Part 20

It is perfectly true that a young alewife may not know an eel from a stick unless it is directly attacked, being in some respects oblivious to much of anything except the need to migrate to salt water. And yet the point is not that they are “stupid,” but that their crowd lives demand a cohesive rhythm, sensitive enough in action, which is paramount to all risks they encounter. It is in fact their main protection. They school and eat. They school and escape. They school and perpetuate themselves. The solitary alewife is lost. These fish move and intercommunicate in a frame of continuity to which they are forever held. But can we call it a restriction? Its terms may be quite invisible to us.

The Binding Rain

So this is, or was, Cape Cod, as June booms with fruition. The nights throb; and on a clear one how the long frames of the stars line up overhead! There is no end of internment, no end of use and opening out.

It is not the place I came to, out of the city, though its shape, like a giant curved arm, or fish hook lying out in the Atlantic, is the same. Its oak trees have grown, even in the comparatively few years I have lived here. The old, gray-shingled houses are still in evidence, but there are many more new ones, seemingly temporary as this age goes. The shores are crowded, beginning toward the end of June. We are scrambling to take advantage of our summer economy while it lasts, although the buzz saw sounds the year through, as well as the chickadees, building motels, summer cottages, gas stations, houses for the retired. Cape Cod still has a certain itinerant quality, which may ally it to its more seagoing past.

In my own terms the Cape is not the same. I have outlived my dependence on its past. I go by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones with less interest. The “old characters” are not around to talk to any more. I am not quite so fascinated by grown-over wagon tracks as I used to be. Something pleasant is lost--even a blessed continuity. Still, I have learned to look for another, which has no particular choice as to place, joining them all.

This is not just “natural history” I have found, unless you are also willing to call it “natural mystery.” This is life, or death-in-life, as well as “nature.” In any case it is bountiful, or niggardly, relentless, terrible, but always at hand. Only walk out and see. Cape Cod is rife with unknown lives (and what I know about its ocean waters is not worth mentioning). Where do we begin? With a first question perhaps. To make it is to recover from being afraid of getting or giving the wrong answer, a step toward knowledge.

I have not learned much about cell structure, or the delicate co-ordination of organisms in their environment, or some of those remarkable mechanisms that trigger action in certain plants or animals of land and sea; but I have made that first step.

I stand by some pond, wondering how deep it is. Everything around me says, in comparative silence: “As deep as you make it,” and I have no need to think my questions will delay the source that leads them on.

The rolling energies of nature remind us of our own potentialities. In a small country field is all existence and its hazards. Ponderous storms, killing balances of cold and heat, great rains or droughts, hang over the needs of its competitive inhabitants. A natural, unimpeachable violence wipes out untold numbers, or holds them to its order. And yet the plants and animals themselves that endure, survive, and die prove an essential vigor in the process. It is not only a matter of “food gathering” and “competition” for them. They fight the winds, in rhythmic unity. They are made to face the universe, with the universe inside them. Their motions, their changing adaptation to circumstance, are also their great self-expenditure. Live and be finished off, but above all live!

This Cape Cod, this special piece of America, has its unexampled strength and a “progress” which will not take second place to our own. Sun and rain, the capacities of earth, the mindless ways of the flower, the strange and short sensitivities of the insects in their other world, the brooding sea in its ominous tidal balance held by moon and turning globe, all this matrix of energy has its standards and its abiding needs.

It rains steadily as the tourists begin to drive down the Cape in ever increasing numbers, thus abashing their spirits. Rain is a nuisance. It keeps us in and deprives us of perpetual warmth and light. If there were no rain? Drought is only on the surface. Water comes from pipes, the way milk comes from refrigerator cars.

But the rain will not be stopped. Clean, cool, straight falling, pattering on multitudinous leaves, it insists on its own power and propriety. There is no wind. The calm gray sky is gently, loosely moving, but held dead center with its riches of rain. The fall is steady and fast above the treetops, with single drops ticking off from each waxen leaf, sliding down the pine needles to end at their tips in brilliant crystal eyes. With a thin long seething it spits and spats and trickles on, pausing occasionally, then putting forth again. The water lands on the dead leaf floor under the trees, or thick beds of needles, sliding and soaking through, making gradual displacements between litter and soil, stirring gently, providing the life of earth its refreshment and guaranteeing its sustenance.

Between pond lilies and reeds the rain spatters the fresh water. It changes the lakes and ponds as it changes the earth. The water level moves up and down from year to year depending on the rainfall. In a pond it will move up the rim and cover the roots of overhanging shrubs--blueberries, alders, or swamp azaleas--then, after a year or two, it will recede again, revealing a narrow beach. During the years there will be continual, subtle alterations in the nature of plants around the pond, and in the habits of the animals dependent on them.

The rain falls through woodland bogs, and open swamps. It trickles down bare slopes and thicket-studded valleys. It runs over incessantly moving brooks and streams that bear it toward the sea. Its drops bounce with silvery emphasis across the waters of the slow, gray tidal inlets. They sound like a breath along the sands, and while arrowlike terns are excitedly diving for fish, they pock the silver-streaked levels of the bay, and then are lost to sight, pattering out over massive waters.

Even and sweet the descent, calm and clean its provision. The rain thrusts in and guarantees immediate growth. It binds the birds to the insects to the plants, to sun and air, breaking down elements in the soil, loosening it for billions of its travelers, making sure of sustenance in that release. Rain sound in June, which at other seasons may cut like a knife, is one of beatitude. I listen. I accept. It carries me on. Out of the hollow mind of the universe what conceptions may come in the millions and millions of years ahead? How many, in the next spit of timelessness, will fall prey to disaster? Both calm and calamity are in the cards. This is acceptable enough to life in nature. And who am I to claim some vain detachment?

Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.