April Light
One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water. There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead.
Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal—probably a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the channel—swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with a yell as its head slips by and out of sight.
A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high spring night—life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its origins.
Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance. The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light.
There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a beetle’s iridescent green.
Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible to see the grass growing.
There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds, making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance.
In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow sunlight of a path where I am walking.
These are the signs of spring, the illuminations I have been waiting for. And its fresh, cool wind, striking my face, seems to carry new senses with it. It is beginning to be fragrant and full. It calls up in me a new alertness along with a new contentment. But underneath all these pleasant surfaces and scattered events, I feel the power of their origins. For all I can find and associate with spring, the romantic, welcome season, there are vastly more uncounted changes, unrealized ways of reaching up and out, responding to a new range of light and darkness. The protozoa tell me I have seen nothing yet as to fire. The migrant herring coming in at night say this April is ageless and dark. Everywhere around me, things deeply silent and unseen begin to share a proximity. They move in the waters, while they shoulder the dirt below ground. In the structure of their alliances, developed in measure and with appropriateness, is the co-ordination of the great globe as it spins in space. They respond to a power which not only defines the “spring” but will transform it and send it on its way.