Part 19

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.

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.

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.

Co-ordination is intrinsic to the life of an environment, acted upon by every predator. There will be no fight between the sunfish and the horned pout, but the sunfish has affirmed its ancient rights to the territory that comprises its nest. It is bold in defense of its home, up to the point, presumably, that it goes beyond a boundary which its feelings establish for it. I am reminded of those birds, like the herring gulls and their “threat postures” (described by N. K. Tinbergen in The Herring Gull’s World, 1954) assumed when two birds defend their respective positions on either side of a boundary invisible to us but strongly felt by them. In these cases a fight may never result, because the two alternate drives of defense and aggression cancel each other out. What the trained observer sees as an indication of what is going on are “behavior patterns,” types of physical action that show him what this gull communication might mean. In any case, up and down the scale of life is force and counterforce, action and reaction, in a balance that is understood in as many ways as there are species.

The lusty month of June is made up of all its encounters, many of them savage in isolation; but we may look for Roman circuses in vain. Wait all day and no life seems to devour another. Wait all year and you may never see the fight you are looking for. Now and then to be sure, as with an abundance of fish and their marauding predators, you can see savagery and greed confined, but even so the lesson is the same. It is not killing, eating, and aggression which seem paramount but an over-all rhythm and balance in which they are only elements. Later on, between July and December, the young alewives hatched out this spring in pond waters will start returning to the sea. I have often seen them as they go down the fish ladders by which their spawning parents came up. Perhaps through some attraction to the water’s force where it spills down hard over the concrete rims of each pool in the ladder, the fingerlings mass and circle before dropping back downstream. It is here that a number of eels, some of them of large size, coil and slither through the water, and eat large quantities of fish. Eels are largely nocturnal in habit, but they do go through periods of feeding by day. Sometimes they act like eating machines, methodically grabbing one little fish after another; but the alewives continually swim over them, unregarding. Where the fish idle in the stream below, in less turbulent, clearer water, perfectly capable of seeing any eels lying in wait for them, they are in no way affected, so far as I can see. The eels themselves, lying on the stream bottom for long periods after eating, pay no attention while the little alewives swim over them. Here is a strange relation between enemies.