Night in the Afternoon
If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and stars never fail us.
The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I am not one to disparage such banalities.
“Good morning.” “What’s good about it?” Dead oak leaves hang like wet rags in the cold rain. After the rain stops there is a cold moisture suspended in the air with its own whiteness. There is a silence everywhere, except for a chickadee’s harsh split trills nearby, the low tone of offshore waters, and the indiscriminate sound of engines on roads or in the sky. The woodchuck, the box turtle, and the chipmunk are asleep. There are no insects above ground to catch the eye. The day shortens, and we who are always calling for more sunshine, pleased at the idea of some perpetual, impossible comfort, are obliged to confront night in the afternoon. Life is quiet, stripped of redundancy. There is a new restraint about our depopulated local world, and at the same time new openings afforded. At least the season seems to offer another quality for interpretation. Perhaps, for example, because the trees are bare and the ground devitalized, we are to look up and find the sky.
I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness through the ground, but overhead the infinite dome almost resounds. It is blazing, bounding, soaring with the means and light of existence. I am not troubled at all that I look out from an unimportant planet dependent on a common star, and am only able to see a few light-years away, each light-year being a distance of six million million miles. There is sight past sight. The strongest telescope is still an extension of the human eye. Our measurements themselves are a form of participation in that fantastic distance, which may not make us any less lonely, but we have a mind in space; and since men calculate, by observation of the heavens and of their earth, that the laws of life are the same as far and farther than they can see, then they have hearts and blood there too. I stand here on the cold ground, and take sensual note of the universe.
Then I move back into my domestic hole to do a little hibernating of my own. A winter withdrawal sets in, when outer resources escape me. I am drawn inward to human want and its frustrations, to common egotism or inertia. The December days progress almost remotely. Who cares about the secrets of that cold and darkening earth outside? Our problems are sufficient unto themselves.
But there is a natural complex of greed, a provision for appetite, that brings men and earth to mutuality. Manifested by the weather, it sometimes puts us out of doors to understand real fortitude. Instead of easing on toward January, December begins to tug and roar. It snows all day and there are north winds of from thirty to forty miles an hour driving the snow against our houses, suggesting an extra struggle we might not be quite ready for. Then it warms up to 2 or 4 degrees above freezing, and the following morning begins with a cold rain and sleet falling down with hissing, disheartening force. The temperature drops. The sleet turns to snow, driving in violently from the north, hitting the trees like bullets. The sky closes in. There is no horizon. The wind swirls. Trees rock and bend. This is a storm with a great rush of savagery, setting wild, grim traps for the unprotected. “Now,” it says, “I have you. Try some adventures in this.”
There is ice or cemented snow along the tree trunks in the direction of the storm, so that by sight and feel I know the wind is from the northeast quarter, without need of instruments. My hand tells me where the present power is coming from.
When the snow and wind let up a little, I head for the shore and find signs down, gutters yanked out, and telegraph wires dangling across the road. Salt water ahead of me is churning, tossing white spume against the open shore, while the wind seethes, whines, and howls with growing intensity. The feeling of conflict is everywhere around me—a hurling and letting go, a bend and give, a clash, a holding against insufferable strain. The sand on the upper beach is whipped into stinging strength. The sea is almost boiling, its racing, conflicting edges spray-lined. On top of an exceptionally high tide, great waves run in over a sheltered inlet, sending their combers farther toward the land. All points of contact and withdrawal, rise and fall, seem to be concentrated in this monumental turbulence, a force that is almost uncontained. Is it a replica in violence of the normally unseen stresses and strains lying under a peaceful season, or a life? Our bodies are made of air and salt water, in their components of hydrogen and oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. A storm should be our organic companion. But this cold screaming fury makes me take refuge behind a wall. Man may have overcome the elements, but not his elemental frailty.
Out over the gray and white waters, hovering against the wind in an almost idle way, are several herring gulls. And, at the mouth of the inlet, riding calmly on the roaring, running tide, facing up against a thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind, is a loon—close-reefed, well fitted in all respects to weather the worst.