Part 15

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.