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.
* * * * *