Nature's Year

Part 1

NATURE’S YEAR

Books by John Hay:

A PRIVATE HISTORY THE RUN NATURE’S YEAR

JOHN HAY

NATURE’S YEAR

The Seasons of Cape Cod

ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE

1961 Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-8166 Copyright © 1961 by John Hay All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

For Kristi, Susan, Kitty, Rebecca, and Charles Mark--with me on this journey through the year

Contents

July 11

A Start on Cape Cod--An Entry--Other Lands within the “Narrow Land”

August 25

A Wild Home Land--The Musicians--A Walk with an Oven Bird--Toward the Sea

September 47

Youth on the Move--An Open Shore--Chipmunks

October 61

Where Is Home?--The Field of Learning--Colors of the Season--The Last Day in October

November 81

The Seed in the Season--The Clouds--The Inconstant Land--The Dead and the Living

December 97

An Old Place, an Old Man--Night in the Afternoon--Two Encounters

January 113

Exposure--Ice on the Ponds--Contrast and Response

February 127

Secrets in the Open--The Sea in the Ground--Need--Death, Man Made

March 143

Part 2

Restless Days--An Extravagance--Interpretation--Response

April 161

Deeper News--April Light--“Frightened Away”

May 173

Declarations--Facets of Expression--Travel

June 187

The Garden--Room to Spare--The Binding Rain

July

A Start on Cape Cod

I drove to Cape Cod with travelers from everywhere. I came to this narrow peninsula over the blistering, insatiable roads of America with the summer crowd--in my shirt sleeves, with dark glasses to protect my sight--conscious of almost nothing but cars, and casualties ... our migrations have them too, like the birds and fish.

I saw an accident so terrible I could not describe it. Machines were flung into the air and smashed. A life was tossed away, a human being crushed like a doll. Human relationships were pathetically severed by the brutality of chance. Then we were allowed to go on--travelers racing down the highway through the blood-boiling heat of the sun. We come in with speed and we go away with speed, and we are both afraid and desirous of it. The human run in its relentless self-absorption seems more abstracted than any other natural force.

The resident population of Cape Cod is some 80,000, and in July the number increases to an estimated 250,000 or more, a kind of barometric rise that is equivalent to what is happening in the earth at large. After Labor Day, when the summer tribe has gone back to the cities, relief comes. You can cross the road in comparative safety. Then, something like apathy pervades the Cape, as if its diminished society were trying to recover from an encounter with enormous odds.

Now I am off the road and back on the 110-foot hill where we put our house--part of a ridge that runs along the glacial moraine about a mile back from Cape Cod Bay. Dry Hill was its local name, and in fact, driving a well, we found a constant source of water only at 130 feet. This evening the yellow light runs liquidly through the oak trees and the pitch pines around us. I can hear the voices of some of my travel companions lifting from the shore, calling, pleading, protesting. A snatch of radio music comes in. A plane drones overhead. The warm air seems to breathe hard, as if to compete with human breath.

I often wonder, when I am back on the Cape again, whether I chose the right place in which to live. It looks bare and scrubby, lean and poor, in comparison with those lands to the north and west of us which are far prouder in their trees. It has been burned over, cut down, and generally abused by man, and most of its healthy trees will never attain full growth because of the salt spray that the winds drive over them in many storms. And the sea, for all its surrounding presence, seems a mere backdrop a great deal of the time, a flatness along the horizon, but it is indomitably there. All the winds, the plants, the shores, the contours of this low land, are influenced by it, and because of it we are carried out into a distance in spite of ourselves. The sea mitigates our insularity.

Cape Cod reefs out into the Atlantic. I saw our house when it was new as a ship above the trees. I imagined a voyage. I recognize that although there are some true fishermen here who sail the year around, the rest of us are summer sailors, with no lasting allegiance or commitment to the dangers of salt water. Yet the Cape provides space for whoever might take the risk or pleasure of finding it. The sea and sky are very wide. The winds blow in from all quarters.

The yellow evening lowers now, through the young, shining leaves of the oak trees, creating new recesses of darkness. Tides of fire hang above the water. There are snatches of bird song through the woods: a robin; the silver pealing of a wood thrush; a towhee; a whippoorwill, starting in on its over-and-over-again, the loud repetitious whistling that makes the night known even as the day hangs on. And finally faint stirrings here and there, easings down, last faint pips and trills before the dark. I am conscious of the tenancy of nature, in which there is more putting forth, more endurance, more population, in fact, than any visitor or local man might ever begin to realize. The great world we live in is no longer one for hide-outs. If this makes for intolerable pressure and despair, it also brings much more into view. Local recognition becomes a general need, and there are more possibilities in it than we have been told. While the human race has been approaching three billions in number, and making ready to put its mark on the moon or hang its hearing aids off Venus, I seem to have spent many years missing, or unwittingly avoiding, almost as many lives and chances close to home. How can I begin to compensate?

An Entry

I had decided to start this book in July, with the idea that this was the time embodying the full, crowded height of life--the noise, the color, the jostle of creatures in wonderful variety, just like that load of passengers getting off the boat at Provincetown to see the sights. The leaves are fresh. The motions of greed and fulfillment are in full course. Even so, I hardly knew what riches to snatch at first. In fact, another bold, heat-heavy day, with its crowds and its pride of accident, had the effect of making me recoil. I was muttering: “Slow down. Slow down. Why so thick and fast?”

On my way back from walking to the mailbox just now, I stepped off the road into the oak trees through which it runs, dropped the newspapers and the letters, watched and waited. I sat on the upper edge of a hollow where dappled shadows rocked lightly between the trees, on their gray trunks, and across the sloping ground. There was a pervading swish of leaves around me, an occasional stirring at the tree tops. I heard the slow, dragged caroling of a red-eyed vireo. Filtered light played on the low growth of sarsaparilla, hazelnut, huckleberry, and bracken, or dry land fern, with the brown floor of oak leaves in dead but useful attendance, holding moisture, shelter, and fruition in reserve.

The wood had a climate of its own, cooler, darker than the hot, damp, wide open world of road and shore. There are climates within climates, as there are worlds within worlds. Under the bark of a tree the beetle inhabits a place that has special atmospheric conditions differing from the woods outside it; and so it is with the woodchuck in its hole, the ants in their hill. Any place, of whatever size, however endowed in our scheme of things with grandeur or insignificance, any home, may be greatly subtle in its variance.

A sweet, plaintive “pee-a-wee,” and a wood peewee, a neat little bird, black, light gray, and white like a phoebe, but with white wing bars, flew in quickly and lightly, to perch on a gray limb. The bird would tuck its head down, and then move it from side to side, looking for flying insects, repeating its song every five seconds or so. Its tail, not bobbing like a phoebe’s, twitched very slightly when its head moved. Then, in brief action, it fluttered out, caught an insect, and returned to its perch. These little flights covered most of the area around its tree, almost methodically. Once I heard the crack of its bill as it chased a fly almost down to the ground, halfway across the wood. It alighted on a new branch--to try out another base of action? But then another peewee flew in, perched, and sang at a far corner of the hollow, and the first one hurriedly flew back to its original perch as if it had been threatened and was making sure of its position. The wood seemed strung together by the intangible threads of their motion.

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