Part 8
On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more than two feet high, as well as stunted pitch pine with a mustard tinge to their needles. Dark clumps of hudsonia, a heath, resembling heather, cover the hollows and slopes, the billowing mounds on cliff tops above the beach. The vegetation lies low against wind and salt spray. It looks rusty and tormented. On the steep slopes to the beach there are milky films of snow, and then patches of white foam at the bottom. The surf roars in, sidling with great licks and washes along the sands.
The sea beyond is full of long waves that take the low sunlight of late afternoon and swoop and fall with it. They come in from the distance and then rise as they approach the shore, showing their marbled, curved surfaces, to pause at the crest and plunge down. A stiff north wind holds them back a little. Manes of spray whip back at their cresting and when they fall the spray rises up almost vertically. Just inshore, where the breakers fling in their prows along the sloping beach, the waters foam with constant movement, in and out, all bubbling and shifting with a turbulent milk, whose surface looks opalescent--colors of blue, green, and pink bordered by heavy pearl. And what a sound! A thundering, a loud fermentation, with an occasional great soft clash of waves like cymbals, the long surf roaming and lunging in the evening light for miles and miles. From where I stand on the cliff top I can see a little group of men and children jumping and throwing sticks and stones into the surf. They run back and forth with its rhythm, playing touch and go with it, running to keep warm in the wind, playing as if they had to, dancing for the surf’s thunder. They laugh, shout, hurl driftwood into it. They jump and wave their arms as the water reflects their images, just on the fringe of an immense, terrible beauty, responding with an antic kind of love.
The sea provides a cold, unfathomed latitude in the tightness of January. On land too there is a kind of under-rhythm of things allowed, or rather a special winter pace and timing, each life with its relation to the cold. The thin light and air seem to define the leeway. Thick snow showers slant in. Sky, hills, and shore are blotted out. There is nothing to be seen but the naked trees, the oak leaves like tattered old flags holding against the wind that kicks the flakes ahead. The storm abates into gusts, and occasional sweeps of snow with blue patches blown clear in the sky. At each advent of this blue clarity, with sharp spun strands of light coming in from the sun, the birds respond. Snow swirls. Wind seethes. There is nothing to be seen but a tree sparrow or a chickadee at the bird feeder. Then the blue patches show again and the earth clears to vision. A flock of juncos fly in, or a blue jay glides through; a red-tailed hawk screams in the sky. It is as if they were all puppets dancing for their master light.
Special response is as much a part of winter as extreme reaction or withdrawal. I see this in the birds. I hear it in the yawing creaks of a pine, in dead leaf stir, wind speech, in their collaboration. I feel it in the quality of the season, its rigid shocks, its holding hard and letting go, its suspense and trigger edges, the obedience it calls for, the inertness and tight compliance.
Within the temperature range permitted it, life now shows many hairbreadth balances. Some marine animals “deactivate” during the winter--the equivalent of that coma and lowered metabolism which is called hibernation in the woodchuck or the chipmunk. If no ice blocks are in the way, and I can walk out over the offshore flats, I find periwinkles still holding on to rocks or driftwood, but obviously slowed down almost to a stop. On the other hand, common rock barnacles breed during the winter months as far north as Delaware and New Jersey, sending out eggs which will hatch in cold sea water into free-swimming larvae. And there is a red crab in Boston Harbor which stays active throughout the winter.
When it gets abnormally cold, shellfish “supercool.” They have a freezing nucleus and will survive if not suddenly jarred.
Adaptation to ranges in temperature varies enormously. Some plants and animals die when the temperature drops beyond a certain point, and others when they are released too quickly from freezing temperatures. Some animals avoid the cold by migrating, or they are able by specialized habits to eat and survive as permanent residents.
The conditions of life in its natural environment, whether land or water, vary from place to place, although the sea, for example, is less extreme and difficult than is the land. Such conditions may show dramatic contrasts in areas that are fairly close together. Because of the influence of the Labrador Current, the waters to the north of Cape Cod are colder than those to the south, where they are influenced by the Gulf Stream. As a result, there are some species of marine invertebrates which exist on one side of the Cape but not the other.
The frog, a cold-blooded animal whose tissues approximate the temperature around it, lies in the cold mud, sometimes in blocks of ice, an intrinsic part of winter. The blue jay, on the other hand, is less helpless, and is able to forage above the ice and snow. Like man, it has an internal temperature of its own, regardless of the weather; although man is without the insulation of feathers or fur. A thing apart, I run to my house, my city, the tunnels of my society, in order to escape the cold. I wonder, though, whether this mental animal, a great experiment in complexity, is not as perilously balanced as any simple organism, a mussel or a clam, in the extremes of temperature and environment.
_February_
_Secrets in the Open_
Rain comes, heavy, cold, inert. Dirt roads begin to turn to mud. Then the vice tightens again. Below freezing temperatures take hold, putting a new strain on plants and trees lately thawed. It is not steady, continuous cold that now threatens life, but the shifts between freezing and thawing--alternates in the caprices of energy. We are not allowed to open our pores and eyes too much, lest we be taken unawares, stopped as we try to start again.
I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song.
Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy, crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but its name--the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door.
A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster and responds so readily to accidents?
I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather ... hidden fires almost seen.
In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.
Something says stand and wait, look out and over; and when I do life stirs, assembles, and flies. The yellow marsh grasses sway beyond me. Ice shines white in the drainage ditches. A flicker, sun loaded, flies over to the far side. Tall dry reeds rattle together.
In silence, a female purple finch lands on a tree facing the wind, its breast shining in the light. I hear the dry “tik” of a myrtle warbler. Then a chickadee swings and loops out of a wind-washed pitch pine above me.
Through the thickets of alder, shad, blueberry, and sumac on the surrounding banks, I become aware of a sweet spring voice, then of small singings here and there, and when I follow them up I realize they come from the shrubs themselves. Twigs rustle and touch. Gray branches out of frozen ground sing in contact. Even the marsh reeds make occasional sharp, squeaking twangs. There is no melody among the birds. A robin, although it is as red as it will ever be in spring, and fatter, with feathers puffed out on the cold, flies to an alder bush, where a few dried berries are still hanging, to perch without a sound.
The music is there, though it may become louder and richer in a later context. Musical capacity is not confined to a few animals, or to spring and summer. Cold air and frost rehearse with plants as well, under the changing sun. The song of light is played in many ways.
_The Sea in the Ground_
It is on just such a day, when hope, interest, renewal seem to be afforded, though held in check, that I find other local residents--other people, other customs--that are not only in readiness, but blooming with color as though it were summertime. The temperature is barely at the freezing point. The air is bright and clear, and the top of the ground is played over by sunny warmth. In flowing fields that skirt the oaks, the reindeer moss, with many branches, perhaps suggestive of antlers (though it gets its name because it provides food for reindeer and musk oxen in the frozen tundras of the Arctic), is gray like dawn dew, or an almost luminous gray-green. Light nests of snow with sparkling hexagonal flakes rest between its curly fronds.
The reindeer moss is one of the lichens. A lichen, each separate plant, multitudes of which compose the visible growth, is a composite of a fungus and an alga, seen only through a microscope. The alga contains the coloring matter, or chlorophyll, and can therefore carry out the process of photosynthesis, manufacturing food with water and sunlight. The fungus, which has no such ability, wraps its threads around the alga, protects it from the sun, and stores the moisture for their partnership; and, if they are of the rock-growing variety, anchors them both securely.
The lichens are tough. They can endure extreme contrasts in temperature, and hang on in barren areas where other plants could not get a foothold. In fact, they are pioneers of millions of years’ service. They prepared the way for all the changing elaboration of plants with leaves and stems that followed them, after they had broken down bare rock with their acids, dissolved it, cracked it, and combined their own dead materials with the rock particles to form soil.
In these round-edged plates of lichen that cover rocks or tree trunks in the bare February woods, I see a life that is almost independent of the season. It goes beyond or behind our immediate knowledge of it into a kind of primal security, settling in where little else is possible.
The color of lichens is the color of the green algae of the sea and of fresh-water ponds. If their blue-grays, gray-greens, or yellows, bring up the cast-steel color of ocean barrens to my imagination, or green water lolling at the sand’s edge, or underwater depths running with fish and shafts of light, there is knowledge to back me up. The progenitors of the lichens and their relatives the mosses--this richly green hair-capped moss that soaks up melting snow in the sunlight--were unicellular organisms that formed in the sea. The line is direct. The algae in lichens need water. Without it they would not be able to make food or reproduce.
(The blue-green algae, which as a species is abundant in both marine and fresh waters, as well as in the soil, has the ability of lichens to endure very difficult environments. It can exist in icy pools or hot springs. The latter extreme was brought home very forcibly to me not long ago in Nevada, when I saw this plant growing at the edge of a fissure from which hydrogen sulphide gas was puffing out. The algae was growing where steam condensed near the surface and must have been thriving in temperatures of nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.)
The color of our inland lichens and mosses changes with the rate of moisture. Reindeer moss withdraws in dry months as a method of coping with a disadvantageous season, instead of trying to carry on an uncertain battle for existence. It shrinks, in other words, turning dry and crunchy underfoot, but in wet weather it absorbs, almost drinks up, water, and then turns spongelike and its color gleams more richly.
In the absence of leaves filtering the sunlight, the trunks of the larger oaks are dappled and spotted with these colors of watery origin. I say the larger oaks because the lichens once started may take a long time to spread. The golden lichen is a very slow-growing species, although there are many stone walls in this region that are covered with it. I have watched one spot of golden lichen for two years or more. No bigger than a fifty-cent piece, it grows on a stone step outside the house, and has hardly expanded at all.
So it is an enduring kind of fertility that shines here, as the gray sea waters rock in the distance. And when I turn over a log, or take up a handful of spongy oak leaf humus, half thawed in the sunlight, there is visible evidence of the life now arrested in the frozen soil. I find a millipede, curled up like the shell of a chambered nautilus. I hold it in my hand and keep breathing on it, until it comes to life and starts moving around, stretching out, its myriad legs moving with fantastic synchronization, ready to be busy again, traveling seriously with the given purpose of eating bits of leaves, breaking down organic matter in the earth. It is suggested that the millipede may have been one of the earliest animals to leave the ocean, where all life presumably began, and take to the land--one of those statements, of course, that leaves millions of years in the balance of human guesses, but gives me another approach to ageless tenacity in this ocean-bordered wood.
There is another ancient animal, the pill bug, damp bug, or armadillo, which I find in semihibernation in the middle of a rotten log. Pill bug because it can roll up into a perfect little ball; damp bug for its choice of environment; wood louse for its habitat and general appearance, although it is no louse but a crustacean, not an insect but related to brine shrimp, water fleas, lobsters and crabs. It is one of the few members of this family that have become adapted to life on land, but it retains a set of gills, or at least respiratory tubes with some functional equivalence to gills. It also retains an organic affinity for wetness, needing constant moisture in order to breathe, and will invariably direct itself to the dampest environment it can find. One dry summer day I uncovered a bunch of wood lice way out in the middle of a dusty patch of ground that looked like a miniature desert. They had taken advantage of the only shelter available, an old fragment of a board that held some shade and moisture under it.
In terms of millions of years the development of millipede, or pill bug, becomes extremely complex and partly unknown. When did the pill bug leave the sea? How did its special breathing apparatus evolve? How, in other words, did it gradually adapt itself to life as a land animal? The problems of science are manifold. For an observer the very sense of a link between primal sea and primal earth embodied in this half-bug, half-marine crustacean, gives it great stature. There is thunder and depth in the pill bug.
I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or the month of February, but endless projection and development.
Not lost too long--because the cold deepens and bites in the late afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It feels like snow.
_Need_
Early next morning the snow begins to fall, thin and glassy, bringing in a new kind of quiet, unpredictable intent, spotting the thawed surface of the earth. After a few hours the flakes are heavier, and their momentum increases. They run down dizzily, with a ticking sound, shrouding the distance, pelting dead leaves, collecting in clumps between the needles of the pitch pines, coming down steadily and fast. The temperature drops quite suddenly, and the snow flakes grow lighter again. The wind sharpens, sending them ahead of it, lancing toward the south.
Hour after hour the snow collects with mesmerizing totality, and in the colder evening the wind drives in with great fury and drifts pile up. Dry snow whirls in and races around the windows, scouring them like a dust storm. The wind molds a long drift on the north side of the house, like flesh over bone, hip edge out and curving in, a woman’s shape, an inanimate body molded by violence into classic beauty, hollowed, not for love unless the wind is love, carved, marked down and conquered by everything that is latent and unconquered in the storm.
For many days afterward the arctic air reigns over us, and the snow is crusted, blindingly white in the sun, a mortal danger to animals whose food supply it covers. A long sickle, a new moon, of ice begins to appear along the rim of Cape Cod Bay. There is crackling, grinding cold, in a day when we rise a little past the sun instead of ahead of it. The freezing nights, for some of the animals that have endured the winter so far, must be interminable, except for the rabbit, caught suddenly in the open by a great-horned owl. I found what was left of it in the woods--a burst of little bits of fur in the snow; the owl’s tracks; a mold left by the rabbit’s body.
A hermit thrush dies of starvation, all its remnant food at winter’s end cut off by the snow. It is pathetically light, held in the hand, and when it is dissected only the tiniest patches of red meat show on either side of the breast bone.
I find a dead eider duck on the shore. It may have been blown against a tree in the storm. One wing is broken, and the feathers buffed and thin from beating. After its feeding grounds are frozen over in an inlet farther down the Cape, a great blue heron dies on the snow-covered shores, wounding its neck in the last throes.
The bird feeder is crowded with intermittent flocks of chickadees, juncos, and sparrows, all the ever present winter birds, pecking at seed, flying off, hopping on the snow, each with intense, nervous, active habits, keeping their wild, interrelated ways, entering in, displacing each other, disappearing and returning. A bolt of a bird suddenly tears in from nowhere and all the little ones are gone in a burst. A sharp-shinned hawk, a small hawk with an appetite for songbirds, has attacked in hunger and desperation, but it swerves when it reaches the feeder--its aim disturbed by fear as it approaches the house--and crashes into the window. It sits on the snow, terribly stunned, its head drooping. The body is the light umber of an immature bird, the breast streaked red. After a few minutes it stirs a little, wing shoulders twitching, head up, and yellow eyes glaring with the pure wild look of a hawk. Finally it lifts up quickly and beats away toward a line of trees in the distance.
The chickadees are soon back, jumping down to the feeder from an overhanging pitch pine and bouncing back up like small puffs of snow, having left danger behind with their usual vibrant but sturdy acceptance. They are businesslike, determined little birds. If I could only get inside that head behind the tiny black eyes, and follow. I could swear it has the quickest perception of things. In any case it acts as if there were no time for leisure. Its whole body is tripped constantly at a staccato rate. The head moves up, down, sideways, in the needs of sight and utility. It poises to hammer a seed held between its tiny black toes and claws. It rounds the branch of a pine, ready for the next find, wonderfully resourceful in the game of survival; with a serious intent, gay in action, employing every second with such thoroughness as to be completely careless of the outcome of life, and so perhaps to surpass it.
The mourning doves, whose low coos I mistook for an owl’s when I first heard them, are another of our permanent residents, not often at the bird feeder, but fairly ready visitors when they overcome their initial fear. One flies in, wings whistling wildly, hesitates, turns back, makes another foray, then waits in a shad tree thirty feet away, head bobbing, eyes blinking against the sharp sunlight. When a mourning dove flies up it shows a blue in its generally buff-colored feathers like a blue evening mist after winter rain. It walks with pigeonlike head bobbing back and forth, its thin tail standing out behind a tear-shaped body like the shaft of a cart, then spreading round and wide at the tip when the bird flies off.
While the sturdy chickadees carry on business as usual, the dove, in gentle alarm, waits for an hour or two before hunger drives it back to stay and feed; and not long after that another dove flies in to join it.
On the south side of the Cape where the open Atlantic surf keeps the shore waters fairly free of ice, there are sea ducks, eiders, baldpates, mergansers, blacks, or scoters, flying over the sea, or settling down on its shifting surfaces. Tiny white buffleheads, which make ducking dives into the water, show brilliantly against gray ice on the banks of an inlet at Monomoy. A tornado-shaped formation of red-backed sandpipers stands over the gun-metal sea. Patterns of wings and water run together, while the land is still not broken out of its frozen gravity.