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_