temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast
between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the
average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32
degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of
likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions.
Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both
February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the
Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage
is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not
recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first
obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds
coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.
The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon.
Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the
southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the
feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without
what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of
disaster.
“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make
life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice.
High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous
capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness.
Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the
sands.
The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try
at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks
and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty
weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the
storm.
I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of
a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the
actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my
own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer
wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to
a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.
March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it
begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies
up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the
wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in
a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from
tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They
have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three
notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty”
with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.”
Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the
other on a lower key.
A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in
sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of
a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like
fast-dripping water.
Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the
birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music.
The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the
waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter
and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color
and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part
of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out
like a fan.
There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a
dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are
dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at
their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.
This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter
quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats
that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The
squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic
kind of dance.
Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the
winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there
is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and
then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but
in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning
to seek its opportunities.
I am impatient for spring, as raw, unseasonably cold weather continues,
and then I see a dark little caterpillar on the road, or a mourning
cloak butterfly, sprung out of hibernation. I hear a pair of mourning
doves, cooing with slow measure and deliberation, long silences
between. They seem to say something to me about attention. “What
will come may not be, as yet. But we know when. And you might if you
listened.”
If I listened, and if I watched, found each insect as it came out of
hibernation, comprehended a tree as a living thing, beginning to stir
and seek, followed the development of buds and roots, the unseen life
that stirs in egg or chrysalis through every inch of ground.
There is, in common with the rest of the year’s revolutions, nothing
neat or simple about the process of reawakening. It has started
already. Raccoons in this area begin to breed in February and start
foraging for their young in March. The great horned owl nests in
January and February. During the dead of winter a few animals such
as skates and barnacles start breeding in offshore waters. Variable
reaction in this time of change is as complex as the order which
controls it.
Hibernation itself, that mysterious state which is somewhere between
death and sleep, differs in various species. Some mammals hibernate not
because of outside conditions but because of internal changes in their
blood stream, as if timed not to the weather but the year. Each life is
cyclical, corresponding accurately to the circling of the globe, but in
mode and terms it differs vastly. When the frogs begin to stir around
a local pond, birds, independent of hibernation, move back from other
climates. Late in March a few alewives swim into fresh water from the
sea. Late in April large numbers begin to show up, at a time which only
varies by a few days, year after year. Yet their arrival, like their
growth and responses, is conditioned by any number of circumstances
that are not only physically distant from us but may be remote as yet
from scientific scrutiny. To realize that the slightest changes in
temperature can affect whole worlds of life, and that this factor is
only one of many, can make a man feel hopelessly inept.
So spring is not to come now, nor tomorrow, suddenly complete with shy
warmth and flowers according to our expectations, but will take its
periodic time, within a wide range and with enormous resources. By
the same token, no spring comes pleasantly, without a certain amount
of doom in its wake. A flock of male blue birds flies north too soon.
They die during a severe snow storm or a week of extreme cold. Thawing
takes place too suddenly for one form of life, and too quick a drop in
temperature will kill another.
March is complex and March is in a rage, though I begin to feel a
universal response, a gradual turn, in the ground, through the trees,
down by the shore as the wind changes from tearing things loose to a
peaceful low breathing. I smell salt things on the edge of motion,
balanced on a tip of allowance. I hear what I am unable to see,
stirring, tuning up across the land. The response may be hesitant or
bold, delayed or premature, but it is coming. There is knowledge around
me, even purpose, whether or not it is working in mindless ways. When
I see sunlight playing on a blade of grass, I see the component parts
of wisdom. Then the grass joins the squirrel in its dance. Eels join
men in restlessness and speculation.
_An Extravagance_
We built a small concrete pool on our place, which is locally known as
Dry Hill, and so brought the life of water a little closer to us. In
the summertime the pool nurtures a migrant population of green frogs. I
have put nothing in it except some sunfish that subsequently died, so
that the occasional signs of new life it shows, like a water strider,
or some nymph or larva of an insect that flew by and deposited its
eggs, always strikes me as a dispensation from the sky. It is a proof
of life’s pressing, inescapable need to drive into every opening.
Thinking of draining the pool and cleaning it out for the approach of
spring, I find a life so surprising and sudden as to take all human
propriety out of my system. There, on the brown, algae-fringed edge
of the pool, something moves, telling me that this well of water is
more than ornamental. Light olive-colored insects, scum-covered,
goggle-eyed, stalk on the edge, or skate very slowly through the
water--the strangest kind of revelation. What could I clean up now
without a sense of shame?
The dragonfly larva, or nymph, which turns into an adult after a series
of molts, is a fantastic-looking creature. I take one out of the pool
and put it in a jar for observation. What I observe has no familiar
meaning for me. It stays motionless, except when the jar is moved. I
wonder again, as I did with a robber fly in the summer, what an insect
is. Is it only a stereotyped pattern on the changing screen of nature?
This one exhibits itself as a sort of embodied suspension, careless of
death or time, like the process of evolution itself. There is no hurry.
The nymph lives for more than a week without food. Through a magnifying
glass, I look at the flat-bottomed, skiff-shaped body made shaggy by
algae-covered hair, the jointed legs, the upended tail. It is striped,
and there are brown markings over and across its goggle eyes, and
brown on its strange mouth part, which sits in front of its face like
a catchers mask. This part, or device, is called the labrum. It is
hinged, equipped with hooks, and can be shot forward rapidly to grab
and hold the animal’s prey. In the nymph’s case, as with so many other
things in nature, seemingly endless waiting and suspense precedes
occasional spurts of lightning rapidity.
As I peer at it, greatly enlarged behind my magnifying glass, its
jointed legs suddenly flail up in front of me, and I actually feel a
tremor of alarm--which might be humorous, except for my sense that this
small dragon is timeless in some awesome way.
As March is proving a seasonal release, at least in starting, so it
also reveals an extravagance in the form of a dragonfly nymph, and what
will come from that little insect shows that extravagance may have no
end. After a series of molts, the number and duration of which depends
on the species, a nymph will climb up on some green stalk spiking out
of the water, the skin on its back will crack, and it will emerge from
a sheath which it leaves behind, a dry, empty counterpart, and turn
into a big, gauzy-winged dragonfly. It is given two worlds, water and
air. Its embodied transformation from one into another is as rare a
thing as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly; and is
evidence of a daring like the flight of Icarus toward the sun, but more
successful.
Nature takes the nymph out of itself. It is no goggle-eyed inhabitant
of some other planet, no knight doomed to expire by weight of armor. I
see the fantastic in it and also a miraculous reality, which will not
rest with own products. This water predator will turn into a brightly
colored, great-eyed hunter, skimming everywhere over land and water,
darting across the roaring traffic of a city, flying over the surface
of the ocean miles from land. Time seems suspended in the nymph; and
this may be appropriate enough. It is the result of ages; but its
metamorphosis is fresh and new, a successful act of endless creativity.
_Interpretation_
It is in the nature of things to surprise, after temporary
imprisonments. Surprise is what men look for. It is a need. And this
puts us somewhat in the position of a dragonfly larva, suspended, until
sprung out. Since we are not as rigidly and instinctively stuck as the
insects, relief from our often unblessed condition may come simply
because we get a chance to look around. Freshness of act, unfailing
originality, is here, but it takes time to see. After an age of
inattention it comes like a red squirrel, which I meet unexpectedly one
raw March morning. Its whole body twitches and shakes. It jumps with
an extraordinary series of halts and starts; then, like a boy playing
Indian, it leaps behind a rock as I walk by.
If there is any spare time in a harried world, perhaps it should be
used in cultivating habits of attention, learning how to keep open
for possibility, instead of inventing distractions that provide for
nothing. What is loosely called “nature study” requires discipline
like any other area of knowledge, and acquaintance with its subjects,
their names, their habits, their place and performance, may encourage
extremes of refinement; but it is one good way to begin. It takes you
out. It shows you what else can be done. By example it may spring you
into a new mood of action. It provides new acquaintances, showing you
life, the surprise, where there used to be a wall.
I, as well as my children, am still learning to read. I am still making
a collection of terms, in order to attempt a rudimentary analysis of
what I find. First in importance, though, comes an admission that what
I am considering is not so strangled by human terminology that it does
not have an identity, a sacredness even, of its own. Discovery gets its
worth from what it pursues.
I see a pitch pine with different eyes, not because I have learned
that its clusters have three needles, but because I recognize its
independent existence. I know that it has needs, and a history, that it
is not divorced from an infinity of circumstances just because I can
identify it. We do not need to be vain about our name grubbing, our
scientific nomenclature; it is only the beginning.
When I go to the edge of a pond I have a pleasurable sense of
excitement, not only because I have been there before, finding the good
old tadpoles and water striders, but because I know that I will find
something unexplained, the same life perhaps, but in new relationships.
There is a swarm of thin little flies dancing in the warm sunlight on a
March afternoon. They not only tell me something about the lengthening
days, but the light seems to sit differently on their wings. They are a
revelation, materializing out of a distance, hovering near.
In the game of identification we have to admit that nature is not an
exclusively human province. Then we can be led by it, like this class
of children, boys and girls on file through the woods, exploring new
land, in expectation.
There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the
tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out
and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded
slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small
ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar
where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice
scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on
the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds
in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing
on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal
creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because
of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown
shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy
glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south,
winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels
of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls
to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder
whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a
myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special
character of this day.
It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness,
spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks,
months, years later, they come out with something learned that a
teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness
which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a
little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had
seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she
wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she
had seen a snowy owl.
Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the
loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the
realm of science but not accuracy.
But we lead in to nature through names as well as our senses, and then
by familiarity with habits, size, shape, color, the order of change,
the ways of dying out and returning with plants and animals. Knowledge
is our medium, and we are obliged to question.
What is that tree, strangely bent over along the snowy ground? A wild
cherry? What happened to it? What is the evidence? Did another tree
fall on it when it was a sapling, bend it down and force it to grow out
horizontally? Its thick trunk stretches for six feet parallel to the
ground, only a few inches above it, then turns and starts up into a
sky-opening between the thickets beside it, sending up a wild array of
branches. What else can we say about it?
Then one boy, putting things together, hearing how the tree compensated
for its difficulties, needed light, and thrusted after it, cries out:
“Why that sounds as if the tree was alive!” That is what we have been
looking for. He is well started.
_Response_
March progresses toward its end, gradually adding to the population.
Dark-headed, deep-colored male robins tug at worms on the lawn.
Red-winged blackbirds sail low over marshes, or take stations by the
edge of a pond, with reedy cries. The purple finches sing, along
with the shrill braying of the blue jays. White-throated sparrows,
quail, jays, and partridges that have been here all winter are more
in evidence, especially on sunny days, and begin to be accompanied by
newcomers, like the grackles. Myrtle warblers flutter up into the air
and down again, catching insects. But the wind blows. It backs and
fills. The rain is cold. The turn toward spring is very gradual, hardly
perceptible at times.
Then a few alewives, a dozen or so, come in out of salt water and show
up in Stony Brook, familiar strangers, large, pale fish weaving slowly
up through the narrow stream. It has begun to be a time of declaration.
New patterns, new arrangements are taking place, however much the
season seems to lag.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth I hear a high, shrill sound,
whirring and spinning, suggesting proud activity, presence set free.
The spring peepers are making it known that a time has arrived, and I
take joy in the news, having failed to make any definite assurance of
it myself. Their sound embraces all this changing land, rising above
the whispered roars of the sea.
Now the perpetrator of this chorus is a tiny tan frog with a smudged
cross or X on its back, named _Hyla Crucifer_. The male of the species
has been speaking up on behalf of spring openings for millions of
years. In that capacity it is authoritative enough. Its voice, almost
incredibly loud and shrill for an animal that is not much over an inch
long, is amplified by means of a large bubblelike pouch which acts as
a resonator. This mechanism is put to use after the animal comes out
of winter torpor, after warm rain, and as the season itself breathes
and sounds more freely. The peeper moves around with the earth itself
and makes a declaration which, it seems to me, does not deserve the
term automatic any more than the fiddling of grasshoppers in August.
Both are part of the deep and various play of the year. In any case
this specialty of voice is something of a marvel in itself. It is not
like the eyes of an owl that are so made as to make maximum use of
dim light, or the wings of a herring gull that can ride turbulent air
currents above the water, or like the fins of a fish, the sensitive
nose of a dog. The peeper’s vocal parts are not specialized for
environmental use to that degree. Their primary, specific function is
to attract the female. Mating and voice are synonymous. But perhaps we
could also say that this mating cry, this sometimes bell-like sound, is
fitted to the whole environment, that it belongs unerringly to a new
earth and a new season. It seems to bring life and place, function and
expression together. It is unequivocal. It is perfect. It speaks up
reliably on behalf of everything now springing or about to spring.
For all their vast population in the bogs, ponds, edges, swamps, and
other wet areas of the Cape, individual spring peepers are very hard to
find. During a cool evening, as the stars begin to declare themselves,
I hear the peepers’ collective voice rising up around me, passing into
the sky. On the banks of Berry’s Hole, that deep, swampy hollow nearby,
there is a pulsing, piercing, deafening chorus. The wind suddenly blows
over in a loud torrent, but the peepers keep on. I walk farther down
and they stop; then they begin again, after I sit still for a minute
or two. The banks are wet, after a light afternoon rain, and they must
be covered by frogs, judging by the sound; but I search every bit of
ground with a flashlight and am unable to find a single one.
A wild, moist spring wind flings around the rim of the hollow, which
is gray, dusted with fog, and in the clear opening overhead the stars
fling out and away. Water stands dark and still where the banks end.
Grass hummocks and shrubs choke the wet areas beyond. I sit for many
minutes concentrating on one area with my flashlight. The peepers’ cry
is deafening. Then at last, I see one. It jumps onto my shoes. And then
another, on a low lying branch, moving along in the light--it displaces
a third, which is toppled down into the leaves. They seem limp in
action. A peeper is minute, almost weightless in my hand.
[Illustration]
Nearby footsteps will silence them. They react spontaneously like
tadpoles and minnows that dart off into deep water from a pond’s
edge when you approach. Yet they are not bothered by the beam of a
flashlight.
Such a tiny thing, this animal, this cool, moist, anonymous amphibian,
for so proud a message! I can see that a peeper’s whole body pumps as
it calls. It is like a bellows, and the vocal sac blows out like a
blister, bluish-green in the light. “Peep-peep-peep,” and the whole
night is filled with an insistent, stirring cry. No human statement
can rival this simple, triumphant mode of revelation. The earth begins
again.
_April_
_Deeper News_
I read in the papers that spring is beginning to show its vast capacity
in the nation behind us, with tornadoes in the west, and floods to the
south. The way is being cleared with a violence.
And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at
night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale,
carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness.
The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There
is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but
that--a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for
another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an
“incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a
vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape
Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before
dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South
Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned,
four survived, and one is missing.
[Illustration]