withdrawn.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.