January
Exposure
It is said that winter, being the season when the sun shines on us obliquely, is a period of death, or, as the dictionary puts it, of “dreariness, old age and decay.” We are being deprived of a portion of original energy, and recognize occasionally that if we were out far enough, in as extreme and bare a relationship to the cold as the birds, but without their equivalent in insulation, we would have a hard time surviving (though birds are also perishable and have their share of disease and death from starvation). But we take care of ourselves, in such an elaborate and consuming way, that the grand extremes of weather may only succeed in being a nuisance. The freezing weather deepens this month, after a few days of moderate warmth at the start, and I am free to complain about the heat bills. The car skids and turns a half circle on the highway, which is covered with glare ice one morning, and I am afraid, not for myself so much as for my new car. How could I manage that ten miles back without it? Self-protection may be all that winter means to us, though it is a term that can only be comparative in an age of manufactured violence.
Suddenly there is a tremendous thud above us that jars and rocks the house. It seems to tug at the vitals of the earth and would cause us more than mere shock if we were not aware that it is a plane breaking the sound barrier, thousands of feet in the air. A minute or two later I hear a familiar gabbling, a mixed bugling, overhead, and run out to see twenty Canada geese, hurrying fast down the north wind in four separate flocks aligned in flight. With their long necks stretched out and strong wings beating they are fleeing for their lives, frightened up from winter feeding grounds along the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The earth, for the time being at least, is committed to mankind. The geese cannot so frighten us. They are innocent of ways to “control their environment.”
Then there is almost complete silence again, and I understand what is meant by the “dead of winter.” Under the cold blue stare of the sky nothing seems to be happening. Each sound—a crow cawing, a car on the road, the rustle and clink of a clump of dead oak leaves—is by itself, occupying wide, unpopulated plains. Without the wind, the air too presses on me, with a cold weight. I walk through its depths, feeling it against my face, and suddenly realize that limited sea of oxygen in which we live, this side of outer space and its violet darkness.
This silence may be just as alarming to some people as a “sonic boom.” Nothing seems to be going on. There is an intensity of rest. The demand for something new is unsatisfied. There are men who stray into nature from a city’s booming, reassuring hive, and are frightened by being caught in necessity—one of the year’s cold, unspeaking tides. Perhaps they also recognize how much the sun provides us with other than pleasant company. There is a winter in us from which we will not soon escape into warmth and joy.
Still, this frozen land contributes to a global art. It is cold and silent here because it is hot and loud in India. And how can we spread our wings without a knowledge of deprivation? While I am closed in I know there are redstarts wintering in Mexico and arctic terns in the Antarctic, and when I greet them on their return it will not be only because they have come home (a bird’s nest is not a house but a platform from which to start), but because home comprises so large an area. Some birds, if they survive their first year, will reappear in the vicinity of the place where they were reared. So will salmon, shad, and alewives, returning to their parent stream after years of absence. We are conscious of the great amount of space their journeying requires. Species of fish or birds show great variation in the extent of their migrations, and the whole pattern is wider than a continent. Their movements are not only consistent with periodic motions of climate, weather, the tides, but may be visible evidence of earth changes that go back for incredible lengths of time. They require an unrestricted measure for their lives and deaths. Men alter, restrict, or use up, to suit their needs and fancy. Then they move elsewhere. I see that one of the young men who has been designated for training in space flight, an “Astronaut,” says he accepted the challenge of being sent aloft in a capsule because we were “running out of interesting things to do down here.” The destruction and denial of earth’s resources must have gone farther than we realize. But the life journeys continue, from one sunny round to another, over the earth and its wide-ranging waters. How much we must be missing, even in the wintertime!
Before dawn, after the windless day, the temperature drops to 10 degrees. A walloping, tugging, brutal wind sets in. The frost so rigidifies the needles of the pines, burning into their cells, that they look dark and scorched. I feel as if the rigid and dizzy earth were being kicked around, rocked like a topheavy boat—the trees its masts. The wind cries: “Remember poverty!” and I go gasping for breath through the fierce air, feeling as perishable as a moth. We may be having the mere taste of an extreme, but this penury weather is huge and mighty all the same. It is the result of a Labrador storm one thousand to two thousand miles in extent. Its balanced fury tests all it meets.
On this kind of day I am an inland lover. To be wind-cut and sandblasted serves no good human end. As if in general proof of that, I meet no more than a car or two on the highway, and see no one on the streets of the town. The shore is desolate, hissing with driven sand. On the surface the bay waters in the distance are being stiff-armed and flung away. New ice, morose and slow, is nudged by an outgoing tide in the inlet at Paine’s Creek. Gulls drift slowly upwind like clouds. And on the wide tidal flats—the searing, biting, turbulent grounds—groups of Canada geese are stalking through shallow purple waters that reach, wind-scudded, over shoals of peat. Then a new group wheels in low and settles down with the rest. I can hear their honking under the sound of wind and sand. Beyond them, in steely waters speckled green, is a small flock of black ducks.
This is no inanimate landscape. Under the given power, the abandon of the wind, the restrictiveness of the cold, is still an all-containing balance. I listen to those famous travelers the geese as they communicate and am taken a little further out on violent and unreceptive grounds, past my own shivering.
Inland again, listening, taking shelter in the lee of the wind, just as a rabbit jumps away from me and runs under a tangle of bull briar, I am conscious of all the unseen hiding and endurance around me. What else moves here, beside the wind that suddenly rushes in and roars so loud that it makes the trees groan and the large round clouds hurry on? The trees, swaying and creaking, are the most obvious, the most exposed. They are half dead, rigid, hard, inert. The sap coagulates in the extreme cold. I cut a twig with my knife and the pitch is dark and frozen. The trees in their containment, adapted to less water and light, getting scarcely any nutriment, are able to make their stand in the open while other lives must hide.
In the late afternoon the ground stirs harshly. Leaves run in dead abandon. The wind seems to sound a burst of doom, and then seethes in lively rage. A dead limb cracks. I am on the trigger edge of ultimate need. Blue-gray clouds hang over the shaking fingers of the trees. There is a collective power that flays us all, without discrimination.
The shadows have left the earth. Light stays in the sky, and then begins to go. There are rims of pale electric light in the west. Long cloud shoals, now white and pearly gray, stand against wide bands of blue and mauve and pink, like the baked desert cliffs of the Southwest. Finally, and I feel all finality, as the ringing air sheds down enormous heavy cold, received numbly by the earth, the sky turns a startling gemlike blue. We are turned into night. The sky’s mineral beauty shifts to pure blackness lighted by the stars. There is an almost shrilling intensity in the air above the earth-binding wind, and I am conscious of nothing but height, height beyond reach.