Part 12
Then there is that bird, a member of the family of mimics, the brown thrasher, which seems to make a mockery of the whole business. It is a cinnamon-winged, speckled-breasted, long-tailed bird, with a long bill and sharp, quick yellow eyes. The male thrasher is certainly as intense and serious about the duty of staking out his territory as any other species, but what issues loudly from his open bill seems like the most comical sort of parody. He may not be as good a mimic as the mocking bird--which has been known to imitate a flock of blue jays--but he manages a wonderful take-off on the whole race of birds. He is a master of a grab bag of trills, chatters, pips and cries, of rasps and sweetnesses, of sudden blurts, and obvious pauses as if for effect.
Translated into a rapid tempo of words, his song might sound like this: “Jeremy! Jeremy! Ready here. Right here. Wide awake. Wide awake. Chipper! Chipper! Shake a leg. Up! Up! Here’s a joker. This way. This way.” ... an interpretation which probably makes me as ridiculous as he intended, if he is a serious humorist. In the middle of this exhortation I hear a comic little “Cucaracha!” or quite a good imitation of a whippoorwill, as if he saved his more exact skills for a casual moment.
The thrasher may be just as conditioned in his joy and utterances as any other bird. His variations on the general bird theme may come out abstractly, without any attempt at parody, a limited kind of talent, and yet when I listen to it, it seems to me that the bounds of song are being just a bit extended. As compared with other birds, the blackpoll warbler for example, with only a thin, high note, reminiscent of insect sounds in the summer, the thrasher has range and repertoire. He is vocal and conversational, even to the extent of tempting at least one human animal into reading words and intentions into his performance; and this, from a bird’s point of view, might mean that I was extending my limits too.
_Facets of Expression_
I make a foolish game out of attaching words to a bird’s song. Perhaps it is a way of trying to bring the two of us together in familiarity, but to give nature its true respect, every song, color, and action is its own master. Understanding, the best human means of communicating with other lives, might be most effectively attained by keeping a certain distance.
That is the way I feel when I see the alert, tough little chickadees coming up to the house and picking up tufts of hair, rope, or wool, to use as nesting material. They set to work carding it so busily and self-sufficiently that I am restrained from an impulse to join in and look things over. I walk off to my own business.
A pair of tree swallows is trying out a birdhouse, and when I stay too long in the vicinity, they are given an extra reason for a negative decision as to its merits and fly into the distance. This is a time not to meddle, tease, interfere, or try to imitate what cannot be imitated.
From that point of view the life of May, free of human embrace, seems full of wonderful languages, still to be learned, and they are not confined to the uses of sound. Isn’t a flower or wing or new leaf articulate? I watch a mourning cloak butterfly that flits and floats overhead and then lands on a bare patch of ground in the sunlight. The broad wings fold and show their dark, woody, shadow side, with little white circles on them, their pattern and texture a blend of weather-beaten, drab forest floors, suggestive of niches and corners of leaf-decaying darkness. Then the wings spread out again. They are a light mahogany-red with shades of brown, bordered by black lines, and on their bottom edge they are rimmed with little round dashes of purplish blue, like small windows into the sky, and the body is green. The butterfly’s antennae have white tips. It has fine hairs on its back. Then, with a papery, fluttering sound, it is up with startling quickness from the ground; just out of reach, in the frequent manner of butterflies, as many a boy with a net has learned from hard experience.
What can we say about the American robin that has not already been said? All the same, I know him not. He still appears on the spring grass like a stranger. He lands there, then pauses, holding up his head for a long time. No worms? Then he runs off on his robin procedure, abandoning one area for another, where he pauses rigidly again, then cocks his head. The worm is found. This is assessable behavior. By this stiff pausing and then tripping ahead, a robin is apparently able to detect the slightest motion on the ground. We don’t need to look for the emotion or consciousness of a robin beyond the actions to which it is stimulated by the immediate need for food. Utility is all. Or so I have been told. But the robin, like other birds, expresses its relation to the earth in terms of a set of responses which come from a head I know nothing about. It is an organism with much higher bodily temperatures than ours, with a much faster heart beat, burning up energy at a faster rate. Its experiences are entirely different. Down there, on that bird level, what is happening? What kind of awareness does it have, what kind of close, felt proximity to the stirring ground, the shadows, the lightly running wind?
Even the flowers, as if they were special custodians of those fires of light that run through May, seem to express more than the value we have given them. Trim little violets, white, pale blue, or lilac in color, or pink lady’s-slippers blossom out and mark their separate places in the sun with beautiful emphasis. Each is significant. Each is inviolate. And, in a sense, are they not full of motion? In their growth, their seeding, their provision for continuity and change of place, are they not free to run away? They fly in the winds. They grow and they fight for life.
Tiny white chickweed flowers begin to mantle some of our barren areas, and the plants are so quick and strong in growth, establishing themselves as if they had too little time, that they seem to be partners with fish that school and spawn in the sea, or nesting birds.
All the new tumult and excitement combines in what we call spring. Each facet of it, each life in its own right contributes originality, and there are communications between them which surprise us--distant, true, and unerring. I bear witness to them, without quite understanding. One late evening on the shore, the tide pools stand out like mirrors along dark sands. The air is cool. Light sparkles over the receding tide. The distances there, as always, seem sparse and immeasurable. I hear a sharp, wild cry, and then another, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on. Two yellowlegs, I should judge. Theirs are the only sounds, besides the continuous breathing of the sea. Did one respond to the other? Whether it did or not, they are linked. The curved coast line is their orientation, and the wide evening a plane for their cries, and in the play of spring’s advance it is a recognition, vibrant and unique.
Perhaps we come to some such realization of the greatness of nature’s expression in spite of ourselves. We measure natural phenomenon with marvelous accuracy. We are always busy at it, cropping or adding names, readjusting interpretations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. The miracle is still untouched. Why is the mindless flower less than ourselves and our assessments, or the bird’s reaction less remarkable? That which is without mind is not necessarily heedless. Perhaps spring is a manifestation of mind; and its lives, all those facets of motion and beauty, behave in its context as familiars. Each responds in terms of an alliance intrinsically known, as with the birds along their shore.
_Travel_
For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind. There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like: “This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop, sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it seems like a gift of extravagance.
Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night. The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and then disappears down its hole again.
Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly, hopelessly.
A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland, two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.
What I see, what becomes easy to see for any eyes, in the gentle month of May, is an approach to prodigality. We are not yet bitten, dulled, and pounded down by population, of insects or men. Blistering droughts have not come yet, nor excessive rain; but all the component parts of nature run ahead. Through the alternately warm and cool sweeps of weather, there is a steady pattern of growth. This is the season of progression, of fanning out, and as with the trees that have formed next year’s buds, of provision for the future. The oak leaves which are limp and tiny to begin with, develop gradually. They toughen and mature toward their summer function of receiving and storing. They stretch, darken, and shine, turning from tenderness to ability. So it is with the fish hatched from the egg, or nesting birds, or the grass in the ground. To have had a son born this month, as we did, is much in keeping.
Birth is now the rule. I smell a sweet salt air. White petals drop gently to the ground. Birds, trees, and plants, life in the ground below them, are sprung by a constructive light. To follow spring is to make use of yourself. Join and be. Here is as much expanding energy as the human spirit could desire. Aspiration meets its counterparts, on all sides. If, as man says, he represents a climax of sensitivity in the evolutionary sense, then let him now employ his consciousness for all it is worth, and not delay.
Spring is loud and rich in its coming, but it is exact too, with a sustained propriety. Each life is in its place, its shade or full light. Each, held in the general change and roaming, to its necessity. Fragile star flowers and wind flowers bloom in the shade of a wood of beech trees, while out on the open slopes and fields the beach plum bushes are heavy with fat white blossoms, inviting the sun’s full strength.
In that valley where the alewives run, a narrow cut between low hills once made by melt waters from a glacier, and joining fresh-water ponds to Cape Cod Bay, there is now such a variety of life in such a variety of places as to challenge travel in all the senses. It reaches from the fresh-water ponds with their muddy shallows where pickerel weed begins to put up its stalks, painted turtles sun themselves on rocks out of the water, and sunfish make their nests along the sandy edges--from the pond waters gently lapping and smooth surfaces skidded by the wind--all the way through tidal marshes to the sea whose massive motion stands beyond us. Each area, first the ponds, then the brook, as it cascades down rocky slopes, turning as it winds through valley reaches into a creek, and then a tidal estuary, meeting the sand flats on the bay shore, each definite part of land or shore, has its newly active, co-ordinated riches. In the upper end of the valley, just below the pond outlet where fish ladders are crowded with migrating alewives, there is a wild and loud screaming of gulls. They wheel constantly over the stream, and crowds of them settle down on the water, quarreling over feasts of fish. Below them, black-crowned night herons bob and stand tall in a grove of pitch pines. When startled, they cluck and squawk like so many women over a scandal. When one of them flies too close to the herring gulls, it is chased away.
Two upland plovers skim in fast, crying high. A black duck whirs up, showing the white under its wings. The land at the edge of the marsh is full of yellowthroats, warblers with a quick, slurred call: “Weewiticha, weewiticha, weewiticha,” as it sounds to me, and sometimes a softer “Chichibee, chichibee, chichibee.” I watch one of these trim birds. It has a yellow breast and yellow head masked distinctively with black. It lands in the leaves, whips around, flits, quick and alert. Its colors fit with shade and sunlight as though it had been conceived with them--a definite dash of light. In the stream, as it winds down toward salt water, subject to the rise and fall of the tide, small groups of alewives run quickly and persistently through the weaving currents, heading up toward gulls and then the nets and fishways beyond. I feel energy and motion demanding me. Seen or unseen, a flying, starting, striding, swimming, and inviting, makes of the present and its short lives an endlessness.
It is low tide where the channel meets the shore. Warm, hazy air rises over the bare landscape into an empty, chalky-blue sky. But the wide-ribbed sands are run over lightly by gold braided waters, light catchers full of motion, flexing and rippling. Crustaceans dart through them. Periwinkle tracks straggle across the sands, and the empty shells of razor clams litter the surface, along with the worm cases stuck with shells, seaweed and grains of sand, protruding above it; and there are black horseshoe crabs partly dug in, waiting for the tide to turn. The three-toed tracks of shore birds are everywhere, and farther out, through a light wind, a rushing sea sound, I can hear gulls calling low, muttering among themselves, and the unmistakable harsh cry of a tern.
Sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, ruddy turnstones, are dipping up and down, scuttling, or tripping ahead as they feed. In the distance the turnstones, mottled black and brown, with short red legs, look a little like quail.
Two herring gulls are pulling hard at a sand shark, stranded by a tide, or perhaps killed by some fishing boat when it was brought up in the nets. They work at it furiously, tugging and tearing from both sides, since the sand shark’s hide is like sandpaper and many times as thick and tough. When I come up, I can see that they have not managed to do much more than tear out some of the flesh from its head and neck. Judging by the tracks on the sand, they must have been hauling it around for some time.
Far far out, I thought I saw a man digging for clams on the flats, but after walking for half a mile in that direction, I am astonished to see a yearling deer starting in a leisurely way toward the land. It had probably browsed its way out, nibbling at bits of tender seaweed, licking salt, encountering no danger in the expansive room that borders land and sea. Now, with the motion of its long legs showing in all detail as I have never seen them in fields or woods, the deer starts to run slowly, with an almost loose loping. It stops, looks around uneasily, and then the legs unlimber again, but hesitantly. It looks suddenly in my direction; and bounds and bucks away, its legs now working with tense speed. Through my field glasses I find a man and a boy on the beach. Seeing them, the animal changes course, gathers more speed, and when it reaches the shore, dashes up the sloping beach and disappears into a green line of shrubs and low trees.
[Illustration]
The separations on these sand flats are vast. Where the narrow inland water course issues out, nothing is so well defined as space. For the variety of action here and in thousands of miles of deep water beyond, range is the rule, and the brook leads to the sea as all things lead to each other. Our meetings have scarcely begun.
_June_
_The Garden_
“June, June, I beg your pardon, for walking in your garden” is a phrase from an old song, which expresses the delicacy you might feel on some moonlit night about treading a path through fragile shadows and flowers, or intruding by day on their young beauty. The song expresses it succinctly; but the fact of the matter is that the June garden is suddenly so rich and widespread that there are no paths to walk on. It is unavoidable. I find myself wondering how it happened--how it happened that I now take it for granted. My small daughter asked me the other day whether or not the trees wore leaves in the wintertime. She was not quite sure. We have come back to fruition unawares.
The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and have already forgotten what a great and elaborate process it was. I can remember--or I have it in writing (the aid to memory)--that on the twenty-fifth of March there was a light snow in the morning, and that the temperature was well below freezing, with strong north winds all day. The significance of the twenty-fifth comes from its often being used as an average date for the first sound of the spring peepers. That day the whole idea seemed impossible. And yet they sang, two evenings later. Of course the whole year is the scene of birth and growth. Spring is not the sole custodian of arrival. There are flowers that bloom in the autumn. But that was our last beginning, in immediate terms. We have lived through what followed with only the scantiest kind of recognition, to arrive now with a great new crowd of shapes and sounds filling the distance, in the muscular swing of light. Flowery grasses, wild flowers like vetch, daisies, coreopsis, buttercups, and hundreds of others, head up, shoot forth, dance in the sun and compete with one another for living space--part of the rush and race of life we take for granted. The fact that we do take it for granted may be the best proof of our deep connection with it, as with all the natural rounds of the year. We breathe and give birth and die in terms of the same force as these surroundings. It is less articulate with us than realized. The new measures have a steady underlying order which pulses in us like the tides. So I suddenly look around me and find the whole earth peopled with motion and quantity, searching and adjustments, and I find it familiar.
In the warm air the land seems bound together by a whir ticked off in the grass by field crickets, lighted at night by the slow-dancing fireflies, intensified on the millions of new leaf surfaces, petals, and stems, where insects alight, crawl, and eat, many races pursuing their separate ways, aligned with thousands of life communities in function and in act.
June has gone green, with a staggering assumption of authority. The dry land ferns stretch stiff and wide like fans. The huckleberry bushes are springing with light green. The oaks heave and rise with their bounty of fresh leaves. Meadows along the shore are green with samphire; and marsh grasses, still low, looking close-cropped above the dark peat or through rushing waves at high tide.
On the lee side of a stone jetty thrusting out from the shore the water is full of plankton. Tiny marine animals, like barnacle larvae, copepods, baby jellyfish, are being gently carried and lifted by the surf. They are whirled and drifted in the water as it swells and ebbs. There is a beautiful symmetry in these fragile, transparent animals. I notice tiny beads of air along the sides of some of the jellyfish.
In some inland waters joined by inlets to the sea, there are massive numbers of adult jellyfish at this time of year, pulsing slowly through green waters, like transparent animal flowers. The riches of the water, fresh or salt, are immeasurable.
More and more adult alewives are returning to the sea after spawning in ponds and lakes, running back through marsh lands filled with cattails, wild iris, rushes, and arrowheads. Behind them they leave their progeny, which have in fact been hatching out for the past two months, and are gradually becoming so numerous as to interfere with the sport of fishing. These “bait fish” feed bass, pickerel, and perch, which now refuse to react to a mere fly or worm, having more than enough to eat.
There are no waters, no wood or square yard of ground not sounding and moving with new life. A wild readiness, a fluency is here. Within its terrestrial order and confinement everything seems incalculably bold. Now is the time to run ahead. Now, even for our special race, is the time to take the necessary risk of new connections, new affinities. This is a world of alliances.