The Field of Learning
We are committed far from home, but for a field of learning, the start and the finish is still here, still in place, just as that unique season of October, presaging a death in the glory of its color and clouds, brings the first frost, as if to say: “Regard necessity, in all its aspects. Look no further.”
It never comes without warning. One night a thrashing, thicket-tearing wind arrives with much greater cold. Two nights later another wind blasts all warmth away, and when it dies down the frost settles in, leaving a crisp whiteness on the grass at dawn, and clouds of white vapor over the pond waters. The garden beans go limp and the wild indigo turns black.
In that wind the low trees are like a sea, pluming and foaming. They are tossed and rocked, they pitch and writhe, while the stars in ordered majesty stream overhead. When the temperature starts to go down there is not a sound from the insect musicians any more, not one pizzicato, nor audible dry pulsing in the trees. You might think all breeding was over, though generation is latent everywhere.
Then it grows warm again. The insects sound in the grass and in the trees, if to a diminished extent. Crows gather in the early morning, and their various calls, synchronized in the open air, over the treetops, sound highly melodious. I hear a robin caroling, but very quietly, almost out of a playfulness, a musing. In spite of inexorable change, there are false dawns, days, or hours of deceptive warmth that set the long-horned grasshoppers to their buzzing and clicking and the flickers to shouting with renewed energy. All through the woods tiny tree frogs pipe at intervals from the cover of damp leaves. The pools in the fishway at the Brewster Herring Run are loaded with warm October sunlight and three-to four-inch alewives going down to salt water. A kingfisher planes up from branches above the stream with a rattling cry.
The pattern is one of reduction, depopulation, cutting down to size, but like all other shifts in a season, this one is manifested as another angle of light, a different feel to the air, a new set of circumstances, as much as a stop to all activity. When the fall winds swish and swoop along the shore, and I walk the tidal flats, a wide space played upon by light—gold, brown, and blue reflections running through pools and across long ribs of sand—I am regenerated by all the choices that are still ahead of me. Nothing is fixed or finished. It seems to me that everything I encounter is driven by indirection, like the waves and rivulets, sun tangled, that are crossing each other and separating over sand bars during an oncoming tide. Here is the ordered complexity which ensures that our findings, or rather, our search, will never have an end.
The finding-out process begins in childhood. That is why teaching is so great a profession. We intellectual animals have a long period in which to learn our wings. The teacher’s role is to bring us toward our highest capacity, and the tortures of that are immeasurable, on both sides. The field of learning is as wide as the sand flats, and the results as hard to catch as the waves; but a teacher has help from his pupils in ways over which they themselves have little control. Children have new fingers and new eyes and have to be coaxed into using them, but the touch and sight they bring cannot be taught in the schools.
I have found out lately, after some attempts at teaching natural history, that nature springs in a child and a child in nature. You learn that you are teaching both.
Why is one so proud of ignorance, and another of hiding what he knows? Some make a violent effort to be noticed; others, to retreat from view. You have an ambivalent and groping world to deal with, as hard to tape or tie as some of the phenomena you lead it to. But life is present tense to them, neither past nor future. They seem to pick up its manifestations not with adult skill but on the fly, like a boy casually catching a ball after missing ten, and then being surprised at himself. How did it happen? Memories, complexities, prejudices, risks taken on behalf of the future are largely unknown to them. It is enough to be new. There is not even any choice, since all choices are open, being new. Children are the unpredicting and the unpredictable. The one thing in which they never fail is growth, like the natural environment which never fails in its variations on the theme of fertility.
One mild afternoon two of us take out a group of boys on a field trip along the shore, a beginners collecting expedition. The class runs ahead. They find a dead loon on the beach, with rove beetles, lovers of carrion, roaming through its body. These beetles have black and white stripes, suggesting a skunk to one boy, who is still young enough to admit all affinities.
They run on, with erratic energy. They lend a puzzled ear to our explanations of how life forms are related to the places in which we find them. They are not quite certain of our terms. What is “environment?” What, for that matter, is “life?”
Classifications come hard to them at first. Certain types of recognition take a long time to learn. When I think that at the age of thirty I didn’t know the difference between one gull and another, not to speak of their different calls, I am hardly surprised.
“What’s this?”: a dune-dwelling locust, an ichneumon fly; a slipper shell, a shred of kelp, a spider, a scallop shell... all parts of a game, novelties. But when will we know how to fit them all together? An impatient teacher might think from these boys, with their degrees of inattention, that the game will never get under way, that the preparation will never end. Yet their own lesson is that readiness is all, and the outcome immaterial.
I am only half acquainted with them, although some of their native traits stand out plain to see. In one there is a shade of melancholy transplanted from his father, in another courtesy and gaiety. One is rough and full of the fever of unregulated competition. Another is quiet and slow, or quick and sensitive. Together they share a mystery. They are in active flight like young birds, and at this point, this moment of being, allowed its own growth without real harm or hindrance, they give an offering. It is the act of their unknown selves.
They catch some more insects with their nets. They find the bright yellow feathers of a flicker which had been caught and eaten by fox or owl in the beach grass. They identify the remains of a young herring gull washed onto the upper beach. The tide has ebbed and the sands stretch off with glittering lanes and rivulets—gulls stalking in the distance, or resting in white flotillas on the water—and blue salt water curves beyond, over the earth’s perimeter. The October shadows begin to stretch farther down the sands. Light, smoky clouds drift over and a strange little shower of rain comes down, running along the beach, disturbing no one. Then the sun comes clear again, moving westward. Everything we collect, all that we can say about it, is only a start, a suggestion, although each sample leads to all others. We have left a great deal behind. If the north wind roars in again tomorrow, sweeping all warmth away, killing more of life’s visible evidence, or making it cower in the earth, and causing colds and crabbedness in human society, we will still be setting out.