Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

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.

For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more birds will die. Because this Temperate Zone, influenced by oceanic weather, attracts more land birds than otherwise might stay, there is a greater margin of arbitrary risk. The weaker individuals will die first, by a natural law, but all are subject to unusual violence. The comparatively mild coastal climate does not normally have a winter as bad as this one, although extreme conditions are no surprise in North America, and the risks vary for the lives exposed to them. One winter with exceptionally deep frost in the ground, hard winds, and little snow cover, is as dangerous to plants as a month of snow would be to the birds. And a mild winter may result in death or damage from belated storms and cold.

We talk of storms and the hazards of temperature as though nature were merely arbitrary, and inconvenience the essence of her plans. Being less self-sheltered, life subject to wild nature knows the extremes as standards of action. Living things are continually balanced between a bold summer and a demanding winter, where storms are the rule and risk is constant. They are unable to accept less. This terror has its pride.

_Death, Man Made_

Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention, abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder and pollution. In our power we are weak.

I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters, loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush, wielded at random.

Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood. When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive, out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying. Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown, are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a heavy coating of oil.

Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water. I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation, and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers. Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.

This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone. It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.

Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk, having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth a thousand ships.

“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise. Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.

_March_

_Restless Days_

Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32 degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions. Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.

The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon. Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of disaster.

“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice. High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness. Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the sands.

The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the storm.

I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.

March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty” with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.” Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the other on a lower key.

A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like fast-dripping water.

Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music. The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out like a fan.

There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.

This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic kind of dance.

Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning to seek its opportunities.