Travel
For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind. There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like: “This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop, sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it seems like a gift of extravagance.
Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night. The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and then disappears down its hole again.
Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly, hopelessly.
A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland, two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.
What I see, what becomes easy to see for any eyes, in the gentle month of May, is an approach to prodigality. We are not yet bitten, dulled, and pounded down by population, of insects or men. Blistering droughts have not come yet, nor excessive rain; but all the component parts of nature run ahead. Through the alternately warm and cool sweeps of weather, there is a steady pattern of growth. This is the season of progression, of fanning out, and as with the trees that have formed next year’s buds, of provision for the future. The oak leaves which are limp and tiny to begin with, develop gradually. They toughen and mature toward their summer function of receiving and storing. They stretch, darken, and shine, turning from tenderness to ability. So it is with the fish hatched from the egg, or nesting birds, or the grass in the ground. To have had a son born this month, as we did, is much in keeping.
Birth is now the rule. I smell a sweet salt air. White petals drop gently to the ground. Birds, trees, and plants, life in the ground below them, are sprung by a constructive light. To follow spring is to make use of yourself. Join and be. Here is as much expanding energy as the human spirit could desire. Aspiration meets its counterparts, on all sides. If, as man says, he represents a climax of sensitivity in the evolutionary sense, then let him now employ his consciousness for all it is worth, and not delay.
Spring is loud and rich in its coming, but it is exact too, with a sustained propriety. Each life is in its place, its shade or full light. Each, held in the general change and roaming, to its necessity. Fragile star flowers and wind flowers bloom in the shade of a wood of beech trees, while out on the open slopes and fields the beach plum bushes are heavy with fat white blossoms, inviting the sun’s full strength.
In that valley where the alewives run, a narrow cut between low hills once made by melt waters from a glacier, and joining fresh-water ponds to Cape Cod Bay, there is now such a variety of life in such a variety of places as to challenge travel in all the senses. It reaches from the fresh-water ponds with their muddy shallows where pickerel weed begins to put up its stalks, painted turtles sun themselves on rocks out of the water, and sunfish make their nests along the sandy edges—from the pond waters gently lapping and smooth surfaces skidded by the wind—all the way through tidal marshes to the sea whose massive motion stands beyond us. Each area, first the ponds, then the brook, as it cascades down rocky slopes, turning as it winds through valley reaches into a creek, and then a tidal estuary, meeting the sand flats on the bay shore, each definite part of land or shore, has its newly active, co-ordinated riches. In the upper end of the valley, just below the pond outlet where fish ladders are crowded with migrating alewives, there is a wild and loud screaming of gulls. They wheel constantly over the stream, and crowds of them settle down on the water, quarreling over feasts of fish. Below them, black-crowned night herons bob and stand tall in a grove of pitch pines. When startled, they cluck and squawk like so many women over a scandal. When one of them flies too close to the herring gulls, it is chased away.
Two upland plovers skim in fast, crying high. A black duck whirs up, showing the white under its wings. The land at the edge of the marsh is full of yellowthroats, warblers with a quick, slurred call: “Weewiticha, weewiticha, weewiticha,” as it sounds to me, and sometimes a softer “Chichibee, chichibee, chichibee.” I watch one of these trim birds. It has a yellow breast and yellow head masked distinctively with black. It lands in the leaves, whips around, flits, quick and alert. Its colors fit with shade and sunlight as though it had been conceived with them—a definite dash of light. In the stream, as it winds down toward salt water, subject to the rise and fall of the tide, small groups of alewives run quickly and persistently through the weaving currents, heading up toward gulls and then the nets and fishways beyond. I feel energy and motion demanding me. Seen or unseen, a flying, starting, striding, swimming, and inviting, makes of the present and its short lives an endlessness.
It is low tide where the channel meets the shore. Warm, hazy air rises over the bare landscape into an empty, chalky-blue sky. But the wide-ribbed sands are run over lightly by gold braided waters, light catchers full of motion, flexing and rippling. Crustaceans dart through them. Periwinkle tracks straggle across the sands, and the empty shells of razor clams litter the surface, along with the worm cases stuck with shells, seaweed and grains of sand, protruding above it; and there are black horseshoe crabs partly dug in, waiting for the tide to turn. The three-toed tracks of shore birds are everywhere, and farther out, through a light wind, a rushing sea sound, I can hear gulls calling low, muttering among themselves, and the unmistakable harsh cry of a tern.
Sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, ruddy turnstones, are dipping up and down, scuttling, or tripping ahead as they feed. In the distance the turnstones, mottled black and brown, with short red legs, look a little like quail.
Two herring gulls are pulling hard at a sand shark, stranded by a tide, or perhaps killed by some fishing boat when it was brought up in the nets. They work at it furiously, tugging and tearing from both sides, since the sand shark’s hide is like sandpaper and many times as thick and tough. When I come up, I can see that they have not managed to do much more than tear out some of the flesh from its head and neck. Judging by the tracks on the sand, they must have been hauling it around for some time.
Far far out, I thought I saw a man digging for clams on the flats, but after walking for half a mile in that direction, I am astonished to see a yearling deer starting in a leisurely way toward the land. It had probably browsed its way out, nibbling at bits of tender seaweed, licking salt, encountering no danger in the expansive room that borders land and sea. Now, with the motion of its long legs showing in all detail as I have never seen them in fields or woods, the deer starts to run slowly, with an almost loose loping. It stops, looks around uneasily, and then the legs unlimber again, but hesitantly. It looks suddenly in my direction; and bounds and bucks away, its legs now working with tense speed. Through my field glasses I find a man and a boy on the beach. Seeing them, the animal changes course, gathers more speed, and when it reaches the shore, dashes up the sloping beach and disappears into a green line of shrubs and low trees.
The separations on these sand flats are vast. Where the narrow inland water course issues out, nothing is so well defined as space. For the variety of action here and in thousands of miles of deep water beyond, range is the rule, and the brook leads to the sea as all things lead to each other. Our meetings have scarcely begun.