Part 16

There is a swarm of thin little flies dancing in the warm sunlight on a March afternoon. They not only tell me something about the lengthening days, but the light seems to sit differently on their wings. They are a revelation, materializing out of a distance, hovering near.

In the game of identification we have to admit that nature is not an exclusively human province. Then we can be led by it, like this class of children, boys and girls on file through the woods, exploring new land, in expectation.

There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south, winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special character of this day.

It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness, spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks, months, years later, they come out with something learned that a teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she had seen a snowy owl.

Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the realm of science but not accuracy.

But we lead in to nature through names as well as our senses, and then by familiarity with habits, size, shape, color, the order of change, the ways of dying out and returning with plants and animals. Knowledge is our medium, and we are obliged to question.

What is that tree, strangely bent over along the snowy ground? A wild cherry? What happened to it? What is the evidence? Did another tree fall on it when it was a sapling, bend it down and force it to grow out horizontally? Its thick trunk stretches for six feet parallel to the ground, only a few inches above it, then turns and starts up into a sky-opening between the thickets beside it, sending up a wild array of branches. What else can we say about it?

Then one boy, putting things together, hearing how the tree compensated for its difficulties, needed light, and thrusted after it, cries out: “Why that sounds as if the tree was alive!” That is what we have been looking for. He is well started.

Response

March progresses toward its end, gradually adding to the population. Dark-headed, deep-colored male robins tug at worms on the lawn. Red-winged blackbirds sail low over marshes, or take stations by the edge of a pond, with reedy cries. The purple finches sing, along with the shrill braying of the blue jays. White-throated sparrows, quail, jays, and partridges that have been here all winter are more in evidence, especially on sunny days, and begin to be accompanied by newcomers, like the grackles. Myrtle warblers flutter up into the air and down again, catching insects. But the wind blows. It backs and fills. The rain is cold. The turn toward spring is very gradual, hardly perceptible at times.

Then a few alewives, a dozen or so, come in out of salt water and show up in Stony Brook, familiar strangers, large, pale fish weaving slowly up through the narrow stream. It has begun to be a time of declaration. New patterns, new arrangements are taking place, however much the season seems to lag.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth I hear a high, shrill sound, whirring and spinning, suggesting proud activity, presence set free. The spring peepers are making it known that a time has arrived, and I take joy in the news, having failed to make any definite assurance of it myself. Their sound embraces all this changing land, rising above the whispered roars of the sea.

Now the perpetrator of this chorus is a tiny tan frog with a smudged cross or X on its back, named Hyla Crucifer. The male of the species has been speaking up on behalf of spring openings for millions of years. In that capacity it is authoritative enough. Its voice, almost incredibly loud and shrill for an animal that is not much over an inch long, is amplified by means of a large bubblelike pouch which acts as a resonator. This mechanism is put to use after the animal comes out of winter torpor, after warm rain, and as the season itself breathes and sounds more freely. The peeper moves around with the earth itself and makes a declaration which, it seems to me, does not deserve the term automatic any more than the fiddling of grasshoppers in August. Both are part of the deep and various play of the year. In any case this specialty of voice is something of a marvel in itself. It is not like the eyes of an owl that are so made as to make maximum use of dim light, or the wings of a herring gull that can ride turbulent air currents above the water, or like the fins of a fish, the sensitive nose of a dog. The peeper’s vocal parts are not specialized for environmental use to that degree. Their primary, specific function is to attract the female. Mating and voice are synonymous. But perhaps we could also say that this mating cry, this sometimes bell-like sound, is fitted to the whole environment, that it belongs unerringly to a new earth and a new season. It seems to bring life and place, function and expression together. It is unequivocal. It is perfect. It speaks up reliably on behalf of everything now springing or about to spring.

For all their vast population in the bogs, ponds, edges, swamps, and other wet areas of the Cape, individual spring peepers are very hard to find. During a cool evening, as the stars begin to declare themselves, I hear the peepers’ collective voice rising up around me, passing into the sky. On the banks of Berry’s Hole, that deep, swampy hollow nearby, there is a pulsing, piercing, deafening chorus. The wind suddenly blows over in a loud torrent, but the peepers keep on. I walk farther down and they stop; then they begin again, after I sit still for a minute or two. The banks are wet, after a light afternoon rain, and they must be covered by frogs, judging by the sound; but I search every bit of ground with a flashlight and am unable to find a single one.

A wild, moist spring wind flings around the rim of the hollow, which is gray, dusted with fog, and in the clear opening overhead the stars fling out and away. Water stands dark and still where the banks end. Grass hummocks and shrubs choke the wet areas beyond. I sit for many minutes concentrating on one area with my flashlight. The peepers’ cry is deafening. Then at last, I see one. It jumps onto my shoes. And then another, on a low lying branch, moving along in the light--it displaces a third, which is toppled down into the leaves. They seem limp in action. A peeper is minute, almost weightless in my hand.

Nearby footsteps will silence them. They react spontaneously like tadpoles and minnows that dart off into deep water from a pond’s edge when you approach. Yet they are not bothered by the beam of a flashlight.

Such a tiny thing, this animal, this cool, moist, anonymous amphibian, for so proud a message! I can see that a peeper’s whole body pumps as it calls. It is like a bellows, and the vocal sac blows out like a blister, bluish-green in the light. “Peep-peep-peep,” and the whole night is filled with an insistent, stirring cry. No human statement can rival this simple, triumphant mode of revelation. The earth begins again.

April

Deeper News

I read in the papers that spring is beginning to show its vast capacity in the nation behind us, with tornadoes in the west, and floods to the south. The way is being cleared with a violence.

And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale, carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness. The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but that--a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an “incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned, four survived, and one is missing.

They were returning to Boston with 38,000 pounds of fish, after 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.