Two Encounters
After the storm a hard cold sets in for many days. As a rule our Decembers are comparatively mild, with the days alternating between light rain and cool sunshine. Now the very great plunges of the cold, driving the frost deep into the ground, freezing the pond waters, starting a rim of pack ice around Cape Cod Bay, comes as a surprise, something not known before. The weather bureau, explaining the cold as being the result of a vast Canadian high-pressure system, speaks of its unusual “fetch and intensity.” Ten degrees above zero is not severe as compared with conditions in other parts of the world, but this unseasonal extreme is a local reminder of the earth’s potential, and just how much we depend on the normal rhythms of the year. We gasp with cold, turn up the heat, and think that cataclysm is a small thing to the universe.
The cold around us creates a different earth. It demands a readjustment of the senses, as though it were ready with amazing new suggestions. One sharply cold morning when snow lies fresh on the ground I stop by the cemetery where the Blacks are buried, on my way to town. There is something about this day that asks attention. It sings. Pure crystalline masses creak underfoot. The tune of the cold finds an edge on my bones. Pines, stiff cedars, locust trees, hard ground and stone, all share in resonance, being forged and tempered by the cold. The little graveyard hill is a tympanum, or sounding board, very highly pitched, so powerfully taut, being plucked very lightly by the air with sharp whispers and twanging sounds being sent across the snow, that it might be ready to send one chord, incomparably new, into the whole sky.
I start to go away, but a tiny, almost casual trill separates itself from the vibrations of the cold. I keep listening and in a few seconds see a bird rounding the branch of a cedar tree, not twenty feet away. Working in and out of the branches, coming in to view and then disappearing again, is a flock of purple finches, eating cedar berries. The males are washed with a raspberry color that keeps appearing through the dark green masses of the tree like intermittent lights, hints of fruitfulness in the winter’s containment.
Suddenly, surprisingly, a light brown, speckled veery appears on the open branch of a locust. This summer bird, out in the glittering cold, seems to have a startled, wildly timid look in its eyes. Its slim body hesitates, with the problem of aloneness perhaps, or direction, or food in this white earth that has cut so cruelly into its subsistence. Then it flies off into a wood of pitch pines, and I hear a low sound, the mere snatch of a thrush’s warbling.
Just by stopping for ten minutes instead of hurrying on, I have been put into a new relation with the morning, and have seen a singularity and sacredness to all its parts. It could happen in Moscow or New York.
A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me.
I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies... every now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm. On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping, flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of the building—dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart.
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?