Then the vice tightens again. Below freezing temperatures take hold,
putting a new strain on plants and trees lately thawed. It is not
steady, continuous cold that now threatens life, but the shifts between
freezing and thawing--alternates in the caprices of energy. We are not
allowed to open our pores and eyes too much, lest we be taken unawares,
stopped as we try to start again.
I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that
the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles
greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to
say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual
increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already
reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen
ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The
ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a
skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something
to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song.
Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it
feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy,
crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring
town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when
the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy
walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the
other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and
watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of
the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but
its name--the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door.
A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any
insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away
saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going
out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster
and responds so readily to accidents?
I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter
and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of
a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather ...
hidden fires almost seen.
In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the
ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The
sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running
slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release
I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I
find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling
over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground
just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of
scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a
starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber
over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and
rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.
Something says stand and wait, look out and over; and when I do life
stirs, assembles, and flies. The yellow marsh grasses sway beyond me.
Ice shines white in the drainage ditches. A flicker, sun loaded, flies
over to the far side. Tall dry reeds rattle together.
In silence, a female purple finch lands on a tree facing the wind, its
breast shining in the light. I hear the dry “tik” of a myrtle warbler.
Then a chickadee swings and loops out of a wind-washed pitch pine above
me.
Through the thickets of alder, shad, blueberry, and sumac on the
surrounding banks, I become aware of a sweet spring voice, then of
small singings here and there, and when I follow them up I realize
they come from the shrubs themselves. Twigs rustle and touch. Gray
branches out of frozen ground sing in contact. Even the marsh reeds
make occasional sharp, squeaking twangs. There is no melody among the
birds. A robin, although it is as red as it will ever be in spring, and
fatter, with feathers puffed out on the cold, flies to an alder bush,
where a few dried berries are still hanging, to perch without a sound.
The music is there, though it may become louder and richer in a later
context. Musical capacity is not confined to a few animals, or to
spring and summer. Cold air and frost rehearse with plants as well,
under the changing sun. The song of light is played in many ways.
_The Sea in the Ground_
It is on just such a day, when hope, interest, renewal seem
to be afforded, though held in check, that I find other local
residents--other people, other customs--that are not only in readiness,
but blooming with color as though it were summertime. The temperature
is barely at the freezing point. The air is bright and clear, and the
top of the ground is played over by sunny warmth. In flowing fields
that skirt the oaks, the reindeer moss, with many branches, perhaps
suggestive of antlers (though it gets its name because it provides food
for reindeer and musk oxen in the frozen tundras of the Arctic), is
gray like dawn dew, or an almost luminous gray-green. Light nests of
snow with sparkling hexagonal flakes rest between its curly fronds.
The reindeer moss is one of the lichens. A lichen, each separate plant,
multitudes of which compose the visible growth, is a composite of a
fungus and an alga, seen only through a microscope. The alga contains
the coloring matter, or chlorophyll, and can therefore carry out the
process of photosynthesis, manufacturing food with water and sunlight.
The fungus, which has no such ability, wraps its threads around the
alga, protects it from the sun, and stores the moisture for their
partnership; and, if they are of the rock-growing variety, anchors them
both securely.
The lichens are tough. They can endure extreme contrasts in
temperature, and hang on in barren areas where other plants could
not get a foothold. In fact, they are pioneers of millions of years’
service. They prepared the way for all the changing elaboration of
plants with leaves and stems that followed them, after they had broken
down bare rock with their acids, dissolved it, cracked it, and combined
their own dead materials with the rock particles to form soil.
In these round-edged plates of lichen that cover rocks or tree trunks
in the bare February woods, I see a life that is almost independent of
the season. It goes beyond or behind our immediate knowledge of it into
a kind of primal security, settling in where little else is possible.
The color of lichens is the color of the green algae of the sea and
of fresh-water ponds. If their blue-grays, gray-greens, or yellows,
bring up the cast-steel color of ocean barrens to my imagination, or
green water lolling at the sand’s edge, or underwater depths running
with fish and shafts of light, there is knowledge to back me up. The
progenitors of the lichens and their relatives the mosses--this richly
green hair-capped moss that soaks up melting snow in the sunlight--were
unicellular organisms that formed in the sea. The line is direct. The
algae in lichens need water. Without it they would not be able to make
food or reproduce.
(The blue-green algae, which as a species is abundant in both marine
and fresh waters, as well as in the soil, has the ability of lichens
to endure very difficult environments. It can exist in icy pools or
hot springs. The latter extreme was brought home very forcibly to me
not long ago in Nevada, when I saw this plant growing at the edge of
a fissure from which hydrogen sulphide gas was puffing out. The algae
was growing where steam condensed near the surface and must have been
thriving in temperatures of nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.)
The color of our inland lichens and mosses changes with the rate of
moisture. Reindeer moss withdraws in dry months as a method of coping
with a disadvantageous season, instead of trying to carry on an
uncertain battle for existence. It shrinks, in other words, turning dry
and crunchy underfoot, but in wet weather it absorbs, almost drinks up,
water, and then turns spongelike and its color gleams more richly.
In the absence of leaves filtering the sunlight, the trunks of the
larger oaks are dappled and spotted with these colors of watery origin.
I say the larger oaks because the lichens once started may take a long
time to spread. The golden lichen is a very slow-growing species,
although there are many stone walls in this region that are covered
with it. I have watched one spot of golden lichen for two years or
more. No bigger than a fifty-cent piece, it grows on a stone step
outside the house, and has hardly expanded at all.
So it is an enduring kind of fertility that shines here, as the gray
sea waters rock in the distance. And when I turn over a log, or take
up a handful of spongy oak leaf humus, half thawed in the sunlight,
there is visible evidence of the life now arrested in the frozen soil.
I find a millipede, curled up like the shell of a chambered nautilus.
I hold it in my hand and keep breathing on it, until it comes to life
and starts moving around, stretching out, its myriad legs moving
with fantastic synchronization, ready to be busy again, traveling
seriously with the given purpose of eating bits of leaves, breaking
down organic matter in the earth. It is suggested that the millipede
may have been one of the earliest animals to leave the ocean, where all
life presumably began, and take to the land--one of those statements,
of course, that leaves millions of years in the balance of human
guesses, but gives me another approach to ageless tenacity in this
ocean-bordered wood.
There is another ancient animal, the pill bug, damp bug, or armadillo,
which I find in semihibernation in the middle of a rotten log. Pill
bug because it can roll up into a perfect little ball; damp bug for
its choice of environment; wood louse for its habitat and general
appearance, although it is no louse but a crustacean, not an insect
but related to brine shrimp, water fleas, lobsters and crabs. It is
one of the few members of this family that have become adapted to life
on land, but it retains a set of gills, or at least respiratory tubes
with some functional equivalence to gills. It also retains an organic
affinity for wetness, needing constant moisture in order to breathe,
and will invariably direct itself to the dampest environment it can
find. One dry summer day I uncovered a bunch of wood lice way out in
the middle of a dusty patch of ground that looked like a miniature
desert. They had taken advantage of the only shelter available, an old
fragment of a board that held some shade and moisture under it.
In terms of millions of years the development of millipede, or pill
bug, becomes extremely complex and partly unknown. When did the pill
bug leave the sea? How did its special breathing apparatus evolve? How,
in other words, did it gradually adapt itself to life as a land animal?
The problems of science are manifold. For an observer the very sense of
a link between primal sea and primal earth embodied in this half-bug,
half-marine crustacean, gives it great stature. There is thunder and
depth in the pill bug.
I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or
the month of February, but endless projection and development.
Not lost too long--because the cold deepens and bites in the late
afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind
rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It
feels like snow.
_Need_
Early next morning the snow begins to fall, thin and glassy, bringing
in a new kind of quiet, unpredictable intent, spotting the thawed
surface of the earth. After a few hours the flakes are heavier, and
their momentum increases. They run down dizzily, with a ticking sound,
shrouding the distance, pelting dead leaves, collecting in clumps
between the needles of the pitch pines, coming down steadily and fast.
The temperature drops quite suddenly, and the snow flakes grow lighter
again. The wind sharpens, sending them ahead of it, lancing toward the
south.
Hour after hour the snow collects with mesmerizing totality, and in the
colder evening the wind drives in with great fury and drifts pile up.
Dry snow whirls in and races around the windows, scouring them like a
dust storm. The wind molds a long drift on the north side of the house,
like flesh over bone, hip edge out and curving in, a woman’s shape, an
inanimate body molded by violence into classic beauty, hollowed, not
for love unless the wind is love, carved, marked down and conquered by
everything that is latent and unconquered in the storm.
For many days afterward the arctic air reigns over us, and the snow
is crusted, blindingly white in the sun, a mortal danger to animals
whose food supply it covers. A long sickle, a new moon, of ice begins
to appear along the rim of Cape Cod Bay. There is crackling, grinding
cold, in a day when we rise a little past the sun instead of ahead of
it. The freezing nights, for some of the animals that have endured the
winter so far, must be interminable, except for the rabbit, caught
suddenly in the open by a great-horned owl. I found what was left of
it in the woods--a burst of little bits of fur in the snow; the owl’s
tracks; a mold left by the rabbit’s body.
A hermit thrush dies of starvation, all its remnant food at winter’s
end cut off by the snow. It is pathetically light, held in the hand,
and when it is dissected only the tiniest patches of red meat show on
either side of the breast bone.
I find a dead eider duck on the shore. It may have been blown against a
tree in the storm. One wing is broken, and the feathers buffed and thin
from beating. After its feeding grounds are frozen over in an inlet
farther down the Cape, a great blue heron dies on the snow-covered
shores, wounding its neck in the last throes.
The bird feeder is crowded with intermittent flocks of chickadees,
juncos, and sparrows, all the ever present winter birds, pecking at
seed, flying off, hopping on the snow, each with intense, nervous,
active habits, keeping their wild, interrelated ways, entering in,
displacing each other, disappearing and returning. A bolt of a bird
suddenly tears in from nowhere and all the little ones are gone in
a burst. A sharp-shinned hawk, a small hawk with an appetite for
songbirds, has attacked in hunger and desperation, but it swerves when
it reaches the feeder--its aim disturbed by fear as it approaches the
house--and crashes into the window. It sits on the snow, terribly
stunned, its head drooping. The body is the light umber of an immature
bird, the breast streaked red. After a few minutes it stirs a little,
wing shoulders twitching, head up, and yellow eyes glaring with the
pure wild look of a hawk. Finally it lifts up quickly and beats away
toward a line of trees in the distance.
The chickadees are soon back, jumping down to the feeder from an
overhanging pitch pine and bouncing back up like small puffs of
snow, having left danger behind with their usual vibrant but sturdy
acceptance. They are businesslike, determined little birds. If I could
only get inside that head behind the tiny black eyes, and follow. I
could swear it has the quickest perception of things. In any case it
acts as if there were no time for leisure. Its whole body is tripped
constantly at a staccato rate. The head moves up, down, sideways, in
the needs of sight and utility. It poises to hammer a seed held between
its tiny black toes and claws. It rounds the branch of a pine, ready
for the next find, wonderfully resourceful in the game of survival;
with a serious intent, gay in action, employing every second with such
thoroughness as to be completely careless of the outcome of life, and
so perhaps to surpass it.
The mourning doves, whose low coos I mistook for an owl’s when I first
heard them, are another of our permanent residents, not often at the
bird feeder, but fairly ready visitors when they overcome their initial
fear. One flies in, wings whistling wildly, hesitates, turns back,
makes another foray, then waits in a shad tree thirty feet away, head
bobbing, eyes blinking against the sharp sunlight. When a mourning dove
flies up it shows a blue in its generally buff-colored feathers like
a blue evening mist after winter rain. It walks with pigeonlike head
bobbing back and forth, its thin tail standing out behind a tear-shaped
body like the shaft of a cart, then spreading round and wide at the tip
when the bird flies off.
While the sturdy chickadees carry on business as usual, the dove, in
gentle alarm, waits for an hour or two before hunger drives it back to
stay and feed; and not long after that another dove flies in to join it.
On the south side of the Cape where the open Atlantic surf keeps
the shore waters fairly free of ice, there are sea ducks, eiders,
baldpates, mergansers, blacks, or scoters, flying over the sea, or
settling down on its shifting surfaces. Tiny white buffleheads, which
make ducking dives into the water, show brilliantly against gray ice
on the banks of an inlet at Monomoy. A tornado-shaped formation of
red-backed sandpipers stands over the gun-metal sea. Patterns of wings
and water run together, while the land is still not broken out of its
frozen gravity.
For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can
kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more
birds will die. Because this Temperate Zone, influenced by oceanic
weather, attracts more land birds than otherwise might stay, there is
a greater margin of arbitrary risk. The weaker individuals will die
first, by a natural law, but all are subject to unusual violence. The
comparatively mild coastal climate does not normally have a winter as
bad as this one, although extreme conditions are no surprise in North
America, and the risks vary for the lives exposed to them. One winter
with exceptionally deep frost in the ground, hard winds, and little
snow cover, is as dangerous to plants as a month of snow would be to
the birds. And a mild winter may result in death or damage from belated
storms and cold.
We talk of storms and the hazards of temperature as though nature were
merely arbitrary, and inconvenience the essence of her plans. Being
less self-sheltered, life subject to wild nature knows the extremes as
standards of action. Living things are continually balanced between a
bold summer and a demanding winter, where storms are the rule and risk
is constant. They are unable to accept less. This terror has its pride.
_Death, Man Made_
Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill
too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association
with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the
validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption
of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely
an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is
all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly
pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see
a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human
agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or
another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or
inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of
death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal
predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at
a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is
so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we
pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even
obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not
represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or
assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods
of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention,
abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder
and pollution. In our power we are weak.
I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter
dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of
having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant
vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of
the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their
tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have
made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not
to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds
drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them
out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters,
loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial
habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And
because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines
they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution
has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush,
wielded at random.
[Illustration]
Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand
flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way
as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood.
When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive,
out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying.
Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown,
are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a
heavy coating of oil.
Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or
washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the
northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water.
I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They
have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny
but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their
feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation,
and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no
bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So
the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or
they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just
offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers.
Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their
buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when
alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash
ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their
digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.
This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local
residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise
escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only
recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone.
It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off
Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be
virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.
Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk,
having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too
frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It
may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been
oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth
a thousand ships.
“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering
eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with
saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance
which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise.
Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is
in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy
and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.
_March_
_Restless Days_