Part 8
Then there is almost complete silence again, and I understand what is meant by the “dead of winter.” Under the cold blue stare of the sky nothing seems to be happening. Each sound--a crow cawing, a car on the road, the rustle and clink of a clump of dead oak leaves--is by itself, occupying wide, unpopulated plains. Without the wind, the air too presses on me, with a cold weight. I walk through its depths, feeling it against my face, and suddenly realize that limited sea of oxygen in which we live, this side of outer space and its violet darkness.
This silence may be just as alarming to some people as a “sonic boom.” Nothing seems to be going on. There is an intensity of rest. The demand for something new is unsatisfied. There are men who stray into nature from a city’s booming, reassuring hive, and are frightened by being caught in necessity--one of the year’s cold, unspeaking tides. Perhaps they also recognize how much the sun provides us with other than pleasant company. There is a winter in us from which we will not soon escape into warmth and joy.
Still, this frozen land contributes to a global art. It is cold and silent here because it is hot and loud in India. And how can we spread our wings without a knowledge of deprivation? While I am closed in I know there are redstarts wintering in Mexico and arctic terns in the Antarctic, and when I greet them on their return it will not be only because they have come home (a bird’s nest is not a house but a platform from which to start), but because home comprises so large an area. Some birds, if they survive their first year, will reappear in the vicinity of the place where they were reared. So will salmon, shad, and alewives, returning to their parent stream after years of absence. We are conscious of the great amount of space their journeying requires. Species of fish or birds show great variation in the extent of their migrations, and the whole pattern is wider than a continent. Their movements are not only consistent with periodic motions of climate, weather, the tides, but may be visible evidence of earth changes that go back for incredible lengths of time. They require an unrestricted measure for their lives and deaths. Men alter, restrict, or use up, to suit their needs and fancy. Then they move elsewhere. I see that one of the young men who has been designated for training in space flight, an “Astronaut,” says he accepted the challenge of being sent aloft in a capsule because we were “running out of interesting things to do down here.” The destruction and denial of earth’s resources must have gone farther than we realize. But the life journeys continue, from one sunny round to another, over the earth and its wide-ranging waters. How much we must be missing, even in the wintertime!
Before dawn, after the windless day, the temperature drops to 10 degrees. A walloping, tugging, brutal wind sets in. The frost so rigidifies the needles of the pines, burning into their cells, that they look dark and scorched. I feel as if the rigid and dizzy earth were being kicked around, rocked like a topheavy boat--the trees its masts. The wind cries: “Remember poverty!” and I go gasping for breath through the fierce air, feeling as perishable as a moth. We may be having the mere taste of an extreme, but this penury weather is huge and mighty all the same. It is the result of a Labrador storm one thousand to two thousand miles in extent. Its balanced fury tests all it meets.
On this kind of day I am an inland lover. To be wind-cut and sandblasted serves no good human end. As if in general proof of that, I meet no more than a car or two on the highway, and see no one on the streets of the town. The shore is desolate, hissing with driven sand. On the surface the bay waters in the distance are being stiff-armed and flung away. New ice, morose and slow, is nudged by an outgoing tide in the inlet at Paine’s Creek. Gulls drift slowly upwind like clouds. And on the wide tidal flats--the searing, biting, turbulent grounds--groups of Canada geese are stalking through shallow purple waters that reach, wind-scudded, over shoals of peat. Then a new group wheels in low and settles down with the rest. I can hear their honking under the sound of wind and sand. Beyond them, in steely waters speckled green, is a small flock of black ducks.
This is no inanimate landscape. Under the given power, the abandon of the wind, the restrictiveness of the cold, is still an all-containing balance. I listen to those famous travelers the geese as they communicate and am taken a little further out on violent and unreceptive grounds, past my own shivering.
Inland again, listening, taking shelter in the lee of the wind, just as a rabbit jumps away from me and runs under a tangle of bull briar, I am conscious of all the unseen hiding and endurance around me. What else moves here, beside the wind that suddenly rushes in and roars so loud that it makes the trees groan and the large round clouds hurry on? The trees, swaying and creaking, are the most obvious, the most exposed. They are half dead, rigid, hard, inert. The sap coagulates in the extreme cold. I cut a twig with my knife and the pitch is dark and frozen. The trees in their containment, adapted to less water and light, getting scarcely any nutriment, are able to make their stand in the open while other lives must hide.
In the late afternoon the ground stirs harshly. Leaves run in dead abandon. The wind seems to sound a burst of doom, and then seethes in lively rage. A dead limb cracks. I am on the trigger edge of ultimate need. Blue-gray clouds hang over the shaking fingers of the trees. There is a collective power that flays us all, without discrimination.
The shadows have left the earth. Light stays in the sky, and then begins to go. There are rims of pale electric light in the west. Long cloud shoals, now white and pearly gray, stand against wide bands of blue and mauve and pink, like the baked desert cliffs of the Southwest. Finally, and I feel all finality, as the ringing air sheds down enormous heavy cold, received numbly by the earth, the sky turns a startling gemlike blue. We are turned into night. The sky’s mineral beauty shifts to pure blackness lighted by the stars. There is an almost shrilling intensity in the air above the earth-binding wind, and I am conscious of nothing but height, height beyond reach.
_Ice on the Ponds_
The air is crystalline and the sunlight through the pitch pine needles gives them a glassy sheen. This is one of those rare times when almost all of Cape Cod’s innumerable ponds are iced over and the children can go skating after school. It has been consistently cold for weeks, with comparatively little snow, and the pond surfaces tempt all skaters to soar.
But we have had a day and a half of thawing weather. When my young daughter and I go to a pond to skate, we hear its fine whomping sound as it expands under the sun’s warmth. What looks like jagged broken bits of crystal, catching light on the surface, turn out to be part of the ice structure, thawing ice refrozen. We find hundreds of water spiders frozen in around the edge where yesterday they had been brought out into the water by rain and comparative warmth, and on the way we found a dead worm on top of frozen ground. So some animals are flung around with the season and respond fatally to chance. They belong to an allowance left over from December. Then it ends, and the day hardens like the ice. It is as though the helpless were not to be allowed their helplessness for some time to come.
To skate on a long stretch of unmarked ice, over green reflected clouds, with the sound of clear air swishing past your face, is to voyage, full sail. It is a shining freedom, and our only competition is in play, to skid and turn and rush like water birds in the springtime--the only hardship a bruising fall. Under black holes we can see down to the bottom of the pond, where there are little forests of green moss and water plants, very still and soft. Suddenly a diving beetle swims quickly and erratically across and then a slow tadpole moves into sight. There is enough sun-induced warmth in the shallow water at the pond’s edge to allow life more play, though in that respect a pond is easier on its inhabitants than the land. With its cover of ice it is now in a state of “winter stagnation.” There are frogs buried in the mud and fish moving sluggishly in cold, stabilized waters. But this is an environment which always allows activity in at least some of its inhabitants throughout the year. Its extremes and revolutions of temperature bear little comparison with those of the land. Our hazards are of a sterner kind.
When we kneel on the ice, where the mobile sky is reflected, and look down in, the water world seems half awake and half asleep, half tropical and half glacial. The waters are almost motionless over intermittent green carpets and through their black depths. The whole being of the pond seems to move independently of our surface storms. It has a heart of its own.
The winter land is a harder environment, though we sometimes make more of its rigidity than we need to. At the pond’s edge I brush past a bayberry bush, and its dried, dark gray berries smell as pungently and herbaceously as they did when ripe--waxen and pewter colored--in the fall. There are checkerberry or partridgeberry plants rimming the pond. In fact they grow well through the acid earth of these woodlands, and their shiny leaves stay green throughout the winter. They are also called wintergreen, or mountain tea, and their leaves taste spicy and aromatic. Are we still common enough to make new names instead of numbers, implying that familiarity, touch, and association have not been left behind?
You know the checkerberry, hugging the ground with shiny, flavored leaves, tiny bell-like flowers pure white in the late spring, bright red berries in the autumn. Something to say hello to, and not merely to recognize as _Gaultheria procumbens_ and pass by. To name means to know, love--perhaps even to laugh at. The fact that the checkerberry has so many other common names is a human distinction. Consider: grouseberry, spiceberry, oneberry, chicken-berry, deerberry, groundberry, hillberry, ivyberry, boxberry, teaberry, greenberry, ivy-plum, chinks, drunkards, red pollen, rapper-dandies, wax cluster, redberry tea, Canadian tea. They dance in friendship. I have been told that the name “Drunkards” comes from the use of checkerberry tea as a remedy for a hangover, but am unable to corroborate it.
While I am pulling off my skates and chewing on a spicy leaf, a trim, round little chickadee comes within four feet of me and twitters and scolds. Then two warier golden-crowned kinglets show up suddenly in a nearby shrub, crying: “Tseet! Tseet!” and flit away. We climb up the steep sides of the pond and face the slopes toward the north. Bold gusts of wind strike us. Stiff briars and branches whip us as we walk along a narrow path, and the play of winter sunlight through the clouds goes lively across the grasses and through the gray trees.
_Contrast and Response_
January seems grim and contained. This is not the time to expect life to declare itself. Even local human circumstances are such as to prove a kind of gray waiting. While the rest of the world retires in Florida, counts change in New York, or struggles with vast new shifts and divided aims, Cape Cod stays down, and holds on. The population is five times less than that of the summer. It is the barren, exposed peninsula it used to be, with the exception of the new woodlands and all the cottages. We are linked by highway and modern communicatory apparatus with the rest of the continent, but in this season there is a feeling of diminished wants. The human pulse begins to rise in April or May, when people paint and refurbish their motels and cottages in preparation for the great migration of vacationists. Now the economy subsists more on expectation than fulfillment. The human squirrels have stored away their acorns. The forage is thin in January for all inhabitants.
The weather roams still, with our surrounding waters. Why live here but for the reason that there is always an element of sufficient grandeur? Although the sea might not be visible for the motels and trailers before your eyes, a few miles, or a few yards, brings its untouched enormity into view. The sky is wide, and the ocean waters are still breathing loud or low with fruitful magnitude. They are at the end of every road. And when the foghorn bawls from Chatham like a lost cow, we know that there are still headlands and ships, the uncalculated and the unknown.
On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more than two feet high, as well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in, sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.
The sea beyond is full of long waves that take the low sunlight of late afternoon and swoop and fall with it. They come in from the distance and then rise as they approach the shore, showing their marbled, curved surfaces, to pause at the crest and plunge down. A stiff north wind holds them back a little. Manes of spray whip back at their cresting and when they fall the spray rises up almost vertically. Just inshore, where the breakers fling in their prows along the sloping beach, the waters foam with constant movement, in and out, all bubbling and shifting with a turbulent milk, whose surface looks opalescent--colors of blue, green, and pink bordered by heavy pearl. And what a sound! A thundering, a loud fermentation, with an occasional great soft clash of waves like cymbals, the long surf roaming and lunging in the evening light for miles and miles. From where I stand on the cliff top I can see a little group of men and children jumping and throwing sticks and stones into the surf. They run back and forth with its rhythm, playing touch and go with it, running to keep warm in the wind, playing as if they had to, dancing for the surf’s thunder. They laugh, shout, hurl driftwood into it. They jump and wave their arms as the water reflects their images, just on the fringe of an immense, terrible beauty, responding with an antic kind of love.
The sea provides a cold, unfathomed latitude in the tightness of January. On land too there is a kind of under-rhythm of things allowed, or rather a special winter pace and timing, each life with its relation to the cold. The thin light and air seem to define the leeway. Thick snow showers slant in. Sky, hills, and shore are blotted out. There is nothing to be seen but the naked trees, the oak leaves like tattered old flags holding against the wind that kicks the flakes ahead. The storm abates into gusts, and occasional sweeps of snow with blue patches blown clear in the sky. At each advent of this blue clarity, with sharp spun strands of light coming in from the sun, the birds respond. Snow swirls. Wind seethes. There is nothing to be seen but a tree sparrow or a chickadee at the bird feeder. Then the blue patches show again and the earth clears to vision. A flock of juncos fly in, or a blue jay glides through; a red-tailed hawk screams in the sky. It is as if they were all puppets dancing for their master light.
[Illustration]
Special response is as much a part of winter as extreme reaction or withdrawal. I see this in the birds. I hear it in the yawing creaks of a pine, in dead leaf stir, wind speech, in their collaboration. I feel it in the quality of the season, its rigid shocks, its holding hard and letting go, its suspense and trigger edges, the obedience it calls for, the inertness and tight compliance.
Within the temperature range permitted it, life now shows many hairbreadth balances. Some marine animals “deactivate” during the winter--the equivalent of that coma and lowered metabolism which is called hibernation in the woodchuck or the chipmunk. If no ice blocks are in the way, and I can walk out over the offshore flats, I find periwinkles still holding on to rocks or driftwood, but obviously slowed down almost to a stop. On the other hand, common rock barnacles breed during the winter months as far north as Delaware and New Jersey, sending out eggs which will hatch in cold sea water into free-swimming larvae. And there is a red crab in Boston Harbor which stays active throughout the winter.
When it gets abnormally cold, shellfish “supercool.” They have a freezing nucleus and will survive if not suddenly jarred.
Adaptation to ranges in temperature varies enormously. Some plants and animals die when the temperature drops beyond a certain point, and others when they are released too quickly from freezing temperatures. Some animals avoid the cold by migrating, or they are able by specialized habits to eat and survive as permanent residents.
The conditions of life in its natural environment, whether land or water, vary from place to place, although the sea, for example, is less extreme and difficult than is the land. Such conditions may show dramatic contrasts in areas that are fairly close together. Because of the influence of the Labrador Current, the waters to the north of Cape Cod are colder than those to the south, where they are influenced by the Gulf Stream. As a result, there are some species of marine invertebrates which exist on one side of the Cape but not the other.
The frog, a cold-blooded animal whose tissues approximate the temperature around it, lies in the cold mud, sometimes in blocks of ice, an intrinsic part of winter. The blue jay, on the other hand, is less helpless, and is able to forage above the ice and snow. Like man, it has an internal temperature of its own, regardless of the weather; although man is without the insulation of feathers or fur. A thing apart, I run to my house, my city, the tunnels of my society, in order to escape the cold. I wonder, though, whether this mental animal, a great experiment in complexity, is not as perilously balanced as any simple organism, a mussel or a clam, in the extremes of temperature and environment.
_February_
_Secrets in the Open_
Rain comes, heavy, cold, inert. Dirt roads begin to turn to mud. Then the vice tightens again. Below freezing temperatures take hold, putting a new strain on plants and trees lately thawed. It is not steady, continuous cold that now threatens life, but the shifts between freezing and thawing--alternates in the caprices of energy. We are not allowed to open our pores and eyes too much, lest we be taken unawares, stopped as we try to start again.
I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song.
Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy, crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but its name--the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door.
A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster and responds so readily to accidents?
I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather ... hidden fires almost seen.
In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.
Something says stand and wait, look out and over; and when I do life stirs, assembles, and flies. The yellow marsh grasses sway beyond me. Ice shines white in the drainage ditches. A flicker, sun loaded, flies over to the far side. Tall dry reeds rattle together.
In silence, a female purple finch lands on a tree facing the wind, its breast shining in the light. I hear the dry “tik” of a myrtle warbler. Then a chickadee swings and loops out of a wind-washed pitch pine above me.