Part 3

A little girl at the beach comes running through the shallow waters crying: “Something touched me, and it wasn’t Daddy!”

Later on, her mother wonders aloud if crabs bite. She picks one up and when she gets her answer, screams with pain and anger at all the “unnatural” and the unknown.

Just the other side of us is not only a bewildering variety but a space, which we have still to find, filled with an unfamiliar silence, or random sounds, seemingly disconnected motions, sudden flights that we witness out of the corner of an eye. When we only assign the word “purpose” to ourselves, it is hard to understand just what credit to give that which only stands and waits, or moves from one place to another. I sit on the beach, moving a little away from a portable radio that a man has brought to assure himself of his continuous hold on human affairs, and look out over the hazy surface of the water, past a long border of waves that lollop on the sand. There is a large bird standing on a rock not far offshore. I know it as a great black-backed gull, a scavenger, a predator, which sometimes eats the eggs and kills the young of other species of gulls whose nesting islands it shares, and robs other birds of their food ... and that is about all I know, aside from having watched its splendid, easy flight. So it stands, and may stand, for an hour or more at a time, sea-surrounded, glaring out with expressionless yellow eyes. Is it digesting a heavy meal? Is it waiting for low tide so that its feeding grounds will be uncovered? Is it greedy, savage, lazy, and bold? All such questions are tentative. The subject is aloof.

Why is there so much hanging around and waiting, so much suspension in nature? It comes as an occasional surprise to us timekeepers. In the gull we suspect obliviousness, and yet it may be prompted by the demands of a space of water, light, air, stretching before and around it, in its being, of whose motion and sense we are scarcely aware.

We see very little. I am told that the very sands we sit on are full of minute organisms. The visible life, perhaps in the form of a few beach fleas, represents an extremely small percentage of the life unseen, a condition which has its parallel in the soil. But a short walk or wade along the shore can give you proof enough, without the need of a nip from a crab, that the tidal grounds are covered and circulating with life, a life which in its marine forms might seem small, simple, primitive, and unallied with much that we landed mammals can understand.

I cannot inquire much of the moon snail, blindly, slowly moving across the sands under the tidal waters, with its large foot feeling for a clam. It only reveals itself to me by outward acts and signs which do not seem to have much variety. A small hole, countersunk in a shell, is common proof that a moon snail has drilled in and then eaten the occupant. When you see a “sand collar,” which this animal forms of sand grains and eggs, you know another side of its existence. Perhaps that is all there is to it--eating and reproduction--the round shellfish mindlessly carrying out its destiny. If it says anything at all to me it is only out of undeciphered darkness, silence, and original need.

A tiny, shrimplike animal hovers in the water, then darts over my foot, only describing itself to me by its quick motion, and that is all I know of it. It suddenly buries itself in the sandy bottom, where reflected sunlight makes golden nets, that stretch and tremble through the constantly flowing waters.

The tide ebbs. The sun starts to evaporate the moisture from the top surface of a big rock, part of a jetty that thrusts out from the beach. I see a number of dark periwinkles around and under an algae-sheathed, water-soaked branch that lies there, a source of food for these browsers and vegetarians. They are a common marine snail, used for human food in many parts of the world, and usually so numerous and well known as to be taken for granted. As the water recedes and sinks below the surface of the jetty, the sun beats down, drying the rock. Some of the animals stay under the shade and moisture of the stick, but more begin to move slowly away from it. When these travelers finally reach the edge of the rock, they start down its shaded face. Their dark, whorled shells, though an intrinsic part of them, are hoisted, moved around, almost in a full circle, seeming to slip loosely over their bodies as they move down. Their black tentacles, like antennae on insects, wave slightly on their snouts, and their slimy foot works slowly down. Their motion is a curious combination of probing, oozing, gliding, and at the same time, holding on, assuring the grip, with a kind of portentous caution. Since I can easily tip one off with my finger, I also feel a tenuousness about them, in their relation to this realm of tidal power with its constant displacements--but adaptability is probably a better way to think of it. They have lasted, in their loose wandering, through a period of time which we can only estimate. They have a special authority. As I watch them it seems to me that no other action is of any more pressing importance during this moment in the scheme of things.

These personifications of motion, these strangers, have untouched lands of their own.

That silent sea at my side is colossal, inscrutable, and holds out no solace or advice. We only have our toes in, on a tiny section of its summer shore. Most of us barely touch its surface. Even so, it offers as much to a traveling human as to a snail. It is still an old space unexplored, and if we leave the vacation sands and set out on an afternoon’s sail, we may be following some need of wind and water in us, some unused acquaintance.

There is a well-known sand bar to steer by in the hazy distance across Cape Cod Bay. We buck the steely waves upwind, close hauled, half hot in the sun, half cold and shivering when the water thrashes in over the bow of the boat. Ropes creak slightly through the boom and the mast. The wake bubbles. Wood strains through water. The west wind blows stiff over conflicting waves. The time passes with a certain monotony but for the craft of sailors and its requirements. There is nothing called for but to sail, with no other distractions on this immediate flat world of light, no concern ... and yet we sense some ultimate demand that comes from this blue giant, whose depths and tricks are still unfathomed.

The flat necessity of it makes sailing its own satisfaction. It becomes physical. We fly, we feel, we calculate, by sinew, flesh, and bones, and through the salty blood in our veins. We may be a degree closer to the black-backed gull.

There on arrival are great white sheets of sand curving up into a barrier of dunes back of a pebbly beach, where a beach buggy rolls along scaring up clouds and crowds of terns, and sanderlings in spinning flight. The jeep stops and teen-agers jump down and out, crying stridently. We anchor the boat just off the beach. The water is clear and cold. The dunes are sun reflectors, clean and warm, and we find whitish-gray grasshoppers on them, flecked like the sand.

Sailing back again in late afternoon, the boat goes fast and free before the wind over the water now turned green, a blend of sky blue and the yellow of a falling sun. The bay lies out like an enormous garden, patched with color and motion, the salt waters full of latent power, ready with every kind of mood, flowing by and over, interwrought, crossing time and circumstance. We pass a clanging bell buoy. Evening comes on. Gold icicles on the water are turning and softening to shades of pink and purple. It is like striding over a wide land of peace and plenty, before we tack into the harbor.

August

A Wild Home Land

What I wanted to do was follow the year around, recognizing that hours, days, months, or years are as elusive as unseen atoms (even though, universal law being consistent, we deduce their behavior with some success). I am not sure where July left off and August began. Summer flies away from me, like an unknown bird.

Out into August then, while there is time. When I step into it as if into something new, I sense thousands and thousands of roving lives, taking their opportunities where and when they can. The day is hot and shining. The oak leaves, no longer fresh and young, but spotted with growths, chewed by insects, frayed and scarred, are still tough, deeply green, harnessing the sun, under a stir and slide of air. Two big red-tailed hawks sail high overhead, screaming constantly. A blue jay screams, in a fair likeness. The hawks wheel lower down along the trees, inside the horizon. Then two little tree sparrows flit by. Insects drone, stir, and buzz. There is a dragging, rattling sound of leaves as a box turtle moves slowly along. A cicada chorus rises like a sudden breeze from the southeast and then subsides. Two black and white warblers go through the cover of the woods in a quick butterfly flight together. The “Tock! Tock!” of a chipmunk sounds behind a brush pile, almost like the end notes of a whippoorwill’s song.

I feel a balance in space between them all: the roamers, hawks, or gulls, in the sky’s great allowance; the spider swinging on a thread and making its own web of a world; colorful, elusive warblers through the trees; the chipmunk on its chosen ground. These sounds, synonymous with motion, seem to hold them in mutual alliance, round in a lightness of air that is strict and easy in its coming and release, like the cicadas; but there is an intensity here that makes my heart beat faster.

A jay jumps down to a branch, cocks its crested head, with those black eyes full of readiness, and brays. The spider wraps up a captured moth with rapid skill. A robber fly waits on a leaf with throbbing abdomen and a look of contained vitality. It is not to be known. I see the brown, glazed wings folded back in the sunlight, and two black, sky-light eyes on top of its head. It seems preternaturally lean. It stays there for ten minutes and I watch it closely, almost suspended with it in my attention. A robber fly is a tough predator, but to call it cold, indifferent to pain, careless of life, darkness personified? Our terms are useless. I do not know. Then my attention is cut, as it abruptly darts off, swinging in an arc, perhaps to catch a housefly a hundred feet away.

In the buzz, the running light, the stir of summer, I feel as if each motion, each event had its own pressing concern. This homeland, no longer graced with the name of wilderness, is full of wild, unparalleled desire.

Everyone knows that the month of August is loaded with insects, although they come under the heading of “bugs,” a menace to human society. Their fibrous trills are incessant in the grass. Their high, shrill sounds announce the heated air. Those two species that we hate more than most, just for their familiarity, the flies and mosquitoes, drone around us. In the heat of noon our senses are a little clouded. We may be mumbling something about “the will of life be done,” and it is being done ... in great part by the insects. The summer rage to take and to share in taking is carried out in minute detail, from the tiniest mite in the soil to the dragonfly.

Manifest energy, using its short summer span, fills our surroundings with its wealth of insects. It has not been long since I was taught the modicum of knowledge needed to name a few of them, to start in on a fraction of the 680,000 species that fill the earth; but it was enough to add to my sight. I had never realized that such foreign and incredible variety existed so close to me.

A yellow jacket tugs furiously at a dead cricket on the road, like a hungry dog with raw meat. Delicate aphids waver on flower stalks. A big striped cicada killer roams through the oaks. Other wasps sip juice or nibble carrion. Dragonflies dart across both land and water on their tangential licks of speed. The cabbage butterflies flutter and alight with pale, yellow wings held together like one thin sail against the sunlight. Over and under, in and out, flying, crawling, suspended in plants and in the growth of plants, seizing their time, waiting, indefinitely if need be, held in chrysalis or egg, emerging, feeding, adding to death and life in death ... what are these strangers?

There are wasps as red as rubies; flies of a more scintillating, vibrant green than emeralds; and shiny bronze or golden beetles which are the envy of human art. If color is life, to make the human eyes ring and the body respond, they have it, and they also lack it. Some are so diaphanous as to belong only to the sunlit air, and some are so dark, as though part of unseen depths, that all color is only a dance, springing away.

We use up constant, frustrated energy keeping them in check. Their dry throbbing annoys us. They eat our crops, transmit disease, and drive us away from our pleasures: although in the bold stare of nature they are effective employees. We might, slapping a mosquito, recognize their necessity as pollinators, earth movers, or food, respect the role they play in decomposition and growth ... then we must turn around and invent new poisons. Insects are redoubtable enemies. We are never quite sure which of us is in the ascendancy, just as we are never sure of what they are.

Still we can look and marvel at their complex detail: these wings like lace or spun glass; wings cut short and wide or thin as a hair; wings with the pattern of flowers, or veins of a leaf; bodies round and narrow, oval or oblong; strange truncated abdomens; huge, compound eyes; legs impossibly thin and long, or unbelievable in number and still co-ordinated; heads like alligators; bodies like sticks; false eyes; false horns; repulsive, intangible, unreal.

Here seems to be automatic, nerve-end response in unreflecting zeros, whose lives pass with their deaths, but still, on this earth crust they are affiliated with everything. That which may frighten or startle a bird, like the eye spots on a moth’s wing, is related to a bird. Animals are adapted to their environments and the medium in which they live and act; but so many tricks and curiosities are embodied in the insects, so many far-fetched connections of shape and motion, as to leave all particular environments behind.