increased
the tempo of his playing when she came near? Did he sense success?
Still harder to spot--almost impossible by day, and difficult enough
at night--are the snowy tree crickets, but they are numerous in this
low-treed, shrubby area. Where the long-horned grasshoppers sound at
intervals, the combined chorus of snowy tree crickets pulses on. They
are slender little creatures, a very pale, almost immaterial, green,
but their fragile, transparent, membranous wings, raised higher than
those of a long-horned when it plays, make a cry that rises up like
peepers in the spring. This is the famous “temperature cricket” whose
song speeds up or slows down in response to heat or cold. According
to the field manuals, you can divide the number of notes per minute
by four and then add forty, which will give you the approximate
temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
So this great scraping and fiddling perpetuates a dance. The first
frost will end the lives of most of these musicians. August’s
high sounding means a coming end, but all of its connections and
associations join in sending on the year. This is what the month means,
as well as the hum of tourists driving down the Cape and back again.
Listen to the chosen string.
There is a miraculous sensitivity in the cricket that slows down when
the temperature begins to cool at night, or even when a cloud passes
over the sun by day. The male calls to attract the female, though it
is apparently not known whether her arrival may not be the result of
happenstance. His playing is as much a part of general expression as
individual intention or reaction. In any case the eggs are laid, which
will stay dormant throughout the winter, to hatch in the spring. The
organic cycle continues, making an announcement, sending up a music
whose players are so attuned to light and dark, sunlit or clouded
skies, warm air or cold, day or night, that their existence depends
upon the slightest change.
_A Walk with an Oven Bird_
The broader aspects of the weather are more apparent to my kind
of receptiveness, which is less mortally tuned to degrees than a
grasshopper. There is still an abnormal amount of rain as the month
goes on. Their sun blotted out, many tourists have left the Cape
earlier than usual. I notice that the days are shorter and cooler. The
prevailing wind, southwest in fair weather, southeast before a storm,
blows gently, or in gusts when it rains. A big mud puddle on our wood
road has collected a whole population of green frogs. At night there is
great frog carnage on the wet highways. I have noticed in the past that
this is their season for traveling, whether it is wet or dry, but heavy
rains encourage their migration, sending them far and wide. There is a
multitude of garden toads around the house. One night it cools down to
about 50 degrees and in the dawn hour the leaves are bluish gray with
dew. A hurricane, spawned in the Bahamas, is two hundred miles east of
Florida, but beginning to turn slightly to the north, away from the
eastern seaboard. High seas are predicted in three or four days’ time.
I feel as though we were hesitating on the brink of new necessities,
swinging between one resolution and another not yet found. The season
is beginning to join the winds. Some migrant birds have already flown
away. Other birds fly through the leaf canopy feeding seriously and
silently. A warbler, a female yellow-throat, skips lightly along a
patch of briar and vines. A brilliant oriole jumps into a patch of oaks
and moves on down sunlight-yellow ramps of leaves, and a black-billed
cuckoo, a large brown bird with a handsome, long tail, stops in on
a branch with a look of eagerness and seeking, then flashes off again.
There is a change in their action and timing. The adults are long since
through with the claiming and proclaiming that rang in the woods before
they nested. The steady, constant business of feeding their young is
about over for most species, though I see a flicker, or yellowhammer,
come through the trees in diving, shooting flight, with a young one
following loudly after it. There are many fledglings, but on the whole
the birds, many of them starting to molt, are silent compared with
spring and early summer.
[Illustration]
This wood road of ours, where the birds fly through, is used every
school-day morning by our children on their way to catch the bus. It is
a kind of open line through change. It rides the side of a low ridge,
and glacial hollows dip away from it. It once served as a wagon road
for woodcutters, and is still shaded by the insistent, if none too
“sturdy,” oaks, which come back again and again, no matter how many
times they are cut. They make the road a green tunnel in summer, and
their gray branches with knotted fingers rattle and sway above it in
the wintertime. It receives many travelers by land and some by sea. (A
few Januaries ago I found a dovekie there, a little sea bird with the
black back, short black wings, and white breast of a penguin. It is one
of the members of the auk family, breeding in Greenland and migrating
down from the ice-locked waters of the Arctic Circle to feed in the
Atlantic during the winter. Its short wings are meant for swimming,
diving, and flying in and out of waves, so they are not very effective
when blown inland by a storm. The dovekie I found was unable to take
off, and in any case weak and hungry. So after a futile effort to feed
it, I took it back to Cape Cod Bay, where it started to fly along the
surface of the water, though weakly, in short, floundering dashes.)
With a half mile of concentrated road it is easier to take cognizance
of friends and strangers than when you are trying to make California
on the transcontinental highway. You can see how it is used by skunk,
squirrel, deer, and the hunters of deer. I walk it in expectation.
One of the animals that constantly move across the road and live
in the woods beside it is that bird which looks like a tiny thrush
but is classified as a wood warbler, the oven bird. Its “Teacher!
Teacher!” rings out in spring and early summer. It was named after its
leaf-hidden nest, made on the ground, with a hole going in at the side
like a Dutch oven.
Here is an oven bird, tail bobbing slightly, perched on the lower
branches of a red maple beside the road ... a little more out in the
open than usual, less concentrated on its earlier nesting territory.
It flutters down to the road. This is one of those birds that have
the distinction, if that is what it is, of being able to walk, rather
than hop or run. So it starts walking, through the dappled shadows on
the road, as I keep a respectable distance behind it. Or perhaps I
walk and it attends to business. The oven bird goes back and forth,
pecking insects, with a quick meandering, interrupted by an occasional
little jump at the leaves of an overhanging shrub or plant. This is not
a straight walker, no Indian with a destination, but its body moves
constantly from left to right in purposeful flexibility.
“How well you see!” I think to myself. I can see nothing at my level
but a tiny yellow caterpillar swinging through the air on a silken
thread. But it is clear to me that the oven bird works the road with
clear results. We keep going. We come to a stretch in full sunlight
where the trees stand off to the side, and my companion keeps to the
shadows with determination, pecking away at insects along the few
inches of shaded bank to one side. A flicker bursts through, shouting:
“Tawicka! Tawicka!” and the oven bird flies ahead a few feet and then
goes on walking.
We have now traveled about an eighth of a mile. Under a heavy weave
of leaves the bird moves to left and right over the road, pecking for
insects, working, progressing. Olive brown; capped with an orange
stripe; with speckled breast and pale pink legs ... a shadow bird,
a leaf litter bird; and now a fellow walker, that has made more use
of this road than any of us and our omnivorous machines. At a sharp
bend in the road where it leads up to the house, the oven bird finally
flies off and disappears in the trees, in a southerly direction by
coincidence. Our walk is over, but the flight of birds will leave all
cars behind.
_Toward the Sea_
There is “man” and there is “nature.” But do we really know where the
climate of existence starts, where its storms are brewed? All weather
is unexpected. Another variation in the known routine, another change
in use, and we may move, reluctantly, into some new awareness while
primal energy bowls on with infinite capacity.
Among the oaks the leaves on the top branches sway and rustle, while
those on the wood floor scarcely lift at all, but there is a constant
sound of air among them, and it might be possible to hear a ferment in
the ground. Small suns blaze through round leaf lobes. Standing on a
slope toward the north from which the glaciers came, and the auroras
crackle, shimmer, and flow, and the cold from Canada will have its
way, I have a feeling of portentous motion, of being sledded out on a
speeding globe.
The hurricane veered off. There was rain, but no great winds. The mud
puddle in the road dried up after several sunny days, and the green
frogs left; but when it filled up again they had not returned. The
frogs have a different motion in them and will not come back to suit my
metronome.
Many vacationers are going home. We can almost walk across the highway
without fear. There is still the press, the fevered demands of summer
in the air, but something else is going to have its way.
A changing light, a shifting wind, calls me out to meet more of this
earth than I know. Habit stifles me. My round needs to be recharged.
So I take a walk, like the oven bird, though not to gather any more
food than my senses and my spirit need. There is a lobe of land a mile
away, through the oaks, over the shore road, and across to sea level,
called the Crow Pasture. It is bordered by a tidal inlet and marsh on
one side and the sands of Cape Cod Bay on the other. It is covered with
low, wind-topped growth, blueberry bushes, beach plums, stands of pitch
pine, and stunted oak; and it is flushed with moving light and shadow,
hovered over and hunted by great clouds. The Crow Pasture is without
houses so far, and it is a bare recipient of high events, the range of
storms, the distances that come in and declare themselves by wind or
flight, the summer vaunting of the sun, the cold appeal of the moon.
Narrow, rutted dirt roads lead into it and take you on.
This land, once used for pasturing cows, now domesticated only by
sparrows, robins, and chickadees, has final summer abundance in it.
Locusts bound from dry land grasses with rattling wings. Green head
flies buzz in savage haste. A yellow and black goldfinch flies over,
bouncing along.
There are ebony-beaded blackberries on the ground, and a few dark
berries left on high bush blueberries. A stiff wind from the south
shakes up the thickets and the wild indigo, a compact, light bouquet of
a plant with cloverlike leaves and yellow pea flowers. Pointed cedars
stir and writhe. The air rushes through the bayberries with their
glossy leaves, and it sweeps down across the marshland ahead through
purple and yellow grasses that plume and sway, off to the white sands
beyond.
Open land, wild air, lead ahead until salt water appears, the blue
barrens that curve beyond sight. Stiff, stunted bushes are backed up
at the edge of the marsh, hideaways for sparrows, then marsh rosemary,
or sea lavender, shows in occasional clumps through the eddying stalks
of grass. One area is thick with mosquitoes, sounding a low melody of
harassment. In the bed of a ditch, dotted with holes made by fiddler
crabs, are the tracks of a skunk. All that lives here permanently, not
foraging like a skunk, or migratory like most of the birds, has to
stand strong light, harsh winds, and salt spray, that dry, abrase, and
burn.
The marsh merges with the sand, back of low dunes covered with stiff,
sharp-tipped beach grass and seaside goldenrod, thick stalked, with
broad soft leaves, a succulent, related to cacti, made to hold and
retain moisture. The beach shelves down from the dunes and meets the
exposed tidal ground, ledges of dark peat which is pitted like volcanic
rock, and very slippery to walk on. Beyond it at low tide the sand
flats ease out, stretch and flow, with aisles and purple fingers of
water rippling, writhing, and probing across them.
Further along the shore a group of gray and white herring gulls stand
into the wind. Hiding in a clump of peat-rooted grasses a few hundred
feet from them is a gull in its first year. One of its wings is broken,
with the primary feathers dragging on the ground. The bird stalks
slowly along, tripping a little, isolated, a picture of shame and loss.
When I approach, it moves reluctantly toward the other gulls, then
stands into the wind slightly behind and to the side of them. Suddenly
the flock takes to the air, and the young gull stays down, crippled,
unable to forage for its food, and ultimately doomed. There are various
kinds of mutual assistance in nature. Some species, like Canada geese,
may help, or try to help a fallen mate; but there are no hospitals. I
am told that a sick bee rolls out of a hive if it can, or is pushed
out by the others. Animals must be deeply aware of death, and they die
alone, perhaps with an instinctive understanding that they have to pay
the price of a health which nature ultimately requires.
The landscape slopes on and out from life to life, swept by the air,
an earth, sand, water, run of interchanging light. Clouds of white
terns are hovering and diving over the waters of the bay. Suddenly a
dark-plumaged marsh hawk flies into the midst of them. They harry it in
the blue, heat-clouded sky. The hawk circles, dodges, flaps on, while
they dive on it continually. It twists and rises higher and higher
trying to shake them off, until it plummets down and flies low over the
surface of the water, making a great round turn back to the shore.
The crippled gull stands and waits with hurt patience. The hawk flies
back to the marsh behind the beach and begins to beat slowly over it,
covering the ground methodically, hunting the unwary shrew, mouse, or
sparrow. The terns dive for fish. The tide waters begin to slip in over
the sand. Measure for measure. Necessity keeps its component parts in
order, as the light changes, and the south wind keeps blowing.
* * * * *
Down the shore to the east is an inlet called Paine’s Creek, which
receives the inland migration of alewives in the spring, and takes out
their young, hatched in early spring and summer, as they swim to salt
water. The alewife fry, two or three inches long, attract gulls and
terns. During the month there has been a migratory colony of terns in
the vicinity, principally common terns, both adult and immature.
In the general Cape Cod area there are two principal nesting places
every year, at Tern Island, Chatham, and in Plymouth. During the
season--the birds arrive about the end of April--both terneries have
populations which number in the thousands. There are in addition a few
small islands off the Cape and a few comparatively isolated areas where
smaller groups nest successfully, although terns are sociable birds,
and breed best in large numbers. In August, beginning with the arctic
tern, which, I am told, is the earliest to migrate, the birds begin to
leave their nesting sites in groups or small companies on their way
south. They spend the winter anywhere from Florida to the edge of the
Antarctic ice.
So the Paine’s Creek area, with its sand eels and alewife fry,
represents a way station, a stopping-off place, one leg of a migratory
journey ... the first for birds hatched during the late spring or early
summer. Terns reach flying age in a month, but their parents go on
feeding them for some time. They are slow to mature and do not breed
until they are about three years old.
The young are not much smaller than their parents, and without a close
watch it might be hard to tell the difference at first; but their
heads are gray, as compared with the jet-black napes and crowns on the
adults. They still spend most of the time waiting to be fed. Some
make inexperienced, practice flights over the water, plunging in and
out in an almost kittenish, hit-or-miss way, while their parents dive
like arrows, pinpointing the surface with little flashes of spray, from
which they rise up with silver quarries in their sharp bills. But as
many more of the young terns stand along the beach or on shoals at the
mouth of the inlet, crying, begging to be fed.
Terns are intensely active and brilliant in performance. They are
comparatively small birds, but they are capable of migrating over
thousands of miles of ocean waters, and their long, angled wings beat
deep, low, and strong. They are all black and white sharpness, flashing
as bright as the gold circlets of water around sharp grasses at the
mouth of the inlet. They swing. They dart. They winnow the air. Their
lovely white shuttlecock tails spread out and settle as they turn
against the wind, crying: “Kierr! Kierr!”
Two juveniles wait on a shoal, constantly calling in a high-pitched
tremolo, intensified when a parent bird flies over them. The trim
expert adult flies past, then swings back down the shore and circles
back, finally coming in to land between them. It has no food in its
bill, but stands there for a minute or so, and then begins to move away
from them, as they crouch and strut after it in an almost elderly way,
crying their protests. It signals departure with a slight lift of its
wings and in a few seconds flies up, the thwarted young ones taking off
behind it.
In this behavior I see the play of learning, the many repetitions that
precede a balanced natural art. Other adults swing in with sand eels or
fish in their bills and hover, or circle back, avoiding rivals, then
drop down next to a twittering, beak-gaping child, giving it the whole
fish, or holding on to it and flying away, which has the effect of
teasing the young one to follow after. In this way the fledgling terns,
some still crouching down in a submissive manner as they did in their
nests, learn to fly up, to chase, dive, and dodge, to breast the air,
and beat their wings for all the long voyages their lives may hold.
In a few weeks most of them will suddenly flock away and migrate. In
the meantime they practice the instinctive measures of growth, training
in the insistent, excitable ways of a tern, for air and open waters
over half the earth.
_September_
_Youth on the Move_
The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is
a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The
people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses.
Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now
that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have
departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps
shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the
practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look
around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see
when I take off my dark glasses?
I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local
future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone
born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a
frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.”
The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows
occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land
stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in
order, earth-honored, momentous changes.
In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked
up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the
fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging
against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the
land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east,
join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future,
with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the
day blow away?”
When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed
from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with
white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies
and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy
tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.
This is a marginal season like the spring. It is full of new
appearances, as well as late fruitions. The goldenrod, strong flower
of the sun, still plumes its store of light, and represents me well in
my country, in spite of congressional inclination to award some puffy,
manufactured rose with the title of national flower.
Asters, lilac and white, grow abundantly in the sandy soil. Their
little pin wheel flowers are as crisp and clean as the new dresses of
the girls when they go off for the first day of school. The novelty,
after the closed-in summer tempo, is an outwardness. There are many
immature birds that appear suddenly in various untried places, and not
necessarily because of the demands of a set migration. Because of these
fledglings the various bird populations have so increased that they are
pushed into looking for food beyond their nesting areas.
Immature hermit thrushes appear as if at random, and many robins
and towhees. The towhee, once called red-eyed, a name that seems to
have been changed to rufous-sided, is a handsome black, white, and
terra-cotta bird which likes scrubby areas, thickets, and open woods.
So we see it frequently. It has a black and white tail with which it
puts on a spectacular performance, flicking and flashing its feathers
like a gambler with a deck of cards; and it floats over the brush and
across the ground with its tail spread wide behind it.
Now the young towhees call “Twee! Twee!” not quite at adult strength
and clarity, but they are finding themselves. They are on the move.
A covey of young quail suddenly starts across the road, coming out of
a field still loud with insects. Heads and necks up, they run almost
trippingly forward with sweet, piping alarm.
A young red-tailed hawk is brought into school by a boy whose father
found it trapped in his chicken yard and killed it ignominiously
with a baseball bat. Red tails are big beauties with a thick supply
of feathers. Their backs are brown, their white bellies flecked with
brown. The usual place to find them is high up, wheeling around the sky
on a watch for rodents; and occasionally they fly out of pitch pine
woods where they roost. The dead one has lost its piercing cry and the
electric glare in its eyes, but its talons still look formidable. They
are black, and as sharp-tipped, as wildly curved, as hooks of steel,
joined in power and flexibility.
Bright days warm the surface of the inland ponds that have their outlet
in the waters of our local brook and estuary leading through marshes to
Cape Cod Bay. The sun’s radiance hurries up the alewife fry in their
ancient impulse to go down to salt water, from which they will return
in three or four years’ time to spawn like their elders, usually in the
same fresh-water system where they were hatched. These little silver
fish, with an unfathomed stare in their big eyes, run out on an ebb
tide from Paine’s Creek. They attract gulls and terns, which hover in
crowds against the west wind.
The plumage of the young terns still in the area now shows a more
definite contrast between black and white. They have become more adept
at flight. Many are still being fed ... almost continuously during
those hours of shallow water when fish are easier to catch, so that the
passivity of those still waiting on the sands looks like a consequence
of being overstuffed. I get the impression that less food is being
proffered by the parent birds, but they have certainly not relinquished
their responsibility. They bring in small fish and their large children
gulp them down and wait for more. Other young birds are now flying
readily--chasing after their parents, beseeching attention, but more
often trying to fish for themselves. Little by little, by rewards and
refusal, failure and success, they are progressing toward the perfected
action of mature birds. They are becoming more aggressive, fighting
for space over a crowded channel, or protecting their catch. The
adults, whose success in fishing they are beginning to approximate,
hover over the water, beaks pointing down, then dive suddenly, wings
partly folded back. They hit the water like small stones, then come up
again, flying away fast if they have a fish in their bills, chased by
other birds that cry “Karr! Karr!” with a slightly growling note. It
is not so much that the young terns are taught, in our sense of the
word, as that they become more and more a part of the communicable
rhythm of the whole race of terns. Their circling, diving, hovering, or
racing downwind are common proficiencies of motion, that fit the great
environment of air and sea. Growing up is rhythmic practice. There is
not such a gap between tutelage and its recipients as there might seem
to be among human beings.
Terns seem involved in a ritualistic performance throughout their
lives. Much of the behavior they show in getting food as nestlings and
fledgling birds has its parallels in adulthood. There is the “fish
flight,” for example, which has its origins in the begging, receiving,
and then hunting food of a growing bird. (A fish is a master image, a
center of recognition and attachment, with all the formality of action
it entails.)
The fish flight is a term which in its strict sense is applied to the
behavior of birds during pre-courtship. It involves emotional display
between pairs of birds, as distinct from their food-getting habits in
general. In detail it includes differences in calls, in the relative
positions of birds during flight, and in the way they carry a fish. A
fish in the bill not only represents the fulfillment of need. It may
also be an offering, a display, and perhaps the instrument for a mutual
awareness between male and female, even before sex recognition occurs.
But if the fish flight can be tied down to behavior at a particular
stage in their lives, the terns also show similar reactions before and
after it. Mated birds go on offering fish as they fly by one another,
or begging, so that feeding is used to maintain a bond between them.
And of course the fish is the basis of all the instinctive training
of the young. The process of begging and receiving, or offering for
the uses of recognition, continues on in many forms through their life
stages. They pursue a formality. Their flights show the grace in action
of a whole society.
At half tide, when the water recedes over the sand flats, the terns
flock there, preening and bathing in the tidal pools. Occasionally one
will lift its wings up beautifully into the wind, receiving the wash
of air. Some fly back to the inlet and drink the brackish water. The
community seems to gather more and more closely together as time goes
on. They all begin to roost densely in one area. At times they take to
the air, as if alarmed. They rise and circle, crowds of white, crying
shrilly, and then fly down again. Or they spin like a larger flock of
sandpipers, a white cloud dancing with dizzy perfection over some fish
weirs in the distance. Perhaps it could be called communal practice
for the next journey. In their rhythms they are self-sustained,
self-protective, like schools of fish, but at the same time bound out,
under the laws of the wild air. One day soon I will go down to watch
again, finding that most of them have flown away.
_An Open Shore_
We stay where we are, while the young migrant birds and the men of the
city leave us. But the days sharpen and change. The nights grow longer
and cooler. The westerly winds increase. There is a brilliance in the
air, and the sea makes a clean statement to our senses. “Adjust your
vision,” the sky seems to say, “to a turn in height and depth and in a
new area of relentless winds.”
Those migratory birds that are still with us feed actively, fly with
restless energy, and collect in flocks. In many undisturbed areas,
down by the barrier beaches and through the salt marshes, treeless,
open to the sun, you can see a great number using their special
physical advantages to feed or fly, hide or attack, in the patterns of
environment.
The U. S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier
beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles
into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and
so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At
first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other
land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted,
salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open
ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds
endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea--whelks, surf
clams, or scallops. Back in the marsh where mud snails stream slowly
ahead in a long procession, the shore birds race in, or turn quickly in
a shimmering flock, or settle among the hummocks, and along sandy rims.
Dowitchers stolidly probe the mud with their long bills. That mottled,
distinctive bird, the ruddy turnstone, pushes, or turns over, pebbles
and stones--thus proving its name--as it searches for the worms and
crustaceans underneath. Shy piping plovers, white as oyster shells,
stand by themselves behind a dune. Sanderlings hurry back and forth
with little twinkling legs. The yellowlegs fly up and over with short,
piercing cries, their wings curved like sickles. Or a solitary marbled
godwit flies by, handsomely patterned on its wings with black and
white. Least sandpipers, tiny animals with greenish legs, hurry and
flit along, feeding at the edge of the tide pools and the rim of inlets.
The terns--common, roseate, least--fly at a point where the tide comes
in through an opening in the beach. Sharp-cut divers, they swoop low,
dipping into the water again and again. A few ring-billed gulls move
among the shore birds. They are a little like a small herring gull, but
their heads are more rounded, like pigeons. They have a lighter flight,
and a softer look than their raucous, flat-headed relatives. And over
the ridge of the beach, against up-dune horizons, is a long belt of
great black-backed gulls, large, proud, and with a look of supreme
idleness and cruelty.
Here is “function” in all variety, each life to its place, filling a
niche, with the special form and manner by which it feeds and tries to
survive. And every bird is a bird of the sun, adapted to this treeless,
narrow shore that blazes with cutting light, the light of sand, or
rock turned to sand, of water, roaring and moaning in the sea, rushing
back through a tidal cut on the ebb, then trickling, evaporating,
and swelling in again at the flood. Each animal works an open coast,
across its burning days. The fliers with wings so sharp, energies of
light, fit the high or low wants of the wind, the curves and sweeps of
the open marsh, the glaring sands. And they hurry on stilts, or tiny
short legs. They bob up and down. They run trippingly along--all to
the rhythm of the watered, indefinite shore, looking for food that is
rhythmic in myriad ways. Here is a great tribe of searchers.
The human race, as it climbs laughingly into motor boats and roars
down an inlet, or sits soberly baiting fish hooks in a row boat, or
basks in the sun, is no less brought in, fitted to this region--for
all our autonomous great world of threats and shelters. There is some
compelling call, that springs its lives ahead, and will not be talked
away. Even the large, extraneous footmarks of seventy male and female
“birders”--a very special tribe--are evidence of an omnivorousness, a
searching, communicating, flocking together, from which no animals are
entirely exempt.
_Chipmunks_
As some of the inhabitants of sea and shore move on to the south,
inland life adjusts itself to local climate. The leaves on the trees
are still green, but the bracken, or dry land fern, has turned
brown, one of the early signs of autumn. My surroundings are full of
statements of this kind, an end result of preparation. I notice one of
them. I stop--pleased to be told--and then I wonder what was silently
going on in August to have placed us with such definition in September.
Plants and animals move into a new light, a new scene, when I am
merely groping with their names. Perhaps because I have read too many
newspapers, I am limited to what we call events. I see some outward
evidence, and am obliged to go backward in order to reconstruct what
might have been, when the real show is already over.
So all September’s reassociations and revolutions may just end up
for me as a clump of locust leaves tugged loose by the wind, or the
sudden opening in a milkweed pod, or a new chill in the air. One
day I notice that a milkweed pod--on the same plant where I saw the
butterflies--erect like a lamp on its bent stem, has developed a
dimpled line down the middle. The next day it has cracked apart, and
there in the sheath are the compact seeds, overlapping like fish
scales, making a kind of cone with a tail of soft silk made up of
myriads of threads. They are moist at first, in their womb, then
they dry out and each seed parachutes away, the silky rays darting,
swirling, racing high, subject to every turn and twist of air. There
will be new populations, out of old circumstances. What happened
to the milkweed before this culmination? How many hairstreak and
monarch butterflies paid it a visit? How did it change with change in
temperature and moisture and length of days? Where did it come from
originally? Next year, if I have not been sent ahead myself, I will
stand watch over the plant so as not to miss what might be the greatest
show on earth.
[Illustration]
We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and
rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a
chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the
chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in
their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far
too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes
hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little
“ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring
them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around
like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity,
or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable
point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their
cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or
stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light
tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a
kind of actively questioning mood.
I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is--a striped,
bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion,
quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch
each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity.
Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away,
with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is
around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump
behind a boulder.
It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought
together into relationship by another danger--the dark universe of
chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which
my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a
chipmunk’s eye.
I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground
was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying
part of an apple up a slope toward its hole, located in the side of
a ridge some twenty feet above an old apple tree. When it saw me it
dropped the apple, which promptly rolled downhill. Then it watched me
with that silent waiting on chance, that throbbing look of expectation
which they have, one paw twitching slightly and clutched to its chest.
I was quiet, and at a respectable distance, so the chipmunk picked up
its food again and hurried back to the hole; but the apple was too big
to go in, and it rolled back downhill. This happened four times. The
apple rolled down. The chipmunk hauled it back up, turned it around,
put it up against the hole, a little like a man facing the problem of
moving a large bed through a narrow door. Finally it nibbled bits off
the edge, slipped sideways into the hole, and pulled the apple in after
it. I stole up as quietly as I could and saw that it was eating away
successfully with its food overhead. A problem had been solved, and
with a fair amount of intelligence.
The illumination we find in nature does not necessarily come from
comparing degrees of intelligence, in which man always finds himself
the winner. The light goes deeper. Our analytical ways, our methods of
order, imitate an order which is indefinitely resourceful. Sometimes
it shows itself past explanation. It is like this September evening
after rain. For a short time, ten minutes perhaps, not long before
dark, the earth is colored with magic, shadowless light. The grass is
intensely green. The sky turns gray and pink. Distant fields are red
and astonishingly bright. All colors are sure and strong, joining in
pure gradations. The evening is full of mystic peace. A kitten watches
the light, transfixed in the doorway (together, for all I know, with
some chipmunk by the stone wall outside), arrested by what I in my own
silence can only think of as an unmatchable glory, never to return in
quite the same measure.
_October_
_Where Is Home?_
The ordered days wheel on and fall into patterns consistently new.
On further acquaintance, the place I live in seems to extend its
boundaries and add to its store of lives. I struggle to understand.
The more I add to my list of things as time goes on, the less my crude
interpretations fit the circumstances. I started here with a tract
of land. I built a house. I have a family. I am not yet sure of my
location. The kingfisher says one thing, and the frog another. The
snake travels a few thousand feet of home area, and the tern thousands
of miles. They are both on Cape Cod. Then one leaves another. All
action blows hot and cold with endless variations. A little knowledge
makes my center rock with uncertainty.
I am not even a native in the strict sense, and cannot be said to
know my way around by feel, as a man might who was born here. I had
a talk the other day with a time-honored Cape Codder on the subject
of how fish or birds found their way. He was not able to give me any
illumination on the scientific aspects of the subject, but when it came
to human beings, he did give me some tips on how to avoid getting lost.
I had confessed that I once set off in a rowboat and was lost in an
offshore fog for the better part of a morning, rowing steadily in the
wrong direction.
The next time that happened to me, he suggested, I should drop anchor
and wait for the fog to lift. In that dense shroud it is also possible,
if you happen to be wading in shallow water, to lose sight of your boat
when it is only a few yards away. Under such circumstances he once used
his fishing line to help him get back to the boat by using the lead
sinker as the center of a compass, playing out the line and circling
until he reached it.
The sea can be a trackless wilderness only a few yards offshore.
Natives have been lost in it as well as newcomers. Still, there is no
substitute for acquaintance, for knowing the sea’s look and its ways.
This man claimed he could feel his way in the fog. In other words,
taking in all factors, familiar or deducible, such as the way the tide
is running, whether it is ebbing or rising, how the wind goes, and
from what quarter, or even guessing direction by the ridges on a sand
bar, he could take the right course, without, as he put it “letting my
judgment interfere.”
It took me a while just to learn the local compass directions, but
now that I have my north, south, east, and west inside me, I am not
sure, even walking through the trees, that I will not bump into my old
ignorance. It takes time to find your way. A man new to the countryside
might well be envious of some of the older inhabitants that know where
they are without trying--a turtle, for example. A box turtle’s slow
motion over the year seems like a true measure of ancientness. While
the birds, the fish, the men depart, this dry land reptile seems to
feel responsible for holding back, for the weight of the earth itself.
In the springtime I have seen a slow pair approaching each other in
a mood of affinity, while the rest of the procreative world danced
overhead, and I have seen a female laying her eggs in a sand bank,
covering them over with a last shove of her hind legs, then moving
away, a little more quickly than usual, it seemed to me, as if to
return to the more agreeable task of waiting things out. When fall
comes and their cold blood slows, they grow torpid and finally dig out
of sight into the ground.
On one of these warm days in early October I hear a slow dragging in
the leaves, and come upon a box turtle eating a mushroom. They have
beautifully patterned shells, ocher or yellow, sometimes orange, and
dusty black, almost batik in design, with many variations. I stand
about eight feet away, while it holds its head and neck straight up,
watching me. I guess it to be a male, by the bright red little eyes.
The eyes of a female are a darker reddish brown.
[Illustration]
His wrinkled red neck pulses a little. His yellow beak and curved mouth
line are tight shut under his flat-topped head, with bits of mushroom
sticking out on either side. Very comical, he looks; but he stares down
any inclination in me to laugh out loud. He watches me without moving
for a full fifteen minutes before I get tired of the experiment and go
away. Nothing, he seems to realize, can outlast a box turtle. This old
male, with his wrinkled red jowls, and his soft, puddled-looking feet,
must represent some antediluvian complacency, or, for all I know, a
reasonable pride.
In captivity box turtles have exceeded forty years before they died,
and some grow to be much older than that, if they avoid being crushed
on the highways or killed by forest fires, since they are otherwise
invulnerable to most predators, excepting man. This year a box turtle
was found locally by a man whose deceased relative had carved his
initials on its shell in 1889, making the turtle seventy-one years old.
How old the turtle was when so tagged is not known.
They are wanderers--more so, for example, than the water turtles, and
with a certain assurance. Within their chosen environment, of open
field, shrubby slope, or marsh periphery, they cover a great deal of
ground. They seem to carry a staying power with them, and an ancient
decorum. They are like old natives true to ancestral places. There is
something enviable about this fittingness to home.
Still, I have enough modern restlessness or rootlessness in me to
think that a home or piece of land probably has fewer boundaries than
ever before. We are going to have to know our location “way out,” as
some of the old Cape Codders used to say. I have an equal envy of the
terns that are flying toward the Caribbean or the Antarctic. They are
birds of the world, in which they know their direction by markers
that are light-years away, or so some scientists believe after much
investigation. The latest theory is that migrating birds find their
way by the sun’s changing position during daylight hours and by some
of the constellations at night. They have a built-in mastery of what
it took many thousands of years for man to learn, with his surpassing
intellect. They are readers of the stars. Their home is in the wide
blind sky.
_The Field of Learning_
We are committed far from home, but for a field of learning, the start
and the finish is still here, still in place, just as that unique
season of October, presaging a death in the glory of its color and
clouds, brings the first frost, as if to say: “Regard necessity, in all
its aspects. Look no further.”
It never comes without warning. One night a thrashing, thicket-tearing
wind arrives with much greater cold. Two nights later another wind
blasts all warmth away, and when it dies down the frost settles in,
leaving a crisp whiteness on the grass at dawn, and clouds of white
vapor over the pond waters. The garden beans go limp and the wild
indigo turns black.
In that wind the low trees are like a sea, pluming and foaming. They
are tossed and rocked, they pitch and writhe, while the stars in
ordered majesty stream overhead. When the temperature starts to go
down there is not a sound from the insect musicians any more, not one
pizzicato, nor audible dry pulsing in the trees. You might think all
breeding was over, though generation is latent everywhere.
Then it grows warm again. The insects sound in the grass and in the
trees, if to a diminished extent. Crows gather in the early morning,
and their various calls, synchronized in the open air, over the
treetops, sound highly melodious. I hear a robin caroling, but very
quietly, almost out of a playfulness, a musing. In spite of inexorable
change, there are false dawns, days, or hours of deceptive warmth that
set the long-horned grasshoppers to their buzzing and clicking and the
flickers to shouting with renewed energy. All through the woods tiny
tree frogs pipe at intervals from the cover of damp leaves. The pools
in the fishway at the Brewster Herring Run are loaded with warm October
sunlight and three-to four-inch alewives going down to salt water. A
kingfisher planes up from branches above the stream with a rattling cry.
The pattern is one of reduction, depopulation, cutting down to size,
but like all other shifts in a season, this one is manifested as
another angle of light, a different feel to the air, a new set of
circumstances, as much as a stop to all activity. When the fall winds
swish and swoop along the shore, and I walk the tidal flats, a wide
space played upon by light--gold, brown, and blue reflections running
through pools and across long ribs of sand--I am regenerated by all the
choices that are still ahead of me. Nothing is fixed or finished. It
seems to me that everything I encounter is driven by indirection, like
the waves and rivulets, sun tangled, that are crossing each other and
separating over sand bars during an oncoming tide. Here is the ordered
complexity which ensures that our findings, or rather, our search, will
never have an end.
The finding-out process begins in childhood. That is why teaching is
so great a profession. We intellectual animals have a long period in
which to learn our wings. The teacher’s role is to bring us toward our
highest capacity, and the tortures of that are immeasurable, on both
sides. The field of learning is as wide as the sand flats, and the
results as hard to catch as the waves; but a teacher has help from his
pupils in ways over which they themselves have little control. Children
have new fingers and new eyes and have to be coaxed into using them,
but the touch and sight they bring cannot be taught in the schools.
I have found out lately, after some attempts at teaching natural
history, that nature springs in a child and a child in nature. You
learn that you are teaching both.
Why is one so proud of ignorance, and another of hiding what he knows?
Some make a violent effort to be noticed; others, to retreat from view.
You have an ambivalent and groping world to deal with, as hard to tape
or tie as some of the phenomena you lead it to. But life is present
tense to them, neither past nor future. They seem to pick up its
manifestations not with adult skill but on the fly, like a boy casually
catching a ball after missing ten, and then being surprised at himself.
How did it happen? Memories, complexities, prejudices, risks taken on
behalf of the future are largely unknown to them. It is enough to be
new. There is not even any choice, since all choices are open, being
new. Children are the unpredicting and the unpredictable. The one thing
in which they never fail is growth, like the natural environment which
never fails in its variations on the theme of fertility.
One mild afternoon two of us take out a group of boys on a field trip
along the shore, a beginners collecting expedition. The class runs
ahead. They find a dead loon on the beach, with rove beetles, lovers of
carrion, roaming through its body. These beetles have black and white
stripes, suggesting a skunk to one boy, who is still young enough to
admit all affinities.
They run on, with erratic energy. They lend a puzzled ear to our
explanations of how life forms are related to the places in which
we find them. They are not quite certain of our terms. What is
“environment?” What, for that matter, is “life?”
Classifications come hard to them at first. Certain types of
recognition take a long time to learn. When I think that at the age of
thirty I didn’t know the difference between one gull and another, not
to speak of their different calls, I am hardly surprised.
“What’s this?”: a dune-dwelling locust, an ichneumon fly; a slipper
shell, a shred of kelp, a spider, a scallop shell ... all parts of a
game, novelties. But when will we know how to fit them all together?
An impatient teacher might think from these boys, with their degrees
of inattention, that the game will never get under way, that the
preparation will never end. Yet their own lesson is that readiness is
all, and the outcome immaterial.
I am only half acquainted with them, although some of their native
traits stand out plain to see. In one there is a shade of melancholy
transplanted from his father, in another courtesy and gaiety. One is
rough and full of the fever of unregulated competition. Another is
quiet and slow, or quick and sensitive. Together they share a mystery.
They are in active flight like young birds, and at this point, this
moment of being, allowed its own growth without real harm or hindrance,
they give an offering. It is the act of their unknown selves.
They catch some more insects with their nets. They find the bright
yellow feathers of a flicker which had been caught and eaten by fox or
owl in the beach grass. They identify the remains of a young herring
gull washed onto the upper beach. The tide has ebbed and the sands
stretch off with glittering lanes and rivulets--gulls stalking in the
distance, or resting in white flotillas on the water--and blue salt
water curves beyond, over the earth’s perimeter. The October shadows
begin to stretch farther down the sands. Light, smoky clouds drift
over and a strange little shower of rain comes down, running along
the beach, disturbing no one. Then the sun comes clear again, moving
westward. Everything we collect, all that we can say about it, is
only a start, a suggestion, although each sample leads to all others.
We have left a great deal behind. If the north wind roars in again
tomorrow, sweeping all warmth away, killing more of life’s visible
evidence, or making it cower in the earth, and causing colds and
crabbedness in human society, we will still be setting out.
_Colors of the Season_
There is yellow and peach pink on the leaves of the red maples, and
some of the oaks begin to show signs of changing, but the most colorful
plants are the mushrooms. The wet weather has been providential for
them, and they have come up in some areas where I cannot remember
having seen them before. They thrust mysteriously but stubbornly
through the grass in a wide semicircle of white moons. They parade up
the side of trees, and across the wood floor their cups or parasols
stand comfortably grounded in dead leaves or decaying wood. (We see
only the flower of the mushroom protruding above the ground, while
underneath lies the complex mat of fine fibers from which they blossom,
the mycelium.)
For such pulpy, soft, almost immaterial-looking plants, mushrooms show
a strange power to lift, which is caused, in reality, by hydraulic
pressure within them, amounting to as much as six or eight pounds
per square inch. They come up through an inch or two of concrete, or
through the asphalt surface of a road. They move the heavy bark of old
logs aside. One of them puts up a scaly dome under the edge of a pump
house eave that almost touches the ground, as if it intended to lift
the roof off.
When we think of fungi, we have a justifiable association with rot
and decay, mildew and mold. They lack chlorophyll, that famous green
substance by which other plants are able to absorb the energy of the
sunlight and through it convert carbon dioxide and water into food.
The mushrooms, like other fungi, get their food directly from organic
matter, rich soil, rotting wood, or leaf mold. They reproduce by
billions of tiny spores, each of which, or rather, the comparatively
few that catch, are started in such a matrix. In a sense they are
procreative flowers of the darkness, annuals which the earth puts forth
in its own teeming right, regardless of the gay slaves of the sunlight.
But they are colorful. They wear the earth’s sulfurs, umbers, and
ochers, its iron rusts, light greens, grays, and whites, as well as
some startling rose-reds and vermilions.
I find a small one in the wet leaves which is a lavender-blue, named,
according to my reference book, the violet cortinarius, and good to
eat--surprisingly enough. Color is no criterion of what is poisonous.
The deadly amanita does not have the flickering blue-green color of
something low and ominous, nor is it a dangerous red, a signal for all
but the most reckless to keep off. Some of the reddest mushrooms, in
point of fact, are the best to eat. But the deadly amanita is almost
tempting in appearance. It is white and succulent-looking, and to eat
enough of it means death.
A strange thing, the mushroom, of short annual appearances (though the
roots, or mycelium, are perennial), of quick growth and quick decay.
Some of them are already turned into rotten dark brown, nearly liquid
heaps. Others will gradually dry up and disappear, but now, on this
tag end of a moist season, they are the local bounty. They have curled
edges like cabbage or dead oak leaves. They take the form of single
stems and fronds like seaweed. They are fringed, scalloped, round or
flat, thin or fat. They bunch together at the base of an old stump, or
they climb the side of a tree in shelves. Their heads take the form of
lima beans, or floppy rabbit ears, fans, umbrellas, trumpets, shaggy
hats, or cottage roofs. They are scaly, rough, smooth, or silky. They
have thin stems and dainty heads like flowers; or both head and stem
look like one great overgrown protuberance. Here and there, coming
through the leaf litter, are yellow bunches of coral mushrooms, so
called because they have the look of branched coral; and in the deep
shade they seem almost luminous. In fact, whether or not any mushrooms
do have a luminosity, like some fungi, they have a glimmer of decay
about them in our imagination. They are of the earth unearthly, in
spite of the fact that many of them provide substantial beds for insect
larvae, that they are good, if sometimes treacherous food, and that
they can raise the top off a road.
This year has also been rich in Indian pipes. This is that unreal,
pure-white plant, which, in more mythical times, has been called the
corpse plant, or ghost flower. It blooms by itself, though out of the
moist woodland humus like the mushrooms, lacking chlorophyll as they
do. There is some dispute apparently, consistent with the Indian pipe’s
ghostly nature, about what it really is. Some books refer to it as a
“saprophyte,” which means a plant that absorbs its nutrition from dead
or decaying organic matter, but in others it is called a “parasite.” A
parasite gets its nourishment from a living host. The Indian pipe has a
very small mat of rootlets where the thick stems join together at the
base of the plant. If you dig it out of the ground it looks as if it
were resting on bare knuckles. These roots, according to the botanists,
have an outer layer of funguslike tissue, which means that the fungus
rather than the roots has actual contact with the soil. So it sounds
as though the Indian pipe, being dependent for its food on the fungus
and not the soil or humus, were a parasite. Another alternative, if
the fungus gets any nourishment from the plant, is that they live in a
state of mutual association, or symbiosis. Thus science, still trying
for exactitude, and the Indian pipe, still unaccountable. It seems to
be on the verge of several worlds rather than an integral part of one,
a plant you might meet in a dream.
Other old and once popular names for it are: Dutchman’s-pipe; fairy
smoke; convulsion weed; eyebright; bird’s nest; and American ice
plant. It was called ice plant, according to Alice O. Albertson in her
_Nantucket Wild Flowers_ (1921), because “it resembles frozen jelly
and is juicy and tender and dissolves in the hands like ice.” One
contemporary authority calls it “clammy,” which is accurate enough,
and keeps it in the realm of ghosts and chills, but I think it was an
exaggeration to say that it dissolves in the hands. I find it solid
enough, not fragile or perishable to the touch. Its stems have a
fibrous, tough core, which is sometimes hard to tear. It also has a
pungent, woody smell, though this probably comes from the soil it grows
in.
All the same, it is an elusive, beautiful flower, a miraculous
specialty. Coral pink shines almost translucently through the stems,
which are covered with tiny white bracts, or scales, taking the place
of leaves--scales of a tiny albino fish perhaps--and the bell-like
flowers hang their stiff white heads straight down, with pink seed pods
standing up between them, round, decoratively grooved little crowns.
When the plant dies, it stands for months as a thin, brownish black
string, having turned from beautiful ghost to lifeless reality.
Over the mushrooms and Indian pipes, in subtle relationship to them,
the leaves are losing their green chlorophyll and revealing the other,
more stable pigments that last out long enough to make the familiar
glory of the autumn. There is not so much a general “dying” in the
fall, as an adjustment. Insect eggs are in the bark or ground, the
mushroom spores are being carried through the air, the grasses are
heavy with seed, acorns drop to the ground. One day last October I was
hit with a shower of acorns from the white oaks. This year, since oaks
fruit heavily on different years, I notice more acorns from the black
oaks. How fast these acorns get to work! A little curling, probing,
adventurous sprout comes from the nut, and in a short time has grown
several inches. A few manage to take hold before the ground is frozen.
A multitude of others provide food for squirrels, chipmunks, or blue
jays. The measure of these arrangements is complex and elaborate.
Between the leaf of a tree and a mushroom, worlds apart in function,
there are connections of rainfall, temperature, or sunlight, in a
context continually new, and though the ground colors fade, sunsets,
seas, and inland waters will take over their active play.
That great bonfire of a maple tree--one special to my boyhood--that
I used to marvel at in the New Hampshire fall, is here replaced by
second-or third-growth oaks. I now live in a stunted land; but as it is
the sea which surrounds it, so, in its long low stretches, its glacial
hollows and running hills, it rides ahead like open billows. The early
splashes of color come from the red of the sumac and the purple-reds of
the huckleberries and blueberries. Then color begins to spread through
the oaks, that war with yellow-green pitch pines for living space.
Yellow or red streaks show in the leaves of the white oak, orange in
the waxy leaves of the post oak, brilliant red in the scarlet oak. Then
deep reds, maroons, cowhide yellows and browns pervade them, and our
woodland surroundings seem full of a beautiful propriety, a beauty in
necessity.
Occasional copses of beech trees are shining with golden bronze; and
tupelo, or black gum, trees, with scraggy, undulant branches, have
little leaves that are a blazing, livid red. Over bare hillsides the
“hog cranberry,” or bearberry, a perennial ground cover with shiny
leaves, is hung with cherry-red fruit. The cultivated cranberry bogs
show broad stretches of purple-red, shaped, depending on the area, in
squares, circles, or oblongs, all, if well cared for, neatly ditched.
The tidal inlets and marshes run with flaxen and gold, spotted at their
edges with light festival red from the berries of black alder, a form
of holly.
These flaming revelations signal the trees’ reaction to the decrease
in light’s intensity, or the colder temperature of the soil. The leaf
decomposes. The tree withdraws and makes ready for a leaner season;
but it is too big a display for mere “adjustment.” You will not find
the category of color in a historical dictionary or the encyclopedia
of social sciences, but in this temperate zone at least, it is now an
integral part of the history of change, and of natural society.
* * * * *
There is a deep little hollow nearby called Berry’s Hole. Many years
ago it contained a cranberry bog, and it is still wet bottom land with
water around its edge, and a center choked with moisture-loving shrubs
and reeds. Frogs take advantage of it, as well as water insects and
their larvae. Wood peewees nest around it in the springtime. Now it
is radiant with its special version of the fall. In the middle of
October, sheep laurel is still green on the surrounding slopes, through
the purple huckleberry bushes. I walk down them into a raining screen
of leaves. Berry’s Hole is circled by red, also called swamp, maples,
and their red and yellow leaves, light and delicate compared to those
of the oak trees on dry slopes above them, slip down constantly through
the bright air, drift, eddy, and finally touch the ground, or fill the
brown water with loose-lying, sinking rafts of color.
A green frog leaps into the water with a squeak. I notice a box turtle
on the bank, with its head determinedly locked in this time. Its
markings, on an almost black shell, are dashes of yellow, and a rich
reddish orange that reminds me of a Blackburnian warbler.
Response to color is response to energy, the radiance and the
reflection of light. I close my eyes after looking across the sun and
see red, the color of warmth and desire. Around the eye of Berry’s Hole
is the red of blood and the yellow of the sun.
_The Last Day in October_
The night, after a deceptively bright and soothing day, seems suddenly
withdrawn. The wind has a hard feel to it, as if a northern authority
had come to stay. Heavy rolls of cumulus clouds hang in the sky when
morning breaks, and the Cape begins to look like my winter image of it,
dank and cold, with inert, slate-colored seas investing its shores. The
oak leaves have turned a darker, more lifeless red, or they are light
brown. I notice that the leaves of the white oaks are among the first
to die, beginning to curl up like stiff, ancient hands, with an ashy
pallor on them. The scarlet oaks are the last to lose their color.
As a result of their definite adjustment, insisting on certain rules
of change before many of the rest of us are quite ready, the oak
woods seem to have a dark, plenipotentiary look. The trees stand in
self-saved, stiff company, although the animals that visit them are
lively enough. I watch a gray squirrel burying acorns in loose dirt
at the edge of the road. He has that continually twitching, starting
and stopping, restless being of his rodent relatives the red squirrels
and the chipmunks. He runs back and forth over the sandy earth burying
the acorns, and then, as if unsatisfied with the places he put them,
bringing them out again.
The squirrel’s gray, fur-clad body flows with suppleness. The big gray
tail is sudden too in its motion, stretching out behind, or up, with
curled tip when the animal stops to sit. He quits his activity, and
with a long bound and dive he is up a tree. Along with its slapdash
motion, but provident method, the gray squirrel may also have a touch
of foolhardiness in its nature, though even the most practiced make
their slips. I have never seen it happen myself, but a friend tells me
that he has seen gray squirrels miss their leap occasionally in high
trees near his house and fall to their death.
The leaf litter still fairly jumps with mice and shrews. A little blind
shrew with dark gray pelt and pink nose slips out of a bank of leaves
where I walk. It swerves with astonishing speed and squeaks angrily at
me before it dives out of sight into the leaves. This, in contrast to
other members of the mouse family, is a fighter.
I go into a part of the oak wood which has been a little more protected
... a hollow fenced in and fringed by strands of bull briar. It is an
open space where deer have come in to paw the ground and settle down at
night. Skunks have left little holes where they clawed into the leaf
mold on their hunt for grubs. Towhees have scratched the leaves apart.
Cottontails have stopped here, hopped, nibbled, and jumped away.
This land is mine. The deed is recorded in my name. But I cannot claim
to have put it to better use than the animals to whom it is public
property. It belongs to the deer, the skunk, the rabbit, and the
towhee, who eat, pass through, or take shelter there. With my approach,
of course, the whole question of tenure is rudely solved, except for
the countless stay-at-home organisms in the ground beneath me. The deer
turns once with a large gaze, then bounds away with its white, electric
brush of a tail flung up. “Boom!” a partridge thunders up, cuffing
leaves and twigs with its wings, and hurtles off through the trees.
A crow gives a warning call as it flies overhead. I am allowed the
land if I want it, though not much trust is involved. But why should I
expect comfort or acceptance, in this open realm of risk? Neither man
nor deer was mother to the skunk. It knew its own. Chance meetings will
do, for the love I find in them.
On the calendar this is the last day of October, and it has some
justice to the title. The lunar months mirror the general character of
the year’s transitions. In spite of the fact that all single days are
lost in the passage of light and we are left behind, this one seems
full of an end and a turn to something else. The local life is making
its last forays, before a time of dormancy, hibernation, or struggle
to survive. A mourning cloak butterfly beats lightly by, with no other
companions to be seen. I find some mud dauber wasps, flies, and a
cicada killer, all hibernating in a pile of rotten logs. The woods
are full of the intermittent beauty of the last oak leaves, red, with
a deep tone in the gray day, and the sumacs still show their shining
raspberry color on the surrounding slopes.
The late afternoon is cold and quiet. I regret the shorter day and the
need to leave the great air so soon. But underneath lowering clouds is
a growing gap of swirling orange toward the west. As the light recedes
around us, the sunset begins to show the power and surge of pattern
in the sky. Coils and whips of gold at first--bold, bright, far away.
Then spun gold behind dark barriers--the ribs of whales, giant minnows,
plumes tinted with salmon, the curving timbers of ships, and all things
rare and imaginary plunging through an oceanic fire. Also I see golden
October going, in fields of last excitement. But what this and many
other sunsets say is “Come on!” However you use your days and nights,
in speed or muddled preoccupations, come. It will be too late soon for
the feast that is now, whose fires are always carrying over to the
other side of the world.
_November_
_The Seed in the Season_
The glory goes, and there comes the first sudden plucking out of dead
leaves. They scud and sail. They lift and fall to the ground, where
they sometimes scuttle unexpectedly like mice.
November rolls into view with cool, solemn, formal consistency. When
it rains they say: “I’m glad it’s not that white stuff,” although Cape
Cod is not noted for its snow. There is no deep and heavy frost as yet,
no northeast gales driving wet flakes at our eyes. A number of Cape
Codders migrate to Florida for the winter. Daylight diminishes. As the
leaves drop off we begin to see more distinctly between the trees. I
find two spotted turtles moving very slowly through the waters of a
ditch at one side of an abandoned cranberry bog. In one open field
there are a few red-legged grasshoppers, much less active than a few
weeks before. An occasional cricket, grasshopper, or spider is spotted
and animated by the rays of the sun when it bursts through drifting
clouds. Here and there a violet aster or late goldenrod stands in bloom
between innumerable plants that are fuzzy with seed. The milkweed still
sends crowds of little silk parachutes shining on the wind.
We are now in a genuine country state of which the urban power talks
with both scorn and ignorant nostalgia. The summer no longer pounds at
our temples. The fall color is gone. There is nothing to look at, and
very little to hear except the wind, or a plane in the distance, a car
on the highway. To a city lover it is silent and deadly dull.
As to the nostalgia, I doubt that there is much stress any more on
the virtue implicit in country living. Since all men now dwell in all
places, they question virtue everywhere; but some still talk as though
the country were a place for that intangible peace and moral order that
they think is lacking in the world. The country, however, is in the
grip of a power that has no moral values and is greater than morality.
It is false and true. It is benign and it is terrible. It cures and it
kills. And I do not suppose that whether or not the earth is made up of
human cities can make much difference to it. I am waiting for a deeper
tone than hope.
There is no noise or compelling distraction in a field or stand of
trees. Still, a forester suggested to me that if trees could make
themselves heard, in their internal growth and adjustments, the roar
would be deafening. The same thought has been applied to life in the
ground, with its countless microorganisms, in a state of continual
displacement and turmoil, growing and dying, consuming and being
consumed. They too might roar. We have enough at hand and under our
feet to make general tumult no surprise.
The point about this countryside is not its isolation but its
potentiality. It is in charge of origins. What is more dramatic than
the production of seeds in plants and grasses over one small field?
The seeds are in uncountable numbers, and each one is a miniature
plant, an embryo, surrounded by food and a protective coating. It is an
embodiment of force. It eats and breathes, and now goes into a period
of dormancy like an animal, ready to germinate in the spring when
conditions are favorable. Such facts are part of elementary biology,
but they cover up the stir and momentum of the globe.
[Illustration]
These seeds, on grass and weeds now growing thinner, drier, more
colorless, are not only rich in generation, on their own account, but
they provide beyond themselves. The juncos, or snow birds, that come
down from the north will survive on a seed diet throughout the winter,
with the sparrows, and that sustaining food the mice, preyed upon by
fox, weasel, or hawk. The simplest “food chain” suggests the links in
many others. In fact there is no fundamental separation anywhere in
this common world of life, despite the greatly various environments
of water and land that we use to help us differentiate between the
species. Winds blow through. Tides lap over. Each plant and animal is
proof of general contact and association.
The insignificant seed has energy and sustenance enough to perpetuate
many worlds. It makes me look at mere grass with more interest than
I did. I believe there are some fourteen hundred species of grasses
in the United States, of which I know less than a dozen. There is one
grass which grows in many areas of the Cape, through open slopes, pine
woods, sandy, run-down fields, that I have heard called beard, or
prairie grass. I have walked by it, on it, and through it for years
without knowing its name, though its nameless, light-catching beauty
often caught my attention. It turns out to be broom sedge (_Andropogon
scoparius_), a plant that reaches from here and the Middle Atlantic
States south to Texas and across the southeast to California. It is
a poor soil, poor forage grass, appropriate to this nonagricultural
region. Its stems rise from a bunch of curving, rustling leaf blades,
and are covered with tiny florets that go to seed in the fall, little
feathery tufts. As the autumn months progress it grows more colorful,
deepening to tawny pink, with a touch of purple, before it takes on its
straw-colored midwinter hue. The little silky feathery tufts shine in
the sunlight like the slightest spits and sparkles on a pool, or tiny
plumes of frost, intangibly gentle, sustaining their brightness as the
winter comes on. The stems are two to three feet tall, and with their
delicate adornments, they stand the year around, stirring, curving
forward, nodding back, with the utmost refinement. So I praise what is
for me a new discovery, though it has stood near me in its own praise
for many years--a country eloquence.
Almost all local preparations are done. The seed is sown and made
ready. The time for persistence is coming, when those grasses we
take so much for granted will hold our earth together. When the sun
warms them, drying on slopes and through old fields, they smell sweet
underfoot, a natural, uncut hay.
_The Clouds_
The power of sending on is latent in the seed, but the weather itself
is always openly manifest, and when the leaves fall, when the summer
nests begin to show up in unexpected places, then it hits us even
harder. The northeast winds are beginning to be something to hide from.
The sky stares with a wider, colder eye.
When it is cloudy I hear the dull drone of unseen planes far above
me, and I think of a world at large that is teeming with meetings and
negotiations, losing decisions, waiting on results. The immediate earth
seems to shift, tack, and decide according to its clouds, that slant
up the sky in fibrous strands, hang deep and low, or lift across the
sunlight.
The sun’s rays slant lower between the open aisles of the trees, and
there is a keener, icier edge to the light. I walk out through a
hollowed, dipping and waving landscape onto gray-green lichens, and
dry, sweet-smelling grasses of an old field laced with briars, and
the pale blue sky is on top of me with intoxicating height. The vapor
trail of a jet plane cuts across the sky for miles, while slower clouds
ease and change across the November blue, allowing lazy time for the
imagination.
But if to imagine is a dispensation from nature that allows us to
take part in her intricate creativeness, then it is no idleness.
Rationally, a cloud, whether cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, or a
combination thereof, is what it is: a collection of drops of water,
or ice particles, suspended in the air. Meteorology as a science must
be one of the most intriguing, since its subjects never sit still. I
would, if I could, make an analysis of the clouds that are typical
of a season, the changes in pace that make themselves known overhead;
though the old maritime men of Cape Cod could do a better job. They
knew what they depended on, in the way of calm or storm, and predicted
what they felt. Subjective interpretation is suspect these days, but
it implies a common familiarity for which objective analysis offers no
substitute. The sensate imagination, with its head in the clouds, finds
interconnections past their specialty and name.
Clouds, collecting moisture from the ponds, lakes, or ocean waters,
have many of the shapes and patterns of the land, or head, if you like,
that they come from. We can find faces in them, as well as in the dregs
of a teacup; but they are the images of an invention that is more fluid
than our own. Their texture may cause them to look like scratched,
glacial rocks, or they are wooly and fibrous at the same time. They
might suggest cocoons or the nest of fall webworms. They hang in
snowy shoals or in striated banks. They ripple like the sands at low
tide. They look like whitecaps on the sea. They move as slowly and
inexorably as fields of ice, or in quick bursts ahead of the wind. They
roll in mountainous abundance, or fan out like a river’s long fingers
stretching out across a delta.
Clouds suggest seaweed, grasses, wings. Occasionally they remind me of
ferns, and of the fernlike patterns that the frost makes on a window,
or they resemble some basic structure of a living thing. As plants
and animals are united in fundamental physical laws and in their
chemical composition, so clouds, for all their evanescence, cannot be
separated from the world of life. Clouds are announcements of progress
and decline. They show the sky’s adventures. There is more to them
than my fancy. The light, the wind, the altitude, temperature, time
of day or year commit them to a definite size, shape, and existence.
They are images of substance, in a motion which casts everything into
its weather, including that human sign on the sky, the jet’s trail,
imposing an abstract scar ten miles across.
_The Inconstant Land_
When the clouds cover the sky like gun smoke and the air feels cold
and restricting, I am reminded that the character of Cape Cod has
nothing to offer an uncertain world except uncertainty. Its trees are
not of a size to hang on to, and its dunes shift like the waves. It is
a land that men have ravaged with fire, not excluding the Indians who
preceded us, and abused without compunction. It is said there used to
be great stands of trees on the Cape, hardwoods, hemlocks and pine. The
remnants of submerged Atlantic white cedar forests have been found as
far as three miles out in Cape Cod Bay, and bog borings have revealed
the evidence of timber in some areas where trees now have only a bare
subsistence. But during the nineteenth century, judging by photographs
and local account, this peninsula was much poorer in trees than it is
now, even though our local woods cannot be given credit for much height
and dignity.
A man from New Hampshire visited me briefly a few years ago and said:
“What in the world are you living here for? There aren’t any trees!” I
pointed out to him that we had the sea, but the place seemed poor and
flat to him, and he headed back to the mountains and tall timber as
fast as he could, though he first chose to have a lunch of seafood, on
his way out.
When I bought the land I live on, it had a desolate appearance aside
from a long view of the water, but its high wildness appealed to me.
It was covered with dead oaks, standing everywhere like stripped
spars. They had been killed off by a severe infestation of gypsy
moths, and were, in any case, weak, cutover growth to begin with. The
local landowners cut the woods down almost completely, then waited,
twenty-five years in many cases, to cut them again. Others cut for
firewood whenever they needed it. This area is covered like a rabbit
warren with tracks made by wagons coming in to take out wood. I talked
with a man recently who used to ride on the wagon seat with his
grandfather when he was a boy. They liked to pull trees out when the
frost was in the ground. Even then the wagon would be so heavily loaded
that it sank in almost to the axles, with the horse pulling hard in
the middle. The deep ruts are still to be seen. Besides taking out the
wood for sale and for their own use, the owners would sell it “on the
stump,” letting individuals go on their land and cut.
Since this was a country whose inhabitants often made a sparse living
out of livestock as well as fish, the land was also used for grazing.
Cattle and sheep kept the brush and ground cover down. Many sandy
hillsides were not only bare, but beginning to erode badly.
In his _Cape Cod_, Thoreau speaks of the country between the towns of
Barnstable and Orleans on the bay side as being “bare, or with only a
little scrubby wood left on the hills.” “Generally,” he writes, “the
ploughed fields of the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of
salt and Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander’s notions of
soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and he
will not be able, for some time afterwards, to distinguish soil from
sand.”
Fire has tormented the Cape, ever since the Indians, who used it to
clear areas for corn, or to increase the visibility when hunting game.
When the humus on the woodland floor is thin, and the trees not healthy
or high enough to provide protective shade, thus retaining moisture
in the ground, a severe drought may make them ripe for burning. I
have heard it said that fires used to be set deliberately in order to
improve the blueberry crop. And a neighbor tells me that he has seen
thirty or more fires set by the sparks from a train, chugging down the
Cape, as he watched from a bare hillside half a century ago.
Oddly enough, the pitch pine owes a great deal of its present
prosperity to fire. It is one of the few trees whose roots stay alive
and which comes back after an area has been burned over. Most of its
competitors, except scrub oaks and black oaks, are killed off. It
is a tough tree, and when it grows to good height with its rugged,
wind-whisking look, a beautiful one; but it has its vulnerable points.
It is very greedy for light, being what the tree experts call an
“intolerant tree,” and it cannot stand competition. Pitch pines that
come up under the shade of oaks or even of their own kind, soon die
off. They demand their own ground. The oaks, especially the white oak,
are much more tolerant of shade, and may in time push out the pitch
pine, provided fires are held to a minimum in the future.
The oaks are monumentally persistent. Cut them down fifty times and
they will sprout back from the roots, which merely spread out a little
further and send out more shoots. These “sprout hardwoods” have poor
quality wood. They have fungus diseases, and are subject to attack
by insect borers. The general attitude toward them is that they are
worthless. Now that they are not much in demand for firewood, the
bulldozer, rather than the ax, is their major enemy. But they deserve
some admiration for holding their own. The first year or two after
cutting, a sprout oak will grow very fast, but then it settles down
for a long future, beginning to grow at a slow, insistent rate, taking
what comes. This is a windy and salty land, where oaks may never grow
to great girth and height, but they seem eloquent about their right to
last out the next five thousand years on Cape Cod as well as we, even
though thirty feet, or in some areas five, may be the maximum they
reach. This is their chosen land.
The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound
like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is
full of the collaborative music of air and trees. They may be poor
trees, low and rangy, subject to great abuse, but in their growth they
make the land march between its surrounding waters. The gray oak trunks
go in ranks and tiers for mile after mile down the center of the Cape,
interspersed by individual pitch pines, or backed up and sided by pines
in independent woods that look rounded and bunched in the distance,
pocked with dark green shadows. The oak branches thrust up their
candelabras of branches and stiff twigs against the pale sky, ready for
next spring’s sunlight. The pitch pines stand with scaly, dark brown
trunks and thick needles rocking and switching around, authorities on
wind, and sandy soil, on impermanence, on taking your chances when and
where you can.
Geologists say that this truly “narrow land,” no more than a mile wide
in some sections, seven or eight in others, may vanish under the sea
in five or six thousand years. Its border of sands is always in the
process of roaming and shifting. The Cape has no bedrock. Its rocks
are migrants, brought down from the north by moving ice. In spite of
the evidence of some once fairly rich timberland and deep topsoil, the
Cape does not convince you of any depth and permanence other than its
alliance with salt water.
The sea gives and the sea takes away, breaking through a barrier beach
during winter storms and roaring into the marsh and sheltered inlet
behind, cutting down cliffs a foot or two a year, or imperceptibly
stealing inches from a low-lying shore; while it adds new beaches,
packs new tons of sand around an outlying spit or shoal. Last year,
when I accompanied a group of children on their geology class, we
uncovered a burying pit for horses and cows in the sandbank at the head
of one of the bay beaches. If there had been a farm in the vicinity,
a hundred years or more ago, the sea may well have cut in over half a
mile to reach these bones.
The winds sweep overhead, or merely threaten, the beach waters lap
gently, or bridle and roar, and the only stability I feel is that of
the tides, a lasting balance between the give-and-take of water and
land. The Cape’s ravaged past and stunted present seems transmuted
into motion. What this spit of land has taught me is an altered sense
of the context of time. I once saw a tree either as material for the
woodpile, or something with a growth so slow as to pass notice. Now
I have begun to see trees moving by the million in a million varied
places. Natural change is made up of so many circumstances, the
continuum of life in its vast order is so far from being held down by
history, that everything requires us to move on into the distance.
It may well be regretted, but Cape Cod is not so much a place for
traditionalism as a victim of the beautiful and impatient earth.
_The Dead and the Living_
A cautious solemnity is beginning to take hold, although the weather
plays new tricks as it alternates between the influences of north
and south, east and west. Rain pours over the land. Then, on a warm
day, there is thunder and lightning at noon, succeeded by a furious
northwest wind after dark, bringing in a deeper cold. The wind hums and
roars during the night, and with the sky clear and the stars out, the
Cape has a new swept and running feel to it.
On a night of full moonlight, there are glassy shadows between the
trees, with a dry surf of air; and if sight brings sound, almost
tinkling beams of light from the low moon. New stations, new harmonies
of cold are suggested by stiff trees on their low hills and hummocks,
standing against persimmon and topaz sunsets, or by a crystal edge on
the sunlight.
We have had light frosts, but by the end of the month no consistent,
freezing weather has been reached. Then on the thirtieth the
temperature drops to 20 degrees. I notice a flower, Queen Anne’s lace,
still blooming, all by itself in a field of matted grass. During the
night the surface of the ground is frozen hard ... a cap of reality at
last, with no more lingering. There is a genuine glittering clarity
of cold, in cloud, and branch and stone. Out on the bay the low waves
look as if they had a harder push and pull to make, imbued with new
heaviness. A boy shows me the frozen body of a red-legged grasshopper,
perfectly preserved for a little while by a power to which its only
adaptation is death. What still stands above ground now faces poverty,
and primitive recalcitrance.
There is a kind of ice sludge being nudged in by the tides along the
shore and through rippling purple waters of tidal inlets. There are ice
circlets around the marsh grass. Thin ice sheets form at the rim of
fresh-water ponds.
The inland world seems either subdued or facing survival’s icy stare,
and even self-sufficient human society looks ready to draw in and hole
up for the winter. But since Cape Cod is surrounded by the sea, it has
another depth, another range, where other populations roam while the
rest of us wait and shiver. Above water, the more visible migrants are
those wintering sea birds--auks, scoters, black ducks, eiders, old
squaws, brant and Canada geese--that feed along the shore, in sheltered
inlets, or in waters farther out, depending on their habit.
In my locality Canada geese and black ducks are swimming through
peat-rooted grasses off Paine’s Creek where the terns were fishing two
months ago. A line of white-winged scoters flies low over the heaving
waters of the bay. I watch two black ducks in the sky, approaching
from the north. They are coming over at high speed downwind with wings
beating hard. Then more ducks fly up across inlet and marsh, taking off
to windward. They swing back for a short stretch, then up again, as if
to hold position, like travelers reconnoitering, then fly on and out of
sight.
Two miles or more from shore I see points of spray going up from the
surface of the water, and above them many large white birds continually
turning and diving, from a considerable height. These are the gannets,
that appear off Cape waters in the autumn after they have nested on
their island territories in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The immature,
first-year birds, which can also be seen diving for fish, are almost
totally black. They are usually not with us for long, since they pass
to winter feeding grounds, which may be as far south as the Caribbean.
Anyone who has seen them crowding their nesting grounds on Bonaventure
Island off the Gaspé Peninsula, will know, from close observation,
how spectacular these birds are. They allow tourists to come almost
as close to them as chickens in a yard. Thousands of pairs nest at
the top of high cliffs or along their ledges above the water, each
with its established square foot or two of nesting territory. A loud,
rattling cry goes up, out of a multitude of hoarse croaks and groans.
I felt a great sense of pressure and establishment in this bird city,
this singular society with its consistent behavior and ceremony. The
pairs greet one another bowing, or with heads raised and the long thick
bills fencing. Their stiff carved heads are always in motion, always in
response to one another. It is a pressing, elaborate spectacle, ancient
and authoritative.
Gannets are awkward landers. They come in stiffly and do a kind of
top-heavy tumble when they hit the ground; but as ocean flyers they
have no superiors. When I see them again silently gliding over the
waters off the Cape, I greet them for their earth-honored mastery. At
a distance they might be mistaken for herring gulls, but they are much
larger, and their long black-ended wings are typical. When you see
points of spray going up far out on the water, and white birds diving,
you have unmistakably seen the gannets.
Earlier this month, during an easterly storm, with pouring, blinding,
deafening wind and rain, a few gannets were flying close to the
shore off Paine’s Creek where the water was a little calmer and the
atmosphere less overcast than farther out in the bay. The birds flew
low, since the fish they were hunting were in shallow water and
presumably close to the surface. On this stormy morning they flew in
an almost leisurely way over the surface, flapping their wings and
gliding. They would turn casually and dive, their wings half spread.
Then they rose and flew steadily on with power and ease, their wings
feeling the stiff wind, using it like the ancient professionals they
were.
Now the north wind is blowing hard in the late afternoon. There are
slate-gray cloud masses in the sky, with a steely light where the sun
rays through, and the temperature has dropped to about 40 degrees.
Offshore over rocking, ponderous, gray waters, I can see the crowds
of gannets following a shoal line in the distance. They catch the
light from the sun when it strikes occasionally through the clouds,
intensifying their whiteness and turning the water green. They seem to
drift and turn continually, their arrowed bodies plummeting down, the
splashes appearing against white bordered waves. As I walk inland the
sun goes westward behind massive clouds and the gannets, far out, high
and white, keep diving with exact abandon.
The intermittent sunlight wheels in to brighten the yellow grasses and
make the sand sparkle. To the north it is as if the sky were moving
down from its Arctic limits and announcing new themes, with iceberg
clouds, and high walls of cold against which the sun strikes new
fire, while the wind rushes down to make the message felt. A flock of
sharp-tailed sparrows lands on the sand, the marsh-side of a dune. They
fly up into the stiff, cold air, and then drop down into a small hollow
for protection. They stay there for a while under the great force of
wind and blown sand, not closely knit so much as spread out in what
looks like a perilous unanimity. If one sparrow should stray even a
foot away from the rest, in their over-all, though loose, pattern, I
feel as if it must be irretrievably lost, blown off, and separated.
That which holds the sharp-beaked, yellow-headed little birds together
is in their senses. They intercommunicate as one flock and form. It is
a control--as lightly manifested as the sparrows themselves, but as
powerful as the elements against which they stand.
_December_
_An Old Place, an Old Man_
When the feel of winter comes, in November or early December--though
by astronomical calculation winter does not start until December
twenty-second--when the first hard seal is set on the ground, and we
are settled in with a new plainness, then it is not difficult to bring
back yesterday and its country living. Winter’s role in the year’s
wheel is an arresting, for the sake of renewal, a sleep, or half sleep,
for later waking. It has its own suspense and violence, its roars and
silences, like the other seasons, but in general its order is of a
different quality, having an inwardness and resistance, a bare, gray
need to keep things inside and hidden down. This is the time of year
that shows a plain connection between human beings and their land.
I see last leaves whipping around the hollows off an old Cape road,
or walk through the now more oblique rays of the sun that yellow the
sandy ground held by thin, waving grasses, gray beach plum or bayberry
bushes, and I recognize what has been left behind.
Here, surrounded by open slopes, is an abandoned house site, now a
cellar hole, walled by square blocks of glacial granite. Orchard
grass, timothy, and redtop still engage the old domesticity. Inside
their circle you can see where children played, water was fetched and
carried, chickens fed, and voices raised. There are yucca plants close
to the foundations, and a rose or two. I transplanted such a rose a
few years ago, and with added nourishment it turned from a slight,
single-petaled flower to a great bunch of pinkish-purple fragrance.
Unlike some abandoned farm sites in other parts of New England, there
is nothing left here to show what the inhabitants did. There are no
harrows, stone bolts, yokes, or farm implements, not even any pots and
pans. The stones are left, and the faithful grasses, and beyond them
the crunchy, gray deer moss, and beard grass of indigenous fields.
It was a small place, of bare subsistence. Whatever the qualities
of the people who lived there, they left simplicity behind them.
Not too far away, a bulldozer is making a desert with giant scoops,
high-tension wires are marching by, and a plane rips the air overhead.
We are encroaching in our oblivious fashion, without delay. The new
domesticities may occupy only a tenth of an acre each, but they
engage all lands. The old domestic wildness cannot be replaced. It
was a lodgment limited by need, gray outside and dark within, perhaps
unbearably close and confined at times, but with a knowledge of its
earth.
It seems to me that as the world has grown outward in recent years,
even I, a comparative newcomer to Cape Cod, have lost some local life
to memory. When you live in a place for the first time you see behind
it to its roots and grain, before the storms of circumstance blow you
away from it. I remember a few old men who seemed so representative of
the old Cape that it will never be the same now that they are gone.
The loss is of a country speech, the flavor of a flesh and blood
nurtured on locality. What has replaced them can be defined in terms of
California as well as Cape Cod, which means no detriment to either, for
what we are now obliged to consider is locality in a wider field. But
those old men were born as we may not yet be born, sturdily, in custom
and resignation.
Nathan Black died in October 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He was
born in 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a near
neighbor. His land abutted mine, and since he was the proprietor of the
Black Hills Barber Shop, I could walk down through the woods to get my
hair cut, for the price, in a trillion-dollar world, of fifty cents.
He was a heavy man, with bright brown eyes, and a head of curly white
hair. He fitted the open Cape Cod weather, or the weather fitted him.
I am not sure of the distinction. Nearly ninety years of change, of
natural cataclysm, of both peace and abysmal war in the human world,
had left him in the same place, with the same measure, outwardly at
least, of stability.
When he left his place, or the customary orbit of work and old friends
that constituted his life, perhaps to drive out on a new highway or
to the chain store, he may never have stopped being surprised. I
remember his looking at me with a kind of amused questioning--but no
alarm--and saying something about no one belonging here any more. The
new population didn’t quite make sense to him.
In the way of old countrymen who knew their boundaries, he was tough
and unforgiving in his role of landowner. He had his rights, “By
gawly!” and he would know when someone did him wrong. He held on hard,
and I suspect there were neighbors who felt the possessiveness too
strongly, but this being none of my business, I will go in and get my
hair cut.
The shop, with a tool shed under the same roof, where “Nate” used
to grind knives and axes, stood, and still stands, across the yard
from the house where he was born. There are some other gray-shingled,
outlying buildings on both sides of a dirt road that runs through
scrubby woods and hollows, dry hills sloping down to marshy bottom land
... wood-lot country. One December day I rapped at the door, and he
put his jacket on and walked across the yard with me, where two white
ducks were parading and some red chickens giving the frozen ground a
going over. The old man bent down a little and spoke to his dog Bonnie,
a cream-colored spaniel, which had just wagged up to him: “Did you get
it?”
Then, to me: “I lost an egg. Picked up five eggs, out of the hen yard
this mornin’, and came back with four. Maybe there was a hole in these
old pants of mine.”
The barber shop was small, long and narrow, but he had a stove in
there that kept it warm. There were some old magazines on a bench
against the wall, with a black Homburg hat hanging on a peg. It had
been given him by an old customer, a wealthy man who had lived on the
Cape during the summer and had come in to have his hair cut for many
years before he died. There was a photograph on the wall of the two of
them with an inscription underneath that read: “Established 1884. A
satisfied customer is our best advertisement.” They were standing out
in front of the shop, smiling in the sun.
“Feller came here yesterday and I had to clip him in the kitchen. Shop
was too cold,” Nate said.
The calm of the place was comforting. It came, I suppose, from an
acceptance that emanated from him, and brought in many old friends, who
would sit down to say: “Nate, just thought I’d come over and pass the
time of day.”
Whatever he had to say about other people never left them without the
honor of human circumstances. “Pretty close, he is,” he would say with
a little laugh, or “I guess he had a shade on” (a Cape Cod expression
for being drunk). “Guess you can’t hold on to nothin’,” he said about
some local theft, in a way that insisted on not being roused beyond
necessity.
His origins were out of a kind of history of which there was very
little left intact except himself. He once showed me a tintype of his
mother, a handsome girl named Bridget Malady, who had emigrated from
Ireland in 1862. His father, Timothy Black, was born in Yarmouth, on
the Cape. At the age of ten he signed on as a cook aboard the packet
which sailed between East Dennis and Boston, and seems to have spent
a good deal of his life on intermittent voyages at sea. He was also
in the butchering and slaughtering business with his two sons. In the
autumn they used to butcher eighty-five hogs or more, at the rate of
three a day. And in some rough but related way, Timothy Black started
his son in the barbering business. Nate remembered how his father used
to cut his hair in the kitchen, long before the Black Hills emporium
was established: “I used to sit there while he was sort of pummeling
at me on the back of the neck. By gol! I sure did cringe when he was
chopping me with those women’s scissors.”
While I, seventy or eighty years later, was sitting in the barber’s
chair, getting more expert and calmer work done on me, I assembled a
little of the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an
expedition to the post office or the store took up a large part of the
day. That was the time when you could hitch the horse up to a post and
stop for a long chat, “having the capacity to waste time” as I heard a
Texan phrase it about some of his countrymen in the western part of the
state. People walked between their houses--there are foot paths still
showing--on barren hills. They had small herds of cows that foraged
on the sloping fields. Families used to picnic together by the ponds,
and there were barn dances on Saturday nights, which were sometimes
the occasion for a rip-roaring fight. I have heard it said that Nate
Black was the strongest fighter in the region, when outraged beyond his
normal patience, but he would reveal none of this prowess to me.
The Black family also held dances in their kitchen. The father of
the house played the violin. On such occasions they would have plum
porridge suppers, or they served crackers, milk, and raisins, and
sometimes hulled corn.
He was of a piece with his surroundings. I think of many things he
talked about while I was having my hair cut and they all meant the
gray, sea-girded land, and a human closeness to it. I think of the
deer that ate his beans, of his duck that was carried off by a fox, of
foxes being reduced in population by the mange, of a watering place
for horses by Cedar Pond in East Dennis (a beautiful pond with ranks
of dark cedars backing it up, and now being encroached upon by house
lots); and he talked about the big eels waiting to eat young herrin’
(or alewives) at the mouth of a pond, and of sounding the depths of
Round Pond here in West Brewster.
And then there was his dog which had to be chained up because it got
so wildly excited chasing rabbits through the woods that it was
constantly lost, having once been picked up nearly ten miles away; and
the coon that climbed a tree after a hen; and his little granddaughter
wanting to shine a flashlight through the window one night and
take a picture of a coon she saw outdoors, because it was “such a
pretty-looking animal.”
There also come to mind the fishing boats all-over white with screaming
gulls, that he once spoke about with real excitement, and, of course,
the yearly work on his cranberry bogs ... he and his tart and lively
wife used to pick them together; and the shifting price of cranberries,
and his wood lots, and who was after him to buy some of his land.
“Yes yes” he would say, in the Cape Cod fashion, and always, when a
customer was leaving the shop: “Come again.”
His wife Emily died two years before him. Some time before that I
stopped to talk with him when he was scything the family plot in Red
Top Cemetery, which lies at the junction of two country roads, on a
little hill or high knoll up in the sky and the ocean winds. He told
me two women had come up one day while he was there and said: “What a
nice place!” He and his wife are buried there, in a place which has no
more permanence than any other, but for them and by them had the simple
power of acquaintance.
[Illustration]
_Night in the Afternoon_
If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when
I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at
least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not
to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to
make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the
examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and
stars never fail us.
The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain
or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you
listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to
apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives
open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In
any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I
am not one to disparage such banalities.
“Good morning.” “What’s good about it?” Dead oak leaves hang like wet
rags in the cold rain. After the rain stops there is a cold moisture
suspended in the air with its own whiteness. There is a silence
everywhere, except for a chickadee’s harsh split trills nearby, the low
tone of offshore waters, and the indiscriminate sound of engines on
roads or in the sky. The woodchuck, the box turtle, and the chipmunk
are asleep. There are no insects above ground to catch the eye. The day
shortens, and we who are always calling for more sunshine, pleased at
the idea of some perpetual, impossible comfort, are obliged to confront
night in the afternoon. Life is quiet, stripped of redundancy. There
is a new restraint about our depopulated local world, and at the same
time new openings afforded. At least the season seems to offer another
quality for interpretation. Perhaps, for example, because the trees are
bare and the ground devitalized, we are to look up and find the sky.
I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as
thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness
through the ground, but overhead the infinite dome almost resounds. It
is blazing, bounding, soaring with the means and light of existence.
I am not troubled at all that I look out from an unimportant planet
dependent on a common star, and am only able to see a few light-years
away, each light-year being a distance of six million million miles.
There is sight past sight. The strongest telescope is still an
extension of the human eye. Our measurements themselves are a form of
participation in that fantastic distance, which may not make us any
less lonely, but we have a mind in space; and since men calculate, by
observation of the heavens and of their earth, that the laws of life
are the same as far and farther than they can see, then they have
hearts and blood there too. I stand here on the cold ground, and take
sensual note of the universe.
Then I move back into my domestic hole to do a little hibernating of my
own. A winter withdrawal sets in, when outer resources escape me. I am
drawn inward to human want and its frustrations, to common egotism or
inertia. The December days progress almost remotely. Who cares about
the secrets of that cold and darkening earth outside? Our problems are
sufficient unto themselves.
But there is a natural complex of greed, a provision for appetite,
that brings men and earth to mutuality. Manifested by the weather, it
sometimes puts us out of doors to understand real fortitude. Instead
of easing on toward January, December begins to tug and roar. It snows
all day and there are north winds of from thirty to forty miles an hour
driving the snow against our houses, suggesting an extra struggle we
might not be quite ready for. Then it warms up to 2 or 4 degrees above
freezing, and the following morning begins with a cold rain and sleet
falling down with hissing, disheartening force. The temperature drops.
The sleet turns to snow, driving in violently from the north, hitting
the trees like bullets. The sky closes in. There is no horizon. The
wind swirls. Trees rock and bend. This is a storm with a great rush of
savagery, setting wild, grim traps for the unprotected. “Now,” it says,
“I have you. Try some adventures in this.”
There is ice or cemented snow along the tree trunks in the direction
of the storm, so that by sight and feel I know the wind is from the
northeast quarter, without need of instruments. My hand tells me where
the present power is coming from.
When the snow and wind let up a little, I head for the shore and find
signs down, gutters yanked out, and telegraph wires dangling across
the road. Salt water ahead of me is churning, tossing white spume
against the open shore, while the wind seethes, whines, and howls with
growing intensity. The feeling of conflict is everywhere around me--a
hurling and letting go, a bend and give, a clash, a holding against
insufferable strain. The sand on the upper beach is whipped into
stinging strength. The sea is almost boiling, its racing, conflicting
edges spray-lined. On top of an exceptionally high tide, great waves
run in over a sheltered inlet, sending their combers farther toward
the land. All points of contact and withdrawal, rise and fall, seem
to be concentrated in this monumental turbulence, a force that is
almost uncontained. Is it a replica in violence of the normally
unseen stresses and strains lying under a peaceful season, or a life?
Our bodies are made of air and salt water, in their components of
hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. A storm should be our organic
companion. But this cold screaming fury makes me take refuge behind a
wall. Man may have overcome the elements, but not his elemental frailty.
Out over the gray and white waters, hovering against the wind in an
almost idle way, are several herring gulls. And, at the mouth of the
inlet, riding calmly on the roaring, running tide, facing up against a
thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind, is a loon--close-reefed, well fitted in
all respects to weather the worst.
_Two Encounters_
After the storm a hard cold sets in for many days. As a rule our
Decembers are comparatively mild, with the days alternating between
light rain and cool sunshine. Now the very great plunges of the cold,
driving the frost deep into the ground, freezing the pond waters,
starting a rim of pack ice around Cape Cod Bay, comes as a surprise,
something not known before. The weather bureau, explaining the cold
as being the result of a vast Canadian high-pressure system, speaks
of its unusual “fetch and intensity.” Ten degrees above zero is not
severe as compared with conditions in other parts of the world, but
this unseasonal extreme is a local reminder of the earth’s potential,
and just how much we depend on the normal rhythms of the year. We gasp
with cold, turn up the heat, and think that cataclysm is a small thing
to the universe.
The cold around us creates a different earth. It demands a readjustment
of the senses, as though it were ready with amazing new suggestions.
One sharply cold morning when snow lies fresh on the ground I stop by
the cemetery where the Blacks are buried, on my way to town. There
is something about this day that asks attention. It sings. Pure
crystalline masses creak underfoot. The tune of the cold finds an edge
on my bones. Pines, stiff cedars, locust trees, hard ground and stone,
all share in resonance, being forged and tempered by the cold. The
little graveyard hill is a tympanum, or sounding board, very highly
pitched, so powerfully taut, being plucked very lightly by the air with
sharp whispers and twanging sounds being sent across the snow, that it
might be ready to send one chord, incomparably new, into the whole sky.
I start to go away, but a tiny, almost casual trill separates itself
from the vibrations of the cold. I keep listening and in a few seconds
see a bird rounding the branch of a cedar tree, not twenty feet
away. Working in and out of the branches, coming in to view and then
disappearing again, is a flock of purple finches, eating cedar berries.
The males are washed with a raspberry color that keeps appearing
through the dark green masses of the tree like intermittent lights,
hints of fruitfulness in the winter’s containment.
Suddenly, surprisingly, a light brown, speckled veery appears on the
open branch of a locust. This summer bird, out in the glittering cold,
seems to have a startled, wildly timid look in its eyes. Its slim body
hesitates, with the problem of aloneness perhaps, or direction, or food
in this white earth that has cut so cruelly into its subsistence. Then
it flies off into a wood of pitch pines, and I hear a low sound, the
mere snatch of a thrush’s warbling.
Just by stopping for ten minutes instead of hurrying on, I have been
put into a new relation with the morning, and have seen a singularity
and sacredness to all its parts. It could happen in Moscow or New York.
A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the
stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and
yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There
is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns
through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a
huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings
and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me.
I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical
backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories
high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and
its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies ... every
now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm.
On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping,
flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of
the building--dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they
are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a
purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart.
Then I am back down the street again with my own tribe that teems with
general might and inner purposes of its own, going and returning--out
continually--representatives of a force of mind that can gauge the
mechanics of the universe, and in animal power overrunning the earth. I
see in these shoppers an evolutionary line of vision never satisfied,
a history of cities, ledges of light running to unknown futures.
The world is in the hands of these omnipresent and familiar beings,
the young and the old, black-haired, brown, yellow, or gray, in the
indefinite shapes and interchanges of their lives--the human race
hurrying through its own lighted ways. And if I shouted: “Stop! Look
away from yourselves. Consider the starlings!” with what sort of mild
madness would I be credited?
_January_
_Exposure_
It is said that winter, being the season when the sun shines on us
obliquely, is a period of death, or, as the dictionary puts it, of
“dreariness, old age and decay.” We are being deprived of a portion of
original energy, and recognize occasionally that if we were out far
enough, in as extreme and bare a relationship to the cold as the birds,
but without their equivalent in insulation, we would have a hard time
surviving (though birds are also perishable and have their share of
disease and death from starvation). But we take care of ourselves, in
such an elaborate and consuming way, that the grand extremes of weather
may only succeed in being a nuisance. The freezing weather deepens this
month, after a few days of moderate warmth at the start, and I am free
to complain about the heat bills. The car skids and turns a half circle
on the highway, which is covered with glare ice one morning, and I am
afraid, not for myself so much as for my new car. How could I manage
that ten miles back without it? Self-protection may be all that winter
means to us, though it is a term that can only be comparative in an age
of manufactured violence.
Suddenly there is a tremendous thud above us that jars and rocks the
house. It seems to tug at the vitals of the earth and would cause us
more than mere shock if we were not aware that it is a plane breaking
the sound barrier, thousands of feet in the air. A minute or two later
I hear a familiar gabbling, a mixed bugling, overhead, and run out to
see twenty Canada geese, hurrying fast down the north wind in four
separate flocks aligned in flight. With their long necks stretched out
and strong wings beating they are fleeing for their lives, frightened
up from winter feeding grounds along the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The
earth, for the time being at least, is committed to mankind. The geese
cannot so frighten _us_. They are innocent of ways to “control their
environment.”
Then there is almost complete silence again, and I understand what is
meant by the “dead of winter.” Under the cold blue stare of the sky
nothing seems to be happening. Each sound--a crow cawing, a car on the
road, the rustle and clink of a clump of dead oak leaves--is by itself,
occupying wide, unpopulated plains. Without the wind, the air too
presses on me, with a cold weight. I walk through its depths, feeling
it against my face, and suddenly realize that limited sea of oxygen in
which we live, this side of outer space and its violet darkness.
This silence may be just as alarming to some people as a “sonic boom.”
Nothing seems to be going on. There is an intensity of rest. The demand
for something new is unsatisfied. There are men who stray into nature
from a city’s booming, reassuring hive, and are frightened by being
caught in necessity--one of the year’s cold, unspeaking tides. Perhaps
they also recognize how much the sun provides us with other than
pleasant company. There is a winter in us from which we will not soon
escape into warmth and joy.
Still, this frozen land contributes to a global art. It is cold and
silent here because it is hot and loud in India. And how can we spread
our wings without a knowledge of deprivation? While I am closed in
I know there are redstarts wintering in Mexico and arctic terns in
the Antarctic, and when I greet them on their return it will not be
only because they have come home (a bird’s nest is not a house but a
platform from which to start), but because home comprises so large
an area. Some birds, if they survive their first year, will reappear
in the vicinity of the place where they were reared. So will salmon,
shad, and alewives, returning to their parent stream after years
of absence. We are conscious of the great amount of space their
journeying requires. Species of fish or birds show great variation in
the extent of their migrations, and the whole pattern is wider than
a continent. Their movements are not only consistent with periodic
motions of climate, weather, the tides, but may be visible evidence
of earth changes that go back for incredible lengths of time. They
require an unrestricted measure for their lives and deaths. Men alter,
restrict, or use up, to suit their needs and fancy. Then they move
elsewhere. I see that one of the young men who has been designated
for training in space flight, an “Astronaut,” says he accepted the
challenge of being sent aloft in a capsule because we were “running
out of interesting things to do down here.” The destruction and denial
of earth’s resources must have gone farther than we realize. But the
life journeys continue, from one sunny round to another, over the earth
and its wide-ranging waters. How much we must be missing, even in the
wintertime!
Before dawn, after the windless day, the temperature drops to 10
degrees. A walloping, tugging, brutal wind sets in. The frost so
rigidifies the needles of the pines, burning into their cells, that
they look dark and scorched. I feel as if the rigid and dizzy earth
were being kicked around, rocked like a topheavy boat--the trees its
masts. The wind cries: “Remember poverty!” and I go gasping for breath
through the fierce air, feeling as perishable as a moth. We may be
having the mere taste of an extreme, but this penury weather is huge
and mighty all the same. It is the result of a Labrador storm one
thousand to two thousand miles in extent. Its balanced fury tests all
it meets.
On this kind of day I am an inland lover. To be wind-cut and
sandblasted serves no good human end. As if in general proof of that,
I meet no more than a car or two on the highway, and see no one on the
streets of the town. The shore is desolate, hissing with driven sand.
On the surface the bay waters in the distance are being stiff-armed
and flung away. New ice, morose and slow, is nudged by an outgoing
tide in the inlet at Paine’s Creek. Gulls drift slowly upwind like
clouds. And on the wide tidal flats--the searing, biting, turbulent
grounds--groups of Canada geese are stalking through shallow purple
waters that reach, wind-scudded, over shoals of peat. Then a new
group wheels in low and settles down with the rest. I can hear their
honking under the sound of wind and sand. Beyond them, in steely waters
speckled green, is a small flock of black ducks.
This is no inanimate landscape. Under the given power, the
abandon of the wind, the restrictiveness of the cold, is still an
all-containing balance. I listen to those famous travelers the geese
as they communicate and am taken a little further out on violent and
unreceptive grounds, past my own shivering.
Inland again, listening, taking shelter in the lee of the wind, just
as a rabbit jumps away from me and runs under a tangle of bull briar,
I am conscious of all the unseen hiding and endurance around me. What
else moves here, beside the wind that suddenly rushes in and roars so
loud that it makes the trees groan and the large round clouds hurry
on? The trees, swaying and creaking, are the most obvious, the most
exposed. They are half dead, rigid, hard, inert. The sap coagulates
in the extreme cold. I cut a twig with my knife and the pitch is dark
and frozen. The trees in their containment, adapted to less water and
light, getting scarcely any nutriment, are able to make their stand in
the open while other lives must hide.
In the late afternoon the ground stirs harshly. Leaves run in dead
abandon. The wind seems to sound a burst of doom, and then seethes in
lively rage. A dead limb cracks. I am on the trigger edge of ultimate
need. Blue-gray clouds hang over the shaking fingers of the trees.
There is a collective power that flays us all, without discrimination.
The shadows have left the earth. Light stays in the sky, and then
begins to go. There are rims of pale electric light in the west. Long
cloud shoals, now white and pearly gray, stand against wide bands of
blue and mauve and pink, like the baked desert cliffs of the Southwest.
Finally, and I feel all finality, as the ringing air sheds down
enormous heavy cold, received numbly by the earth, the sky turns a
startling gemlike blue. We are turned into night. The sky’s mineral
beauty shifts to pure blackness lighted by the stars. There is an
almost shrilling intensity in the air above the earth-binding wind, and
I am conscious of nothing but height, height beyond reach.
_Ice on the Ponds_
The air is crystalline and the sunlight through the pitch pine needles
gives them a glassy sheen. This is one of those rare times when almost
all of Cape Cod’s innumerable ponds are iced over and the children can
go skating after school. It has been consistently cold for weeks, with
comparatively little snow, and the pond surfaces tempt all skaters to
soar.
But we have had a day and a half of thawing weather. When my young
daughter and I go to a pond to skate, we hear its fine whomping sound
as it expands under the sun’s warmth. What looks like jagged broken
bits of crystal, catching light on the surface, turn out to be part
of the ice structure, thawing ice refrozen. We find hundreds of water
spiders frozen in around the edge where yesterday they had been brought
out into the water by rain and comparative warmth, and on the way we
found a dead worm on top of frozen ground. So some animals are flung
around with the season and respond fatally to chance. They belong to an
allowance left over from December. Then it ends, and the day hardens
like the ice. It is as though the helpless were not to be allowed their
helplessness for some time to come.
To skate on a long stretch of unmarked ice, over green reflected
clouds, with the sound of clear air swishing past your face, is to
voyage, full sail. It is a shining freedom, and our only competition
is in play, to skid and turn and rush like water birds in the
springtime--the only hardship a bruising fall. Under black holes we can
see down to the bottom of the pond, where there are little forests of
green moss and water plants, very still and soft. Suddenly a diving
beetle swims quickly and erratically across and then a slow tadpole
moves into sight. There is enough sun-induced warmth in the shallow
water at the pond’s edge to allow life more play, though in that
respect a pond is easier on its inhabitants than the land. With its
cover of ice it is now in a state of “winter stagnation.” There are
frogs buried in the mud and fish moving sluggishly in cold, stabilized
waters. But this is an environment which always allows activity in at
least some of its inhabitants throughout the year. Its extremes and
revolutions of temperature bear little comparison with those of the
land. Our hazards are of a sterner kind.
When we kneel on the ice, where the mobile sky is reflected, and
look down in, the water world seems half awake and half asleep, half
tropical and half glacial. The waters are almost motionless over
intermittent green carpets and through their black depths. The whole
being of the pond seems to move independently of our surface storms. It
has a heart of its own.
The winter land is a harder environment, though we sometimes make
more of its rigidity than we need to. At the pond’s edge I brush past
a bayberry bush, and its dried, dark gray berries smell as pungently
and herbaceously as they did when ripe--waxen and pewter colored--in
the fall. There are checkerberry or partridgeberry plants rimming the
pond. In fact they grow well through the acid earth of these woodlands,
and their shiny leaves stay green throughout the winter. They are also
called wintergreen, or mountain tea, and their leaves taste spicy and
aromatic. Are we still common enough to make new names instead of
numbers, implying that familiarity, touch, and association have not
been left behind?
You know the checkerberry, hugging the ground with shiny, flavored
leaves, tiny bell-like flowers pure white in the late spring, bright
red berries in the autumn. Something to say hello to, and not
merely to recognize as _Gaultheria procumbens_ and pass by. To name
means to know, love--perhaps even to laugh at. The fact that the
checkerberry has so many other common names is a human distinction.
Consider: grouseberry, spiceberry, oneberry, chicken-berry, deerberry,
groundberry, hillberry, ivyberry, boxberry, teaberry, greenberry,
ivy-plum, chinks, drunkards, red pollen, rapper-dandies, wax cluster,
redberry tea, Canadian tea. They dance in friendship. I have been told
that the name “Drunkards” comes from the use of checkerberry tea as a
remedy for a hangover, but am unable to corroborate it.
While I am pulling off my skates and chewing on a spicy leaf, a trim,
round little chickadee comes within four feet of me and twitters and
scolds. Then two warier golden-crowned kinglets show up suddenly in a
nearby shrub, crying: “Tseet! Tseet!” and flit away. We climb up the
steep sides of the pond and face the slopes toward the north. Bold
gusts of wind strike us. Stiff briars and branches whip us as we walk
along a narrow path, and the play of winter sunlight through the clouds
goes lively across the grasses and through the gray trees.
_Contrast and Response_
January seems grim and contained. This is not the time to expect life
to declare itself. Even local human circumstances are such as to
prove a kind of gray waiting. While the rest of the world retires in
Florida, counts change in New York, or struggles with vast new shifts
and divided aims, Cape Cod stays down, and holds on. The population
is five times less than that of the summer. It is the barren, exposed
peninsula it used to be, with the exception of the new woodlands and
all the cottages. We are linked by highway and modern communicatory
apparatus with the rest of the continent, but in this season there is
a feeling of diminished wants. The human pulse begins to rise in April
or May, when people paint and refurbish their motels and cottages in
preparation for the great migration of vacationists. Now the economy
subsists more on expectation than fulfillment. The human squirrels
have stored away their acorns. The forage is thin in January for all
inhabitants.
The weather roams still, with our surrounding waters. Why live here but
for the reason that there is always an element of sufficient grandeur?
Although the sea might not be visible for the motels and trailers
before your eyes, a few miles, or a few yards, brings its untouched
enormity into view. The sky is wide, and the ocean waters are still
breathing loud or low with fruitful magnitude. They are at the end of
every road. And when the foghorn bawls from Chatham like a lost cow, we
know that there are still headlands and ships, the uncalculated and the
unknown.
On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and
breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak
forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more than two feet high, as
well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark
clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows
and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The
vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and
tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of
snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in,
sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.
The sea beyond is full of long waves that take the low sunlight of late
afternoon and swoop and fall with it. They come in from the distance
and then rise as they approach the shore, showing their marbled, curved
surfaces, to pause at the crest and plunge down. A stiff north wind
holds them back a little. Manes of spray whip back at their cresting
and when they fall the spray rises up almost vertically. Just inshore,
where the breakers fling in their prows along the sloping beach, the
waters foam with constant movement, in and out, all bubbling and
shifting with a turbulent milk, whose surface looks opalescent--colors
of blue, green, and pink bordered by heavy pearl. And what a sound! A
thundering, a loud fermentation, with an occasional great soft clash of
waves like cymbals, the long surf roaming and lunging in the evening
light for miles and miles. From where I stand on the cliff top I can
see a little group of men and children jumping and throwing sticks and
stones into the surf. They run back and forth with its rhythm, playing
touch and go with it, running to keep warm in the wind, playing as if
they had to, dancing for the surf’s thunder. They laugh, shout, hurl
driftwood into it. They jump and wave their arms as the water reflects
their images, just on the fringe of an immense, terrible beauty,
responding with an antic kind of love.
The sea provides a cold, unfathomed latitude in the tightness of
January. On land too there is a kind of under-rhythm of things allowed,
or rather a special winter pace and timing, each life with its
relation to the cold. The thin light and air seem to define the leeway.
Thick snow showers slant in. Sky, hills, and shore are blotted out.
There is nothing to be seen but the naked trees, the oak leaves like
tattered old flags holding against the wind that kicks the flakes
ahead. The storm abates into gusts, and occasional sweeps of snow
with blue patches blown clear in the sky. At each advent of this blue
clarity, with sharp spun strands of light coming in from the sun, the
birds respond. Snow swirls. Wind seethes. There is nothing to be seen
but a tree sparrow or a chickadee at the bird feeder. Then the blue
patches show again and the earth clears to vision. A flock of juncos
fly in, or a blue jay glides through; a red-tailed hawk screams in the
sky. It is as if they were all puppets dancing for their master light.
[Illustration]
Special response is as much a part of winter as extreme reaction or
withdrawal. I see this in the birds. I hear it in the yawing creaks of
a pine, in dead leaf stir, wind speech, in their collaboration. I feel
it in the quality of the season, its rigid shocks, its holding hard and
letting go, its suspense and trigger edges, the obedience it calls for,
the inertness and tight compliance.
Within the temperature range permitted it, life now shows many
hairbreadth balances. Some marine animals “deactivate” during the
winter--the equivalent of that coma and lowered metabolism which is
called hibernation in the woodchuck or the chipmunk. If no ice blocks
are in the way, and I can walk out over the offshore flats, I find
periwinkles still holding on to rocks or driftwood, but obviously
slowed down almost to a stop. On the other hand, common rock barnacles
breed during the winter months as far north as Delaware and New Jersey,
sending out eggs which will hatch in cold sea water into free-swimming
larvae. And there is a red crab in Boston Harbor which stays active
throughout the winter.
When it gets abnormally cold, shellfish “supercool.” They have a
freezing nucleus and will survive if not suddenly jarred.
Adaptation to ranges in temperature varies enormously. Some plants and
animals die when the temperature drops beyond a certain point, and
others when they are released too quickly from freezing temperatures.
Some animals avoid the cold by migrating, or they are able by
specialized habits to eat and survive as permanent residents.
The conditions of life in its natural environment, whether land or
water, vary from place to place, although the sea, for example, is
less extreme and difficult than is the land. Such conditions may show
dramatic contrasts in areas that are fairly close together. Because
of the influence of the Labrador Current, the waters to the north of
Cape Cod are colder than those to the south, where they are influenced
by the Gulf Stream. As a result, there are some species of marine
invertebrates which exist on one side of the Cape but not the other.
The frog, a cold-blooded animal whose tissues approximate the
temperature around it, lies in the cold mud, sometimes in blocks of
ice, an intrinsic part of winter. The blue jay, on the other hand, is
less helpless, and is able to forage above the ice and snow. Like man,
it has an internal temperature of its own, regardless of the weather;
although man is without the insulation of feathers or fur. A thing
apart, I run to my house, my city, the tunnels of my society, in order
to escape the cold. I wonder, though, whether this mental animal, a
great experiment in complexity, is not as perilously balanced as any
simple organism, a mussel or a clam, in the extremes of temperature and
environment.
_February_
_Secrets in the Open_
Rain comes, heavy, cold, inert. Dirt roads begin to turn to mud.
Then the vice tightens again. Below freezing temperatures take hold,
putting a new strain on plants and trees lately thawed. It is not
steady, continuous cold that now threatens life, but the shifts between
freezing and thawing--alternates in the caprices of energy. We are not
allowed to open our pores and eyes too much, lest we be taken unawares,
stopped as we try to start again.
I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that
the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles
greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to
say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual
increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already
reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen
ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The
ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a
skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something
to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song.
Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it
feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy,
crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring
town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when
the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy
walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the
other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and
watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of
the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but
its name--the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door.
A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any
insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away
saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going
out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster
and responds so readily to accidents?
I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter
and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of
a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather ...
hidden fires almost seen.
In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the
ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The
sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running
slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release
I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I
find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling
over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground
just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of
scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a
starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber
over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and
rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.
Something says stand and wait, look out and over; and when I do life
stirs, assembles, and flies. The yellow marsh grasses sway beyond me.
Ice shines white in the drainage ditches. A flicker, sun loaded, flies
over to the far side. Tall dry reeds rattle together.
In silence, a female purple finch lands on a tree facing the wind, its
breast shining in the light. I hear the dry “tik” of a myrtle warbler.
Then a chickadee swings and loops out of a wind-washed pitch pine above
me.
Through the thickets of alder, shad, blueberry, and sumac on the
surrounding banks, I become aware of a sweet spring voice, then of
small singings here and there, and when I follow them up I realize
they come from the shrubs themselves. Twigs rustle and touch. Gray
branches out of frozen ground sing in contact. Even the marsh reeds
make occasional sharp, squeaking twangs. There is no melody among the
birds. A robin, although it is as red as it will ever be in spring, and
fatter, with feathers puffed out on the cold, flies to an alder bush,
where a few dried berries are still hanging, to perch without a sound.
The music is there, though it may become louder and richer in a later
context. Musical capacity is not confined to a few animals, or to
spring and summer. Cold air and frost rehearse with plants as well,
under the changing sun. The song of light is played in many ways.
_The Sea in the Ground_
It is on just such a day, when hope, interest, renewal seem
to be afforded, though held in check, that I find other local
residents--other people, other customs--that are not only in readiness,
but blooming with color as though it were summertime. The temperature
is barely at the freezing point. The air is bright and clear, and the
top of the ground is played over by sunny warmth. In flowing fields
that skirt the oaks, the reindeer moss, with many branches, perhaps
suggestive of antlers (though it gets its name because it provides food
for reindeer and musk oxen in the frozen tundras of the Arctic), is
gray like dawn dew, or an almost luminous gray-green. Light nests of
snow with sparkling hexagonal flakes rest between its curly fronds.
The reindeer moss is one of the lichens. A lichen, each separate plant,
multitudes of which compose the visible growth, is a composite of a
fungus and an alga, seen only through a microscope. The alga contains
the coloring matter, or chlorophyll, and can therefore carry out the
process of photosynthesis, manufacturing food with water and sunlight.
The fungus, which has no such ability, wraps its threads around the
alga, protects it from the sun, and stores the moisture for their
partnership; and, if they are of the rock-growing variety, anchors them
both securely.
The lichens are tough. They can endure extreme contrasts in
temperature, and hang on in barren areas where other plants could
not get a foothold. In fact, they are pioneers of millions of years’
service. They prepared the way for all the changing elaboration of
plants with leaves and stems that followed them, after they had broken
down bare rock with their acids, dissolved it, cracked it, and combined
their own dead materials with the rock particles to form soil.
In these round-edged plates of lichen that cover rocks or tree trunks
in the bare February woods, I see a life that is almost independent of
the season. It goes beyond or behind our immediate knowledge of it into
a kind of primal security, settling in where little else is possible.
The color of lichens is the color of the green algae of the sea and
of fresh-water ponds. If their blue-grays, gray-greens, or yellows,
bring up the cast-steel color of ocean barrens to my imagination, or
green water lolling at the sand’s edge, or underwater depths running
with fish and shafts of light, there is knowledge to back me up. The
progenitors of the lichens and their relatives the mosses--this richly
green hair-capped moss that soaks up melting snow in the sunlight--were
unicellular organisms that formed in the sea. The line is direct. The
algae in lichens need water. Without it they would not be able to make
food or reproduce.
(The blue-green algae, which as a species is abundant in both marine
and fresh waters, as well as in the soil, has the ability of lichens
to endure very difficult environments. It can exist in icy pools or
hot springs. The latter extreme was brought home very forcibly to me
not long ago in Nevada, when I saw this plant growing at the edge of
a fissure from which hydrogen sulphide gas was puffing out. The algae
was growing where steam condensed near the surface and must have been
thriving in temperatures of nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.)
The color of our inland lichens and mosses changes with the rate of
moisture. Reindeer moss withdraws in dry months as a method of coping
with a disadvantageous season, instead of trying to carry on an
uncertain battle for existence. It shrinks, in other words, turning dry
and crunchy underfoot, but in wet weather it absorbs, almost drinks up,
water, and then turns spongelike and its color gleams more richly.
In the absence of leaves filtering the sunlight, the trunks of the
larger oaks are dappled and spotted with these colors of watery origin.
I say the larger oaks because the lichens once started may take a long
time to spread. The golden lichen is a very slow-growing species,
although there are many stone walls in this region that are covered
with it. I have watched one spot of golden lichen for two years or
more. No bigger than a fifty-cent piece, it grows on a stone step
outside the house, and has hardly expanded at all.
So it is an enduring kind of fertility that shines here, as the gray
sea waters rock in the distance. And when I turn over a log, or take
up a handful of spongy oak leaf humus, half thawed in the sunlight,
there is visible evidence of the life now arrested in the frozen soil.
I find a millipede, curled up like the shell of a chambered nautilus.
I hold it in my hand and keep breathing on it, until it comes to life
and starts moving around, stretching out, its myriad legs moving
with fantastic synchronization, ready to be busy again, traveling
seriously with the given purpose of eating bits of leaves, breaking
down organic matter in the earth. It is suggested that the millipede
may have been one of the earliest animals to leave the ocean, where all
life presumably began, and take to the land--one of those statements,
of course, that leaves millions of years in the balance of human
guesses, but gives me another approach to ageless tenacity in this
ocean-bordered wood.
There is another ancient animal, the pill bug, damp bug, or armadillo,
which I find in semihibernation in the middle of a rotten log. Pill
bug because it can roll up into a perfect little ball; damp bug for
its choice of environment; wood louse for its habitat and general
appearance, although it is no louse but a crustacean, not an insect
but related to brine shrimp, water fleas, lobsters and crabs. It is
one of the few members of this family that have become adapted to life
on land, but it retains a set of gills, or at least respiratory tubes
with some functional equivalence to gills. It also retains an organic
affinity for wetness, needing constant moisture in order to breathe,
and will invariably direct itself to the dampest environment it can
find. One dry summer day I uncovered a bunch of wood lice way out in
the middle of a dusty patch of ground that looked like a miniature
desert. They had taken advantage of the only shelter available, an old
fragment of a board that held some shade and moisture under it.
In terms of millions of years the development of millipede, or pill
bug, becomes extremely complex and partly unknown. When did the pill
bug leave the sea? How did its special breathing apparatus evolve? How,
in other words, did it gradually adapt itself to life as a land animal?
The problems of science are manifold. For an observer the very sense of
a link between primal sea and primal earth embodied in this half-bug,
half-marine crustacean, gives it great stature. There is thunder and
depth in the pill bug.
I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or
the month of February, but endless projection and development.
Not lost too long--because the cold deepens and bites in the late
afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind
rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It
feels like snow.
_Need_
Early next morning the snow begins to fall, thin and glassy, bringing
in a new kind of quiet, unpredictable intent, spotting the thawed
surface of the earth. After a few hours the flakes are heavier, and
their momentum increases. They run down dizzily, with a ticking sound,
shrouding the distance, pelting dead leaves, collecting in clumps
between the needles of the pitch pines, coming down steadily and fast.
The temperature drops quite suddenly, and the snow flakes grow lighter
again. The wind sharpens, sending them ahead of it, lancing toward the
south.
Hour after hour the snow collects with mesmerizing totality, and in the
colder evening the wind drives in with great fury and drifts pile up.
Dry snow whirls in and races around the windows, scouring them like a
dust storm. The wind molds a long drift on the north side of the house,
like flesh over bone, hip edge out and curving in, a woman’s shape, an
inanimate body molded by violence into classic beauty, hollowed, not
for love unless the wind is love, carved, marked down and conquered by
everything that is latent and unconquered in the storm.
For many days afterward the arctic air reigns over us, and the snow
is crusted, blindingly white in the sun, a mortal danger to animals
whose food supply it covers. A long sickle, a new moon, of ice begins
to appear along the rim of Cape Cod Bay. There is crackling, grinding
cold, in a day when we rise a little past the sun instead of ahead of
it. The freezing nights, for some of the animals that have endured the
winter so far, must be interminable, except for the rabbit, caught
suddenly in the open by a great-horned owl. I found what was left of
it in the woods--a burst of little bits of fur in the snow; the owl’s
tracks; a mold left by the rabbit’s body.
A hermit thrush dies of starvation, all its remnant food at winter’s
end cut off by the snow. It is pathetically light, held in the hand,
and when it is dissected only the tiniest patches of red meat show on
either side of the breast bone.
I find a dead eider duck on the shore. It may have been blown against a
tree in the storm. One wing is broken, and the feathers buffed and thin
from beating. After its feeding grounds are frozen over in an inlet
farther down the Cape, a great blue heron dies on the snow-covered
shores, wounding its neck in the last throes.
The bird feeder is crowded with intermittent flocks of chickadees,
juncos, and sparrows, all the ever present winter birds, pecking at
seed, flying off, hopping on the snow, each with intense, nervous,
active habits, keeping their wild, interrelated ways, entering in,
displacing each other, disappearing and returning. A bolt of a bird
suddenly tears in from nowhere and all the little ones are gone in
a burst. A sharp-shinned hawk, a small hawk with an appetite for
songbirds, has attacked in hunger and desperation, but it swerves when
it reaches the feeder--its aim disturbed by fear as it approaches the
house--and crashes into the window. It sits on the snow, terribly
stunned, its head drooping. The body is the light umber of an immature
bird, the breast streaked red. After a few minutes it stirs a little,
wing shoulders twitching, head up, and yellow eyes glaring with the
pure wild look of a hawk. Finally it lifts up quickly and beats away
toward a line of trees in the distance.
The chickadees are soon back, jumping down to the feeder from an
overhanging pitch pine and bouncing back up like small puffs of
snow, having left danger behind with their usual vibrant but sturdy
acceptance. They are businesslike, determined little birds. If I could
only get inside that head behind the tiny black eyes, and follow. I
could swear it has the quickest perception of things. In any case it
acts as if there were no time for leisure. Its whole body is tripped
constantly at a staccato rate. The head moves up, down, sideways, in
the needs of sight and utility. It poises to hammer a seed held between
its tiny black toes and claws. It rounds the branch of a pine, ready
for the next find, wonderfully resourceful in the game of survival;
with a serious intent, gay in action, employing every second with such
thoroughness as to be completely careless of the outcome of life, and
so perhaps to surpass it.
The mourning doves, whose low coos I mistook for an owl’s when I first
heard them, are another of our permanent residents, not often at the
bird feeder, but fairly ready visitors when they overcome their initial
fear. One flies in, wings whistling wildly, hesitates, turns back,
makes another foray, then waits in a shad tree thirty feet away, head
bobbing, eyes blinking against the sharp sunlight. When a mourning dove
flies up it shows a blue in its generally buff-colored feathers like
a blue evening mist after winter rain. It walks with pigeonlike head
bobbing back and forth, its thin tail standing out behind a tear-shaped
body like the shaft of a cart, then spreading round and wide at the tip
when the bird flies off.
While the sturdy chickadees carry on business as usual, the dove, in
gentle alarm, waits for an hour or two before hunger drives it back to
stay and feed; and not long after that another dove flies in to join it.
On the south side of the Cape where the open Atlantic surf keeps
the shore waters fairly free of ice, there are sea ducks, eiders,
baldpates, mergansers, blacks, or scoters, flying over the sea, or
settling down on its shifting surfaces. Tiny white buffleheads, which
make ducking dives into the water, show brilliantly against gray ice
on the banks of an inlet at Monomoy. A tornado-shaped formation of
red-backed sandpipers stands over the gun-metal sea. Patterns of wings
and water run together, while the land is still not broken out of its
frozen gravity.
For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can
kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more
birds will die. Because this Temperate Zone, influenced by oceanic
weather, attracts more land birds than otherwise might stay, there is
a greater margin of arbitrary risk. The weaker individuals will die
first, by a natural law, but all are subject to unusual violence. The
comparatively mild coastal climate does not normally have a winter as
bad as this one, although extreme conditions are no surprise in North
America, and the risks vary for the lives exposed to them. One winter
with exceptionally deep frost in the ground, hard winds, and little
snow cover, is as dangerous to plants as a month of snow would be to
the birds. And a mild winter may result in death or damage from belated
storms and cold.
We talk of storms and the hazards of temperature as though nature were
merely arbitrary, and inconvenience the essence of her plans. Being
less self-sheltered, life subject to wild nature knows the extremes as
standards of action. Living things are continually balanced between a
bold summer and a demanding winter, where storms are the rule and risk
is constant. They are unable to accept less. This terror has its pride.
_Death, Man Made_
Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill
too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association
with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the
validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption
of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely
an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is
all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly
pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see
a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human
agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or
another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or
inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of
death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal
predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at
a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is
so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we
pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even
obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not
represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or
assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods
of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention,
abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder
and pollution. In our power we are weak.
I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter
dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of
having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant
vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of
the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their
tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have
made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not
to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds
drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them
out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters,
loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial
habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And
because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines
they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution
has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush,
wielded at random.
[Illustration]
Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand
flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way
as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood.
When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive,
out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying.
Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown,
are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a
heavy coating of oil.
Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or
washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the
northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water.
I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They
have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny
but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their
feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation,
and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no
bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So
the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or
they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just
offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers.
Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their
buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when
alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash
ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their
digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.
This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local
residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise
escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only
recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone.
It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off
Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be
virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.
Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk,
having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too
frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It
may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been
oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth
a thousand ships.
“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering
eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with
saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance
which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise.
Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is
in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy
and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.
_March_
_Restless Days_
Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean
temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast
between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the
average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32
degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of
likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions.
Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both
February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the
Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage
is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not
recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first
obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds
coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.
The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon.
Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the
southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the
feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without
what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of
disaster.
“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make
life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice.
High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous
capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness.
Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the
sands.
The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try
at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks
and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty
weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the
storm.
I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of
a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the
actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my
own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer
wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to
a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.
March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it
begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies
up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the
wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in
a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from
tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They
have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three
notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty”
with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.”
Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the
other on a lower key.
A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in
sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of
a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like
fast-dripping water.
Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the
birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music.
The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the
waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter
and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color
and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part
of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out
like a fan.
There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a
dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are
dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at
their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.
This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter
quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats
that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The
squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic
kind of dance.
Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the
winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there
is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and
then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but
in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning
to seek its opportunities.
I am impatient for spring, as raw, unseasonably cold weather continues,
and then I see a dark little caterpillar on the road, or a mourning
cloak butterfly, sprung out of hibernation. I hear a pair of mourning
doves, cooing with slow measure and deliberation, long silences
between. They seem to say something to me about attention. “What
will come may not be, as yet. But we know when. And you might if you
listened.”
If I listened, and if I watched, found each insect as it came out of
hibernation, comprehended a tree as a living thing, beginning to stir
and seek, followed the development of buds and roots, the unseen life
that stirs in egg or chrysalis through every inch of ground.
There is, in common with the rest of the year’s revolutions, nothing
neat or simple about the process of reawakening. It has started
already. Raccoons in this area begin to breed in February and start
foraging for their young in March. The great horned owl nests in
January and February. During the dead of winter a few animals such
as skates and barnacles start breeding in offshore waters. Variable
reaction in this time of change is as complex as the order which
controls it.
Hibernation itself, that mysterious state which is somewhere between
death and sleep, differs in various species. Some mammals hibernate not
because of outside conditions but because of internal changes in their
blood stream, as if timed not to the weather but the year. Each life is
cyclical, corresponding accurately to the circling of the globe, but in
mode and terms it differs vastly. When the frogs begin to stir around
a local pond, birds, independent of hibernation, move back from other
climates. Late in March a few alewives swim into fresh water from the
sea. Late in April large numbers begin to show up, at a time which only
varies by a few days, year after year. Yet their arrival, like their
growth and responses, is conditioned by any number of circumstances
that are not only physically distant from us but may be remote as yet
from scientific scrutiny. To realize that the slightest changes in
temperature can affect whole worlds of life, and that this factor is
only one of many, can make a man feel hopelessly inept.
So spring is not to come now, nor tomorrow, suddenly complete with shy
warmth and flowers according to our expectations, but will take its
periodic time, within a wide range and with enormous resources. By
the same token, no spring comes pleasantly, without a certain amount
of doom in its wake. A flock of male blue birds flies north too soon.
They die during a severe snow storm or a week of extreme cold. Thawing
takes place too suddenly for one form of life, and too quick a drop in
temperature will kill another.
March is complex and March is in a rage, though I begin to feel a
universal response, a gradual turn, in the ground, through the trees,
down by the shore as the wind changes from tearing things loose to a
peaceful low breathing. I smell salt things on the edge of motion,
balanced on a tip of allowance. I hear what I am unable to see,
stirring, tuning up across the land. The response may be hesitant or
bold, delayed or premature, but it is coming. There is knowledge around
me, even purpose, whether or not it is working in mindless ways. When
I see sunlight playing on a blade of grass, I see the component parts
of wisdom. Then the grass joins the squirrel in its dance. Eels join
men in restlessness and speculation.
_An Extravagance_
We built a small concrete pool on our place, which is locally known as
Dry Hill, and so brought the life of water a little closer to us. In
the summertime the pool nurtures a migrant population of green frogs. I
have put nothing in it except some sunfish that subsequently died, so
that the occasional signs of new life it shows, like a water strider,
or some nymph or larva of an insect that flew by and deposited its
eggs, always strikes me as a dispensation from the sky. It is a proof
of life’s pressing, inescapable need to drive into every opening.
Thinking of draining the pool and cleaning it out for the approach of
spring, I find a life so surprising and sudden as to take all human
propriety out of my system. There, on the brown, algae-fringed edge
of the pool, something moves, telling me that this well of water is
more than ornamental. Light olive-colored insects, scum-covered,
goggle-eyed, stalk on the edge, or skate very slowly through the
water--the strangest kind of revelation. What could I clean up now
without a sense of shame?
The dragonfly larva, or nymph, which turns into an adult after a series
of molts, is a fantastic-looking creature. I take one out of the pool
and put it in a jar for observation. What I observe has no familiar
meaning for me. It stays motionless, except when the jar is moved. I
wonder again, as I did with a robber fly in the summer, what an insect
is. Is it only a stereotyped pattern on the changing screen of nature?
This one exhibits itself as a sort of embodied suspension, careless of
death or time, like the process of evolution itself. There is no hurry.
The nymph lives for more than a week without food. Through a magnifying
glass, I look at the flat-bottomed, skiff-shaped body made shaggy by
algae-covered hair, the jointed legs, the upended tail. It is striped,
and there are brown markings over and across its goggle eyes, and
brown on its strange mouth part, which sits in front of its face like
a catchers mask. This part, or device, is called the labrum. It is
hinged, equipped with hooks, and can be shot forward rapidly to grab
and hold the animal’s prey. In the nymph’s case, as with so many other
things in nature, seemingly endless waiting and suspense precedes
occasional spurts of lightning rapidity.
As I peer at it, greatly enlarged behind my magnifying glass, its
jointed legs suddenly flail up in front of me, and I actually feel a
tremor of alarm--which might be humorous, except for my sense that this
small dragon is timeless in some awesome way.
As March is proving a seasonal release, at least in starting, so it
also reveals an extravagance in the form of a dragonfly nymph, and what
will come from that little insect shows that extravagance may have no
end. After a series of molts, the number and duration of which depends
on the species, a nymph will climb up on some green stalk spiking out
of the water, the skin on its back will crack, and it will emerge from
a sheath which it leaves behind, a dry, empty counterpart, and turn
into a big, gauzy-winged dragonfly. It is given two worlds, water and
air. Its embodied transformation from one into another is as rare a
thing as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly; and is
evidence of a daring like the flight of Icarus toward the sun, but more
successful.
Nature takes the nymph out of itself. It is no goggle-eyed inhabitant
of some other planet, no knight doomed to expire by weight of armor. I
see the fantastic in it and also a miraculous reality, which will not
rest with own products. This water predator will turn into a brightly
colored, great-eyed hunter, skimming everywhere over land and water,
darting across the roaring traffic of a city, flying over the surface
of the ocean miles from land. Time seems suspended in the nymph; and
this may be appropriate enough. It is the result of ages; but its
metamorphosis is fresh and new, a successful act of endless creativity.
_Interpretation_
It is in the nature of things to surprise, after temporary
imprisonments. Surprise is what men look for. It is a need. And this
puts us somewhat in the position of a dragonfly larva, suspended, until
sprung out. Since we are not as rigidly and instinctively stuck as the
insects, relief from our often unblessed condition may come simply
because we get a chance to look around. Freshness of act, unfailing
originality, is here, but it takes time to see. After an age of
inattention it comes like a red squirrel, which I meet unexpectedly one
raw March morning. Its whole body twitches and shakes. It jumps with
an extraordinary series of halts and starts; then, like a boy playing
Indian, it leaps behind a rock as I walk by.
If there is any spare time in a harried world, perhaps it should be
used in cultivating habits of attention, learning how to keep open
for possibility, instead of inventing distractions that provide for
nothing. What is loosely called “nature study” requires discipline
like any other area of knowledge, and acquaintance with its subjects,
their names, their habits, their place and performance, may encourage
extremes of refinement; but it is one good way to begin. It takes you
out. It shows you what else can be done. By example it may spring you
into a new mood of action. It provides new acquaintances, showing you
life, the surprise, where there used to be a wall.
I, as well as my children, am still learning to read. I am still making
a collection of terms, in order to attempt a rudimentary analysis of
what I find. First in importance, though, comes an admission that what
I am considering is not so strangled by human terminology that it does
not have an identity, a sacredness even, of its own. Discovery gets its
worth from what it pursues.
I see a pitch pine with different eyes, not because I have learned
that its clusters have three needles, but because I recognize its
independent existence. I know that it has needs, and a history, that it
is not divorced from an infinity of circumstances just because I can
identify it. We do not need to be vain about our name grubbing, our
scientific nomenclature; it is only the beginning.
When I go to the edge of a pond I have a pleasurable sense of
excitement, not only because I have been there before, finding the good
old tadpoles and water striders, but because I know that I will find
something unexplained, the same life perhaps, but in new relationships.
There is a swarm of thin little flies dancing in the warm sunlight on a
March afternoon. They not only tell me something about the lengthening
days, but the light seems to sit differently on their wings. They are a
revelation, materializing out of a distance, hovering near.
In the game of identification we have to admit that nature is not an
exclusively human province. Then we can be led by it, like this class
of children, boys and girls on file through the woods, exploring new
land, in expectation.
There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the
tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out
and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded
slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small
ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar
where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice
scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on
the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds
in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing
on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal
creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because
of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown
shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy
glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south,
winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels
of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls
to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder
whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a
myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special
character of this day.
It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness,
spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks,
months, years later, they come out with something learned that a
teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness
which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a
little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had
seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she
wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she
had seen a snowy owl.
Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the
loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the
realm of science but not accuracy.
But we lead in to nature through names as well as our senses, and then
by familiarity with habits, size, shape, color, the order of change,
the ways of dying out and returning with plants and animals. Knowledge
is our medium, and we are obliged to question.
What is that tree, strangely bent over along the snowy ground? A wild
cherry? What happened to it? What is the evidence? Did another tree
fall on it when it was a sapling, bend it down and force it to grow out
horizontally? Its thick trunk stretches for six feet parallel to the
ground, only a few inches above it, then turns and starts up into a
sky-opening between the thickets beside it, sending up a wild array of
branches. What else can we say about it?
Then one boy, putting things together, hearing how the tree compensated
for its difficulties, needed light, and thrusted after it, cries out:
“Why that sounds as if the tree was alive!” That is what we have been
looking for. He is well started.
_Response_
March progresses toward its end, gradually adding to the population.
Dark-headed, deep-colored male robins tug at worms on the lawn.
Red-winged blackbirds sail low over marshes, or take stations by the
edge of a pond, with reedy cries. The purple finches sing, along
with the shrill braying of the blue jays. White-throated sparrows,
quail, jays, and partridges that have been here all winter are more
in evidence, especially on sunny days, and begin to be accompanied by
newcomers, like the grackles. Myrtle warblers flutter up into the air
and down again, catching insects. But the wind blows. It backs and
fills. The rain is cold. The turn toward spring is very gradual, hardly
perceptible at times.
Then a few alewives, a dozen or so, come in out of salt water and show
up in Stony Brook, familiar strangers, large, pale fish weaving slowly
up through the narrow stream. It has begun to be a time of declaration.
New patterns, new arrangements are taking place, however much the
season seems to lag.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth I hear a high, shrill sound,
whirring and spinning, suggesting proud activity, presence set free.
The spring peepers are making it known that a time has arrived, and I
take joy in the news, having failed to make any definite assurance of
it myself. Their sound embraces all this changing land, rising above
the whispered roars of the sea.
Now the perpetrator of this chorus is a tiny tan frog with a smudged
cross or X on its back, named _Hyla Crucifer_. The male of the species
has been speaking up on behalf of spring openings for millions of
years. In that capacity it is authoritative enough. Its voice, almost
incredibly loud and shrill for an animal that is not much over an inch
long, is amplified by means of a large bubblelike pouch which acts as
a resonator. This mechanism is put to use after the animal comes out
of winter torpor, after warm rain, and as the season itself breathes
and sounds more freely. The peeper moves around with the earth itself
and makes a declaration which, it seems to me, does not deserve the
term automatic any more than the fiddling of grasshoppers in August.
Both are part of the deep and various play of the year. In any case
this specialty of voice is something of a marvel in itself. It is not
like the eyes of an owl that are so made as to make maximum use of
dim light, or the wings of a herring gull that can ride turbulent air
currents above the water, or like the fins of a fish, the sensitive
nose of a dog. The peeper’s vocal parts are not specialized for
environmental use to that degree. Their primary, specific function is
to attract the female. Mating and voice are synonymous. But perhaps we
could also say that this mating cry, this sometimes bell-like sound, is
fitted to the whole environment, that it belongs unerringly to a new
earth and a new season. It seems to bring life and place, function and
expression together. It is unequivocal. It is perfect. It speaks up
reliably on behalf of everything now springing or about to spring.
For all their vast population in the bogs, ponds, edges, swamps, and
other wet areas of the Cape, individual spring peepers are very hard to
find. During a cool evening, as the stars begin to declare themselves,
I hear the peepers’ collective voice rising up around me, passing into
the sky. On the banks of Berry’s Hole, that deep, swampy hollow nearby,
there is a pulsing, piercing, deafening chorus. The wind suddenly blows
over in a loud torrent, but the peepers keep on. I walk farther down
and they stop; then they begin again, after I sit still for a minute
or two. The banks are wet, after a light afternoon rain, and they must
be covered by frogs, judging by the sound; but I search every bit of
ground with a flashlight and am unable to find a single one.
A wild, moist spring wind flings around the rim of the hollow, which
is gray, dusted with fog, and in the clear opening overhead the stars
fling out and away. Water stands dark and still where the banks end.
Grass hummocks and shrubs choke the wet areas beyond. I sit for many
minutes concentrating on one area with my flashlight. The peepers’ cry
is deafening. Then at last, I see one. It jumps onto my shoes. And then
another, on a low lying branch, moving along in the light--it displaces
a third, which is toppled down into the leaves. They seem limp in
action. A peeper is minute, almost weightless in my hand.
[Illustration]
Nearby footsteps will silence them. They react spontaneously like
tadpoles and minnows that dart off into deep water from a pond’s
edge when you approach. Yet they are not bothered by the beam of a
flashlight.
Such a tiny thing, this animal, this cool, moist, anonymous amphibian,
for so proud a message! I can see that a peeper’s whole body pumps as
it calls. It is like a bellows, and the vocal sac blows out like a
blister, bluish-green in the light. “Peep-peep-peep,” and the whole
night is filled with an insistent, stirring cry. No human statement
can rival this simple, triumphant mode of revelation. The earth begins
again.
_April_
_Deeper News_
I read in the papers that spring is beginning to show its vast capacity
in the nation behind us, with tornadoes in the west, and floods to the
south. The way is being cleared with a violence.
And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at
night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale,
carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness.
The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There
is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but
that--a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for
another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an
“incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a
vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape
Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before
dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South
Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned,
four survived, and one is missing.
[Illustration]
They were returning to Boston with 38,000 pounds of fish, after
fishing west of Georges Banks. During the night, through a thick fog,
a thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour wind, high waves, and heavy rain, the
radar stopped working and the crewmen were unable to see. The “Back
Shore” bar, on which the trawler ran aground, is an old graveyard for
ships. Modern equipment has cut down greatly on losses, along with some
of the old safeguards against them. Many lighthouses are no longer
manned by lighthouse keepers and their families. Great beams of light
swing out over the dark sea and back again with inanimate, unmanned
precision. Members of Coast Guard rescue crews may no longer be men
born and bred here who know every inch of their beaches. In fact, they
are more likely to come from a different state, and to be stationed
temporarily on the Cape, so that a man hunting for a wreck may not have
too exact an idea of his location.
During the afternoon, after I hear the news and drive to see the wreck,
a southwest wind blows over the cliffs that stand above the Wellfleet
beach, and clouds swirl up across the blue emptiness. Cars line both
sides of the road. A thin trickle of people walk along the heights,
sands held by yellow grass and purple patches of bearberry, and there
are others far down the long beach where the trawler lies, heaved over
to starboard.
From morning news accounts and a scatter of talk the story of the
doomed ship and the rescue comes to me a little, from under its
nighttime shroud of fog and heaving waves. After the radar quit and the
vessel ran aground on the sand bar, the crew made a futile effort to
get her off. Then the radio failed. The ship was being knocked around
in the thrashing darkness. All attempts failed to put dories overboard.
And the seven men went into the pilothouse, where they stayed for some
five hours. When day broke, the tide was changing and the seas seemed
bigger than ever. The men were battered and exhausted. The trawler’s
decks were awash, and they thought she was beginning to break up. The
captain then ordered the crew over the sides, at which time the ship
was some 600 to 700 yards offshore.
A local family, a man, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter,
proprietors of summer cottages above the beach, were wakened at four
forty-five in the morning by two coastguardmen who had seen the wreck
and stopped in to use the phone. While one of the men drove along the
heights and trained the spotlights of his jeep on the wreck, the other,
accompanied by the family, walked down to the shore. The fog had lifted
a little and they could see white spars rocking above the water, and
what looked at first like debris, being washed back and forth against
the shore. Forming a hand-to-hand chain, the four rescuers then
managed by just standing out far enough in the icy water to pull three
men in. More Coast Guard personnel came later and rescued the fourth.
The survivors were terribly numbed by the cold. One of them had to be
forced into walking so as to save his life. “How much further?” he kept
mumbling, as he stumbled around in the sands, held up by the mother and
daughter. Later, the flesh of these survivors was found to be black
and blue from the pounding they had taken on board the ship and in the
surf, flung against the sands.
Two other crewmen were found dead on the beach. Another local resident
saw one of them where he lay at the bottom of a ladder that reached
down the cliff: “A big man, between thirty and forty. He had coveralls
on, but no shirt.”
His wife says: “I’ll never complain about the price of fish again!”
There are plenty of fish in evidence, all for free, although not a
single one is taken away. The boat’s catch must have been broken into
and scattered by the surf. Every ten yards or so along the wide,
shelving beach are dead fish, lined up as if they had been placed
there--a market display, for no taste but dissolution. Gray haddock
cleaned by the fishermen’s knives. Rose fish, pinkish, orange-red, a
sunset color, with fringed fins, and enormous jellied eyes rimmed with
white, like goggles.
A hatch cover floats loose in the water, and a pair of yellow, oiled
fisherman’s overalls lies on the sand.
The boat, which was shoved and lifted by the seas until it now lies
a few yards off the beach, is just ahead. We curious onlookers walk
toward it in growing silence. The surf waters are breaking on the beach
beside the strong, humble craft, inactive, done, pounded down. I can
make out her name, _Paulmino_, along the bow. She is banked over hard,
and the waves, still fairly high, back and fill around the stern. They
well up, then ease away again. Where water sloshes amidships there are
tattered nets and bobbing cork floats. The steel masts stand with ropes
and stays unbroken, and the high, white pilothouse is intact, where
they spent their terrible night.
I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could
have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for
could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their
distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions
and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death,
or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that
no mortal fear escapes.
_April Light_
One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers
again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows
around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled
yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to
Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the
turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are
crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets
in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the
headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water.
There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound
in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead.
Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where
it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the
fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash
as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some
twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal--probably
a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the
channel--swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with
a yell as its head slips by and out of sight.
A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I
startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars
are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the
shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high
spring night--life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish
come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its
origins.
Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike
stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it
comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that
I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are
microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not
to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is
this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination
from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When
I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a
little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance.
The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the
presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter
nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true
representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light.
There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly
arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving
in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a
beetle’s iridescent green.
Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the
warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us
like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the
novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a
bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible
to see the grass growing.
There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on
their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds,
making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance.
In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on
the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins
a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles
down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it
had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the
soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak
butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow
sunlight of a path where I am walking.
These are the signs of spring, the illuminations I have been waiting
for. And its fresh, cool wind, striking my face, seems to carry new
senses with it. It is beginning to be fragrant and full. It calls up
in me a new alertness along with a new contentment. But underneath all
these pleasant surfaces and scattered events, I feel the power of their
origins. For all I can find and associate with spring, the romantic,
welcome season, there are vastly more uncounted changes, unrealized
ways of reaching up and out, responding to a new range of light and
darkness. The protozoa tell me I have seen nothing yet as to fire. The
migrant herring coming in at night say this April is ageless and dark.
Everywhere around me, things deeply silent and unseen begin to share a
proximity. They move in the waters, while they shoulder the dirt below
ground. In the structure of their alliances, developed in measure and
with appropriateness, is the co-ordination of the great globe as it
spins in space. They respond to a power which not only defines the
“spring” but will transform it and send it on its way.
“_Frightened Away_”
The swallows freely dip and fall and sail in high wild air, and as a
southern surprise two adult turkey vultures soar low over the land,
their wings like great flags, frayed at the tips. The cattail seeds
begin to fly. Part of April’s cool progression, the tough-leaved
Mayflowers blossom out of banks and brown leaf litter, with tiny pink
and white flowers, deep cupped, strong and sweet of scent.
On the twenty-fifth there is a big run of alewives in the brook. It is
an event that attracts attention. Cars stop by. Small crowds gather
and walk down to see the fish. This is not as great a day as it used
to be, when salt herring counted heavily in the economic livelihood of
Cape Cod, but it brings up remnant feelings. And the fish, after all,
provide an open ceremony, even though the details of their natural or
economic history may not be known to everyone. It is a spectacle worth
leaving a car for, and might even tempt someone to leave his car for
good, suggesting new roads and means of locomotion not yet considered.
They mass in the shallow water of the brook, with flinty gleams showing
on their backs and dorsal fins. Eyes staring, mouths gaping, turning
and wheeling, the foot-long alewives move up through the fishways,
obeying their great drive for fulfillment. Herring gulls gather above
the water course by which the fish ascend through marshes and then
fresh water to their spawning areas in the ponds. They circle overhead
in the blinding sky, like a prodigal crown.
The alewife multitude always draws a “why” from some visitor. Their
force is so obvious and yet not quite to be explained by referring to
them as “poor fish.” Huge numbers are caught in nets where they die in
a shining, gasping, shivering mass, and then are hauled away in barrels
for the purposes of bait or cat food. Others attempt impossible rocky
barriers and die of wounds or exhaustion, and a certain percentage
have fallen prey to gulls before they arrive. They encounter enormous
hazards, and the alewives, unlike men, or as men think of themselves,
are unable to turn back. The plan that put them here seems wasteful
and even too bold for those who see life in terms of human ascendancy,
where all problems are subordinate to our conscious attempt to use the
earth and save ourselves. But there they are, back again so committedly
as to make the most self-enclosed glimpse something of the primal
energy that makes all life insist on renewal and advance. Even the
children who jump down to the water’s edge and try to flip the fish out
with their hands, treating them sometimes with extraordinary cruelty,
must feel some attachment to this force, or perhaps they feel it more
than the rest of us.
After trying to explain the habits of alewives to a group of children
one day, I asked them why, if all the fish were taken out of the brook
every day in the week, there would be hardly any fish returning in a
few years’ time.
I don’t excuse my lack of clarity. In any case, one boy answered:
“Because they would get so frightened they would all go away and not
come back.”
Wrong, of course. Someone might even be tempted to cry: “Ridiculous!”
The answer to the question is that most of the alewives return to the
stream in whose headwaters they were hatched and where they grew up for
a few weeks or months of their lives before returning to salt water.
They then continue to grow in the sea, returning at sexual maturity in
three or four years’ time. So if all the spawning fish are taken out of
the brook every day in the week there would be no eggs to hatch out in
the ponds above the stream, and the population would be decimated.
“No,” you say to the child, “you don’t understand. Let me explain this
again.”
That the fish are “frightened” does not come into the picture at all,
aside from the facts, and it is blatant anthropomorphism to try and
read human response or attributes into a fish. Does a fish take fright?
Perhaps, although it might be more accurate to call it an alarm, or
flight reaction, an automatic nerve response inherent in the whole race.
Trying to talk like an adult, I describe the alewives’ running in to
spawn as “slavery to the reproductive urge.” What happens to them on
the way is immaterial to this unconscious necessity. Fish that commit
suicide do not do so out of choice.
And yet, when these fish swing away from me, as my shadow comes over
them, when they try time after time, sometimes frantically, to climb a
mound of rocks or a head of water, I wonder about being “frightened,”
or the noun “fear.” Is this spring stream of life without it? A bird
trips off a branch in sudden alarm, cries out, and then forgets, to
start in on a singing joy all over again. Birds are more emotional than
cold-blooded fish, but if fear is a protective, lifesaving reaction
inherent in a great many animals, then the fish may not be devoid of
it. They are one of the foods of the universe, and in balance with that
function, it is not just that their glands stimulate them to momentary
activity, or that they flinch before disaster, but that they express in
their bodies the wild need for freedom to act, to find, to run, to be,
that manifests itself in highly developed animals, and to some degree
in the lesser ones. They are in a sense compensating for the uses to
which they are put as a prey, or element, of universal appetite.
The alewives will not be frightened away, but they will come back with
fear. It is not wise to be too impatient with a child.
_May_
_Declarations_
The colder, and still relatively silent world of April is past. Warm
sunlight runs across trees, sharp shadows, water and sand, with a
penetrating radiance. The alewives now come up the inland stream day
after day. Pale, sun laden, they move against the fast-rushing current,
arousing great excitement in the gulls. The big white and gray birds
hover over, then dive down in a flock where the fish crowd in shallow
water on their way up. The valley is full of marauding and assemblies
and crying out as the fish keep on, rushing and weaving with the stream
flowing over their backs.
And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little
trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like
standing clouds in open woods and valleys throughout the Cape. Pink and
yellow and silvery-green colors begin to appear on the oaks. Anthers
are hanging conspicuously from the pitch pines.
Fish, insects, plants, birds are all, if I can personify them so, in
close and obedient relationship to nature. They count on strength and
protection when they sing or flower out above the ground. They are
in confident relationship to the general being. And so they act with
confidence. They have come. They will be. They declare themselves. The
birds make the dawns sound with a silvery rain of music. On the morning
when a thrush wakes me up, its rippling and melodious peals lifting and
diving through the air, I have an incalculable urge to migrate outward
and claim new territory. Spring tells me I have not had enough.
The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying
along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods,
each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I
think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help
us not only in our geography but to extend our senses.
Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on
flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of
shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home
builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim
a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of
ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often
arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as
a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the
songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land
possession.
The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than
most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred
yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that
would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an
anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a
clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through
the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to
lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if
you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and
listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare.
“Air_tree_!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-_tree_!” continually,
inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like
pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in
the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however
much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what
starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The
towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct
relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the
general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real
and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is
a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with
the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true
awareness.
In the newly unfolding regions of delicate leaves a prairie warbler
sings “Tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee” very rapidly, on an upward
crescendo. A slim little bird, with a yellow breast streaked with
black, its sharp trim beak opens wide as the notes swell out of its
throat, and it seems to send song as far as it can. I think of constant
effort, constant quick hearts. It picks up a light green caterpillar
from the oak leaves and sings as it holds it in its beak. Then the
warbler beats at the insect a little, pecks and shakes it, then
swallows it down; and goes on singing.
An oven bird perches on the oaks and sings, with breast uplifted, tail
shaking, making a glorious effort. How could I dare say that this
bird or another down the road, which accompanies it, is only singing
something that sounds to our ears like “Teacher-teacher-teacher”?
No bird song is alike, even in members of the same species. Each
individual has its variation and seems to derive strength and pleasure
from it. And it seems to me that they not only declare their rights
and titles but are expressing something on behalf of spring. It is as
if they sang: “It is not I. It is not I” but rather, all flowering,
crossing, taking or accumulating, all growth. The song is a part of
earth.
Then there is that bird, a member of the family of mimics, the brown
thrasher, which seems to make a mockery of the whole business. It is
a cinnamon-winged, speckled-breasted, long-tailed bird, with a long
bill and sharp, quick yellow eyes. The male thrasher is certainly as
intense and serious about the duty of staking out his territory as any
other species, but what issues loudly from his open bill seems like
the most comical sort of parody. He may not be as good a mimic as the
mocking bird--which has been known to imitate a flock of blue jays--but
he manages a wonderful take-off on the whole race of birds. He is a
master of a grab bag of trills, chatters, pips and cries, of rasps and
sweetnesses, of sudden blurts, and obvious pauses as if for effect.
Translated into a rapid tempo of words, his song might sound like
this: “Jeremy! Jeremy! Ready here. Right here. Wide awake. Wide
awake. Chipper! Chipper! Shake a leg. Up! Up! Here’s a joker. This
way. This way.” ... an interpretation which probably makes me as
ridiculous as he intended, if he is a serious humorist. In the middle
of this exhortation I hear a comic little “Cucaracha!” or quite a good
imitation of a whippoorwill, as if he saved his more exact skills for a
casual moment.
The thrasher may be just as conditioned in his joy and utterances as
any other bird. His variations on the general bird theme may come out
abstractly, without any attempt at parody, a limited kind of talent,
and yet when I listen to it, it seems to me that the bounds of song are
being just a bit extended. As compared with other birds, the blackpoll
warbler for example, with only a thin, high note, reminiscent of insect
sounds in the summer, the thrasher has range and repertoire. He is
vocal and conversational, even to the extent of tempting at least one
human animal into reading words and intentions into his performance;
and this, from a bird’s point of view, might mean that I was extending
my limits too.
_Facets of Expression_
I make a foolish game out of attaching words to a bird’s song. Perhaps
it is a way of trying to bring the two of us together in familiarity,
but to give nature its true respect, every song, color, and action is
its own master. Understanding, the best human means of communicating
with other lives, might be most effectively attained by keeping a
certain distance.
That is the way I feel when I see the alert, tough little chickadees
coming up to the house and picking up tufts of hair, rope, or wool,
to use as nesting material. They set to work carding it so busily and
self-sufficiently that I am restrained from an impulse to join in and
look things over. I walk off to my own business.
A pair of tree swallows is trying out a birdhouse, and when I stay too
long in the vicinity, they are given an extra reason for a negative
decision as to its merits and fly into the distance. This is a time not
to meddle, tease, interfere, or try to imitate what cannot be imitated.
From that point of view the life of May, free of human embrace, seems
full of wonderful languages, still to be learned, and they are not
confined to the uses of sound. Isn’t a flower or wing or new leaf
articulate? I watch a mourning cloak butterfly that flits and floats
overhead and then lands on a bare patch of ground in the sunlight.
The broad wings fold and show their dark, woody, shadow side, with
little white circles on them, their pattern and texture a blend of
weather-beaten, drab forest floors, suggestive of niches and corners
of leaf-decaying darkness. Then the wings spread out again. They are
a light mahogany-red with shades of brown, bordered by black lines,
and on their bottom edge they are rimmed with little round dashes of
purplish blue, like small windows into the sky, and the body is green.
The butterfly’s antennae have white tips. It has fine hairs on its
back. Then, with a papery, fluttering sound, it is up with startling
quickness from the ground; just out of reach, in the frequent manner of
butterflies, as many a boy with a net has learned from hard experience.
What can we say about the American robin that has not already been
said? All the same, I know him not. He still appears on the spring
grass like a stranger. He lands there, then pauses, holding up his head
for a long time. No worms? Then he runs off on his robin procedure,
abandoning one area for another, where he pauses rigidly again, then
cocks his head. The worm is found. This is assessable behavior. By this
stiff pausing and then tripping ahead, a robin is apparently able to
detect the slightest motion on the ground. We don’t need to look for
the emotion or consciousness of a robin beyond the actions to which
it is stimulated by the immediate need for food. Utility is all. Or
so I have been told. But the robin, like other birds, expresses its
relation to the earth in terms of a set of responses which come from a
head I know nothing about. It is an organism with much higher bodily
temperatures than ours, with a much faster heart beat, burning up
energy at a faster rate. Its experiences are entirely different. Down
there, on that bird level, what is happening? What kind of awareness
does it have, what kind of close, felt proximity to the stirring
ground, the shadows, the lightly running wind?
Even the flowers, as if they were special custodians of those fires
of light that run through May, seem to express more than the value we
have given them. Trim little violets, white, pale blue, or lilac in
color, or pink lady’s-slippers blossom out and mark their separate
places in the sun with beautiful emphasis. Each is significant. Each
is inviolate. And, in a sense, are they not full of motion? In their
growth, their seeding, their provision for continuity and change of
place, are they not free to run away? They fly in the winds. They grow
and they fight for life.
Tiny white chickweed flowers begin to mantle some of our barren
areas, and the plants are so quick and strong in growth, establishing
themselves as if they had too little time, that they seem to be
partners with fish that school and spawn in the sea, or nesting birds.
All the new tumult and excitement combines in what we call spring. Each
facet of it, each life in its own right contributes originality, and
there are communications between them which surprise us--distant, true,
and unerring. I bear witness to them, without quite understanding. One
late evening on the shore, the tide pools stand out like mirrors along
dark sands. The air is cool. Light sparkles over the receding tide.
The distances there, as always, seem sparse and immeasurable. I hear a
sharp, wild cry, and then another, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther
on. Two yellowlegs, I should judge. Theirs are the only sounds, besides
the continuous breathing of the sea. Did one respond to the other?
Whether it did or not, they are linked. The curved coast line is their
orientation, and the wide evening a plane for their cries, and in the
play of spring’s advance it is a recognition, vibrant and unique.
Perhaps we come to some such realization of the greatness of nature’s
expression in spite of ourselves. We measure natural phenomenon with
marvelous accuracy. We are always busy at it, cropping or adding names,
readjusting interpretations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and
dividing. The miracle is still untouched. Why is the mindless flower
less than ourselves and our assessments, or the bird’s reaction less
remarkable? That which is without mind is not necessarily heedless.
Perhaps spring is a manifestation of mind; and its lives, all those
facets of motion and beauty, behave in its context as familiars. Each
responds in terms of an alliance intrinsically known, as with the birds
along their shore.
_Travel_
For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close
enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in
delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind.
There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all
at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living
jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like:
“This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager
appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding
and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or
environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop,
sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it
seems like a gift of extravagance.
Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night.
The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging
a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at
the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half
emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and
then disappears down its hole again.
Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a
cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two
impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of
red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly,
hopelessly.
A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the
shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting
on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and
glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland,
two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female
perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters
above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he
flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of
sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in
the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel
low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.
What I see, what becomes easy to see for any eyes, in the gentle month
of May, is an approach to prodigality. We are not yet bitten, dulled,
and pounded down by population, of insects or men. Blistering droughts
have not come yet, nor excessive rain; but all the component parts
of nature run ahead. Through the alternately warm and cool sweeps of
weather, there is a steady pattern of growth. This is the season of
progression, of fanning out, and as with the trees that have formed
next year’s buds, of provision for the future. The oak leaves which
are limp and tiny to begin with, develop gradually. They toughen and
mature toward their summer function of receiving and storing. They
stretch, darken, and shine, turning from tenderness to ability. So it
is with the fish hatched from the egg, or nesting birds, or the grass
in the ground. To have had a son born this month, as we did, is much in
keeping.
Birth is now the rule. I smell a sweet salt air. White petals drop
gently to the ground. Birds, trees, and plants, life in the ground
below them, are sprung by a constructive light. To follow spring is to
make use of yourself. Join and be. Here is as much expanding energy as
the human spirit could desire. Aspiration meets its counterparts, on
all sides. If, as man says, he represents a climax of sensitivity in
the evolutionary sense, then let him now employ his consciousness for
all it is worth, and not delay.
Spring is loud and rich in its coming, but it is exact too, with a
sustained propriety. Each life is in its place, its shade or full
light. Each, held in the general change and roaming, to its necessity.
Fragile star flowers and wind flowers bloom in the shade of a wood of
beech trees, while out on the open slopes and fields the beach plum
bushes are heavy with fat white blossoms, inviting the sun’s full
strength.
In that valley where the alewives run, a narrow cut between low hills
once made by melt waters from a glacier, and joining fresh-water ponds
to Cape Cod Bay, there is now such a variety of life in such a variety
of places as to challenge travel in all the senses. It reaches from the
fresh-water ponds with their muddy shallows where pickerel weed begins
to put up its stalks, painted turtles sun themselves on rocks out of
the water, and sunfish make their nests along the sandy edges--from
the pond waters gently lapping and smooth surfaces skidded by the
wind--all the way through tidal marshes to the sea whose massive motion
stands beyond us. Each area, first the ponds, then the brook, as it
cascades down rocky slopes, turning as it winds through valley reaches
into a creek, and then a tidal estuary, meeting the sand flats on the
bay shore, each definite part of land or shore, has its newly active,
co-ordinated riches. In the upper end of the valley, just below the
pond outlet where fish ladders are crowded with migrating alewives,
there is a wild and loud screaming of gulls. They wheel constantly over
the stream, and crowds of them settle down on the water, quarreling
over feasts of fish. Below them, black-crowned night herons bob and
stand tall in a grove of pitch pines. When startled, they cluck and
squawk like so many women over a scandal. When one of them flies too
close to the herring gulls, it is chased away.
Two upland plovers skim in fast, crying high. A black duck whirs
up, showing the white under its wings. The land at the edge of the
marsh is full of yellowthroats, warblers with a quick, slurred call:
“Weewiticha, weewiticha, weewiticha,” as it sounds to me, and sometimes
a softer “Chichibee, chichibee, chichibee.” I watch one of these trim
birds. It has a yellow breast and yellow head masked distinctively
with black. It lands in the leaves, whips around, flits, quick and
alert. Its colors fit with shade and sunlight as though it had
been conceived with them--a definite dash of light. In the stream, as
it winds down toward salt water, subject to the rise and fall of the
tide, small groups of alewives run quickly and persistently through
the weaving currents, heading up toward gulls and then the nets and
fishways beyond. I feel energy and motion demanding me. Seen or unseen,
a flying, starting, striding, swimming, and inviting, makes of the
present and its short lives an endlessness.
It is low tide where the channel meets the shore. Warm, hazy air
rises over the bare landscape into an empty, chalky-blue sky. But the
wide-ribbed sands are run over lightly by gold braided waters, light
catchers full of motion, flexing and rippling. Crustaceans dart through
them. Periwinkle tracks straggle across the sands, and the empty shells
of razor clams litter the surface, along with the worm cases stuck with
shells, seaweed and grains of sand, protruding above it; and there are
black horseshoe crabs partly dug in, waiting for the tide to turn.
The three-toed tracks of shore birds are everywhere, and farther out,
through a light wind, a rushing sea sound, I can hear gulls calling
low, muttering among themselves, and the unmistakable harsh cry of a
tern.
Sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, ruddy turnstones, are dipping up
and down, scuttling, or tripping ahead as they feed. In the distance
the turnstones, mottled black and brown, with short red legs, look a
little like quail.
Two herring gulls are pulling hard at a sand shark, stranded by a tide,
or perhaps killed by some fishing boat when it was brought up in the
nets. They work at it furiously, tugging and tearing from both sides,
since the sand shark’s hide is like sandpaper and many times as thick
and tough. When I come up, I can see that they have not managed to
do much more than tear out some of the flesh from its head and neck.
Judging by the tracks on the sand, they must have been hauling it
around for some time.
Far far out, I thought I saw a man digging for clams on the flats, but
after walking for half a mile in that direction, I am astonished to
see a yearling deer starting in a leisurely way toward the land. It
had probably browsed its way out, nibbling at bits of tender seaweed,
licking salt, encountering no danger in the expansive room that borders
land and sea. Now, with the motion of its long legs showing in all
detail as I have never seen them in fields or woods, the deer starts
to run slowly, with an almost loose loping. It stops, looks around
uneasily, and then the legs unlimber again, but hesitantly. It looks
suddenly in my direction; and bounds and bucks away, its legs now
working with tense speed. Through my field glasses I find a man and a
boy on the beach. Seeing them, the animal changes course, gathers more
speed, and when it reaches the shore, dashes up the sloping beach and
disappears into a green line of shrubs and low trees.
[Illustration]
The separations on these sand flats are vast. Where the narrow inland
water course issues out, nothing is so well defined as space. For the
variety of action here and in thousands of miles of deep water beyond,
range is the rule, and the brook leads to the sea as all things lead to
each other. Our meetings have scarcely begun.
_June_
_The Garden_
“June, June, I beg your pardon, for walking in your garden” is a phrase
from an old song, which expresses the delicacy you might feel on
some moonlit night about treading a path through fragile shadows and
flowers, or intruding by day on their young beauty. The song expresses
it succinctly; but the fact of the matter is that the June garden is
suddenly so rich and widespread that there are no paths to walk on.
It is unavoidable. I find myself wondering how it happened--how it
happened that I now take it for granted. My small daughter asked me the
other day whether or not the trees wore leaves in the wintertime. She
was not quite sure. We have come back to fruition unawares.
The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three
months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and
have already forgotten what a great and elaborate process it was. I
can remember--or I have it in writing (the aid to memory)--that on the
twenty-fifth of March there was a light snow in the morning, and that
the temperature was well below freezing, with strong north winds all
day. The significance of the twenty-fifth comes from its often being
used as an average date for the first sound of the spring peepers. That
day the whole idea seemed impossible. And yet they sang, two evenings
later. Of course the whole year is the scene of birth and growth.
Spring is not the sole custodian of arrival. There are flowers that
bloom in the autumn. But that was our last beginning, in immediate
terms. We have lived through what followed with only the scantiest kind
of recognition, to arrive now with a great new crowd of shapes and
sounds filling the distance, in the muscular swing of light. Flowery
grasses, wild flowers like vetch, daisies, coreopsis, buttercups, and
hundreds of others, head up, shoot forth, dance in the sun and compete
with one another for living space--part of the rush and race of life
we take for granted. The fact that we do take it for granted may be
the best proof of our deep connection with it, as with all the natural
rounds of the year. We breathe and give birth and die in terms of the
same force as these surroundings. It is less articulate with us than
realized. The new measures have a steady underlying order which pulses
in us like the tides. So I suddenly look around me and find the whole
earth peopled with motion and quantity, searching and adjustments, and
I find it familiar.
In the warm air the land seems bound together by a whir ticked off
in the grass by field crickets, lighted at night by the slow-dancing
fireflies, intensified on the millions of new leaf surfaces, petals,
and stems, where insects alight, crawl, and eat, many races pursuing
their separate ways, aligned with thousands of life communities in
function and in act.
June has gone green, with a staggering assumption of authority. The dry
land ferns stretch stiff and wide like fans. The huckleberry bushes are
springing with light green. The oaks heave and rise with their bounty
of fresh leaves. Meadows along the shore are green with samphire; and
marsh grasses, still low, looking close-cropped above the dark peat or
through rushing waves at high tide.
On the lee side of a stone jetty thrusting out from the shore the
water is full of plankton. Tiny marine animals, like barnacle larvae,
copepods, baby jellyfish, are being gently carried and lifted by the
surf. They are whirled and drifted in the water as it swells and ebbs.
There is a beautiful symmetry in these fragile, transparent animals. I
notice tiny beads of air along the sides of some of the jellyfish.
In some inland waters joined by inlets to the sea, there are massive
numbers of adult jellyfish at this time of year, pulsing slowly
through green waters, like transparent animal flowers. The riches of
the water, fresh or salt, are immeasurable.
More and more adult alewives are returning to the sea after spawning in
ponds and lakes, running back through marsh lands filled with cattails,
wild iris, rushes, and arrowheads. Behind them they leave their
progeny, which have in fact been hatching out for the past two months,
and are gradually becoming so numerous as to interfere with the sport
of fishing. These “bait fish” feed bass, pickerel, and perch, which now
refuse to react to a mere fly or worm, having more than enough to eat.
There are no waters, no wood or square yard of ground not sounding and
moving with new life. A wild readiness, a fluency is here. Within its
terrestrial order and confinement everything seems incalculably bold.
Now is the time to run ahead. Now, even for our special race, is the
time to take the necessary risk of new connections, new affinities.
This is a world of alliances.
I walk through a wood of trees--which might be in Cape Cod, Japan, or
Siberia--their gray trunks spotted with dancing shadows, a naked wealth
in motion, thinking that a man might find himself for the first time
in this company, not because of would-be similarities--sap and blood,
branches and arms--but because of a context which they share. I am an
organism that can make a choice. The tree is not; nor can it suffer.
To simplify the matter too much, I am an animal. The tree is a plant.
But in the whole environment, with its intertwining events, its varying
energies, each form of life joins and takes part. In this wood, while
the wind blows across us and yellow light dances through, I think that
even a man and trees, with their vastly different responses, may be
together, players in a sunlight game.
[Illustration]
_Room to Spare_
June is a fullness. There is no part of land and shore not imbued with
warmth and covered with manifestations of strength and capacity, but
the season moves on. It changes to new measures continually, beautiful
in substance but hard to grasp, like a flock of sanderlings swinging
and spinning in unison along the bright sands, or a school of fish. How
do they keep together? What is their communication? Even a forest of
apparently rigid trees has a coherence and order of its own, perhaps a
sensibility, since it goes through all periods of existence. Everywhere
I look there is spacing, and at the same time mutual attraction, in
rhythmic display, as though the laws of space were inherent in every
action and bound in every organism. The play of the universe is
what I sense in its living instruments, and my own, often borrowed,
interpretations stop far short of its magnitude.
Out of the whole possible range of communication (and it seems to me to
go beyond possibility) each species embodies a special response. Its
senses react in a unique and selective way toward its surroundings.
It is true of the frog. What does it hear that we cannot? It is true
of the fish. How does it orient itself in the water? What does it
feel? What explains the sensitivity of some plants to touch? Each have
motions, and in a sense languages, of their own.
How can I understand the hundreds of moths that crowd the screen door
at night? They have all manner of shapes. When I shine my flashlight
on them their eyes glow with an amber fire. They flutter against the
screen, and when I turn the inside light off, fly away immediately.
This is a sensitivity to light and darkness that has its parallels in
the butterflies attracted to flowers of a particular color. They are
selective in their behavior and perhaps restricted at the same time.
And yet, huddled, crawling, landing, and flying off, concentrated in
numbers as they are, they suggest a dark realm of action and context to
me. In spite of their reactions their terms are unknown. It is these
untouched areas which must attract any man who begins to be aware of
them--as though we ourselves had something in us not yet understood.
Where the mystery is, may be the reality.
What we see, even from the outside looking in, is rhythmic performance,
not a series of static events. Balance and rhythm are the rules of
action, understood in depth by moth or fish. Each race, unknown to
the other, plays its own game, follows its own senses, and yet is in
balance with the rest of life. The rules of natural abundance are the
rules of space--not almost constant destruction and collision between
living things but obedience to their given orbits.
Many people have the idea, perhaps because of a human fascination with
violent events, that nature is compounded of just such rigidities--dog
eat dog, or tiger eat horse--or obversely, that nothing happens at
all. Nature is either a menace or a great bore. Could I expect, going
to some pond or water hole concentrated with life to find all kinds of
mutual slaughter going on? At the edge of any small pond I see action
enough this time of year. Many tadpoles hurry off in all directions
at my footfall. I hear a bullfrog’s noble plucked bass sounding among
the pickerel weed, while dark gray catbirds cry in thickets along the
shore. A great antediluvian animal, a snapping turtle, with a fat
black shell, a thick, fat head and neck, and large lidded eyes like a
dog, climbs out of the water to lay its eggs on a sandy bank above.
Its movements are slow and massive, each leg lifted as it goes. Only
a sudden, lunging, upward snap as I tease it with a stick, shows what
quick ferocity it is capable of. In the still pond waters there are
schools of tiny, newly hatched fish, big-eyed, big-headed, with minute
pin-sized bodies, running and twitching in rhythmic solidarity. A
yellow perch runs by, and then a horned pout roves through the fry with
apparent disregard. It passes near a sunfish nest, a little round,
cleared depression on the bottom. The sunfish sallies after it in a
short dash and then returns to hover over its nest, its fringed tail
waving gently. In spite of our expectations, any aggression here is
latent rather than actual, and need, it is clear, has room and time to
spare.
Co-ordination is intrinsic to the life of an environment, acted upon
by every predator. There will be no fight between the sunfish and the
horned pout, but the sunfish has affirmed its ancient rights to the
territory that comprises its nest. It is bold in defense of its home,
up to the point, presumably, that it goes beyond a boundary which its
feelings establish for it. I am reminded of those birds, like the
herring gulls and their “threat postures” (described by N. K. Tinbergen
in _The Herring Gull’s World_, 1954) assumed when two birds defend
their respective positions on either side of a boundary invisible to
us but strongly felt by them. In these cases a fight may never result,
because the two alternate drives of defense and aggression cancel each
other out. What the trained observer sees as an indication of what is
going on are “behavior patterns,” types of physical action that show
him what this gull communication might mean. In any case, up and down
the scale of life is force and counterforce, action and reaction, in a
balance that is understood in as many ways as there are species.
The lusty month of June is made up of all its encounters, many of them
savage in isolation; but we may look for Roman circuses in vain. Wait
all day and no life seems to devour another. Wait all year and you
may never see the fight you are looking for. Now and then to be sure,
as with an abundance of fish and their marauding predators, you can
see savagery and greed confined, but even so the lesson is the same.
It is not killing, eating, and aggression which seem paramount but an
over-all rhythm and balance in which they are only elements. Later on,
between July and December, the young alewives hatched out this spring
in pond waters will start returning to the sea. I have often seen
them as they go down the fish ladders by which their spawning parents
came up. Perhaps through some attraction to the water’s force where it
spills down hard over the concrete rims of each pool in the ladder,
the fingerlings mass and circle before dropping back downstream. It
is here that a number of eels, some of them of large size, coil and
slither through the water, and eat large quantities of fish. Eels are
largely nocturnal in habit, but they do go through periods of feeding
by day. Sometimes they act like eating machines, methodically grabbing
one little fish after another; but the alewives continually swim over
them, unregarding. Where the fish idle in the stream below, in less
turbulent, clearer water, perfectly capable of seeing any eels lying
in wait for them, they are in no way affected, so far as I can see.
The eels themselves, lying on the stream bottom for long periods after
eating, pay no attention while the little alewives swim over them. Here
is a strange relation between enemies.
It is perfectly true that a young alewife may not know an eel from a
stick unless it is directly attacked, being in some respects oblivious
to much of anything except the need to migrate to salt water. And
yet the point is not that they are “stupid,” but that their crowd
lives demand a cohesive rhythm, sensitive enough in action, which
is paramount to all risks they encounter. It is in fact their main
protection. They school and eat. They school and escape. They school
and perpetuate themselves. The solitary alewife is lost. These fish
move and intercommunicate in a frame of continuity to which they are
forever held. But can we call it a restriction? Its terms may be quite
invisible to us.
_The Binding Rain_
So this is, or was, Cape Cod, as June booms with fruition. The nights
throb; and on a clear one how the long frames of the stars line up
overhead! There is no end of internment, no end of use and opening out.
It is not the place I came to, out of the city, though its shape,
like a giant curved arm, or fish hook lying out in the Atlantic, is
the same. Its oak trees have grown, even in the comparatively few
years I have lived here. The old, gray-shingled houses are still in
evidence, but there are many more new ones, seemingly temporary as this
age goes. The shores are crowded, beginning toward the end of June.
We are scrambling to take advantage of our summer economy while it
lasts, although the buzz saw sounds the year through, as well as the
chickadees, building motels, summer cottages, gas stations, houses for
the retired. Cape Cod still has a certain itinerant quality, which may
ally it to its more seagoing past.
In my own terms the Cape is not the same. I have outlived my dependence
on its past. I go by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones
with less interest. The “old characters” are not around to talk to any
more. I am not quite so fascinated by grown-over wagon tracks as I used
to be. Something pleasant is lost--even a blessed continuity. Still, I
have learned to look for another, which has no particular choice as to
place, joining them all.
This is not just “natural history” I have found, unless you are also
willing to call it “natural mystery.” This is life, or death-in-life,
as well as “nature.” In any case it is bountiful, or niggardly,
relentless, terrible, but always at hand. Only walk out and see. Cape
Cod is rife with unknown lives (and what I know about its ocean waters
is not worth mentioning). Where do we begin? With a first question
perhaps. To make it is to recover from being afraid of getting or
giving the wrong answer, a step toward knowledge.
I have not learned much about cell structure, or the delicate
co-ordination of organisms in their environment, or some of those
remarkable mechanisms that trigger action in certain plants or animals
of land and sea; but I have made that first step.
I stand by some pond, wondering how deep it is. Everything around me
says, in comparative silence: “As deep as you make it,” and I have no
need to think my questions will delay the source that leads them on.
The rolling energies of nature remind us of our own potentialities.
In a small country field is all existence and its hazards. Ponderous
storms, killing balances of cold and heat, great rains or droughts,
hang over the needs of its competitive inhabitants. A natural,
unimpeachable violence wipes out untold numbers, or holds them to its
order. And yet the plants and animals themselves that endure, survive,
and die prove an essential vigor in the process. It is not only a
matter of “food gathering” and “competition” for them. They fight the
winds, in rhythmic unity. They are made to face the universe, with
the universe inside them. Their motions, their changing adaptation
to circumstance, are also their great self-expenditure. Live and be
finished off, but above all live!
This Cape Cod, this special piece of America, has its unexampled
strength and a “progress” which will not take second place to our
own. Sun and rain, the capacities of earth, the mindless ways of the
flower, the strange and short sensitivities of the insects in their
other world, the brooding sea in its ominous tidal balance held by moon
and turning globe, all this matrix of energy has its standards and its
abiding needs.
It rains steadily as the tourists begin to drive down the Cape in ever
increasing numbers, thus abashing their spirits. Rain is a nuisance.
It keeps us in and deprives us of perpetual warmth and light. If there
were no rain? Drought is only on the surface. Water comes from pipes,
the way milk comes from refrigerator cars.
But the rain will not be stopped. Clean, cool, straight falling,
pattering on multitudinous leaves, it insists on its own power and
propriety. There is no wind. The calm gray sky is gently, loosely
moving, but held dead center with its riches of rain. The fall is
steady and fast above the treetops, with single drops ticking off from
each waxen leaf, sliding down the pine needles to end at their tips in
brilliant crystal eyes. With a thin long seething it spits and spats
and trickles on, pausing occasionally, then putting forth again. The
water lands on the dead leaf floor under the trees, or thick beds of
needles, sliding and soaking through, making gradual displacements
between litter and soil, stirring gently, providing the life of earth
its refreshment and guaranteeing its sustenance.
Between pond lilies and reeds the rain spatters the fresh water. It
changes the lakes and ponds as it changes the earth. The water level
moves up and down from year to year depending on the rainfall. In
a pond it will move up the rim and cover the roots of overhanging
shrubs--blueberries, alders, or swamp azaleas--then, after a year or
two, it will recede again, revealing a narrow beach. During the years
there will be continual, subtle alterations in the nature of plants
around the pond, and in the habits of the animals dependent on them.
The rain falls through woodland bogs, and open swamps. It trickles
down bare slopes and thicket-studded valleys. It runs over incessantly
moving brooks and streams that bear it toward the sea. Its drops bounce
with silvery emphasis across the waters of the slow, gray tidal inlets.
They sound like a breath along the sands, and while arrowlike terns are
excitedly diving for fish, they pock the silver-streaked levels of the
bay, and then are lost to sight, pattering out over massive waters.
Even and sweet the descent, calm and clean its provision. The rain
thrusts in and guarantees immediate growth. It binds the birds to
the insects to the plants, to sun and air, breaking down elements in
the soil, loosening it for billions of its travelers, making sure of
sustenance in that release. Rain sound in June, which at other seasons
may cut like a knife, is one of beatitude. I listen. I accept. It
carries me on. Out of the hollow mind of the universe what conceptions
may come in the millions and millions of years ahead? How many, in the
next spit of timelessness, will fall prey to disaster? Both calm and
calamity are in the cards. This is acceptable enough to life in nature.
And who am I to claim some vain detachment?
Transcriber’s Notes
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
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