Nature's year

The Garden

“June, June, I beg your pardon, for walking in your garden” is a phrase from an old song, which expresses the delicacy you might feel on some moonlit night about treading a path through fragile shadows and flowers, or intruding by day on their young beauty. The song expresses it succinctly; but the fact of the matter is that the June garden is suddenly so rich and widespread that there are no paths to walk on. It is unavoidable. I find myself wondering how it happened—how it happened that I now take it for granted. My small daughter asked me the other day whether or not the trees wore leaves in the wintertime. She was not quite sure. We have come back to fruition unawares.

The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and have already forgotten what a great and elaborate process it was. I can remember—or I have it in writing (the aid to memory)—that on the twenty-fifth of March there was a light snow in the morning, and that the temperature was well below freezing, with strong north winds all day. The significance of the twenty-fifth comes from its often being used as an average date for the first sound of the spring peepers. That day the whole idea seemed impossible. And yet they sang, two evenings later. Of course the whole year is the scene of birth and growth. Spring is not the sole custodian of arrival. There are flowers that bloom in the autumn. But that was our last beginning, in immediate terms. We have lived through what followed with only the scantiest kind of recognition, to arrive now with a great new crowd of shapes and sounds filling the distance, in the muscular swing of light. Flowery grasses, wild flowers like vetch, daisies, coreopsis, buttercups, and hundreds of others, head up, shoot forth, dance in the sun and compete with one another for living space—part of the rush and race of life we take for granted. The fact that we do take it for granted may be the best proof of our deep connection with it, as with all the natural rounds of the year. We breathe and give birth and die in terms of the same force as these surroundings. It is less articulate with us than realized. The new measures have a steady underlying order which pulses in us like the tides. So I suddenly look around me and find the whole earth peopled with motion and quantity, searching and adjustments, and I find it familiar.

In the warm air the land seems bound together by a whir ticked off in the grass by field crickets, lighted at night by the slow-dancing fireflies, intensified on the millions of new leaf surfaces, petals, and stems, where insects alight, crawl, and eat, many races pursuing their separate ways, aligned with thousands of life communities in function and in act.

June has gone green, with a staggering assumption of authority. The dry land ferns stretch stiff and wide like fans. The huckleberry bushes are springing with light green. The oaks heave and rise with their bounty of fresh leaves. Meadows along the shore are green with samphire; and marsh grasses, still low, looking close-cropped above the dark peat or through rushing waves at high tide.

On the lee side of a stone jetty thrusting out from the shore the water is full of plankton. Tiny marine animals, like barnacle larvae, copepods, baby jellyfish, are being gently carried and lifted by the surf. They are whirled and drifted in the water as it swells and ebbs. There is a beautiful symmetry in these fragile, transparent animals. I notice tiny beads of air along the sides of some of the jellyfish.

In some inland waters joined by inlets to the sea, there are massive numbers of adult jellyfish at this time of year, pulsing slowly through green waters, like transparent animal flowers. The riches of the water, fresh or salt, are immeasurable.

More and more adult alewives are returning to the sea after spawning in ponds and lakes, running back through marsh lands filled with cattails, wild iris, rushes, and arrowheads. Behind them they leave their progeny, which have in fact been hatching out for the past two months, and are gradually becoming so numerous as to interfere with the sport of fishing. These “bait fish” feed bass, pickerel, and perch, which now refuse to react to a mere fly or worm, having more than enough to eat.

There are no waters, no wood or square yard of ground not sounding and moving with new life. A wild readiness, a fluency is here. Within its terrestrial order and confinement everything seems incalculably bold. Now is the time to run ahead. Now, even for our special race, is the time to take the necessary risk of new connections, new affinities. This is a world of alliances.

I walk through a wood of trees—which might be in Cape Cod, Japan, or Siberia—their gray trunks spotted with dancing shadows, a naked wealth in motion, thinking that a man might find himself for the first time in this company, not because of would-be similarities—sap and blood, branches and arms—but because of a context which they share. I am an organism that can make a choice. The tree is not; nor can it suffer. To simplify the matter too much, I am an animal. The tree is a plant. But in the whole environment, with its intertwining events, its varying energies, each form of life joins and takes part. In this wood, while the wind blows across us and yellow light dances through, I think that even a man and trees, with their vastly different responses, may be together, players in a sunlight game.

Room to Spare

June is a fullness. There is no part of land and shore not imbued with warmth and covered with manifestations of strength and capacity, but the season moves on. It changes to new measures continually, beautiful in substance but hard to grasp, like a flock of sanderlings swinging and spinning in unison along the bright sands, or a school of fish. How do they keep together? What is their communication? Even a forest of apparently rigid trees has a coherence and order of its own, perhaps a sensibility, since it goes through all periods of existence. Everywhere I look there is spacing, and at the same time mutual attraction, in rhythmic display, as though the laws of space were inherent in every action and bound in every organism. The play of the universe is what I sense in its living instruments, and my own, often borrowed, interpretations stop far short of its magnitude.

Out of the whole possible range of communication (and it seems to me to go beyond possibility) each species embodies a special response. Its senses react in a unique and selective way toward its surroundings. It is true of the frog. What does it hear that we cannot? It is true of the fish. How does it orient itself in the water? What does it feel? What explains the sensitivity of some plants to touch? Each have motions, and in a sense languages, of their own.

How can I understand the hundreds of moths that crowd the screen door at night? They have all manner of shapes. When I shine my flashlight on them their eyes glow with an amber fire. They flutter against the screen, and when I turn the inside light off, fly away immediately. This is a sensitivity to light and darkness that has its parallels in the butterflies attracted to flowers of a particular color. They are selective in their behavior and perhaps restricted at the same time. And yet, huddled, crawling, landing, and flying off, concentrated in numbers as they are, they suggest a dark realm of action and context to me. In spite of their reactions their terms are unknown. It is these untouched areas which must attract any man who begins to be aware of them—as though we ourselves had something in us not yet understood. Where the mystery is, may be the reality.

What we see, even from the outside looking in, is rhythmic performance, not a series of static events. Balance and rhythm are the rules of action, understood in depth by moth or fish. Each race, unknown to the other, plays its own game, follows its own senses, and yet is in balance with the rest of life. The rules of natural abundance are the rules of space—not almost constant destruction and collision between living things but obedience to their given orbits.

Many people have the idea, perhaps because of a human fascination with violent events, that nature is compounded of just such rigidities—dog eat dog, or tiger eat horse—or obversely, that nothing happens at all. Nature is either a menace or a great bore. Could I expect, going to some pond or water hole concentrated with life to find all kinds of mutual slaughter going on? At the edge of any small pond I see action enough this time of year. Many tadpoles hurry off in all directions at my footfall. I hear a bullfrog’s noble plucked bass sounding among the pickerel weed, while dark gray catbirds cry in thickets along the shore. A great antediluvian animal, a snapping turtle, with a fat black shell, a thick, fat head and neck, and large lidded eyes like a dog, climbs out of the water to lay its eggs on a sandy bank above. Its movements are slow and massive, each leg lifted as it goes. Only a sudden, lunging, upward snap as I tease it with a stick, shows what quick ferocity it is capable of. In the still pond waters there are schools of tiny, newly hatched fish, big-eyed, big-headed, with minute pin-sized bodies, running and twitching in rhythmic solidarity. A yellow perch runs by, and then a horned pout roves through the fry with apparent disregard. It passes near a sunfish nest, a little round, cleared depression on the bottom. The sunfish sallies after it in a short dash and then returns to hover over its nest, its fringed tail waving gently. In spite of our expectations, any aggression here is latent rather than actual, and need, it is clear, has room and time to spare.

Co-ordination is intrinsic to the life of an environment, acted upon by every predator. There will be no fight between the sunfish and the horned pout, but the sunfish has affirmed its ancient rights to the territory that comprises its nest. It is bold in defense of its home, up to the point, presumably, that it goes beyond a boundary which its feelings establish for it. I am reminded of those birds, like the herring gulls and their “threat postures” (described by N. K. Tinbergen in The Herring Gull’s World, 1954) assumed when two birds defend their respective positions on either side of a boundary invisible to us but strongly felt by them. In these cases a fight may never result, because the two alternate drives of defense and aggression cancel each other out. What the trained observer sees as an indication of what is going on are “behavior patterns,” types of physical action that show him what this gull communication might mean. In any case, up and down the scale of life is force and counterforce, action and reaction, in a balance that is understood in as many ways as there are species.

The lusty month of June is made up of all its encounters, many of them savage in isolation; but we may look for Roman circuses in vain. Wait all day and no life seems to devour another. Wait all year and you may never see the fight you are looking for. Now and then to be sure, as with an abundance of fish and their marauding predators, you can see savagery and greed confined, but even so the lesson is the same. It is not killing, eating, and aggression which seem paramount but an over-all rhythm and balance in which they are only elements. Later on, between July and December, the young alewives hatched out this spring in pond waters will start returning to the sea. I have often seen them as they go down the fish ladders by which their spawning parents came up. Perhaps through some attraction to the water’s force where it spills down hard over the concrete rims of each pool in the ladder, the fingerlings mass and circle before dropping back downstream. It is here that a number of eels, some of them of large size, coil and slither through the water, and eat large quantities of fish. Eels are largely nocturnal in habit, but they do go through periods of feeding by day. Sometimes they act like eating machines, methodically grabbing one little fish after another; but the alewives continually swim over them, unregarding. Where the fish idle in the stream below, in less turbulent, clearer water, perfectly capable of seeing any eels lying in wait for them, they are in no way affected, so far as I can see. The eels themselves, lying on the stream bottom for long periods after eating, pay no attention while the little alewives swim over them. Here is a strange relation between enemies.

It is perfectly true that a young alewife may not know an eel from a stick unless it is directly attacked, being in some respects oblivious to much of anything except the need to migrate to salt water. And yet the point is not that they are “stupid,” but that their crowd lives demand a cohesive rhythm, sensitive enough in action, which is paramount to all risks they encounter. It is in fact their main protection. They school and eat. They school and escape. They school and perpetuate themselves. The solitary alewife is lost. These fish move and intercommunicate in a frame of continuity to which they are forever held. But can we call it a restriction? Its terms may be quite invisible to us.

The Binding Rain

So this is, or was, Cape Cod, as June booms with fruition. The nights throb; and on a clear one how the long frames of the stars line up overhead! There is no end of internment, no end of use and opening out.

It is not the place I came to, out of the city, though its shape, like a giant curved arm, or fish hook lying out in the Atlantic, is the same. Its oak trees have grown, even in the comparatively few years I have lived here. The old, gray-shingled houses are still in evidence, but there are many more new ones, seemingly temporary as this age goes. The shores are crowded, beginning toward the end of June. We are scrambling to take advantage of our summer economy while it lasts, although the buzz saw sounds the year through, as well as the chickadees, building motels, summer cottages, gas stations, houses for the retired. Cape Cod still has a certain itinerant quality, which may ally it to its more seagoing past.

In my own terms the Cape is not the same. I have outlived my dependence on its past. I go by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones with less interest. The “old characters” are not around to talk to any more. I am not quite so fascinated by grown-over wagon tracks as I used to be. Something pleasant is lost—even a blessed continuity. Still, I have learned to look for another, which has no particular choice as to place, joining them all.

This is not just “natural history” I have found, unless you are also willing to call it “natural mystery.” This is life, or death-in-life, as well as “nature.” In any case it is bountiful, or niggardly, relentless, terrible, but always at hand. Only walk out and see. Cape Cod is rife with unknown lives (and what I know about its ocean waters is not worth mentioning). Where do we begin? With a first question perhaps. To make it is to recover from being afraid of getting or giving the wrong answer, a step toward knowledge.

I have not learned much about cell structure, or the delicate co-ordination of organisms in their environment, or some of those remarkable mechanisms that trigger action in certain plants or animals of land and sea; but I have made that first step.

I stand by some pond, wondering how deep it is. Everything around me says, in comparative silence: “As deep as you make it,” and I have no need to think my questions will delay the source that leads them on.

The rolling energies of nature remind us of our own potentialities. In a small country field is all existence and its hazards. Ponderous storms, killing balances of cold and heat, great rains or droughts, hang over the needs of its competitive inhabitants. A natural, unimpeachable violence wipes out untold numbers, or holds them to its order. And yet the plants and animals themselves that endure, survive, and die prove an essential vigor in the process. It is not only a matter of “food gathering” and “competition” for them. They fight the winds, in rhythmic unity. They are made to face the universe, with the universe inside them. Their motions, their changing adaptation to circumstance, are also their great self-expenditure. Live and be finished off, but above all live!

This Cape Cod, this special piece of America, has its unexampled strength and a “progress” which will not take second place to our own. Sun and rain, the capacities of earth, the mindless ways of the flower, the strange and short sensitivities of the insects in their other world, the brooding sea in its ominous tidal balance held by moon and turning globe, all this matrix of energy has its standards and its abiding needs.

It rains steadily as the tourists begin to drive down the Cape in ever increasing numbers, thus abashing their spirits. Rain is a nuisance. It keeps us in and deprives us of perpetual warmth and light. If there were no rain? Drought is only on the surface. Water comes from pipes, the way milk comes from refrigerator cars.

But the rain will not be stopped. Clean, cool, straight falling, pattering on multitudinous leaves, it insists on its own power and propriety. There is no wind. The calm gray sky is gently, loosely moving, but held dead center with its riches of rain. The fall is steady and fast above the treetops, with single drops ticking off from each waxen leaf, sliding down the pine needles to end at their tips in brilliant crystal eyes. With a thin long seething it spits and spats and trickles on, pausing occasionally, then putting forth again. The water lands on the dead leaf floor under the trees, or thick beds of needles, sliding and soaking through, making gradual displacements between litter and soil, stirring gently, providing the life of earth its refreshment and guaranteeing its sustenance.

Between pond lilies and reeds the rain spatters the fresh water. It changes the lakes and ponds as it changes the earth. The water level moves up and down from year to year depending on the rainfall. In a pond it will move up the rim and cover the roots of overhanging shrubs—blueberries, alders, or swamp azaleas—then, after a year or two, it will recede again, revealing a narrow beach. During the years there will be continual, subtle alterations in the nature of plants around the pond, and in the habits of the animals dependent on them.

The rain falls through woodland bogs, and open swamps. It trickles down bare slopes and thicket-studded valleys. It runs over incessantly moving brooks and streams that bear it toward the sea. Its drops bounce with silvery emphasis across the waters of the slow, gray tidal inlets. They sound like a breath along the sands, and while arrowlike terns are excitedly diving for fish, they pock the silver-streaked levels of the bay, and then are lost to sight, pattering out over massive waters.

Even and sweet the descent, calm and clean its provision. The rain thrusts in and guarantees immediate growth. It binds the birds to the insects to the plants, to sun and air, breaking down elements in the soil, loosening it for billions of its travelers, making sure of sustenance in that release. Rain sound in June, which at other seasons may cut like a knife, is one of beatitude. I listen. I accept. It carries me on. Out of the hollow mind of the universe what conceptions may come in the millions and millions of years ahead? How many, in the next spit of timelessness, will fall prey to disaster? Both calm and calamity are in the cards. This is acceptable enough to life in nature. And who am I to claim some vain detachment?