A FEBRUARY FRESHET
One of the very interesting events in my out-of-door year is the
February freshet. Perhaps you call it the February _thaw_. That is all
it could be called this year; and, in fact, a _thaw_ is all that it
ever is for me, nowadays, living, as I do, high and dry here, on
Mullein Hill, above a sputtering little trout brook that could not
have a freshet if it tried.
But Maurice River could have a freshet without trying. Let the high
south winds, the high tides, and the warm spring rains come on
together, let them drive in hard for a day and a night, as I have
known them to do, and the deep, dark river goes mad! The tossing tide
sweeps over the wharves, swirls about the piles of the great bridge,
leaps foaming into the air, and up and down its long high banks beats
with all its wild might to break through into the fertile meadows
below.
There are wider rivers, and other, more exciting things, than spring
freshets; but there were not when I was a boy. Why, Maurice River was
so wide that there was but a single boy in the town, as I remember,
who could stand at one end of the drawbridge and skim an oyster-shell
over to the opposite end! The best that I could do was to throw my
voice across and hear it echo from the long, hollow barn on the other
bank. It would seem to me to strike the barn in the middle, leap from
end to end like a creature caged, and then bound back to me faint and
frightened from across the dark tide.
I feared the river. Oh, but I loved it, too. Its tides were always
rising or falling--going down to the Delaware Bay and on to the sea.
And in from the bay, or out to the bay, with white sails set, the big
boats were always moving. And when they had gone, out over the wide
water the gulls or the fish hawks would sail, or a great blue heron,
with wings like the fans of an old Dutch mill, would beat ponderously
across.
I loved the river. I loved the sound of the calking-maul and the adze
in the shipyard, and the smell of the chips and tarred oakum; the
chatter of the wrens among the reeds and calamus; the pink of the
mallow and wild roses along the high mud banks; the fishy ditches with
their deep sluiceways through the bank into the river; and the vast,
vast tide-marshes that, to this day, seem to me to stretch away to the
very edge of the world.
What a world for a boy to drive cows into every morning, and drive
them home from every night, as I used to help do! or to trap muskrats
in during the winter; to go fishing in during the summer; to go
splashing up and down in when the great February freshet came on!
For of all the events of the year, none had such fascination for me as
the high winds and warm downpour that flooded the wharves, that drove
the men of the village out to guard the river-banks, and that drowned
out of their burrows and winter hiding-places all the wild things that
lived within reach of the spreading tide.
The water would pour over the meadows and run far back into the swamps
and farm lands, setting everything afloat that could float--rails,
logs, branches; upon which, as chance offered, some struggling
creature would crawl, and drift away to safety.
But not always to safety; for over the meadows the crows and fish
hawks, gulls, herons, bitterns, and at night the owls, were constantly
beating to pounce upon the helpless voyagers, even taking the
muskrats an easy prey, through their weakness from exposure and long
swimming in the water.
There would be only two shores to this wild meadow-sea--the
river-bank, a mere line of earth drawn through the water, and the
distant shore of the upland. If the wind blew from the upland toward
the bank, then the drift would all set that way, and before long a
multitude of shipwrecked creatures would be tossed upon this narrow
breakwater, that stood, a bare three feet of clay, against the wilder
river-sea beyond.
To walk up and down the bank then was like entering a natural history
museum where all the specimens were alive; or like going to a small
menagerie. Sparrows, finches, robins, mice, moles, voles, shrews,
snakes, turtles, squirrels, muskrats, with even a mink and an opossum
now and then, would scurry from beneath your feet or dive back into
the water as you passed along.
And by what strange craft they sometimes came! I once saw two muskrats
and a gray squirrel floating along on the top of one of the muskrats’
houses. And again a little bob-tailed meadow mouse came rocking along
in a drifting catbird’s nest which the waves had washed from its
anchorage in the rosebushes. And out on the top of some tall stake, or
up among the limbs of a tree you would see little huddled bunches of
fur, a muskrat perhaps that had never climbed before in his life,
waiting, like a sailor lashed to the rigging, to be taken off.
But it was not the multitude of wild things--birds, beasts,
insects--that fascinated me most, that led me out along the slippery,
dangerous bank through the swirling storm; it was rather the fear and
confusion of the animals, the wild giant-spirit raging over the face
of the earth and sky, daunting and terrifying them, that drew me.
Many of the small creatures had been wakened by the flood out of their
deep winter sleep, and, dazed and numbed and frightened, they seemed
to know nothing, to care for nothing but the touch of the solid earth
to their feet.
All of their natural desires and instincts, their hatreds, hungers,
terrors, were sunk beneath the waters. They had lost their wits, like
human creatures in a panic, and, struggling, fighting for a foothold,
they did not notice me unless I made at them, and then only took to
the water a moment to escape the instant peril.
The sight was strange, as if this were another planet and not our
orderly, peaceful world at all. Nor, indeed, was it; for fear cowered
everywhere, in all the things that were of the earth, as over the
earth and everything upon it raged the fury of river and sky.
The frail mud bank trembled under the beating of the waves; the sunken
sluices strangled and shook deep down through the whirlpools sucking
at their mouths; the flocks of scattered sea-birds--ducks and
brant--veered into sight, dashed down toward the white waters or drove
over with mad speed, while the winds screamed and the sky hung black
like a torn and flapping sail.
And I, too, would have to drop upon all fours, with the mice and
muskrats, and cling to the bank for my life, as the snarling river,
leaping at me, would plunge clear over into the meadow below.
A winter blizzard is more deadly, but not more fearful, nor so wild
and tumultuous. For in such a storm as this the foundations of the
deep seem to be broken up, the frame of the world shaken, and you, and
the mice, and the muskrats, share alike the wild, fierce spirit and
the fear.
To be out in such a storm, out where you can feel its full fury, as
upon a strip of bank in the midst of the churning waters, is good for
one. To experience a common peril with your fellow mortals, though
they be only mice and muskrats, is good for one; for it is to share
by so much in their humble lives, and by so much to live outside of
one’s own little self.
And then again, we are so accustomed to the order and fair weather of
our part of the globe, that we get to feel as if the universe were
being particularly managed for us; nay, that we, personally, are
managing the universe. To flatten out on a quaking ridge of earth or
be blown into the river; to hear no voice but the roar of the storm,
and to have no part or power in the mighty tumult of such a storm,
makes one feel about the size of a mouse, makes one feel how vast is
the universe, and how fearful the vortex of its warring forces!
The shriek of those winds is still in my ears, the sting of the
driving rains still on my face, the motion of that frail mud bank,
swimming like a long sea-serpent in the swirling waters, I can still
feel to my finger-tips. And the growl of the river, the streaming
shreds of the sky, the confusion beneath and about me, the mice and
muskrats clinging with me for a foothold--I live it all again at the
first spatter of a February rain upon my face.
To be out in a February freshet, out in a big spring break-up, is to
get a breaking up one’s self, a preparation, like Nature’s, for a new
lease of life--for spring.