Part 5
When we think of fungi, we have a justifiable association with rot and decay, mildew and mold. They lack chlorophyll, that famous green substance by which other plants are able to absorb the energy of the sunlight and through it convert carbon dioxide and water into food. The mushrooms, like other fungi, get their food directly from organic matter, rich soil, rotting wood, or leaf mold. They reproduce by billions of tiny spores, each of which, or rather, the comparatively few that catch, are started in such a matrix. In a sense they are procreative flowers of the darkness, annuals which the earth puts forth in its own teeming right, regardless of the gay slaves of the sunlight. But they are colorful. They wear the earth’s sulfurs, umbers, and ochers, its iron rusts, light greens, grays, and whites, as well as some startling rose-reds and vermilions.
I find a small one in the wet leaves which is a lavender-blue, named, according to my reference book, the violet cortinarius, and good to eat--surprisingly enough. Color is no criterion of what is poisonous. The deadly amanita does not have the flickering blue-green color of something low and ominous, nor is it a dangerous red, a signal for all but the most reckless to keep off. Some of the reddest mushrooms, in point of fact, are the best to eat. But the deadly amanita is almost tempting in appearance. It is white and succulent-looking, and to eat enough of it means death.
A strange thing, the mushroom, of short annual appearances (though the roots, or mycelium, are perennial), of quick growth and quick decay. Some of them are already turned into rotten dark brown, nearly liquid heaps. Others will gradually dry up and disappear, but now, on this tag end of a moist season, they are the local bounty. They have curled edges like cabbage or dead oak leaves. They take the form of single stems and fronds like seaweed. They are fringed, scalloped, round or flat, thin or fat. They bunch together at the base of an old stump, or they climb the side of a tree in shelves. Their heads take the form of lima beans, or floppy rabbit ears, fans, umbrellas, trumpets, shaggy hats, or cottage roofs. They are scaly, rough, smooth, or silky. They have thin stems and dainty heads like flowers; or both head and stem look like one great overgrown protuberance. Here and there, coming through the leaf litter, are yellow bunches of coral mushrooms, so called because they have the look of branched coral; and in the deep shade they seem almost luminous. In fact, whether or not any mushrooms do have a luminosity, like some fungi, they have a glimmer of decay about them in our imagination. They are of the earth unearthly, in spite of the fact that many of them provide substantial beds for insect larvae, that they are good, if sometimes treacherous food, and that they can raise the top off a road.
This year has also been rich in Indian pipes. This is that unreal, pure-white plant, which, in more mythical times, has been called the corpse plant, or ghost flower. It blooms by itself, though out of the moist woodland humus like the mushrooms, lacking chlorophyll as they do. There is some dispute apparently, consistent with the Indian pipe’s ghostly nature, about what it really is. Some books refer to it as a “saprophyte,” which means a plant that absorbs its nutrition from dead or decaying organic matter, but in others it is called a “parasite.” A parasite gets its nourishment from a living host. The Indian pipe has a very small mat of rootlets where the thick stems join together at the base of the plant. If you dig it out of the ground it looks as if it were resting on bare knuckles. These roots, according to the botanists, have an outer layer of funguslike tissue, which means that the fungus rather than the roots has actual contact with the soil. So it sounds as though the Indian pipe, being dependent for its food on the fungus and not the soil or humus, were a parasite. Another alternative, if the fungus gets any nourishment from the plant, is that they live in a state of mutual association, or symbiosis. Thus science, still trying for exactitude, and the Indian pipe, still unaccountable. It seems to be on the verge of several worlds rather than an integral part of one, a plant you might meet in a dream.
Other old and once popular names for it are: Dutchman’s-pipe; fairy smoke; convulsion weed; eyebright; bird’s nest; and American ice plant. It was called ice plant, according to Alice O. Albertson in her _Nantucket Wild Flowers_ (1921), because “it resembles frozen jelly and is juicy and tender and dissolves in the hands like ice.” One contemporary authority calls it “clammy,” which is accurate enough, and keeps it in the realm of ghosts and chills, but I think it was an exaggeration to say that it dissolves in the hands. I find it solid enough, not fragile or perishable to the touch. Its stems have a fibrous, tough core, which is sometimes hard to tear. It also has a pungent, woody smell, though this probably comes from the soil it grows in.
All the same, it is an elusive, beautiful flower, a miraculous specialty. Coral pink shines almost translucently through the stems, which are covered with tiny white bracts, or scales, taking the place of leaves--scales of a tiny albino fish perhaps--and the bell-like flowers hang their stiff white heads straight down, with pink seed pods standing up between them, round, decoratively grooved little crowns. When the plant dies, it stands for months as a thin, brownish black string, having turned from beautiful ghost to lifeless reality.
Over the mushrooms and Indian pipes, in subtle relationship to them, the leaves are losing their green chlorophyll and revealing the other, more stable pigments that last out long enough to make the familiar glory of the autumn. There is not so much a general “dying” in the fall, as an adjustment. Insect eggs are in the bark or ground, the mushroom spores are being carried through the air, the grasses are heavy with seed, acorns drop to the ground. One day last October I was hit with a shower of acorns from the white oaks. This year, since oaks fruit heavily on different years, I notice more acorns from the black oaks. How fast these acorns get to work! A little curling, probing, adventurous sprout comes from the nut, and in a short time has grown several inches. A few manage to take hold before the ground is frozen. A multitude of others provide food for squirrels, chipmunks, or blue jays. The measure of these arrangements is complex and elaborate. Between the leaf of a tree and a mushroom, worlds apart in function, there are connections of rainfall, temperature, or sunlight, in a context continually new, and though the ground colors fade, sunsets, seas, and inland waters will take over their active play.
That great bonfire of a maple tree--one special to my boyhood--that I used to marvel at in the New Hampshire fall, is here replaced by second-or third-growth oaks. I now live in a stunted land; but as it is the sea which surrounds it, so, in its long low stretches, its glacial hollows and running hills, it rides ahead like open billows. The early splashes of color come from the red of the sumac and the purple-reds of the huckleberries and blueberries. Then color begins to spread through the oaks, that war with yellow-green pitch pines for living space. Yellow or red streaks show in the leaves of the white oak, orange in the waxy leaves of the post oak, brilliant red in the scarlet oak. Then deep reds, maroons, cowhide yellows and browns pervade them, and our woodland surroundings seem full of a beautiful propriety, a beauty in necessity.
Occasional copses of beech trees are shining with golden bronze; and tupelo, or black gum, trees, with scraggy, undulant branches, have little leaves that are a blazing, livid red. Over bare hillsides the “hog cranberry,” or bearberry, a perennial ground cover with shiny leaves, is hung with cherry-red fruit. The cultivated cranberry bogs show broad stretches of purple-red, shaped, depending on the area, in squares, circles, or oblongs, all, if well cared for, neatly ditched. The tidal inlets and marshes run with flaxen and gold, spotted at their edges with light festival red from the berries of black alder, a form of holly.
These flaming revelations signal the trees’ reaction to the decrease in light’s intensity, or the colder temperature of the soil. The leaf decomposes. The tree withdraws and makes ready for a leaner season; but it is too big a display for mere “adjustment.” You will not find the category of color in a historical dictionary or the encyclopedia of social sciences, but in this temperate zone at least, it is now an integral part of the history of change, and of natural society.
* * * * *
There is a deep little hollow nearby called Berry’s Hole. Many years ago it contained a cranberry bog, and it is still wet bottom land with water around its edge, and a center choked with moisture-loving shrubs and reeds. Frogs take advantage of it, as well as water insects and their larvae. Wood peewees nest around it in the springtime. Now it is radiant with its special version of the fall. In the middle of October, sheep laurel is still green on the surrounding slopes, through the purple huckleberry bushes. I walk down them into a raining screen of leaves. Berry’s Hole is circled by red, also called swamp, maples, and their red and yellow leaves, light and delicate compared to those of the oak trees on dry slopes above them, slip down constantly through the bright air, drift, eddy, and finally touch the ground, or fill the brown water with loose-lying, sinking rafts of color.
A green frog leaps into the water with a squeak. I notice a box turtle on the bank, with its head determinedly locked in this time. Its markings, on an almost black shell, are dashes of yellow, and a rich reddish orange that reminds me of a Blackburnian warbler.
Response to color is response to energy, the radiance and the reflection of light. I close my eyes after looking across the sun and see red, the color of warmth and desire. Around the eye of Berry’s Hole is the red of blood and the yellow of the sun.
_The Last Day in October_
The night, after a deceptively bright and soothing day, seems suddenly withdrawn. The wind has a hard feel to it, as if a northern authority had come to stay. Heavy rolls of cumulus clouds hang in the sky when morning breaks, and the Cape begins to look like my winter image of it, dank and cold, with inert, slate-colored seas investing its shores. The oak leaves have turned a darker, more lifeless red, or they are light brown. I notice that the leaves of the white oaks are among the first to die, beginning to curl up like stiff, ancient hands, with an ashy pallor on them. The scarlet oaks are the last to lose their color.
As a result of their definite adjustment, insisting on certain rules of change before many of the rest of us are quite ready, the oak woods seem to have a dark, plenipotentiary look. The trees stand in self-saved, stiff company, although the animals that visit them are lively enough. I watch a gray squirrel burying acorns in loose dirt at the edge of the road. He has that continually twitching, starting and stopping, restless being of his rodent relatives the red squirrels and the chipmunks. He runs back and forth over the sandy earth burying the acorns, and then, as if unsatisfied with the places he put them, bringing them out again.
The squirrel’s gray, fur-clad body flows with suppleness. The big gray tail is sudden too in its motion, stretching out behind, or up, with curled tip when the animal stops to sit. He quits his activity, and with a long bound and dive he is up a tree. Along with its slapdash motion, but provident method, the gray squirrel may also have a touch of foolhardiness in its nature, though even the most practiced make their slips. I have never seen it happen myself, but a friend tells me that he has seen gray squirrels miss their leap occasionally in high trees near his house and fall to their death.
The leaf litter still fairly jumps with mice and shrews. A little blind shrew with dark gray pelt and pink nose slips out of a bank of leaves where I walk. It swerves with astonishing speed and squeaks angrily at me before it dives out of sight into the leaves. This, in contrast to other members of the mouse family, is a fighter.
I go into a part of the oak wood which has been a little more protected ... a hollow fenced in and fringed by strands of bull briar. It is an open space where deer have come in to paw the ground and settle down at night. Skunks have left little holes where they clawed into the leaf mold on their hunt for grubs. Towhees have scratched the leaves apart. Cottontails have stopped here, hopped, nibbled, and jumped away.
This land is mine. The deed is recorded in my name. But I cannot claim to have put it to better use than the animals to whom it is public property. It belongs to the deer, the skunk, the rabbit, and the towhee, who eat, pass through, or take shelter there. With my approach, of course, the whole question of tenure is rudely solved, except for the countless stay-at-home organisms in the ground beneath me. The deer turns once with a large gaze, then bounds away with its white, electric brush of a tail flung up. “Boom!” a partridge thunders up, cuffing leaves and twigs with its wings, and hurtles off through the trees. A crow gives a warning call as it flies overhead. I am allowed the land if I want it, though not much trust is involved. But why should I expect comfort or acceptance, in this open realm of risk? Neither man nor deer was mother to the skunk. It knew its own. Chance meetings will do, for the love I find in them.
On the calendar this is the last day of October, and it has some justice to the title. The lunar months mirror the general character of the year’s transitions. In spite of the fact that all single days are lost in the passage of light and we are left behind, this one seems full of an end and a turn to something else. The local life is making its last forays, before a time of dormancy, hibernation, or struggle to survive. A mourning cloak butterfly beats lightly by, with no other companions to be seen. I find some mud dauber wasps, flies, and a cicada killer, all hibernating in a pile of rotten logs. The woods are full of the intermittent beauty of the last oak leaves, red, with a deep tone in the gray day, and the sumacs still show their shining raspberry color on the surrounding slopes.
The late afternoon is cold and quiet. I regret the shorter day and the need to leave the great air so soon. But underneath lowering clouds is a growing gap of swirling orange toward the west. As the light recedes around us, the sunset begins to show the power and surge of pattern in the sky. Coils and whips of gold at first--bold, bright, far away. Then spun gold behind dark barriers--the ribs of whales, giant minnows, plumes tinted with salmon, the curving timbers of ships, and all things rare and imaginary plunging through an oceanic fire. Also I see golden October going, in fields of last excitement. But what this and many other sunsets say is “Come on!” However you use your days and nights, in speed or muddled preoccupations, come. It will be too late soon for the feast that is now, whose fires are always carrying over to the other side of the world.
_November_
_The Seed in the Season_
The glory goes, and there comes the first sudden plucking out of dead leaves. They scud and sail. They lift and fall to the ground, where they sometimes scuttle unexpectedly like mice.
November rolls into view with cool, solemn, formal consistency. When it rains they say: “I’m glad it’s not that white stuff,” although Cape Cod is not noted for its snow. There is no deep and heavy frost as yet, no northeast gales driving wet flakes at our eyes. A number of Cape Codders migrate to Florida for the winter. Daylight diminishes. As the leaves drop off we begin to see more distinctly between the trees. I find two spotted turtles moving very slowly through the waters of a ditch at one side of an abandoned cranberry bog. In one open field there are a few red-legged grasshoppers, much less active than a few weeks before. An occasional cricket, grasshopper, or spider is spotted and animated by the rays of the sun when it bursts through drifting clouds. Here and there a violet aster or late goldenrod stands in bloom between innumerable plants that are fuzzy with seed. The milkweed still sends crowds of little silk parachutes shining on the wind.
We are now in a genuine country state of which the urban power talks with both scorn and ignorant nostalgia. The summer no longer pounds at our temples. The fall color is gone. There is nothing to look at, and very little to hear except the wind, or a plane in the distance, a car on the highway. To a city lover it is silent and deadly dull.
As to the nostalgia, I doubt that there is much stress any more on the virtue implicit in country living. Since all men now dwell in all places, they question virtue everywhere; but some still talk as though the country were a place for that intangible peace and moral order that they think is lacking in the world. The country, however, is in the grip of a power that has no moral values and is greater than morality. It is false and true. It is benign and it is terrible. It cures and it kills. And I do not suppose that whether or not the earth is made up of human cities can make much difference to it. I am waiting for a deeper tone than hope.
There is no noise or compelling distraction in a field or stand of trees. Still, a forester suggested to me that if trees could make themselves heard, in their internal growth and adjustments, the roar would be deafening. The same thought has been applied to life in the ground, with its countless microorganisms, in a state of continual displacement and turmoil, growing and dying, consuming and being consumed. They too might roar. We have enough at hand and under our feet to make general tumult no surprise.
The point about this countryside is not its isolation but its potentiality. It is in charge of origins. What is more dramatic than the production of seeds in plants and grasses over one small field? The seeds are in uncountable numbers, and each one is a miniature plant, an embryo, surrounded by food and a protective coating. It is an embodiment of force. It eats and breathes, and now goes into a period of dormancy like an animal, ready to germinate in the spring when conditions are favorable. Such facts are part of elementary biology, but they cover up the stir and momentum of the globe.
[Illustration]
These seeds, on grass and weeds now growing thinner, drier, more colorless, are not only rich in generation, on their own account, but they provide beyond themselves. The juncos, or snow birds, that come down from the north will survive on a seed diet throughout the winter, with the sparrows, and that sustaining food the mice, preyed upon by fox, weasel, or hawk. The simplest “food chain” suggests the links in many others. In fact there is no fundamental separation anywhere in this common world of life, despite the greatly various environments of water and land that we use to help us differentiate between the species. Winds blow through. Tides lap over. Each plant and animal is proof of general contact and association.
The insignificant seed has energy and sustenance enough to perpetuate many worlds. It makes me look at mere grass with more interest than I did. I believe there are some fourteen hundred species of grasses in the United States, of which I know less than a dozen. There is one grass which grows in many areas of the Cape, through open slopes, pine woods, sandy, run-down fields, that I have heard called beard, or prairie grass. I have walked by it, on it, and through it for years without knowing its name, though its nameless, light-catching beauty often caught my attention. It turns out to be broom sedge (_Andropogon scoparius_), a plant that reaches from here and the Middle Atlantic States south to Texas and across the southeast to California. It is a poor soil, poor forage grass, appropriate to this nonagricultural region. Its stems rise from a bunch of curving, rustling leaf blades, and are covered with tiny florets that go to seed in the fall, little feathery tufts. As the autumn months progress it grows more colorful, deepening to tawny pink, with a touch of purple, before it takes on its straw-colored midwinter hue. The little silky feathery tufts shine in the sunlight like the slightest spits and sparkles on a pool, or tiny plumes of frost, intangibly gentle, sustaining their brightness as the winter comes on. The stems are two to three feet tall, and with their delicate adornments, they stand the year around, stirring, curving forward, nodding back, with the utmost refinement. So I praise what is for me a new discovery, though it has stood near me in its own praise for many years--a country eloquence.
Almost all local preparations are done. The seed is sown and made ready. The time for persistence is coming, when those grasses we take so much for granted will hold our earth together. When the sun warms them, drying on slopes and through old fields, they smell sweet underfoot, a natural, uncut hay.
_The Clouds_
The power of sending on is latent in the seed, but the weather itself is always openly manifest, and when the leaves fall, when the summer nests begin to show up in unexpected places, then it hits us even harder. The northeast winds are beginning to be something to hide from. The sky stares with a wider, colder eye.
When it is cloudy I hear the dull drone of unseen planes far above me, and I think of a world at large that is teeming with meetings and negotiations, losing decisions, waiting on results. The immediate earth seems to shift, tack, and decide according to its clouds, that slant up the sky in fibrous strands, hang deep and low, or lift across the sunlight.