Part 7
I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness through the ground, but overhead the infinite dome almost resounds. It is blazing, bounding, soaring with the means and light of existence. I am not troubled at all that I look out from an unimportant planet dependent on a common star, and am only able to see a few light-years away, each light-year being a distance of six million million miles. There is sight past sight. The strongest telescope is still an extension of the human eye. Our measurements themselves are a form of participation in that fantastic distance, which may not make us any less lonely, but we have a mind in space; and since men calculate, by observation of the heavens and of their earth, that the laws of life are the same as far and farther than they can see, then they have hearts and blood there too. I stand here on the cold ground, and take sensual note of the universe.
Then I move back into my domestic hole to do a little hibernating of my own. A winter withdrawal sets in, when outer resources escape me. I am drawn inward to human want and its frustrations, to common egotism or inertia. The December days progress almost remotely. Who cares about the secrets of that cold and darkening earth outside? Our problems are sufficient unto themselves.
But there is a natural complex of greed, a provision for appetite, that brings men and earth to mutuality. Manifested by the weather, it sometimes puts us out of doors to understand real fortitude. Instead of easing on toward January, December begins to tug and roar. It snows all day and there are north winds of from thirty to forty miles an hour driving the snow against our houses, suggesting an extra struggle we might not be quite ready for. Then it warms up to 2 or 4 degrees above freezing, and the following morning begins with a cold rain and sleet falling down with hissing, disheartening force. The temperature drops. The sleet turns to snow, driving in violently from the north, hitting the trees like bullets. The sky closes in. There is no horizon. The wind swirls. Trees rock and bend. This is a storm with a great rush of savagery, setting wild, grim traps for the unprotected. “Now,” it says, “I have you. Try some adventures in this.”
There is ice or cemented snow along the tree trunks in the direction of the storm, so that by sight and feel I know the wind is from the northeast quarter, without need of instruments. My hand tells me where the present power is coming from.
When the snow and wind let up a little, I head for the shore and find signs down, gutters yanked out, and telegraph wires dangling across the road. Salt water ahead of me is churning, tossing white spume against the open shore, while the wind seethes, whines, and howls with growing intensity. The feeling of conflict is everywhere around me--a hurling and letting go, a bend and give, a clash, a holding against insufferable strain. The sand on the upper beach is whipped into stinging strength. The sea is almost boiling, its racing, conflicting edges spray-lined. On top of an exceptionally high tide, great waves run in over a sheltered inlet, sending their combers farther toward the land. All points of contact and withdrawal, rise and fall, seem to be concentrated in this monumental turbulence, a force that is almost uncontained. Is it a replica in violence of the normally unseen stresses and strains lying under a peaceful season, or a life? Our bodies are made of air and salt water, in their components of hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. A storm should be our organic companion. But this cold screaming fury makes me take refuge behind a wall. Man may have overcome the elements, but not his elemental frailty.
Out over the gray and white waters, hovering against the wind in an almost idle way, are several herring gulls. And, at the mouth of the inlet, riding calmly on the roaring, running tide, facing up against a thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind, is a loon--close-reefed, well fitted in all respects to weather the worst.
_Two Encounters_
After the storm a hard cold sets in for many days. As a rule our Decembers are comparatively mild, with the days alternating between light rain and cool sunshine. Now the very great plunges of the cold, driving the frost deep into the ground, freezing the pond waters, starting a rim of pack ice around Cape Cod Bay, comes as a surprise, something not known before. The weather bureau, explaining the cold as being the result of a vast Canadian high-pressure system, speaks of its unusual “fetch and intensity.” Ten degrees above zero is not severe as compared with conditions in other parts of the world, but this unseasonal extreme is a local reminder of the earth’s potential, and just how much we depend on the normal rhythms of the year. We gasp with cold, turn up the heat, and think that cataclysm is a small thing to the universe.
The cold around us creates a different earth. It demands a readjustment of the senses, as though it were ready with amazing new suggestions. One sharply cold morning when snow lies fresh on the ground I stop by the cemetery where the Blacks are buried, on my way to town. There is something about this day that asks attention. It sings. Pure crystalline masses creak underfoot. The tune of the cold finds an edge on my bones. Pines, stiff cedars, locust trees, hard ground and stone, all share in resonance, being forged and tempered by the cold. The little graveyard hill is a tympanum, or sounding board, very highly pitched, so powerfully taut, being plucked very lightly by the air with sharp whispers and twanging sounds being sent across the snow, that it might be ready to send one chord, incomparably new, into the whole sky.
I start to go away, but a tiny, almost casual trill separates itself from the vibrations of the cold. I keep listening and in a few seconds see a bird rounding the branch of a cedar tree, not twenty feet away. Working in and out of the branches, coming in to view and then disappearing again, is a flock of purple finches, eating cedar berries. The males are washed with a raspberry color that keeps appearing through the dark green masses of the tree like intermittent lights, hints of fruitfulness in the winter’s containment.
Suddenly, surprisingly, a light brown, speckled veery appears on the open branch of a locust. This summer bird, out in the glittering cold, seems to have a startled, wildly timid look in its eyes. Its slim body hesitates, with the problem of aloneness perhaps, or direction, or food in this white earth that has cut so cruelly into its subsistence. Then it flies off into a wood of pitch pines, and I hear a low sound, the mere snatch of a thrush’s warbling.
Just by stopping for ten minutes instead of hurrying on, I have been put into a new relation with the morning, and have seen a singularity and sacredness to all its parts. It could happen in Moscow or New York.
A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me.
I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies ... every now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm. On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping, flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of the building--dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart.
Then I am back down the street again with my own tribe that teems with general might and inner purposes of its own, going and returning--out continually--representatives of a force of mind that can gauge the mechanics of the universe, and in animal power overrunning the earth. I see in these shoppers an evolutionary line of vision never satisfied, a history of cities, ledges of light running to unknown futures. The world is in the hands of these omnipresent and familiar beings, the young and the old, black-haired, brown, yellow, or gray, in the indefinite shapes and interchanges of their lives--the human race hurrying through its own lighted ways. And if I shouted: “Stop! Look away from yourselves. Consider the starlings!” with what sort of mild madness would I be credited?
_January_
_Exposure_
It is said that winter, being the season when the sun shines on us obliquely, is a period of death, or, as the dictionary puts it, of “dreariness, old age and decay.” We are being deprived of a portion of original energy, and recognize occasionally that if we were out far enough, in as extreme and bare a relationship to the cold as the birds, but without their equivalent in insulation, we would have a hard time surviving (though birds are also perishable and have their share of disease and death from starvation). But we take care of ourselves, in such an elaborate and consuming way, that the grand extremes of weather may only succeed in being a nuisance. The freezing weather deepens this month, after a few days of moderate warmth at the start, and I am free to complain about the heat bills. The car skids and turns a half circle on the highway, which is covered with glare ice one morning, and I am afraid, not for myself so much as for my new car. How could I manage that ten miles back without it? Self-protection may be all that winter means to us, though it is a term that can only be comparative in an age of manufactured violence.
Suddenly there is a tremendous thud above us that jars and rocks the house. It seems to tug at the vitals of the earth and would cause us more than mere shock if we were not aware that it is a plane breaking the sound barrier, thousands of feet in the air. A minute or two later I hear a familiar gabbling, a mixed bugling, overhead, and run out to see twenty Canada geese, hurrying fast down the north wind in four separate flocks aligned in flight. With their long necks stretched out and strong wings beating they are fleeing for their lives, frightened up from winter feeding grounds along the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The earth, for the time being at least, is committed to mankind. The geese cannot so frighten _us_. They are innocent of ways to “control their environment.”
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.