An Entry
I had decided to start this book in July, with the idea that this was the time embodying the full, crowded height of life—the noise, the color, the jostle of creatures in wonderful variety, just like that load of passengers getting off the boat at Provincetown to see the sights. The leaves are fresh. The motions of greed and fulfillment are in full course. Even so, I hardly knew what riches to snatch at first. In fact, another bold, heat-heavy day, with its crowds and its pride of accident, had the effect of making me recoil. I was muttering: “Slow down. Slow down. Why so thick and fast?”
On my way back from walking to the mailbox just now, I stepped off the road into the oak trees through which it runs, dropped the newspapers and the letters, watched and waited. I sat on the upper edge of a hollow where dappled shadows rocked lightly between the trees, on their gray trunks, and across the sloping ground. There was a pervading swish of leaves around me, an occasional stirring at the tree tops. I heard the slow, dragged caroling of a red-eyed vireo. Filtered light played on the low growth of sarsaparilla, hazelnut, huckleberry, and bracken, or dry land fern, with the brown floor of oak leaves in dead but useful attendance, holding moisture, shelter, and fruition in reserve.
The wood had a climate of its own, cooler, darker than the hot, damp, wide open world of road and shore. There are climates within climates, as there are worlds within worlds. Under the bark of a tree the beetle inhabits a place that has special atmospheric conditions differing from the woods outside it; and so it is with the woodchuck in its hole, the ants in their hill. Any place, of whatever size, however endowed in our scheme of things with grandeur or insignificance, any home, may be greatly subtle in its variance.
A sweet, plaintive “pee-a-wee,” and a wood peewee, a neat little bird, black, light gray, and white like a phoebe, but with white wing bars, flew in quickly and lightly, to perch on a gray limb. The bird would tuck its head down, and then move it from side to side, looking for flying insects, repeating its song every five seconds or so. Its tail, not bobbing like a phoebe’s, twitched very slightly when its head moved. Then, in brief action, it fluttered out, caught an insect, and returned to its perch. These little flights covered most of the area around its tree, almost methodically. Once I heard the crack of its bill as it chased a fly almost down to the ground, halfway across the wood. It alighted on a new branch—to try out another base of action? But then another peewee flew in, perched, and sang at a far corner of the hollow, and the first one hurriedly flew back to its original perch as if it had been threatened and was making sure of its position. The wood seemed strung together by the intangible threads of their motion.
These were some of the ways by which a wood peewee follows its destiny, employing its chosen place, attending to minutiae, to duty and performance. This was appropriate use, measured necessity. And as the outer earth led to this part of the wood, and it in turn to the “micro-climates” within it, so the birds drew my attention to the insects. I had been bitten a little, just enough to remind me, in my enjoyment, that the place was not unnaturally hospitable; and there were unseen spider mites that would leave me some inflammations to remember them by. Now I searched the space above me, aware, through the flights of the peewee, of the flying life it pursued. Some flies hovered, rocking lightly in the air, and then swung abruptly to one side, or dropped away, buzzing insistently. Tiny midges, illumined by sunlight, waggled between the trees. Moths fluttered down briefly to touch the pale leaves they resembled.
So I had been filled, as I sat there, with a sense of employment. I was part of a quiet, steady, structure of action. What better “security” could I find than that—learning, feeling, that a prodigious energy held all component parts in place and made them dance. In the neatness, discipline, almost detachment, of the bird’s little game as it pursued its subsistence, I saw the working out of natural law in numberless parallels.
Perhaps there was a law to be learned for me. If nature is more than just a background for human thought and endeavor, then it requires a special commitment, a stepping down, a silent, respectful approach. Otherwise we are liable to hear ourselves first, and be put off.
I have been given an entry, but not on my own terms.