full of wonderful languages, still to be learned, and they are not
confined to the uses of sound. Isn’t a flower or wing or new leaf
articulate? I watch a mourning cloak butterfly that flits and floats
overhead and then lands on a bare patch of ground in the sunlight.
The broad wings fold and show their dark, woody, shadow side, with
little white circles on them, their pattern and texture a blend of
weather-beaten, drab forest floors, suggestive of niches and corners
of leaf-decaying darkness. Then the wings spread out again. They are
a light mahogany-red with shades of brown, bordered by black lines,
and on their bottom edge they are rimmed with little round dashes of
purplish blue, like small windows into the sky, and the body is green.
The butterfly’s antennae have white tips. It has fine hairs on its
back. Then, with a papery, fluttering sound, it is up with startling
quickness from the ground; just out of reach, in the frequent manner of
butterflies, as many a boy with a net has learned from hard experience.
What can we say about the American robin that has not already been
said? All the same, I know him not. He still appears on the spring
grass like a stranger. He lands there, then pauses, holding up his head
for a long time. No worms? Then he runs off on his robin procedure,
abandoning one area for another, where he pauses rigidly again, then
cocks his head. The worm is found. This is assessable behavior. By this
stiff pausing and then tripping ahead, a robin is apparently able to
detect the slightest motion on the ground. We don’t need to look for
the emotion or consciousness of a robin beyond the actions to which
it is stimulated by the immediate need for food. Utility is all. Or
so I have been told. But the robin, like other birds, expresses its
relation to the earth in terms of a set of responses which come from a
head I know nothing about. It is an organism with much higher bodily
temperatures than ours, with a much faster heart beat, burning up
energy at a faster rate. Its experiences are entirely different. Down
there, on that bird level, what is happening? What kind of awareness
does it have, what kind of close, felt proximity to the stirring
ground, the shadows, the lightly running wind?
Even the flowers, as if they were special custodians of those fires
of light that run through May, seem to express more than the value we
have given them. Trim little violets, white, pale blue, or lilac in
color, or pink lady’s-slippers blossom out and mark their separate
places in the sun with beautiful emphasis. Each is significant. Each
is inviolate. And, in a sense, are they not full of motion? In their
growth, their seeding, their provision for continuity and change of
place, are they not free to run away? They fly in the winds. They grow
and they fight for life.
Tiny white chickweed flowers begin to mantle some of our barren
areas, and the plants are so quick and strong in growth, establishing
themselves as if they had too little time, that they seem to be
partners with fish that school and spawn in the sea, or nesting birds.
All the new tumult and excitement combines in what we call spring. Each
facet of it, each life in its own right contributes originality, and
there are communications between them which surprise us--distant, true,
and unerring. I bear witness to them, without quite understanding. One
late evening on the shore, the tide pools stand out like mirrors along
dark sands. The air is cool. Light sparkles over the receding tide.
The distances there, as always, seem sparse and immeasurable. I hear a
sharp, wild cry, and then another, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther
on. Two yellowlegs, I should judge. Theirs are the only sounds, besides
the continuous breathing of the sea. Did one respond to the other?
Whether it did or not, they are linked. The curved coast line is their
orientation, and the wide evening a plane for their cries, and in the
play of spring’s advance it is a recognition, vibrant and unique.
Perhaps we come to some such realization of the greatness of nature’s
expression in spite of ourselves. We measure natural phenomenon with
marvelous accuracy. We are always busy at it, cropping or adding names,
readjusting interpretations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and
dividing. The miracle is still untouched. Why is the mindless flower
less than ourselves and our assessments, or the bird’s reaction less
remarkable? That which is without mind is not necessarily heedless.
Perhaps spring is a manifestation of mind; and its lives, all those
facets of motion and beauty, behave in its context as familiars. Each
responds in terms of an alliance intrinsically known, as with the birds
along their shore.
_Travel_
For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close
enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in
delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind.
There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all
at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living
jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like:
“This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager
appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding
and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or
environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop,
sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it
seems like a gift of extravagance.
Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night.
The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging
a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at
the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half
emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and
then disappears down its hole again.
Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a
cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two
impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of
red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly,
hopelessly.
A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the
shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting
on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and
glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland,
two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female
perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters
above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he
flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of
sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in
the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel
low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.
What I see, what becomes easy to see for any eyes, in the gentle month
of May, is an approach to prodigality. We are not yet bitten, dulled,
and pounded down by population, of insects or men. Blistering droughts
have not come yet, nor excessive rain; but all the component parts
of nature run ahead. Through the alternately warm and cool sweeps of
weather, there is a steady pattern of growth. This is the season of
progression, of fanning out, and as with the trees that have formed
next year’s buds, of provision for the future. The oak leaves which
are limp and tiny to begin with, develop gradually. They toughen and
mature toward their summer function of receiving and storing. They
stretch, darken, and shine, turning from tenderness to ability. So it
is with the fish hatched from the egg, or nesting birds, or the grass
in the ground. To have had a son born this month, as we did, is much in
keeping.
Birth is now the rule. I smell a sweet salt air. White petals drop
gently to the ground. Birds, trees, and plants, life in the ground
below them, are sprung by a constructive light. To follow spring is to
make use of yourself. Join and be. Here is as much expanding energy as
the human spirit could desire. Aspiration meets its counterparts, on
all sides. If, as man says, he represents a climax of sensitivity in
the evolutionary sense, then let him now employ his consciousness for
all it is worth, and not delay.
Spring is loud and rich in its coming, but it is exact too, with a
sustained propriety. Each life is in its place, its shade or full
light. Each, held in the general change and roaming, to its necessity.
Fragile star flowers and wind flowers bloom in the shade of a wood of
beech trees, while out on the open slopes and fields the beach plum
bushes are heavy with fat white blossoms, inviting the sun’s full
strength.
In that valley where the alewives run, a narrow cut between low hills
once made by melt waters from a glacier, and joining fresh-water ponds
to Cape Cod Bay, there is now such a variety of life in such a variety
of places as to challenge travel in all the senses. It reaches from the
fresh-water ponds with their muddy shallows where pickerel weed begins
to put up its stalks, painted turtles sun themselves on rocks out of
the water, and sunfish make their nests along the sandy edges--from
the pond waters gently lapping and smooth surfaces skidded by the
wind--all the way through tidal marshes to the sea whose massive motion
stands beyond us. Each area, first the ponds, then the brook, as it
cascades down rocky slopes, turning as it winds through valley reaches
into a creek, and then a tidal estuary, meeting the sand flats on the
bay shore, each definite part of land or shore, has its newly active,
co-ordinated riches. In the upper end of the valley, just below the
pond outlet where fish ladders are crowded with migrating alewives,
there is a wild and loud screaming of gulls. They wheel constantly over
the stream, and crowds of them settle down on the water, quarreling
over feasts of fish. Below them, black-crowned night herons bob and
stand tall in a grove of pitch pines. When startled, they cluck and
squawk like so many women over a scandal. When one of them flies too
close to the herring gulls, it is chased away.
Two upland plovers skim in fast, crying high. A black duck whirs
up, showing the white under its wings. The land at the edge of the
marsh is full of yellowthroats, warblers with a quick, slurred call:
“Weewiticha, weewiticha, weewiticha,” as it sounds to me, and sometimes
a softer “Chichibee, chichibee, chichibee.” I watch one of these trim
birds. It has a yellow breast and yellow head masked distinctively
with black. It lands in the leaves, whips around, flits, quick and
alert. Its colors fit with shade and sunlight as though it had
been conceived with them--a definite dash of light. In the stream, as
it winds down toward salt water, subject to the rise and fall of the
tide, small groups of alewives run quickly and persistently through
the weaving currents, heading up toward gulls and then the nets and
fishways beyond. I feel energy and motion demanding me. Seen or unseen,
a flying, starting, striding, swimming, and inviting, makes of the
present and its short lives an endlessness.
It is low tide where the channel meets the shore. Warm, hazy air
rises over the bare landscape into an empty, chalky-blue sky. But the
wide-ribbed sands are run over lightly by gold braided waters, light
catchers full of motion, flexing and rippling. Crustaceans dart through
them. Periwinkle tracks straggle across the sands, and the empty shells
of razor clams litter the surface, along with the worm cases stuck with
shells, seaweed and grains of sand, protruding above it; and there are
black horseshoe crabs partly dug in, waiting for the tide to turn.
The three-toed tracks of shore birds are everywhere, and farther out,
through a light wind, a rushing sea sound, I can hear gulls calling
low, muttering among themselves, and the unmistakable harsh cry of a
tern.
Sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, ruddy turnstones, are dipping up
and down, scuttling, or tripping ahead as they feed. In the distance
the turnstones, mottled black and brown, with short red legs, look a
little like quail.
Two herring gulls are pulling hard at a sand shark, stranded by a tide,
or perhaps killed by some fishing boat when it was brought up in the
nets. They work at it furiously, tugging and tearing from both sides,
since the sand shark’s hide is like sandpaper and many times as thick
and tough. When I come up, I can see that they have not managed to
do much more than tear out some of the flesh from its head and neck.
Judging by the tracks on the sand, they must have been hauling it
around for some time.
Far far out, I thought I saw a man digging for clams on the flats, but
after walking for half a mile in that direction, I am astonished to
see a yearling deer starting in a leisurely way toward the land. It
had probably browsed its way out, nibbling at bits of tender seaweed,
licking salt, encountering no danger in the expansive room that borders
land and sea. Now, with the motion of its long legs showing in all
detail as I have never seen them in fields or woods, the deer starts
to run slowly, with an almost loose loping. It stops, looks around
uneasily, and then the legs unlimber again, but hesitantly. It looks
suddenly in my direction; and bounds and bucks away, its legs now
working with tense speed. Through my field glasses I find a man and a
boy on the beach. Seeing them, the animal changes course, gathers more
speed, and when it reaches the shore, dashes up the sloping beach and
disappears into a green line of shrubs and low trees.
[Illustration]
The separations on these sand flats are vast. Where the narrow inland
water course issues out, nothing is so well defined as space. For the
variety of action here and in thousands of miles of deep water beyond,
range is the rule, and the brook leads to the sea as all things lead to
each other. Our meetings have scarcely begun.
_June_
_The Garden_
“June, June, I beg your pardon, for walking in your garden” is a phrase
from an old song, which expresses the delicacy you might feel on
some moonlit night about treading a path through fragile shadows and
flowers, or intruding by day on their young beauty. The song expresses
it succinctly; but the fact of the matter is that the June garden is
suddenly so rich and widespread that there are no paths to walk on.
It is unavoidable. I find myself wondering how it happened--how it
happened that I now take it for granted. My small daughter asked me the
other day whether or not the trees wore leaves in the wintertime. She
was not quite sure. We have come back to fruition unawares.
The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three
months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and
have already forgotten what a great and elaborate process it was. I
can remember--or I have it in writing (the aid to memory)--that on the
twenty-fifth of March there was a light snow in the morning, and that
the temperature was well below freezing, with strong north winds all
day. The significance of the twenty-fifth comes from its often being
used as an average date for the first sound of the spring peepers. That
day the whole idea seemed impossible. And yet they sang, two evenings
later. Of course the whole year is the scene of birth and growth.
Spring is not the sole custodian of arrival. There are flowers that
bloom in the autumn. But that was our last beginning, in immediate
terms. We have lived through what followed with only the scantiest kind
of recognition, to arrive now with a great new crowd of shapes and
sounds filling the distance, in the muscular swing of light. Flowery
grasses, wild flowers like vetch, daisies, coreopsis, buttercups, and
hundreds of others, head up, shoot forth, dance in the sun and compete
with one another for living space--part of the rush and race of life
we take for granted. The fact that we do take it for granted may be
the best proof of our deep connection with it, as with all the natural
rounds of the year. We breathe and give birth and die in terms of the
same force as these surroundings. It is less articulate with us than
realized. The new measures have a steady underlying order which pulses
in us like the tides. So I suddenly look around me and find the whole
earth peopled with motion and quantity, searching and adjustments, and
I find it familiar.
In the warm air the land seems bound together by a whir ticked off
in the grass by field crickets, lighted at night by the slow-dancing
fireflies, intensified on the millions of new leaf surfaces, petals,
and stems, where insects alight, crawl, and eat, many races pursuing
their separate ways, aligned with thousands of life communities in
function and in act.
June has gone green, with a staggering assumption of authority. The dry
land ferns stretch stiff and wide like fans. The huckleberry bushes are
springing with light green. The oaks heave and rise with their bounty
of fresh leaves. Meadows along the shore are green with samphire; and
marsh grasses, still low, looking close-cropped above the dark peat or
through rushing waves at high tide.
On the lee side of a stone jetty thrusting out from the shore the
water is full of plankton. Tiny marine animals, like barnacle larvae,
copepods, baby jellyfish, are being gently carried and lifted by the
surf. They are whirled and drifted in the water as it swells and ebbs.
There is a beautiful symmetry in these fragile, transparent animals. I
notice tiny beads of air along the sides of some of the jellyfish.
In some inland waters joined by inlets to the sea, there are massive
numbers of adult jellyfish at this time of year, pulsing slowly
through green waters, like transparent animal flowers. The riches of
the water, fresh or salt, are immeasurable.
More and more adult alewives are returning to the sea after spawning in
ponds and lakes, running back through marsh lands filled with cattails,
wild iris, rushes, and arrowheads. Behind them they leave their
progeny, which have in fact been hatching out for the past two months,
and are gradually becoming so numerous as to interfere with the sport
of fishing. These “bait fish” feed bass, pickerel, and perch, which now
refuse to react to a mere fly or worm, having more than enough to eat.
There are no waters, no wood or square yard of ground not sounding and
moving with new life. A wild readiness, a fluency is here. Within its
terrestrial order and confinement everything seems incalculably bold.
Now is the time to run ahead. Now, even for our special race, is the
time to take the necessary risk of new connections, new affinities.
This is a world of alliances.
I walk through a wood of trees--which might be in Cape Cod, Japan, or
Siberia--their gray trunks spotted with dancing shadows, a naked wealth
in motion, thinking that a man might find himself for the first time
in this company, not because of would-be similarities--sap and blood,
branches and arms--but because of a context which they share. I am an
organism that can make a choice. The tree is not; nor can it suffer.
To simplify the matter too much, I am an animal. The tree is a plant.
But in the whole environment, with its intertwining events, its varying
energies, each form of life joins and takes part. In this wood, while
the wind blows across us and yellow light dances through, I think that
even a man and trees, with their vastly different responses, may be
together, players in a sunlight game.
[Illustration]
_Room to Spare_
June is a fullness. There is no part of land and shore not imbued with
warmth and covered with manifestations of strength and capacity, but
the season moves on. It changes to new measures continually, beautiful
in substance but hard to grasp, like a flock of sanderlings swinging
and spinning in unison along the bright sands, or a school of fish. How
do they keep together? What is their communication? Even a forest of
apparently rigid trees has a coherence and order of its own, perhaps a
sensibility, since it goes through all periods of existence. Everywhere
I look there is spacing, and at the same time mutual attraction, in
rhythmic display, as though the laws of space were inherent in every
action and bound in every organism. The play of the universe is
what I sense in its living instruments, and my own, often borrowed,
interpretations stop far short of its magnitude.
Out of the whole possible range of communication (and it seems to me to
go beyond possibility) each species embodies a special response. Its
senses react in a unique and selective way toward its surroundings.
It is true of the frog. What does it hear that we cannot? It is true
of the fish. How does it orient itself in the water? What does it
feel? What explains the sensitivity of some plants to touch? Each have
motions, and in a sense languages, of their own.
How can I understand the hundreds of moths that crowd the screen door
at night? They have all manner of shapes. When I shine my flashlight
on them their eyes glow with an amber fire. They flutter against the
screen, and when I turn the inside light off, fly away immediately.
This is a sensitivity to light and darkness that has its parallels in
the butterflies attracted to flowers of a particular color. They are
selective in their behavior and perhaps restricted at the same time.
And yet, huddled, crawling, landing, and flying off, concentrated in
numbers as they are, they suggest a dark realm of action and context to
me. In spite of their reactions their terms are unknown. It is these
untouched areas which must attract any man who begins to be aware of
them--as though we ourselves had something in us not yet understood.
Where the mystery is, may be the reality.
What we see, even from the outside looking in, is rhythmic performance,
not a series of static events. Balance and rhythm are the rules of
action, understood in depth by moth or fish. Each race, unknown to
the other, plays its own game, follows its own senses, and yet is in
balance with the rest of life. The rules of natural abundance are the
rules of space--not almost constant destruction and collision between
living things but obedience to their given orbits.
Many people have the idea, perhaps because of a human fascination with
violent events, that nature is compounded of just such rigidities--dog
eat dog, or tiger eat horse--or obversely, that nothing happens at
all. Nature is either a menace or a great bore. Could I expect, going
to some pond or water hole concentrated with life to find all kinds of
mutual slaughter going on? At the edge of any small pond I see action
enough this time of year. Many tadpoles hurry off in all directions
at my footfall. I hear a bullfrog’s noble plucked bass sounding among
the pickerel weed, while dark gray catbirds cry in thickets along the
shore. A great antediluvian animal, a snapping turtle, with a fat
black shell, a thick, fat head and neck, and large lidded eyes like a
dog, climbs out of the water to lay its eggs on a sandy bank above.
Its movements are slow and massive, each leg lifted as it goes. Only
a sudden, lunging, upward snap as I tease it with a stick, shows what
quick ferocity it is capable of. In the still pond waters there are
schools of tiny, newly hatched fish, big-eyed, big-headed, with minute
pin-sized bodies, running and twitching in rhythmic solidarity. A
yellow perch runs by, and then a horned pout roves through the fry with
apparent disregard. It passes near a sunfish nest, a little round,
cleared depression on the bottom. The sunfish sallies after it in a
short dash and then returns to hover over its nest, its fringed tail
waving gently. In spite of our expectations, any aggression here is
latent rather than actual, and need, it is clear, has room and time to
spare.