Chapter 1 of 13 · 3906 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

NATURE’S YEAR

_Books by John Hay_:

A PRIVATE HISTORY THE RUN NATURE’S YEAR

[Illustration]

JOHN HAY

_NATURE’S YEAR_

_The Seasons of Cape Cod_

ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GROSE

_1961 Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York_

_For Kristi, Susan, Kitty, Rebecca, and Charles Mark--with me on this journey through the year_

Contents

_July_ _11_

A Start on Cape Cod--An Entry--Other Lands within the “Narrow Land”

_August_ _25_

A Wild Home Land--The Musicians--A Walk with an Oven Bird--Toward the Sea

_September_ _47_

Youth on the Move--An Open Shore--Chipmunks

_October_ _61_

Where Is Home?--The Field of Learning--Colors of the Season--The Last Day in October

_November_ _81_

The Seed in the Season--The Clouds--The Inconstant Land--The Dead and the Living

_December_ _97_

An Old Place, an Old Man--Night in the Afternoon--Two Encounters

_January_ _113_

Exposure--Ice on the Ponds--Contrast and Response

_February_ _127_

Secrets in the Open--The Sea in the Ground--Need--Death, Man Made

_March_ _143_

Restless Days--An Extravagance--Interpretation--Response

_April_ _161_

Deeper News--April Light--“Frightened Away”

_May_ _173_

Declarations--Facets of Expression--Travel

_June_ _187_

The Garden--Room to Spare--The Binding Rain

_July_

_A Start on Cape Cod_

I drove to Cape Cod with travelers from everywhere. I came to this narrow peninsula over the blistering, insatiable roads of America with the summer crowd--in my shirt sleeves, with dark glasses to protect my sight--conscious of almost nothing but cars, and casualties ... our migrations have them too, like the birds and fish.

I saw an accident so terrible I could not describe it. Machines were flung into the air and smashed. A life was tossed away, a human being crushed like a doll. Human relationships were pathetically severed by the brutality of chance. Then we were allowed to go on--travelers racing down the highway through the blood-boiling heat of the sun. We come in with speed and we go away with speed, and we are both afraid and desirous of it. The human run in its relentless self-absorption seems more abstracted than any other natural force.

The resident population of Cape Cod is some 80,000, and in July the number increases to an estimated 250,000 or more, a kind of barometric rise that is equivalent to what is happening in the earth at large. After Labor Day, when the summer tribe has gone back to the cities, relief comes. You can cross the road in comparative safety. Then, something like apathy pervades the Cape, as if its diminished society were trying to recover from an encounter with enormous odds.

Now I am off the road and back on the 110-foot hill where we put our house--part of a ridge that runs along the glacial moraine about a mile back from Cape Cod Bay. Dry Hill was its local name, and in fact, driving a well, we found a constant source of water only at 130 feet. This evening the yellow light runs liquidly through the oak trees and the pitch pines around us. I can hear the voices of some of my travel companions lifting from the shore, calling, pleading, protesting. A snatch of radio music comes in. A plane drones overhead. The warm air seems to breathe hard, as if to compete with human breath.

I often wonder, when I am back on the Cape again, whether I chose the right place in which to live. It looks bare and scrubby, lean and poor, in comparison with those lands to the north and west of us which are far prouder in their trees. It has been burned over, cut down, and generally abused by man, and most of its healthy trees will never attain full growth because of the salt spray that the winds drive over them in many storms. And the sea, for all its surrounding presence, seems a mere backdrop a great deal of the time, a flatness along the horizon, but it is indomitably there. All the winds, the plants, the shores, the contours of this low land, are influenced by it, and because of it we are carried out into a distance in spite of ourselves. The sea mitigates our insularity.

Cape Cod reefs out into the Atlantic. I saw our house when it was new as a ship above the trees. I imagined a voyage. I recognize that although there are some true fishermen here who sail the year around, the rest of us are summer sailors, with no lasting allegiance or commitment to the dangers of salt water. Yet the Cape provides space for whoever might take the risk or pleasure of finding it. The sea and sky are very wide. The winds blow in from all quarters.

The yellow evening lowers now, through the young, shining leaves of the oak trees, creating new recesses of darkness. Tides of fire hang above the water. There are snatches of bird song through the woods: a robin; the silver pealing of a wood thrush; a towhee; a whippoorwill, starting in on its over-and-over-again, the loud repetitious whistling that makes the night known even as the day hangs on. And finally faint stirrings here and there, easings down, last faint pips and trills before the dark. I am conscious of the tenancy of nature, in which there is more putting forth, more endurance, more population, in fact, than any visitor or local man might ever begin to realize. The great world we live in is no longer one for hide-outs. If this makes for intolerable pressure and despair, it also brings much more into view. Local recognition becomes a general need, and there are more possibilities in it than we have been told. While the human race has been approaching three billions in number, and making ready to put its mark on the moon or hang its hearing aids off Venus, I seem to have spent many years missing, or unwittingly avoiding, almost as many lives and chances close to home. How can I begin to compensate?

_An Entry_

I had decided to start this book in July, with the idea that this was the time embodying the full, crowded height of life--the noise, the color, the jostle of creatures in wonderful variety, just like that load of passengers getting off the boat at Provincetown to see the sights. The leaves are fresh. The motions of greed and fulfillment are in full course. Even so, I hardly knew what riches to snatch at first. In fact, another bold, heat-heavy day, with its crowds and its pride of accident, had the effect of making me recoil. I was muttering: “Slow down. Slow down. Why so thick and fast?”

On my way back from walking to the mailbox just now, I stepped off the road into the oak trees through which it runs, dropped the newspapers and the letters, watched and waited. I sat on the upper edge of a hollow where dappled shadows rocked lightly between the trees, on their gray trunks, and across the sloping ground. There was a pervading swish of leaves around me, an occasional stirring at the tree tops. I heard the slow, dragged caroling of a red-eyed vireo. Filtered light played on the low growth of sarsaparilla, hazelnut, huckleberry, and bracken, or dry land fern, with the brown floor of oak leaves in dead but useful attendance, holding moisture, shelter, and fruition in reserve.

The wood had a climate of its own, cooler, darker than the hot, damp, wide open world of road and shore. There are climates within climates, as there are worlds within worlds. Under the bark of a tree the beetle inhabits a place that has special atmospheric conditions differing from the woods outside it; and so it is with the woodchuck in its hole, the ants in their hill. Any place, of whatever size, however endowed in our scheme of things with grandeur or insignificance, any home, may be greatly subtle in its variance.

A sweet, plaintive “pee-a-wee,” and a wood peewee, a neat little bird, black, light gray, and white like a phoebe, but with white wing bars, flew in quickly and lightly, to perch on a gray limb. The bird would tuck its head down, and then move it from side to side, looking for flying insects, repeating its song every five seconds or so. Its tail, not bobbing like a phoebe’s, twitched very slightly when its head moved. Then, in brief action, it fluttered out, caught an insect, and returned to its perch. These little flights covered most of the area around its tree, almost methodically. Once I heard the crack of its bill as it chased a fly almost down to the ground, halfway across the wood. It alighted on a new branch--to try out another base of action? But then another peewee flew in, perched, and sang at a far corner of the hollow, and the first one hurriedly flew back to its original perch as if it had been threatened and was making sure of its position. The wood seemed strung together by the intangible threads of their motion.

[Illustration]

These were some of the ways by which a wood peewee follows its destiny, employing its chosen place, attending to minutiae, to duty and performance. This was appropriate use, measured necessity. And as the outer earth led to this part of the wood, and it in turn to the “micro-climates” within it, so the birds drew my attention to the insects. I had been bitten a little, just enough to remind me, in my enjoyment, that the place was not unnaturally hospitable; and there were unseen spider mites that would leave me some inflammations to remember them by. Now I searched the space above me, aware, through the flights of the peewee, of the flying life it pursued. Some flies hovered, rocking lightly in the air, and then swung abruptly to one side, or dropped away, buzzing insistently. Tiny midges, illumined by sunlight, waggled between the trees. Moths fluttered down briefly to touch the pale leaves they resembled.

So I had been filled, as I sat there, with a sense of employment. I was part of a quiet, steady, structure of action. What better “security” could I find than that--learning, feeling, that a prodigious energy held all component parts in place and made them dance. In the neatness, discipline, almost detachment, of the bird’s little game as it pursued its subsistence, I saw the working out of natural law in numberless parallels.

Perhaps there was a law to be learned for _me_. If nature is more than just a background for human thought and endeavor, then it requires a special commitment, a stepping down, a silent, respectful approach. Otherwise we are liable to hear ourselves first, and be put off.

I have been given an entry, but not on my own terms.

_Other Lands within the “Narrow Land”_

To answer the question “Where am I?” seems not to be an easy thing. “Obviously” this is the vacation land of Cape Cod where the sun sends the bathers to the beaches and the rain drives them back inland to buy souvenirs, where the harbors are crowded with pleasure craft and the highways with cars--an area whose purpose it is to attend to human distraction. Yet right in the middle of it the action of a small bird reveals a land of its own; and how many others are there still unmet?

It is very strange to me that I have known so little about what was around me, and that I took so long merely to make some inquiries ... about a few names, a few alliances between living things, just enough to give me a hint or two about the growing we are never finished with. We live in a common realm about which we are still half ignorant and half afraid.

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.