Part 5
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.
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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.
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.
The sun’s rays slant lower between the open aisles of the trees, and there is a keener, icier edge to the light. I walk out through a hollowed, dipping and waving landscape onto gray-green lichens, and dry, sweet-smelling grasses of an old field laced with briars, and the pale blue sky is on top of me with intoxicating height. The vapor trail of a jet plane cuts across the sky for miles, while slower clouds ease and change across the November blue, allowing lazy time for the imagination.
But if to imagine is a dispensation from nature that allows us to take part in her intricate creativeness, then it is no idleness. Rationally, a cloud, whether cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, or a combination thereof, is what it is: a collection of drops of water, or ice particles, suspended in the air. Meteorology as a science must be one of the most intriguing, since its subjects never sit still. I would, if I could, make an analysis of the clouds that are typical of a season, the changes in pace that make themselves known overhead; though the old maritime men of Cape Cod could do a better job. They knew what they depended on, in the way of calm or storm, and predicted what they felt. Subjective interpretation is suspect these days, but it implies a common familiarity for which objective analysis offers no substitute. The sensate imagination, with its head in the clouds, finds interconnections past their specialty and name.
Clouds, collecting moisture from the ponds, lakes, or ocean waters, have many of the shapes and patterns of the land, or head, if you like, that they come from. We can find faces in them, as well as in the dregs of a teacup; but they are the images of an invention that is more fluid than our own. Their texture may cause them to look like scratched, glacial rocks, or they are wooly and fibrous at the same time. They might suggest cocoons or the nest of fall webworms. They hang in snowy shoals or in striated banks. They ripple like the sands at low tide. They look like whitecaps on the sea. They move as slowly and inexorably as fields of ice, or in quick bursts ahead of the wind. They roll in mountainous abundance, or fan out like a river’s long fingers stretching out across a delta.
Clouds suggest seaweed, grasses, wings. Occasionally they remind me of ferns, and of the fernlike patterns that the frost makes on a window, or they resemble some basic structure of a living thing. As plants and animals are united in fundamental physical laws and in their chemical composition, so clouds, for all their evanescence, cannot be separated from the world of life. Clouds are announcements of progress and decline. They show the sky’s adventures. There is more to them than my fancy. The light, the wind, the altitude, temperature, time of day or year commit them to a definite size, shape, and existence. They are images of substance, in a motion which casts everything into its weather, including that human sign on the sky, the jet’s trail, imposing an abstract scar ten miles across.
_The Inconstant Land_
When the clouds cover the sky like gun smoke and the air feels cold and restricting, I am reminded that the character of Cape Cod has nothing to offer an uncertain world except uncertainty. Its trees are not of a size to hang on to, and its dunes shift like the waves. It is a land that men have ravaged with fire, not excluding the Indians who preceded us, and abused without compunction. It is said there used to be great stands of trees on the Cape, hardwoods, hemlocks and pine. The remnants of submerged Atlantic white cedar forests have been found as far as three miles out in Cape Cod Bay, and bog borings have revealed the evidence of timber in some areas where trees now have only a bare subsistence. But during the nineteenth century, judging by photographs and local account, this peninsula was much poorer in trees than it is now, even though our local woods cannot be given credit for much height and dignity.
A man from New Hampshire visited me briefly a few years ago and said: “What in the world are you living here for? There aren’t any trees!” I pointed out to him that we had the sea, but the place seemed poor and flat to him, and he headed back to the mountains and tall timber as fast as he could, though he first chose to have a lunch of seafood, on his way out.
When I bought the land I live on, it had a desolate appearance aside from a long view of the water, but its high wildness appealed to me. It was covered with dead oaks, standing everywhere like stripped spars. They had been killed off by a severe infestation of gypsy moths, and were, in any case, weak, cutover growth to begin with. The local landowners cut the woods down almost completely, then waited, twenty-five years in many cases, to cut them again. Others cut for firewood whenever they needed it. This area is covered like a rabbit warren with tracks made by wagons coming in to take out wood. I talked with a man recently who used to ride on the wagon seat with his grandfather when he was a boy. They liked to pull trees out when the frost was in the ground. Even then the wagon would be so heavily loaded that it sank in almost to the axles, with the horse pulling hard in the middle. The deep ruts are still to be seen. Besides taking out the wood for sale and for their own use, the owners would sell it “on the stump,” letting individuals go on their land and cut.
Since this was a country whose inhabitants often made a sparse living out of livestock as well as fish, the land was also used for grazing. Cattle and sheep kept the brush and ground cover down. Many sandy hillsides were not only bare, but beginning to erode badly.
In his _Cape Cod_, Thoreau speaks of the country between the towns of Barnstable and Orleans on the bay side as being “bare, or with only a little scrubby wood left on the hills.” “Generally,” he writes, “the ploughed fields of the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of salt and Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander’s notions of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and he will not be able, for some time afterwards, to distinguish soil from sand.”
Fire has tormented the Cape, ever since the Indians, who used it to clear areas for corn, or to increase the visibility when hunting game. When the humus on the woodland floor is thin, and the trees not healthy or high enough to provide protective shade, thus retaining moisture in the ground, a severe drought may make them ripe for burning. I have heard it said that fires used to be set deliberately in order to improve the blueberry crop. And a neighbor tells me that he has seen thirty or more fires set by the sparks from a train, chugging down the Cape, as he watched from a bare hillside half a century ago.
Oddly enough, the pitch pine owes a great deal of its present prosperity to fire. It is one of the few trees whose roots stay alive and which comes back after an area has been burned over. Most of its competitors, except scrub oaks and black oaks, are killed off. It is a tough tree, and when it grows to good height with its rugged, wind-whisking look, a beautiful one; but it has its vulnerable points. It is very greedy for light, being what the tree experts call an “intolerant tree,” and it cannot stand competition. Pitch pines that come up under the shade of oaks or even of their own kind, soon die off. They demand their own ground. The oaks, especially the white oak, are much more tolerant of shade, and may in time push out the pitch pine, provided fires are held to a minimum in the future.
The oaks are monumentally persistent. Cut them down fifty times and they will sprout back from the roots, which merely spread out a little further and send out more shoots. These “sprout hardwoods” have poor quality wood. They have fungus diseases, and are subject to attack by insect borers. The general attitude toward them is that they are worthless. Now that they are not much in demand for firewood, the bulldozer, rather than the ax, is their major enemy. But they deserve some admiration for holding their own. The first year or two after cutting, a sprout oak will grow very fast, but then it settles down for a long future, beginning to grow at a slow, insistent rate, taking what comes. This is a windy and salty land, where oaks may never grow to great girth and height, but they seem eloquent about their right to last out the next five thousand years on Cape Cod as well as we, even though thirty feet, or in some areas five, may be the maximum they reach. This is their chosen land.