November
The Seed in the Season
The glory goes, and there comes the first sudden plucking out of dead leaves. They scud and sail. They lift and fall to the ground, where they sometimes scuttle unexpectedly like mice.
November rolls into view with cool, solemn, formal consistency. When it rains they say: “I’m glad it’s not that white stuff,” although Cape Cod is not noted for its snow. There is no deep and heavy frost as yet, no northeast gales driving wet flakes at our eyes. A number of Cape Codders migrate to Florida for the winter. Daylight diminishes. As the leaves drop off we begin to see more distinctly between the trees. I find two spotted turtles moving very slowly through the waters of a ditch at one side of an abandoned cranberry bog. In one open field there are a few red-legged grasshoppers, much less active than a few weeks before. An occasional cricket, grasshopper, or spider is spotted and animated by the rays of the sun when it bursts through drifting clouds. Here and there a violet aster or late goldenrod stands in bloom between innumerable plants that are fuzzy with seed. The milkweed still sends crowds of little silk parachutes shining on the wind.
We are now in a genuine country state of which the urban power talks with both scorn and ignorant nostalgia. The summer no longer pounds at our temples. The fall color is gone. There is nothing to look at, and very little to hear except the wind, or a plane in the distance, a car on the highway. To a city lover it is silent and deadly dull.
As to the nostalgia, I doubt that there is much stress any more on the virtue implicit in country living. Since all men now dwell in all places, they question virtue everywhere; but some still talk as though the country were a place for that intangible peace and moral order that they think is lacking in the world. The country, however, is in the grip of a power that has no moral values and is greater than morality. It is false and true. It is benign and it is terrible. It cures and it kills. And I do not suppose that whether or not the earth is made up of human cities can make much difference to it. I am waiting for a deeper tone than hope.
There is no noise or compelling distraction in a field or stand of trees. Still, a forester suggested to me that if trees could make themselves heard, in their internal growth and adjustments, the roar would be deafening. The same thought has been applied to life in the ground, with its countless microorganisms, in a state of continual displacement and turmoil, growing and dying, consuming and being consumed. They too might roar. We have enough at hand and under our feet to make general tumult no surprise.
The point about this countryside is not its isolation but its potentiality. It is in charge of origins. What is more dramatic than the production of seeds in plants and grasses over one small field? The seeds are in uncountable numbers, and each one is a miniature plant, an embryo, surrounded by food and a protective coating. It is an embodiment of force. It eats and breathes, and now goes into a period of dormancy like an animal, ready to germinate in the spring when conditions are favorable. Such facts are part of elementary biology, but they cover up the stir and momentum of the globe.
These seeds, on grass and weeds now growing thinner, drier, more colorless, are not only rich in generation, on their own account, but they provide beyond themselves. The juncos, or snow birds, that come down from the north will survive on a seed diet throughout the winter, with the sparrows, and that sustaining food the mice, preyed upon by fox, weasel, or hawk. The simplest “food chain” suggests the links in many others. In fact there is no fundamental separation anywhere in this common world of life, despite the greatly various environments of water and land that we use to help us differentiate between the species. Winds blow through. Tides lap over. Each plant and animal is proof of general contact and association.
The insignificant seed has energy and sustenance enough to perpetuate many worlds. It makes me look at mere grass with more interest than I did. I believe there are some fourteen hundred species of grasses in the United States, of which I know less than a dozen. There is one grass which grows in many areas of the Cape, through open slopes, pine woods, sandy, run-down fields, that I have heard called beard, or prairie grass. I have walked by it, on it, and through it for years without knowing its name, though its nameless, light-catching beauty often caught my attention. It turns out to be broom sedge (Andropogon scoparius), a plant that reaches from here and the Middle Atlantic States south to Texas and across the southeast to California. It is a poor soil, poor forage grass, appropriate to this nonagricultural region. Its stems rise from a bunch of curving, rustling leaf blades, and are covered with tiny florets that go to seed in the fall, little feathery tufts. As the autumn months progress it grows more colorful, deepening to tawny pink, with a touch of purple, before it takes on its straw-colored midwinter hue. The little silky feathery tufts shine in the sunlight like the slightest spits and sparkles on a pool, or tiny plumes of frost, intangibly gentle, sustaining their brightness as the winter comes on. The stems are two to three feet tall, and with their delicate adornments, they stand the year around, stirring, curving forward, nodding back, with the utmost refinement. So I praise what is for me a new discovery, though it has stood near me in its own praise for many years—a country eloquence.
Almost all local preparations are done. The seed is sown and made ready. The time for persistence is coming, when those grasses we take so much for granted will hold our earth together. When the sun warms them, drying on slopes and through old fields, they smell sweet underfoot, a natural, uncut hay.