fishing west of Georges Banks. During the night, through a thick fog,
a thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour wind, high waves, and heavy rain, the
radar stopped working and the crewmen were unable to see. The “Back
Shore” bar, on which the trawler ran aground, is an old graveyard for
ships. Modern equipment has cut down greatly on losses, along with some
of the old safeguards against them. Many lighthouses are no longer
manned by lighthouse keepers and their families. Great beams of light
swing out over the dark sea and back again with inanimate, unmanned
precision. Members of Coast Guard rescue crews may no longer be men
born and bred here who know every inch of their beaches. In fact, they
are more likely to come from a different state, and to be stationed
temporarily on the Cape, so that a man hunting for a wreck may not have
too exact an idea of his location.
During the afternoon, after I hear the news and drive to see the wreck,
a southwest wind blows over the cliffs that stand above the Wellfleet
beach, and clouds swirl up across the blue emptiness. Cars line both
sides of the road. A thin trickle of people walk along the heights,
sands held by yellow grass and purple patches of bearberry, and there
are others far down the long beach where the trawler lies, heaved over
to starboard.
From morning news accounts and a scatter of talk the story of the
doomed ship and the rescue comes to me a little, from under its
nighttime shroud of fog and heaving waves. After the radar quit and the
vessel ran aground on the sand bar, the crew made a futile effort to
get her off. Then the radio failed. The ship was being knocked around
in the thrashing darkness. All attempts failed to put dories overboard.
And the seven men went into the pilothouse, where they stayed for some
five hours. When day broke, the tide was changing and the seas seemed
bigger than ever. The men were battered and exhausted. The trawler’s
decks were awash, and they thought she was beginning to break up. The
captain then ordered the crew over the sides, at which time the ship
was some 600 to 700 yards offshore.
A local family, a man, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter,
proprietors of summer cottages above the beach, were wakened at four
forty-five in the morning by two coastguardmen who had seen the wreck
and stopped in to use the phone. While one of the men drove along the
heights and trained the spotlights of his jeep on the wreck, the other,
accompanied by the family, walked down to the shore. The fog had lifted
a little and they could see white spars rocking above the water, and
what looked at first like debris, being washed back and forth against
the shore. Forming a hand-to-hand chain, the four rescuers then
managed by just standing out far enough in the icy water to pull three
men in. More Coast Guard personnel came later and rescued the fourth.
The survivors were terribly numbed by the cold. One of them had to be
forced into walking so as to save his life. “How much further?” he kept
mumbling, as he stumbled around in the sands, held up by the mother and
daughter. Later, the flesh of these survivors was found to be black
and blue from the pounding they had taken on board the ship and in the
surf, flung against the sands.
Two other crewmen were found dead on the beach. Another local resident
saw one of them where he lay at the bottom of a ladder that reached
down the cliff: “A big man, between thirty and forty. He had coveralls
on, but no shirt.”
His wife says: “I’ll never complain about the price of fish again!”
There are plenty of fish in evidence, all for free, although not a
single one is taken away. The boat’s catch must have been broken into
and scattered by the surf. Every ten yards or so along the wide,
shelving beach are dead fish, lined up as if they had been placed
there--a market display, for no taste but dissolution. Gray haddock
cleaned by the fishermen’s knives. Rose fish, pinkish, orange-red, a
sunset color, with fringed fins, and enormous jellied eyes rimmed with
white, like goggles.
A hatch cover floats loose in the water, and a pair of yellow, oiled
fisherman’s overalls lies on the sand.
The boat, which was shoved and lifted by the seas until it now lies
a few yards off the beach, is just ahead. We curious onlookers walk
toward it in growing silence. The surf waters are breaking on the beach
beside the strong, humble craft, inactive, done, pounded down. I can
make out her name, _Paulmino_, along the bow. She is banked over hard,
and the waves, still fairly high, back and fill around the stern. They
well up, then ease away again. Where water sloshes amidships there are
tattered nets and bobbing cork floats. The steel masts stand with ropes
and stays unbroken, and the high, white pilothouse is intact, where
they spent their terrible night.
I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could
have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for
could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their
distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions
and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death,
or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that
no mortal fear escapes.
_April Light_
One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers
again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows
around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled
yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to
Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the
turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are
crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets
in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the
headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water.
There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound
in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead.
Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where
it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the
fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash
as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some
twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal--probably
a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the
channel--swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with
a yell as its head slips by and out of sight.
A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I
startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars
are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the
shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high
spring night--life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish
come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its
origins.
Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike
stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it
comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that
I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are
microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not
to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is
this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination
from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When
I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a
little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance.
The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the
presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter
nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true
representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light.
There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly
arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving
in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a
beetle’s iridescent green.
Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the
warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us
like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the
novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a
bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible
to see the grass growing.
There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on
their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds,
making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance.
In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on
the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins
a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles
down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it
had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the
soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak
butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow
sunlight of a path where I am walking.
These are the signs of spring, the illuminations I have been waiting
for. And its fresh, cool wind, striking my face, seems to carry new
senses with it. It is beginning to be fragrant and full. It calls up
in me a new alertness along with a new contentment. But underneath all
these pleasant surfaces and scattered events, I feel the power of their
origins. For all I can find and associate with spring, the romantic,
welcome season, there are vastly more uncounted changes, unrealized
ways of reaching up and out, responding to a new range of light and
darkness. The protozoa tell me I have seen nothing yet as to fire. The
migrant herring coming in at night say this April is ageless and dark.
Everywhere around me, things deeply silent and unseen begin to share a
proximity. They move in the waters, while they shoulder the dirt below
ground. In the structure of their alliances, developed in measure and
with appropriateness, is the co-ordination of the great globe as it
spins in space. They respond to a power which not only defines the
“spring” but will transform it and send it on its way.
“_Frightened Away_”
The swallows freely dip and fall and sail in high wild air, and as a
southern surprise two adult turkey vultures soar low over the land,
their wings like great flags, frayed at the tips. The cattail seeds
begin to fly. Part of April’s cool progression, the tough-leaved
Mayflowers blossom out of banks and brown leaf litter, with tiny pink
and white flowers, deep cupped, strong and sweet of scent.
On the twenty-fifth there is a big run of alewives in the brook. It is
an event that attracts attention. Cars stop by. Small crowds gather
and walk down to see the fish. This is not as great a day as it used
to be, when salt herring counted heavily in the economic livelihood of
Cape Cod, but it brings up remnant feelings. And the fish, after all,
provide an open ceremony, even though the details of their natural or
economic history may not be known to everyone. It is a spectacle worth
leaving a car for, and might even tempt someone to leave his car for
good, suggesting new roads and means of locomotion not yet considered.
They mass in the shallow water of the brook, with flinty gleams showing
on their backs and dorsal fins. Eyes staring, mouths gaping, turning
and wheeling, the foot-long alewives move up through the fishways,
obeying their great drive for fulfillment. Herring gulls gather above
the water course by which the fish ascend through marshes and then
fresh water to their spawning areas in the ponds. They circle overhead
in the blinding sky, like a prodigal crown.
The alewife multitude always draws a “why” from some visitor. Their
force is so obvious and yet not quite to be explained by referring to
them as “poor fish.” Huge numbers are caught in nets where they die in
a shining, gasping, shivering mass, and then are hauled away in barrels
for the purposes of bait or cat food. Others attempt impossible rocky
barriers and die of wounds or exhaustion, and a certain percentage
have fallen prey to gulls before they arrive. They encounter enormous
hazards, and the alewives, unlike men, or as men think of themselves,
are unable to turn back. The plan that put them here seems wasteful
and even too bold for those who see life in terms of human ascendancy,
where all problems are subordinate to our conscious attempt to use the
earth and save ourselves. But there they are, back again so committedly
as to make the most self-enclosed glimpse something of the primal
energy that makes all life insist on renewal and advance. Even the
children who jump down to the water’s edge and try to flip the fish out
with their hands, treating them sometimes with extraordinary cruelty,
must feel some attachment to this force, or perhaps they feel it more
than the rest of us.
After trying to explain the habits of alewives to a group of children
one day, I asked them why, if all the fish were taken out of the brook
every day in the week, there would be hardly any fish returning in a
few years’ time.
I don’t excuse my lack of clarity. In any case, one boy answered:
“Because they would get so frightened they would all go away and not
come back.”
Wrong, of course. Someone might even be tempted to cry: “Ridiculous!”
The answer to the question is that most of the alewives return to the
stream in whose headwaters they were hatched and where they grew up for
a few weeks or months of their lives before returning to salt water.
They then continue to grow in the sea, returning at sexual maturity in
three or four years’ time. So if all the spawning fish are taken out of
the brook every day in the week there would be no eggs to hatch out in
the ponds above the stream, and the population would be decimated.
“No,” you say to the child, “you don’t understand. Let me explain this
again.”
That the fish are “frightened” does not come into the picture at all,
aside from the facts, and it is blatant anthropomorphism to try and
read human response or attributes into a fish. Does a fish take fright?
Perhaps, although it might be more accurate to call it an alarm, or
flight reaction, an automatic nerve response inherent in the whole race.
Trying to talk like an adult, I describe the alewives’ running in to
spawn as “slavery to the reproductive urge.” What happens to them on
the way is immaterial to this unconscious necessity. Fish that commit
suicide do not do so out of choice.
And yet, when these fish swing away from me, as my shadow comes over
them, when they try time after time, sometimes frantically, to climb a
mound of rocks or a head of water, I wonder about being “frightened,”
or the noun “fear.” Is this spring stream of life without it? A bird
trips off a branch in sudden alarm, cries out, and then forgets, to
start in on a singing joy all over again. Birds are more emotional than
cold-blooded fish, but if fear is a protective, lifesaving reaction
inherent in a great many animals, then the fish may not be devoid of
it. They are one of the foods of the universe, and in balance with that
function, it is not just that their glands stimulate them to momentary
activity, or that they flinch before disaster, but that they express in
their bodies the wild need for freedom to act, to find, to run, to be,
that manifests itself in highly developed animals, and to some degree
in the lesser ones. They are in a sense compensating for the uses to
which they are put as a prey, or element, of universal appetite.
The alewives will not be frightened away, but they will come back with
fear. It is not wise to be too impatient with a child.
_May_
_Declarations_
The colder, and still relatively silent world of April is past. Warm
sunlight runs across trees, sharp shadows, water and sand, with a
penetrating radiance. The alewives now come up the inland stream day
after day. Pale, sun laden, they move against the fast-rushing current,
arousing great excitement in the gulls. The big white and gray birds
hover over, then dive down in a flock where the fish crowd in shallow
water on their way up. The valley is full of marauding and assemblies
and crying out as the fish keep on, rushing and weaving with the stream
flowing over their backs.
And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little
trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like
standing clouds in open woods and valleys throughout the Cape. Pink and
yellow and silvery-green colors begin to appear on the oaks. Anthers
are hanging conspicuously from the pitch pines.
Fish, insects, plants, birds are all, if I can personify them so, in
close and obedient relationship to nature. They count on strength and
protection when they sing or flower out above the ground. They are
in confident relationship to the general being. And so they act with
confidence. They have come. They will be. They declare themselves. The
birds make the dawns sound with a silvery rain of music. On the morning
when a thrush wakes me up, its rippling and melodious peals lifting and
diving through the air, I have an incalculable urge to migrate outward
and claim new territory. Spring tells me I have not had enough.
The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying
along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods,
each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I
think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help
us not only in our geography but to extend our senses.
Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on
flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of
shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home
builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim
a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of
ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often
arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as
a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the
songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land
possession.
The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than
most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred
yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that
would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an
anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a
clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through
the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to
lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if
you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and
listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare.
“Air_tree_!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-_tree_!” continually,
inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like
pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in
the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however
much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what
starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The
towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct
relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the
general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real
and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is
a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with
the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true
awareness.
In the newly unfolding regions of delicate leaves a prairie warbler
sings “Tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee” very rapidly, on an upward
crescendo. A slim little bird, with a yellow breast streaked with
black, its sharp trim beak opens wide as the notes swell out of its
throat, and it seems to send song as far as it can. I think of constant
effort, constant quick hearts. It picks up a light green caterpillar
from the oak leaves and sings as it holds it in its beak. Then the
warbler beats at the insect a little, pecks and shakes it, then
swallows it down; and goes on singing.
An oven bird perches on the oaks and sings, with breast uplifted, tail
shaking, making a glorious effort. How could I dare say that this
bird or another down the road, which accompanies it, is only singing
something that sounds to our ears like “Teacher-teacher-teacher”?
No bird song is alike, even in members of the same species. Each
individual has its variation and seems to derive strength and pleasure
from it. And it seems to me that they not only declare their rights
and titles but are expressing something on behalf of spring. It is as
if they sang: “It is not I. It is not I” but rather, all flowering,
crossing, taking or accumulating, all growth. The song is a part of
earth.
Then there is that bird, a member of the family of mimics, the brown
thrasher, which seems to make a mockery of the whole business. It is
a cinnamon-winged, speckled-breasted, long-tailed bird, with a long
bill and sharp, quick yellow eyes. The male thrasher is certainly as
intense and serious about the duty of staking out his territory as any
other species, but what issues loudly from his open bill seems like
the most comical sort of parody. He may not be as good a mimic as the
mocking bird--which has been known to imitate a flock of blue jays--but
he manages a wonderful take-off on the whole race of birds. He is a
master of a grab bag of trills, chatters, pips and cries, of rasps and
sweetnesses, of sudden blurts, and obvious pauses as if for effect.
Translated into a rapid tempo of words, his song might sound like
this: “Jeremy! Jeremy! Ready here. Right here. Wide awake. Wide
awake. Chipper! Chipper! Shake a leg. Up! Up! Here’s a joker. This
way. This way.” ... an interpretation which probably makes me as
ridiculous as he intended, if he is a serious humorist. In the middle
of this exhortation I hear a comic little “Cucaracha!” or quite a good
imitation of a whippoorwill, as if he saved his more exact skills for a
casual moment.
The thrasher may be just as conditioned in his joy and utterances as
any other bird. His variations on the general bird theme may come out
abstractly, without any attempt at parody, a limited kind of talent,
and yet when I listen to it, it seems to me that the bounds of song are
being just a bit extended. As compared with other birds, the blackpoll
warbler for example, with only a thin, high note, reminiscent of insect
sounds in the summer, the thrasher has range and repertoire. He is
vocal and conversational, even to the extent of tempting at least one
human animal into reading words and intentions into his performance;
and this, from a bird’s point of view, might mean that I was extending
my limits too.
_Facets of Expression_
I make a foolish game out of attaching words to a bird’s song. Perhaps
it is a way of trying to bring the two of us together in familiarity,
but to give nature its true respect, every song, color, and action is
its own master. Understanding, the best human means of communicating
with other lives, might be most effectively attained by keeping a
certain distance.
That is the way I feel when I see the alert, tough little chickadees
coming up to the house and picking up tufts of hair, rope, or wool,
to use as nesting material. They set to work carding it so busily and
self-sufficiently that I am restrained from an impulse to join in and
look things over. I walk off to my own business.
A pair of tree swallows is trying out a birdhouse, and when I stay too
long in the vicinity, they are given an extra reason for a negative
decision as to its merits and fly into the distance. This is a time not
to meddle, tease, interfere, or try to imitate what cannot be imitated.