Part 7

Where Is Home?

The ordered days wheel on and fall into patterns consistently new. On further acquaintance, the place I live in seems to extend its boundaries and add to its store of lives. I struggle to understand. The more I add to my list of things as time goes on, the less my crude interpretations fit the circumstances. I started here with a tract of land. I built a house. I have a family. I am not yet sure of my location. The kingfisher says one thing, and the frog another. The snake travels a few thousand feet of home area, and the tern thousands of miles. They are both on Cape Cod. Then one leaves another. All action blows hot and cold with endless variations. A little knowledge makes my center rock with uncertainty.

I am not even a native in the strict sense, and cannot be said to know my way around by feel, as a man might who was born here. I had a talk the other day with a time-honored Cape Codder on the subject of how fish or birds found their way. He was not able to give me any illumination on the scientific aspects of the subject, but when it came to human beings, he did give me some tips on how to avoid getting lost. I had confessed that I once set off in a rowboat and was lost in an offshore fog for the better part of a morning, rowing steadily in the wrong direction.

The next time that happened to me, he suggested, I should drop anchor and wait for the fog to lift. In that dense shroud it is also possible, if you happen to be wading in shallow water, to lose sight of your boat when it is only a few yards away. Under such circumstances he once used his fishing line to help him get back to the boat by using the lead sinker as the center of a compass, playing out the line and circling until he reached it.

The sea can be a trackless wilderness only a few yards offshore. Natives have been lost in it as well as newcomers. Still, there is no substitute for acquaintance, for knowing the sea’s look and its ways. This man claimed he could feel his way in the fog. In other words, taking in all factors, familiar or deducible, such as the way the tide is running, whether it is ebbing or rising, how the wind goes, and from what quarter, or even guessing direction by the ridges on a sand bar, he could take the right course, without, as he put it “letting my judgment interfere.”

It took me a while just to learn the local compass directions, but now that I have my north, south, east, and west inside me, I am not sure, even walking through the trees, that I will not bump into my old ignorance. It takes time to find your way. A man new to the countryside might well be envious of some of the older inhabitants that know where they are without trying--a turtle, for example. A box turtle’s slow motion over the year seems like a true measure of ancientness. While the birds, the fish, the men depart, this dry land reptile seems to feel responsible for holding back, for the weight of the earth itself. In the springtime I have seen a slow pair approaching each other in a mood of affinity, while the rest of the procreative world danced overhead, and I have seen a female laying her eggs in a sand bank, covering them over with a last shove of her hind legs, then moving away, a little more quickly than usual, it seemed to me, as if to return to the more agreeable task of waiting things out. When fall comes and their cold blood slows, they grow torpid and finally dig out of sight into the ground.

On one of these warm days in early October I hear a slow dragging in the leaves, and come upon a box turtle eating a mushroom. They have beautifully patterned shells, ocher or yellow, sometimes orange, and dusty black, almost batik in design, with many variations. I stand about eight feet away, while it holds its head and neck straight up, watching me. I guess it to be a male, by the bright red little eyes. The eyes of a female are a darker reddish brown.

His wrinkled red neck pulses a little. His yellow beak and curved mouth line are tight shut under his flat-topped head, with bits of mushroom sticking out on either side. Very comical, he looks; but he stares down any inclination in me to laugh out loud. He watches me without moving for a full fifteen minutes before I get tired of the experiment and go away. Nothing, he seems to realize, can outlast a box turtle. This old male, with his wrinkled red jowls, and his soft, puddled-looking feet, must represent some antediluvian complacency, or, for all I know, a reasonable pride.

In captivity box turtles have exceeded forty years before they died, and some grow to be much older than that, if they avoid being crushed on the highways or killed by forest fires, since they are otherwise invulnerable to most predators, excepting man. This year a box turtle was found locally by a man whose deceased relative had carved his initials on its shell in 1889, making the turtle seventy-one years old. How old the turtle was when so tagged is not known.

They are wanderers--more so, for example, than the water turtles, and with a certain assurance. Within their chosen environment, of open field, shrubby slope, or marsh periphery, they cover a great deal of ground. They seem to carry a staying power with them, and an ancient decorum. They are like old natives true to ancestral places. There is something enviable about this fittingness to home.

Still, I have enough modern restlessness or rootlessness in me to think that a home or piece of land probably has fewer boundaries than ever before. We are going to have to know our location “way out,” as some of the old Cape Codders used to say. I have an equal envy of the terns that are flying toward the Caribbean or the Antarctic. They are birds of the world, in which they know their direction by markers that are light-years away, or so some scientists believe after much investigation. The latest theory is that migrating birds find their way by the sun’s changing position during daylight hours and by some of the constellations at night. They have a built-in mastery of what it took many thousands of years for man to learn, with his surpassing intellect. They are readers of the stars. Their home is in the wide blind sky.

The Field of Learning

We are committed far from home, but for a field of learning, the start and the finish is still here, still in place, just as that unique season of October, presaging a death in the glory of its color and clouds, brings the first frost, as if to say: “Regard necessity, in all its aspects. Look no further.”

It never comes without warning. One night a thrashing, thicket-tearing wind arrives with much greater cold. Two nights later another wind blasts all warmth away, and when it dies down the frost settles in, leaving a crisp whiteness on the grass at dawn, and clouds of white vapor over the pond waters. The garden beans go limp and the wild indigo turns black.

In that wind the low trees are like a sea, pluming and foaming. They are tossed and rocked, they pitch and writhe, while the stars in ordered majesty stream overhead. When the temperature starts to go down there is not a sound from the insect musicians any more, not one pizzicato, nor audible dry pulsing in the trees. You might think all breeding was over, though generation is latent everywhere.

Then it grows warm again. The insects sound in the grass and in the trees, if to a diminished extent. Crows gather in the early morning, and their various calls, synchronized in the open air, over the treetops, sound highly melodious. I hear a robin caroling, but very quietly, almost out of a playfulness, a musing. In spite of inexorable change, there are false dawns, days, or hours of deceptive warmth that set the long-horned grasshoppers to their buzzing and clicking and the flickers to shouting with renewed energy. All through the woods tiny tree frogs pipe at intervals from the cover of damp leaves. The pools in the fishway at the Brewster Herring Run are loaded with warm October sunlight and three-to four-inch alewives going down to salt water. A kingfisher planes up from branches above the stream with a rattling cry.

The pattern is one of reduction, depopulation, cutting down to size, but like all other shifts in a season, this one is manifested as another angle of light, a different feel to the air, a new set of circumstances, as much as a stop to all activity. When the fall winds swish and swoop along the shore, and I walk the tidal flats, a wide space played upon by light--gold, brown, and blue reflections running through pools and across long ribs of sand--I am regenerated by all the choices that are still ahead of me. Nothing is fixed or finished. It seems to me that everything I encounter is driven by indirection, like the waves and rivulets, sun tangled, that are crossing each other and separating over sand bars during an oncoming tide. Here is the ordered complexity which ensures that our findings, or rather, our search, will never have an end.

The finding-out process begins in childhood. That is why teaching is so great a profession. We intellectual animals have a long period in which to learn our wings. The teacher’s role is to bring us toward our highest capacity, and the tortures of that are immeasurable, on both sides. The field of learning is as wide as the sand flats, and the results as hard to catch as the waves; but a teacher has help from his pupils in ways over which they themselves have little control. Children have new fingers and new eyes and have to be coaxed into using them, but the touch and sight they bring cannot be taught in the schools.

I have found out lately, after some attempts at teaching natural history, that nature springs in a child and a child in nature. You learn that you are teaching both.

Why is one so proud of ignorance, and another of hiding what he knows? Some make a violent effort to be noticed; others, to retreat from view. You have an ambivalent and groping world to deal with, as hard to tape or tie as some of the phenomena you lead it to. But life is present tense to them, neither past nor future. They seem to pick up its manifestations not with adult skill but on the fly, like a boy casually catching a ball after missing ten, and then being surprised at himself. How did it happen? Memories, complexities, prejudices, risks taken on behalf of the future are largely unknown to them. It is enough to be new. There is not even any choice, since all choices are open, being new. Children are the unpredicting and the unpredictable. The one thing in which they never fail is growth, like the natural environment which never fails in its variations on the theme of fertility.

One mild afternoon two of us take out a group of boys on a field trip along the shore, a beginners collecting expedition. The class runs ahead. They find a dead loon on the beach, with rove beetles, lovers of carrion, roaming through its body. These beetles have black and white stripes, suggesting a skunk to one boy, who is still young enough to admit all affinities.

They run on, with erratic energy. They lend a puzzled ear to our explanations of how life forms are related to the places in which we find them. They are not quite certain of our terms. What is “environment?” What, for that matter, is “life?”

Classifications come hard to them at first. Certain types of recognition take a long time to learn. When I think that at the age of thirty I didn’t know the difference between one gull and another, not to speak of their different calls, I am hardly surprised.

“What’s this?”: a dune-dwelling locust, an ichneumon fly; a slipper shell, a shred of kelp, a spider, a scallop shell ... all parts of a game, novelties. But when will we know how to fit them all together? An impatient teacher might think from these boys, with their degrees of inattention, that the game will never get under way, that the preparation will never end. Yet their own lesson is that readiness is all, and the outcome immaterial.

I am only half acquainted with them, although some of their native traits stand out plain to see. In one there is a shade of melancholy transplanted from his father, in another courtesy and gaiety. One is rough and full of the fever of unregulated competition. Another is quiet and slow, or quick and sensitive. Together they share a mystery. They are in active flight like young birds, and at this point, this moment of being, allowed its own growth without real harm or hindrance, they give an offering. It is the act of their unknown selves.

They catch some more insects with their nets. They find the bright yellow feathers of a flicker which had been caught and eaten by fox or owl in the beach grass. They identify the remains of a young herring gull washed onto the upper beach. The tide has ebbed and the sands stretch off with glittering lanes and rivulets--gulls stalking in the distance, or resting in white flotillas on the water--and blue salt water curves beyond, over the earth’s perimeter. The October shadows begin to stretch farther down the sands. Light, smoky clouds drift over and a strange little shower of rain comes down, running along the beach, disturbing no one. Then the sun comes clear again, moving westward. Everything we collect, all that we can say about it, is only a start, a suggestion, although each sample leads to all others. We have left a great deal behind. If the north wind roars in again tomorrow, sweeping all warmth away, killing more of life’s visible evidence, or making it cower in the earth, and causing colds and crabbedness in human society, we will still be setting out.

Colors of the Season

There is yellow and peach pink on the leaves of the red maples, and some of the oaks begin to show signs of changing, but the most colorful plants are the mushrooms. The wet weather has been providential for them, and they have come up in some areas where I cannot remember having seen them before. They thrust mysteriously but stubbornly through the grass in a wide semicircle of white moons. They parade up the side of trees, and across the wood floor their cups or parasols stand comfortably grounded in dead leaves or decaying wood. (We see only the flower of the mushroom protruding above the ground, while underneath lies the complex mat of fine fibers from which they blossom, the mycelium.)