Chapter V: Part 5

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.

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.

And here, heavy fogs invest the Cape during the early morning and at night. On the night of the second we are lashed by a savage gale, carrying wet snow and rain, and feel a searching, bitter dampness. The next morning the sun comes out with promise and radiance. There is a faint new fragrance in the air. It would have been nothing but that--a sense of mild relief after the pressure of a storm, but for another piece of news. At 1 A.M. the Coast Guard had received an “incoherent” distress signal, though without exact location, from a vessel somewhere on a twenty-five-mile stretch of shore between Cape Cod light in Truro and Nauset light in Orleans. It was found before dawn, an eighty-three-foot trawler, which had run aground off South Wellfleet. Out of a crew of seven, the reports say, two are drowned, four survived, and one is missing.

They were returning to Boston with 38,000 pounds of fish, after fishing west of Georges Banks. During the night, through a thick fog, a thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour wind, high waves, and heavy rain, the radar stopped working and the crewmen were unable to see. The “Back Shore” bar, on which the trawler ran aground, is an old graveyard for ships. Modern equipment has cut down greatly on losses, along with some of the old safeguards against them. Many lighthouses are no longer manned by lighthouse keepers and their families. Great beams of light swing out over the dark sea and back again with inanimate, unmanned precision. Members of Coast Guard rescue crews may no longer be men born and bred here who know every inch of their beaches. In fact, they are more likely to come from a different state, and to be stationed temporarily on the Cape, so that a man hunting for a wreck may not have too exact an idea of his location.

During the afternoon, after I hear the news and drive to see the wreck, a southwest wind blows over the cliffs that stand above the Wellfleet beach, and clouds swirl up across the blue emptiness. Cars line both sides of the road. A thin trickle of people walk along the heights, sands held by yellow grass and purple patches of bearberry, and there are others far down the long beach where the trawler lies, heaved over to starboard.

From morning news accounts and a scatter of talk the story of the doomed ship and the rescue comes to me a little, from under its nighttime shroud of fog and heaving waves. After the radar quit and the vessel ran aground on the sand bar, the crew made a futile effort to get her off. Then the radio failed. The ship was being knocked around in the thrashing darkness. All attempts failed to put dories overboard. And the seven men went into the pilothouse, where they stayed for some five hours. When day broke, the tide was changing and the seas seemed bigger than ever. The men were battered and exhausted. The trawler’s decks were awash, and they thought she was beginning to break up. The captain then ordered the crew over the sides, at which time the ship was some 600 to 700 yards offshore.

A local family, a man, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter, proprietors of summer cottages above the beach, were wakened at four forty-five in the morning by two coastguardmen who had seen the wreck and stopped in to use the phone. While one of the men drove along the heights and trained the spotlights of his jeep on the wreck, the other, accompanied by the family, walked down to the shore. The fog had lifted a little and they could see white spars rocking above the water, and what looked at first like debris, being washed back and forth against the shore. Forming a hand-to-hand chain, the four rescuers then managed by just standing out far enough in the icy water to pull three men in. More Coast Guard personnel came later and rescued the fourth. The survivors were terribly numbed by the cold. One of them had to be forced into walking so as to save his life. “How much further?” he kept mumbling, as he stumbled around in the sands, held up by the mother and daughter. Later, the flesh of these survivors was found to be black and blue from the pounding they had taken on board the ship and in the surf, flung against the sands.

Two other crewmen were found dead on the beach. Another local resident saw one of them where he lay at the bottom of a ladder that reached down the cliff: “A big man, between thirty and forty. He had coveralls on, but no shirt.”

His wife says: “I’ll never complain about the price of fish again!”

There are plenty of fish in evidence, all for free, although not a single one is taken away. The boat’s catch must have been broken into and scattered by the surf. Every ten yards or so along the wide, shelving beach are dead fish, lined up as if they had been placed there--a market display, for no taste but dissolution. Gray haddock cleaned by the fishermen’s knives. Rose fish, pinkish, orange-red, a sunset color, with fringed fins, and enormous jellied eyes rimmed with white, like goggles.

A hatch cover floats loose in the water, and a pair of yellow, oiled fisherman’s overalls lies on the sand.

The boat, which was shoved and lifted by the seas until it now lies a few yards off the beach, is just ahead. We curious onlookers walk toward it in growing silence. The surf waters are breaking on the beach beside the strong, humble craft, inactive, done, pounded down. I can make out her name, _Paulmino_, along the bow. She is banked over hard, and the waves, still fairly high, back and fill around the stern. They well up, then ease away again. Where water sloshes amidships there are tattered nets and bobbing cork floats. The steel masts stand with ropes and stays unbroken, and the high, white pilothouse is intact, where they spent their terrible night.

I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death, or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that no mortal fear escapes.

_April Light_

One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water. There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead.

Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal--probably a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the channel--swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with a yell as its head slips by and out of sight.

A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high spring night--life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its origins.

Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance. The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light.

There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a beetle’s iridescent green.

Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible to see the grass growing.

There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds, making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance.

In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow sunlight of a path where I am walking.

These are the signs of spring, the illuminations I have been waiting for. And its fresh, cool wind, striking my face, seems to carry new senses with it. It is beginning to be fragrant and full. It calls up in me a new alertness along with a new contentment. But underneath all these pleasant surfaces and scattered events, I feel the power of their origins. For all I can find and associate with spring, the romantic, welcome season, there are vastly more uncounted changes, unrealized ways of reaching up and out, responding to a new range of light and darkness. The protozoa tell me I have seen nothing yet as to fire. The migrant herring coming in at night say this April is ageless and dark. Everywhere around me, things deeply silent and unseen begin to share a proximity. They move in the waters, while they shoulder the dirt below ground. In the structure of their alliances, developed in measure and with appropriateness, is the co-ordination of the great globe as it spins in space. They respond to a power which not only defines the “spring” but will transform it and send it on its way.

“_Frightened Away_”

The swallows freely dip and fall and sail in high wild air, and as a southern surprise two adult turkey vultures soar low over the land, their wings like great flags, frayed at the tips. The cattail seeds begin to fly. Part of April’s cool progression, the tough-leaved Mayflowers blossom out of banks and brown leaf litter, with tiny pink and white flowers, deep cupped, strong and sweet of scent.

On the twenty-fifth there is a big run of alewives in the brook. It is an event that attracts attention. Cars stop by. Small crowds gather and walk down to see the fish. This is not as great a day as it used to be, when salt herring counted heavily in the economic livelihood of Cape Cod, but it brings up remnant feelings. And the fish, after all, provide an open ceremony, even though the details of their natural or economic history may not be known to everyone. It is a spectacle worth leaving a car for, and might even tempt someone to leave his car for good, suggesting new roads and means of locomotion not yet considered.

They mass in the shallow water of the brook, with flinty gleams showing on their backs and dorsal fins. Eyes staring, mouths gaping, turning and wheeling, the foot-long alewives move up through the fishways, obeying their great drive for fulfillment. Herring gulls gather above the water course by which the fish ascend through marshes and then fresh water to their spawning areas in the ponds. They circle overhead in the blinding sky, like a prodigal crown.

The alewife multitude always draws a “why” from some visitor. Their force is so obvious and yet not quite to be explained by referring to them as “poor fish.” Huge numbers are caught in nets where they die in a shining, gasping, shivering mass, and then are hauled away in barrels for the purposes of bait or cat food. Others attempt impossible rocky barriers and die of wounds or exhaustion, and a certain percentage have fallen prey to gulls before they arrive. They encounter enormous hazards, and the alewives, unlike men, or as men think of themselves, are unable to turn back. The plan that put them here seems wasteful and even too bold for those who see life in terms of human ascendancy, where all problems are subordinate to our conscious attempt to use the earth and save ourselves. But there they are, back again so committedly as to make the most self-enclosed glimpse something of the primal energy that makes all life insist on renewal and advance. Even the children who jump down to the water’s edge and try to flip the fish out with their hands, treating them sometimes with extraordinary cruelty, must feel some attachment to this force, or perhaps they feel it more than the rest of us.

After trying to explain the habits of alewives to a group of children one day, I asked them why, if all the fish were taken out of the brook every day in the week, there would be hardly any fish returning in a few years’ time.

I don’t excuse my lack of clarity. In any case, one boy answered: “Because they would get so frightened they would all go away and not come back.”

Wrong, of course. Someone might even be tempted to cry: “Ridiculous!” The answer to the question is that most of the alewives return to the stream in whose headwaters they were hatched and where they grew up for a few weeks or months of their lives before returning to salt water. They then continue to grow in the sea, returning at sexual maturity in three or four years’ time. So if all the spawning fish are taken out of the brook every day in the week there would be no eggs to hatch out in the ponds above the stream, and the population would be decimated.

“No,” you say to the child, “you don’t understand. Let me explain this again.”

That the fish are “frightened” does not come into the picture at all, aside from the facts, and it is blatant anthropomorphism to try and read human response or attributes into a fish. Does a fish take fright? Perhaps, although it might be more accurate to call it an alarm, or flight reaction, an automatic nerve response inherent in the whole race.

Trying to talk like an adult, I describe the alewives’ running in to spawn as “slavery to the reproductive urge.” What happens to them on the way is immaterial to this unconscious necessity. Fish that commit suicide do not do so out of choice.

And yet, when these fish swing away from me, as my shadow comes over them, when they try time after time, sometimes frantically, to climb a mound of rocks or a head of water, I wonder about being “frightened,” or the noun “fear.” Is this spring stream of life without it? A bird trips off a branch in sudden alarm, cries out, and then forgets, to start in on a singing joy all over again. Birds are more emotional than cold-blooded fish, but if fear is a protective, lifesaving reaction inherent in a great many animals, then the fish may not be devoid of it. They are one of the foods of the universe, and in balance with that function, it is not just that their glands stimulate them to momentary activity, or that they flinch before disaster, but that they express in their bodies the wild need for freedom to act, to find, to run, to be, that manifests itself in highly developed animals, and to some degree in the lesser ones. They are in a sense compensating for the uses to which they are put as a prey, or element, of universal appetite.

The alewives will not be frightened away, but they will come back with fear. It is not wise to be too impatient with a child.

_May_

_Declarations_

The colder, and still relatively silent world of April is past. Warm sunlight runs across trees, sharp shadows, water and sand, with a penetrating radiance. The alewives now come up the inland stream day after day. Pale, sun laden, they move against the fast-rushing current, arousing great excitement in the gulls. The big white and gray birds hover over, then dive down in a flock where the fish crowd in shallow water on their way up. The valley is full of marauding and assemblies and crying out as the fish keep on, rushing and weaving with the stream flowing over their backs.

And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like standing clouds in open woods and valleys throughout the Cape. Pink and yellow and silvery-green colors begin to appear on the oaks. Anthers are hanging conspicuously from the pitch pines.

Fish, insects, plants, birds are all, if I can personify them so, in close and obedient relationship to nature. They count on strength and protection when they sing or flower out above the ground. They are in confident relationship to the general being. And so they act with confidence. They have come. They will be. They declare themselves. The birds make the dawns sound with a silvery rain of music. On the morning when a thrush wakes me up, its rippling and melodious peals lifting and diving through the air, I have an incalculable urge to migrate outward and claim new territory. Spring tells me I have not had enough.

The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods, each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help us not only in our geography but to extend our senses.

Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land possession.

The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare.

“Air_tree_!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-_tree_!” continually, inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true awareness.

In the newly unfolding regions of delicate leaves a prairie warbler sings “Tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee” very rapidly, on an upward crescendo. A slim little bird, with a yellow breast streaked with black, its sharp trim beak opens wide as the notes swell out of its throat, and it seems to send song as far as it can. I think of constant effort, constant quick hearts. It picks up a light green caterpillar from the oak leaves and sings as it holds it in its beak. Then the warbler beats at the insect a little, pecks and shakes it, then swallows it down; and goes on singing.

An oven bird perches on the oaks and sings, with breast uplifted, tail shaking, making a glorious effort. How could I dare say that this bird or another down the road, which accompanies it, is only singing something that sounds to our ears like “Teacher-teacher-teacher”? No bird song is alike, even in members of the same species. Each individual has its variation and seems to derive strength and pleasure from it. And it seems to me that they not only declare their rights and titles but are expressing something on behalf of spring. It is as if they sang: “It is not I. It is not I” but rather, all flowering, crossing, taking or accumulating, all growth. The song is a part of earth.

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.