Part 10

I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.

March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty” with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.” Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the other on a lower key.

A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like fast-dripping water.

Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music. The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out like a fan.

There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.

This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic kind of dance.

Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning to seek its opportunities.

I am impatient for spring, as raw, unseasonably cold weather continues, and then I see a dark little caterpillar on the road, or a mourning cloak butterfly, sprung out of hibernation. I hear a pair of mourning doves, cooing with slow measure and deliberation, long silences between. They seem to say something to me about attention. “What will come may not be, as yet. But we know when. And you might if you listened.”

If I listened, and if I watched, found each insect as it came out of hibernation, comprehended a tree as a living thing, beginning to stir and seek, followed the development of buds and roots, the unseen life that stirs in egg or chrysalis through every inch of ground.

There is, in common with the rest of the year’s revolutions, nothing neat or simple about the process of reawakening. It has started already. Raccoons in this area begin to breed in February and start foraging for their young in March. The great horned owl nests in January and February. During the dead of winter a few animals such as skates and barnacles start breeding in offshore waters. Variable reaction in this time of change is as complex as the order which controls it.

Hibernation itself, that mysterious state which is somewhere between death and sleep, differs in various species. Some mammals hibernate not because of outside conditions but because of internal changes in their blood stream, as if timed not to the weather but the year. Each life is cyclical, corresponding accurately to the circling of the globe, but in mode and terms it differs vastly. When the frogs begin to stir around a local pond, birds, independent of hibernation, move back from other climates. Late in March a few alewives swim into fresh water from the sea. Late in April large numbers begin to show up, at a time which only varies by a few days, year after year. Yet their arrival, like their growth and responses, is conditioned by any number of circumstances that are not only physically distant from us but may be remote as yet from scientific scrutiny. To realize that the slightest changes in temperature can affect whole worlds of life, and that this factor is only one of many, can make a man feel hopelessly inept.

So spring is not to come now, nor tomorrow, suddenly complete with shy warmth and flowers according to our expectations, but will take its periodic time, within a wide range and with enormous resources. By the same token, no spring comes pleasantly, without a certain amount of doom in its wake. A flock of male blue birds flies north too soon. They die during a severe snow storm or a week of extreme cold. Thawing takes place too suddenly for one form of life, and too quick a drop in temperature will kill another.

March is complex and March is in a rage, though I begin to feel a universal response, a gradual turn, in the ground, through the trees, down by the shore as the wind changes from tearing things loose to a peaceful low breathing. I smell salt things on the edge of motion, balanced on a tip of allowance. I hear what I am unable to see, stirring, tuning up across the land. The response may be hesitant or bold, delayed or premature, but it is coming. There is knowledge around me, even purpose, whether or not it is working in mindless ways. When I see sunlight playing on a blade of grass, I see the component parts of wisdom. Then the grass joins the squirrel in its dance. Eels join men in restlessness and speculation.

_An Extravagance_

We built a small concrete pool on our place, which is locally known as Dry Hill, and so brought the life of water a little closer to us. In the summertime the pool nurtures a migrant population of green frogs. I have put nothing in it except some sunfish that subsequently died, so that the occasional signs of new life it shows, like a water strider, or some nymph or larva of an insect that flew by and deposited its eggs, always strikes me as a dispensation from the sky. It is a proof of life’s pressing, inescapable need to drive into every opening.

Thinking of draining the pool and cleaning it out for the approach of spring, I find a life so surprising and sudden as to take all human propriety out of my system. There, on the brown, algae-fringed edge of the pool, something moves, telling me that this well of water is more than ornamental. Light olive-colored insects, scum-covered, goggle-eyed, stalk on the edge, or skate very slowly through the water--the strangest kind of revelation. What could I clean up now without a sense of shame?

The dragonfly larva, or nymph, which turns into an adult after a series of molts, is a fantastic-looking creature. I take one out of the pool and put it in a jar for observation. What I observe has no familiar meaning for me. It stays motionless, except when the jar is moved. I wonder again, as I did with a robber fly in the summer, what an insect is. Is it only a stereotyped pattern on the changing screen of nature? This one exhibits itself as a sort of embodied suspension, careless of death or time, like the process of evolution itself. There is no hurry.

The nymph lives for more than a week without food. Through a magnifying glass, I look at the flat-bottomed, skiff-shaped body made shaggy by algae-covered hair, the jointed legs, the upended tail. It is striped, and there are brown markings over and across its goggle eyes, and brown on its strange mouth part, which sits in front of its face like a catchers mask. This part, or device, is called the labrum. It is hinged, equipped with hooks, and can be shot forward rapidly to grab and hold the animal’s prey. In the nymph’s case, as with so many other things in nature, seemingly endless waiting and suspense precedes occasional spurts of lightning rapidity.

As I peer at it, greatly enlarged behind my magnifying glass, its jointed legs suddenly flail up in front of me, and I actually feel a tremor of alarm--which might be humorous, except for my sense that this small dragon is timeless in some awesome way.

As March is proving a seasonal release, at least in starting, so it also reveals an extravagance in the form of a dragonfly nymph, and what will come from that little insect shows that extravagance may have no end. After a series of molts, the number and duration of which depends on the species, a nymph will climb up on some green stalk spiking out of the water, the skin on its back will crack, and it will emerge from a sheath which it leaves behind, a dry, empty counterpart, and turn into a big, gauzy-winged dragonfly. It is given two worlds, water and air. Its embodied transformation from one into another is as rare a thing as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly; and is evidence of a daring like the flight of Icarus toward the sun, but more successful.

Nature takes the nymph out of itself. It is no goggle-eyed inhabitant of some other planet, no knight doomed to expire by weight of armor. I see the fantastic in it and also a miraculous reality, which will not rest with own products. This water predator will turn into a brightly colored, great-eyed hunter, skimming everywhere over land and water, darting across the roaring traffic of a city, flying over the surface of the ocean miles from land. Time seems suspended in the nymph; and this may be appropriate enough. It is the result of ages; but its metamorphosis is fresh and new, a successful act of endless creativity.

_Interpretation_

It is in the nature of things to surprise, after temporary imprisonments. Surprise is what men look for. It is a need. And this puts us somewhat in the position of a dragonfly larva, suspended, until sprung out. Since we are not as rigidly and instinctively stuck as the insects, relief from our often unblessed condition may come simply because we get a chance to look around. Freshness of act, unfailing originality, is here, but it takes time to see. After an age of inattention it comes like a red squirrel, which I meet unexpectedly one raw March morning. Its whole body twitches and shakes. It jumps with an extraordinary series of halts and starts; then, like a boy playing Indian, it leaps behind a rock as I walk by.

If there is any spare time in a harried world, perhaps it should be used in cultivating habits of attention, learning how to keep open for possibility, instead of inventing distractions that provide for nothing. What is loosely called “nature study” requires discipline like any other area of knowledge, and acquaintance with its subjects, their names, their habits, their place and performance, may encourage extremes of refinement; but it is one good way to begin. It takes you out. It shows you what else can be done. By example it may spring you into a new mood of action. It provides new acquaintances, showing you life, the surprise, where there used to be a wall.

I, as well as my children, am still learning to read. I am still making a collection of terms, in order to attempt a rudimentary analysis of what I find. First in importance, though, comes an admission that what I am considering is not so strangled by human terminology that it does not have an identity, a sacredness even, of its own. Discovery gets its worth from what it pursues.

I see a pitch pine with different eyes, not because I have learned that its clusters have three needles, but because I recognize its independent existence. I know that it has needs, and a history, that it is not divorced from an infinity of circumstances just because I can identify it. We do not need to be vain about our name grubbing, our scientific nomenclature; it is only the beginning.

When I go to the edge of a pond I have a pleasurable sense of excitement, not only because I have been there before, finding the good old tadpoles and water striders, but because I know that I will find something unexplained, the same life perhaps, but in new relationships.

There is a swarm of thin little flies dancing in the warm sunlight on a March afternoon. They not only tell me something about the lengthening days, but the light seems to sit differently on their wings. They are a revelation, materializing out of a distance, hovering near.

In the game of identification we have to admit that nature is not an exclusively human province. Then we can be led by it, like this class of children, boys and girls on file through the woods, exploring new land, in expectation.

There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south, winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special character of this day.

It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness, spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks, months, years later, they come out with something learned that a teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she had seen a snowy owl.

Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the realm of science but not accuracy.

But we lead in to nature through names as well as our senses, and then by familiarity with habits, size, shape, color, the order of change, the ways of dying out and returning with plants and animals. Knowledge is our medium, and we are obliged to question.

What is that tree, strangely bent over along the snowy ground? A wild cherry? What happened to it? What is the evidence? Did another tree fall on it when it was a sapling, bend it down and force it to grow out horizontally? Its thick trunk stretches for six feet parallel to the ground, only a few inches above it, then turns and starts up into a sky-opening between the thickets beside it, sending up a wild array of branches. What else can we say about it?

Then one boy, putting things together, hearing how the tree compensated for its difficulties, needed light, and thrusted after it, cries out: “Why that sounds as if the tree was alive!” That is what we have been looking for. He is well started.

_Response_

March progresses toward its end, gradually adding to the population. Dark-headed, deep-colored male robins tug at worms on the lawn. Red-winged blackbirds sail low over marshes, or take stations by the edge of a pond, with reedy cries. The purple finches sing, along with the shrill braying of the blue jays. White-throated sparrows, quail, jays, and partridges that have been here all winter are more in evidence, especially on sunny days, and begin to be accompanied by newcomers, like the grackles. Myrtle warblers flutter up into the air and down again, catching insects. But the wind blows. It backs and fills. The rain is cold. The turn toward spring is very gradual, hardly perceptible at times.

Then a few alewives, a dozen or so, come in out of salt water and show up in Stony Brook, familiar strangers, large, pale fish weaving slowly up through the narrow stream. It has begun to be a time of declaration. New patterns, new arrangements are taking place, however much the season seems to lag.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth I hear a high, shrill sound, whirring and spinning, suggesting proud activity, presence set free. The spring peepers are making it known that a time has arrived, and I take joy in the news, having failed to make any definite assurance of it myself. Their sound embraces all this changing land, rising above the whispered roars of the sea.

Now the perpetrator of this chorus is a tiny tan frog with a smudged cross or X on its back, named _Hyla Crucifer_. The male of the species has been speaking up on behalf of spring openings for millions of years. In that capacity it is authoritative enough. Its voice, almost incredibly loud and shrill for an animal that is not much over an inch long, is amplified by means of a large bubblelike pouch which acts as a resonator. This mechanism is put to use after the animal comes out of winter torpor, after warm rain, and as the season itself breathes and sounds more freely. The peeper moves around with the earth itself and makes a declaration which, it seems to me, does not deserve the term automatic any more than the fiddling of grasshoppers in August. Both are part of the deep and various play of the year. In any case this specialty of voice is something of a marvel in itself. It is not like the eyes of an owl that are so made as to make maximum use of dim light, or the wings of a herring gull that can ride turbulent air currents above the water, or like the fins of a fish, the sensitive nose of a dog. The peeper’s vocal parts are not specialized for environmental use to that degree. Their primary, specific function is to attract the female. Mating and voice are synonymous. But perhaps we could also say that this mating cry, this sometimes bell-like sound, is fitted to the whole environment, that it belongs unerringly to a new earth and a new season. It seems to bring life and place, function and expression together. It is unequivocal. It is perfect. It speaks up reliably on behalf of everything now springing or about to spring.

For all their vast population in the bogs, ponds, edges, swamps, and other wet areas of the Cape, individual spring peepers are very hard to find. During a cool evening, as the stars begin to declare themselves, I hear the peepers’ collective voice rising up around me, passing into the sky. On the banks of Berry’s Hole, that deep, swampy hollow nearby, there is a pulsing, piercing, deafening chorus. The wind suddenly blows over in a loud torrent, but the peepers keep on. I walk farther down and they stop; then they begin again, after I sit still for a minute or two. The banks are wet, after a light afternoon rain, and they must be covered by frogs, judging by the sound; but I search every bit of ground with a flashlight and am unable to find a single one.

A wild, moist spring wind flings around the rim of the hollow, which is gray, dusted with fog, and in the clear opening overhead the stars fling out and away. Water stands dark and still where the banks end. Grass hummocks and shrubs choke the wet areas beyond. I sit for many minutes concentrating on one area with my flashlight. The peepers’ cry is deafening. Then at last, I see one. It jumps onto my shoes. And then another, on a low lying branch, moving along in the light--it displaces a third, which is toppled down into the leaves. They seem limp in action. A peeper is minute, almost weightless in my hand.

[Illustration]

Nearby footsteps will silence them. They react spontaneously like tadpoles and minnows that dart off into deep water from a pond’s edge when you approach. Yet they are not bothered by the beam of a flashlight.

Such a tiny thing, this animal, this cool, moist, anonymous amphibian, for so proud a message! I can see that a peeper’s whole body pumps as it calls. It is like a bellows, and the vocal sac blows out like a blister, bluish-green in the light. “Peep-peep-peep,” and the whole night is filled with an insistent, stirring cry. No human statement can rival this simple, triumphant mode of revelation. The earth begins again.

_April_

_Deeper News_

I read in the papers that spring is beginning to show its vast capacity in the nation behind us, with tornadoes in the west, and floods to the south. The way is being cleared with a violence.