of the senses, as though it were ready with amazing new suggestions.
One sharply cold morning when snow lies fresh on the ground I stop by
the cemetery where the Blacks are buried, on my way to town. There
is something about this day that asks attention. It sings. Pure
crystalline masses creak underfoot. The tune of the cold finds an edge
on my bones. Pines, stiff cedars, locust trees, hard ground and stone,
all share in resonance, being forged and tempered by the cold. The
little graveyard hill is a tympanum, or sounding board, very highly
pitched, so powerfully taut, being plucked very lightly by the air with
sharp whispers and twanging sounds being sent across the snow, that it
might be ready to send one chord, incomparably new, into the whole sky.
I start to go away, but a tiny, almost casual trill separates itself
from the vibrations of the cold. I keep listening and in a few seconds
see a bird rounding the branch of a cedar tree, not twenty feet
away. Working in and out of the branches, coming in to view and then
disappearing again, is a flock of purple finches, eating cedar berries.
The males are washed with a raspberry color that keeps appearing
through the dark green masses of the tree like intermittent lights,
hints of fruitfulness in the winter’s containment.
Suddenly, surprisingly, a light brown, speckled veery appears on the
open branch of a locust. This summer bird, out in the glittering cold,
seems to have a startled, wildly timid look in its eyes. Its slim body
hesitates, with the problem of aloneness perhaps, or direction, or food
in this white earth that has cut so cruelly into its subsistence. Then
it flies off into a wood of pitch pines, and I hear a low sound, the
mere snatch of a thrush’s warbling.
Just by stopping for ten minutes instead of hurrying on, I have been
put into a new relation with the morning, and have seen a singularity
and sacredness to all its parts. It could happen in Moscow or New York.
A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the
stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and
yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There
is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns
through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a
huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings
and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me.
I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical
backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories
high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and
its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies ... every
now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm.
On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping,
flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of
the building--dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they
are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a
purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart.
Then I am back down the street again with my own tribe that teems with
general might and inner purposes of its own, going and returning--out
continually--representatives of a force of mind that can gauge the
mechanics of the universe, and in animal power overrunning the earth. I
see in these shoppers an evolutionary line of vision never satisfied,
a history of cities, ledges of light running to unknown futures.
The world is in the hands of these omnipresent and familiar beings,
the young and the old, black-haired, brown, yellow, or gray, in the
indefinite shapes and interchanges of their lives--the human race
hurrying through its own lighted ways. And if I shouted: “Stop! Look
away from yourselves. Consider the starlings!” with what sort of mild
madness would I be credited?
_January_
_Exposure_
It is said that winter, being the season when the sun shines on us
obliquely, is a period of death, or, as the dictionary puts it, of
“dreariness, old age and decay.” We are being deprived of a portion of
original energy, and recognize occasionally that if we were out far
enough, in as extreme and bare a relationship to the cold as the birds,
but without their equivalent in insulation, we would have a hard time
surviving (though birds are also perishable and have their share of
disease and death from starvation). But we take care of ourselves, in
such an elaborate and consuming way, that the grand extremes of weather
may only succeed in being a nuisance. The freezing weather deepens this
month, after a few days of moderate warmth at the start, and I am free
to complain about the heat bills. The car skids and turns a half circle
on the highway, which is covered with glare ice one morning, and I am
afraid, not for myself so much as for my new car. How could I manage
that ten miles back without it? Self-protection may be all that winter
means to us, though it is a term that can only be comparative in an age
of manufactured violence.
Suddenly there is a tremendous thud above us that jars and rocks the
house. It seems to tug at the vitals of the earth and would cause us
more than mere shock if we were not aware that it is a plane breaking
the sound barrier, thousands of feet in the air. A minute or two later
I hear a familiar gabbling, a mixed bugling, overhead, and run out to
see twenty Canada geese, hurrying fast down the north wind in four
separate flocks aligned in flight. With their long necks stretched out
and strong wings beating they are fleeing for their lives, frightened
up from winter feeding grounds along the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The
earth, for the time being at least, is committed to mankind. The geese
cannot so frighten _us_. They are innocent of ways to “control their
environment.”
Then there is almost complete silence again, and I understand what is
meant by the “dead of winter.” Under the cold blue stare of the sky
nothing seems to be happening. Each sound--a crow cawing, a car on the
road, the rustle and clink of a clump of dead oak leaves--is by itself,
occupying wide, unpopulated plains. Without the wind, the air too
presses on me, with a cold weight. I walk through its depths, feeling
it against my face, and suddenly realize that limited sea of oxygen in
which we live, this side of outer space and its violet darkness.
This silence may be just as alarming to some people as a “sonic boom.”
Nothing seems to be going on. There is an intensity of rest. The demand
for something new is unsatisfied. There are men who stray into nature
from a city’s booming, reassuring hive, and are frightened by being
caught in necessity--one of the year’s cold, unspeaking tides. Perhaps
they also recognize how much the sun provides us with other than
pleasant company. There is a winter in us from which we will not soon
escape into warmth and joy.
Still, this frozen land contributes to a global art. It is cold and
silent here because it is hot and loud in India. And how can we spread
our wings without a knowledge of deprivation? While I am closed in
I know there are redstarts wintering in Mexico and arctic terns in
the Antarctic, and when I greet them on their return it will not be
only because they have come home (a bird’s nest is not a house but a
platform from which to start), but because home comprises so large
an area. Some birds, if they survive their first year, will reappear
in the vicinity of the place where they were reared. So will salmon,
shad, and alewives, returning to their parent stream after years
of absence. We are conscious of the great amount of space their
journeying requires. Species of fish or birds show great variation in
the extent of their migrations, and the whole pattern is wider than
a continent. Their movements are not only consistent with periodic
motions of climate, weather, the tides, but may be visible evidence
of earth changes that go back for incredible lengths of time. They
require an unrestricted measure for their lives and deaths. Men alter,
restrict, or use up, to suit their needs and fancy. Then they move
elsewhere. I see that one of the young men who has been designated
for training in space flight, an “Astronaut,” says he accepted the
challenge of being sent aloft in a capsule because we were “running
out of interesting things to do down here.” The destruction and denial
of earth’s resources must have gone farther than we realize. But the
life journeys continue, from one sunny round to another, over the earth
and its wide-ranging waters. How much we must be missing, even in the
wintertime!
Before dawn, after the windless day, the temperature drops to 10
degrees. A walloping, tugging, brutal wind sets in. The frost so
rigidifies the needles of the pines, burning into their cells, that
they look dark and scorched. I feel as if the rigid and dizzy earth
were being kicked around, rocked like a topheavy boat--the trees its
masts. The wind cries: “Remember poverty!” and I go gasping for breath
through the fierce air, feeling as perishable as a moth. We may be
having the mere taste of an extreme, but this penury weather is huge
and mighty all the same. It is the result of a Labrador storm one
thousand to two thousand miles in extent. Its balanced fury tests all
it meets.
On this kind of day I am an inland lover. To be wind-cut and
sandblasted serves no good human end. As if in general proof of that,
I meet no more than a car or two on the highway, and see no one on the
streets of the town. The shore is desolate, hissing with driven sand.
On the surface the bay waters in the distance are being stiff-armed
and flung away. New ice, morose and slow, is nudged by an outgoing
tide in the inlet at Paine’s Creek. Gulls drift slowly upwind like
clouds. And on the wide tidal flats--the searing, biting, turbulent
grounds--groups of Canada geese are stalking through shallow purple
waters that reach, wind-scudded, over shoals of peat. Then a new
group wheels in low and settles down with the rest. I can hear their
honking under the sound of wind and sand. Beyond them, in steely waters
speckled green, is a small flock of black ducks.
This is no inanimate landscape. Under the given power, the
abandon of the wind, the restrictiveness of the cold, is still an
all-containing balance. I listen to those famous travelers the geese
as they communicate and am taken a little further out on violent and
unreceptive grounds, past my own shivering.
Inland again, listening, taking shelter in the lee of the wind, just
as a rabbit jumps away from me and runs under a tangle of bull briar,
I am conscious of all the unseen hiding and endurance around me. What
else moves here, beside the wind that suddenly rushes in and roars so
loud that it makes the trees groan and the large round clouds hurry
on? The trees, swaying and creaking, are the most obvious, the most
exposed. They are half dead, rigid, hard, inert. The sap coagulates
in the extreme cold. I cut a twig with my knife and the pitch is dark
and frozen. The trees in their containment, adapted to less water and
light, getting scarcely any nutriment, are able to make their stand in
the open while other lives must hide.
In the late afternoon the ground stirs harshly. Leaves run in dead
abandon. The wind seems to sound a burst of doom, and then seethes in
lively rage. A dead limb cracks. I am on the trigger edge of ultimate
need. Blue-gray clouds hang over the shaking fingers of the trees.
There is a collective power that flays us all, without discrimination.
The shadows have left the earth. Light stays in the sky, and then
begins to go. There are rims of pale electric light in the west. Long
cloud shoals, now white and pearly gray, stand against wide bands of
blue and mauve and pink, like the baked desert cliffs of the Southwest.
Finally, and I feel all finality, as the ringing air sheds down
enormous heavy cold, received numbly by the earth, the sky turns a
startling gemlike blue. We are turned into night. The sky’s mineral
beauty shifts to pure blackness lighted by the stars. There is an
almost shrilling intensity in the air above the earth-binding wind, and
I am conscious of nothing but height, height beyond reach.
_Ice on the Ponds_
The air is crystalline and the sunlight through the pitch pine needles
gives them a glassy sheen. This is one of those rare times when almost
all of Cape Cod’s innumerable ponds are iced over and the children can
go skating after school. It has been consistently cold for weeks, with
comparatively little snow, and the pond surfaces tempt all skaters to
soar.
But we have had a day and a half of thawing weather. When my young
daughter and I go to a pond to skate, we hear its fine whomping sound
as it expands under the sun’s warmth. What looks like jagged broken
bits of crystal, catching light on the surface, turn out to be part
of the ice structure, thawing ice refrozen. We find hundreds of water
spiders frozen in around the edge where yesterday they had been brought
out into the water by rain and comparative warmth, and on the way we
found a dead worm on top of frozen ground. So some animals are flung
around with the season and respond fatally to chance. They belong to an
allowance left over from December. Then it ends, and the day hardens
like the ice. It is as though the helpless were not to be allowed their
helplessness for some time to come.
To skate on a long stretch of unmarked ice, over green reflected
clouds, with the sound of clear air swishing past your face, is to
voyage, full sail. It is a shining freedom, and our only competition
is in play, to skid and turn and rush like water birds in the
springtime--the only hardship a bruising fall. Under black holes we can
see down to the bottom of the pond, where there are little forests of
green moss and water plants, very still and soft. Suddenly a diving
beetle swims quickly and erratically across and then a slow tadpole
moves into sight. There is enough sun-induced warmth in the shallow
water at the pond’s edge to allow life more play, though in that
respect a pond is easier on its inhabitants than the land. With its
cover of ice it is now in a state of “winter stagnation.” There are
frogs buried in the mud and fish moving sluggishly in cold, stabilized
waters. But this is an environment which always allows activity in at
least some of its inhabitants throughout the year. Its extremes and
revolutions of temperature bear little comparison with those of the
land. Our hazards are of a sterner kind.
When we kneel on the ice, where the mobile sky is reflected, and
look down in, the water world seems half awake and half asleep, half
tropical and half glacial. The waters are almost motionless over
intermittent green carpets and through their black depths. The whole
being of the pond seems to move independently of our surface storms. It
has a heart of its own.
The winter land is a harder environment, though we sometimes make
more of its rigidity than we need to. At the pond’s edge I brush past
a bayberry bush, and its dried, dark gray berries smell as pungently
and herbaceously as they did when ripe--waxen and pewter colored--in
the fall. There are checkerberry or partridgeberry plants rimming the
pond. In fact they grow well through the acid earth of these woodlands,
and their shiny leaves stay green throughout the winter. They are also
called wintergreen, or mountain tea, and their leaves taste spicy and
aromatic. Are we still common enough to make new names instead of
numbers, implying that familiarity, touch, and association have not
been left behind?
You know the checkerberry, hugging the ground with shiny, flavored
leaves, tiny bell-like flowers pure white in the late spring, bright
red berries in the autumn. Something to say hello to, and not
merely to recognize as _Gaultheria procumbens_ and pass by. To name
means to know, love--perhaps even to laugh at. The fact that the
checkerberry has so many other common names is a human distinction.
Consider: grouseberry, spiceberry, oneberry, chicken-berry, deerberry,
groundberry, hillberry, ivyberry, boxberry, teaberry, greenberry,
ivy-plum, chinks, drunkards, red pollen, rapper-dandies, wax cluster,
redberry tea, Canadian tea. They dance in friendship. I have been told
that the name “Drunkards” comes from the use of checkerberry tea as a
remedy for a hangover, but am unable to corroborate it.
While I am pulling off my skates and chewing on a spicy leaf, a trim,
round little chickadee comes within four feet of me and twitters and
scolds. Then two warier golden-crowned kinglets show up suddenly in a
nearby shrub, crying: “Tseet! Tseet!” and flit away. We climb up the
steep sides of the pond and face the slopes toward the north. Bold
gusts of wind strike us. Stiff briars and branches whip us as we walk
along a narrow path, and the play of winter sunlight through the clouds
goes lively across the grasses and through the gray trees.
_Contrast and Response_
January seems grim and contained. This is not the time to expect life
to declare itself. Even local human circumstances are such as to
prove a kind of gray waiting. While the rest of the world retires in
Florida, counts change in New York, or struggles with vast new shifts
and divided aims, Cape Cod stays down, and holds on. The population
is five times less than that of the summer. It is the barren, exposed
peninsula it used to be, with the exception of the new woodlands and
all the cottages. We are linked by highway and modern communicatory
apparatus with the rest of the continent, but in this season there is
a feeling of diminished wants. The human pulse begins to rise in April
or May, when people paint and refurbish their motels and cottages in
preparation for the great migration of vacationists. Now the economy
subsists more on expectation than fulfillment. The human squirrels
have stored away their acorns. The forage is thin in January for all
inhabitants.
The weather roams still, with our surrounding waters. Why live here but
for the reason that there is always an element of sufficient grandeur?
Although the sea might not be visible for the motels and trailers
before your eyes, a few miles, or a few yards, brings its untouched
enormity into view. The sky is wide, and the ocean waters are still
breathing loud or low with fruitful magnitude. They are at the end of
every road. And when the foghorn bawls from Chatham like a lost cow, we
know that there are still headlands and ships, the uncalculated and the
unknown.
On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and
breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak
forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more than two feet high, as
well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark
clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows
and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The
vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and
tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of
snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in,
sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.
The sea beyond is full of long waves that take the low sunlight of late
afternoon and swoop and fall with it. They come in from the distance
and then rise as they approach the shore, showing their marbled, curved
surfaces, to pause at the crest and plunge down. A stiff north wind
holds them back a little. Manes of spray whip back at their cresting
and when they fall the spray rises up almost vertically. Just inshore,
where the breakers fling in their prows along the sloping beach, the
waters foam with constant movement, in and out, all bubbling and
shifting with a turbulent milk, whose surface looks opalescent--colors
of blue, green, and pink bordered by heavy pearl. And what a sound! A
thundering, a loud fermentation, with an occasional great soft clash of
waves like cymbals, the long surf roaming and lunging in the evening
light for miles and miles. From where I stand on the cliff top I can
see a little group of men and children jumping and throwing sticks and
stones into the surf. They run back and forth with its rhythm, playing
touch and go with it, running to keep warm in the wind, playing as if
they had to, dancing for the surf’s thunder. They laugh, shout, hurl
driftwood into it. They jump and wave their arms as the water reflects
their images, just on the fringe of an immense, terrible beauty,
responding with an antic kind of love.
The sea provides a cold, unfathomed latitude in the tightness of
January. On land too there is a kind of under-rhythm of things allowed,
or rather a special winter pace and timing, each life with its
relation to the cold. The thin light and air seem to define the leeway.
Thick snow showers slant in. Sky, hills, and shore are blotted out.
There is nothing to be seen but the naked trees, the oak leaves like
tattered old flags holding against the wind that kicks the flakes
ahead. The storm abates into gusts, and occasional sweeps of snow
with blue patches blown clear in the sky. At each advent of this blue
clarity, with sharp spun strands of light coming in from the sun, the
birds respond. Snow swirls. Wind seethes. There is nothing to be seen
but a tree sparrow or a chickadee at the bird feeder. Then the blue
patches show again and the earth clears to vision. A flock of juncos
fly in, or a blue jay glides through; a red-tailed hawk screams in the
sky. It is as if they were all puppets dancing for their master light.
[Illustration]
Special response is as much a part of winter as extreme reaction or
withdrawal. I see this in the birds. I hear it in the yawing creaks of
a pine, in dead leaf stir, wind speech, in their collaboration. I feel
it in the quality of the season, its rigid shocks, its holding hard and
letting go, its suspense and trigger edges, the obedience it calls for,
the inertness and tight compliance.
Within the temperature range permitted it, life now shows many
hairbreadth balances. Some marine animals “deactivate” during the
winter--the equivalent of that coma and lowered metabolism which is
called hibernation in the woodchuck or the chipmunk. If no ice blocks
are in the way, and I can walk out over the offshore flats, I find
periwinkles still holding on to rocks or driftwood, but obviously
slowed down almost to a stop. On the other hand, common rock barnacles
breed during the winter months as far north as Delaware and New Jersey,
sending out eggs which will hatch in cold sea water into free-swimming
larvae. And there is a red crab in Boston Harbor which stays active
throughout the winter.
When it gets abnormally cold, shellfish “supercool.” They have a
freezing nucleus and will survive if not suddenly jarred.
Adaptation to ranges in temperature varies enormously. Some plants and
animals die when the temperature drops beyond a certain point, and
others when they are released too quickly from freezing temperatures.
Some animals avoid the cold by migrating, or they are able by
specialized habits to eat and survive as permanent residents.
The conditions of life in its natural environment, whether land or
water, vary from place to place, although the sea, for example, is
less extreme and difficult than is the land. Such conditions may show
dramatic contrasts in areas that are fairly close together. Because
of the influence of the Labrador Current, the waters to the north of
Cape Cod are colder than those to the south, where they are influenced
by the Gulf Stream. As a result, there are some species of marine
invertebrates which exist on one side of the Cape but not the other.
The frog, a cold-blooded animal whose tissues approximate the
temperature around it, lies in the cold mud, sometimes in blocks of
ice, an intrinsic part of winter. The blue jay, on the other hand, is
less helpless, and is able to forage above the ice and snow. Like man,
it has an internal temperature of its own, regardless of the weather;
although man is without the insulation of feathers or fur. A thing
apart, I run to my house, my city, the tunnels of my society, in order
to escape the cold. I wonder, though, whether this mental animal, a
great experiment in complexity, is not as perilously balanced as any
simple organism, a mussel or a clam, in the extremes of temperature and
environment.
_February_
_Secrets in the Open_