Room to Spare
June is a fullness. There is no part of land and shore not imbued with warmth and covered with manifestations of strength and capacity, but the season moves on. It changes to new measures continually, beautiful in substance but hard to grasp, like a flock of sanderlings swinging and spinning in unison along the bright sands, or a school of fish. How do they keep together? What is their communication? Even a forest of apparently rigid trees has a coherence and order of its own, perhaps a sensibility, since it goes through all periods of existence. Everywhere I look there is spacing, and at the same time mutual attraction, in rhythmic display, as though the laws of space were inherent in every action and bound in every organism. The play of the universe is what I sense in its living instruments, and my own, often borrowed, interpretations stop far short of its magnitude.
Out of the whole possible range of communication (and it seems to me to go beyond possibility) each species embodies a special response. Its senses react in a unique and selective way toward its surroundings. It is true of the frog. What does it hear that we cannot? It is true of the fish. How does it orient itself in the water? What does it feel? What explains the sensitivity of some plants to touch? Each have motions, and in a sense languages, of their own.
How can I understand the hundreds of moths that crowd the screen door at night? They have all manner of shapes. When I shine my flashlight on them their eyes glow with an amber fire. They flutter against the screen, and when I turn the inside light off, fly away immediately. This is a sensitivity to light and darkness that has its parallels in the butterflies attracted to flowers of a particular color. They are selective in their behavior and perhaps restricted at the same time. And yet, huddled, crawling, landing, and flying off, concentrated in numbers as they are, they suggest a dark realm of action and context to me. In spite of their reactions their terms are unknown. It is these untouched areas which must attract any man who begins to be aware of them—as though we ourselves had something in us not yet understood. Where the mystery is, may be the reality.
What we see, even from the outside looking in, is rhythmic performance, not a series of static events. Balance and rhythm are the rules of action, understood in depth by moth or fish. Each race, unknown to the other, plays its own game, follows its own senses, and yet is in balance with the rest of life. The rules of natural abundance are the rules of space—not almost constant destruction and collision between living things but obedience to their given orbits.
Many people have the idea, perhaps because of a human fascination with violent events, that nature is compounded of just such rigidities—dog eat dog, or tiger eat horse—or obversely, that nothing happens at all. Nature is either a menace or a great bore. Could I expect, going to some pond or water hole concentrated with life to find all kinds of mutual slaughter going on? At the edge of any small pond I see action enough this time of year. Many tadpoles hurry off in all directions at my footfall. I hear a bullfrog’s noble plucked bass sounding among the pickerel weed, while dark gray catbirds cry in thickets along the shore. A great antediluvian animal, a snapping turtle, with a fat black shell, a thick, fat head and neck, and large lidded eyes like a dog, climbs out of the water to lay its eggs on a sandy bank above. Its movements are slow and massive, each leg lifted as it goes. Only a sudden, lunging, upward snap as I tease it with a stick, shows what quick ferocity it is capable of. In the still pond waters there are schools of tiny, newly hatched fish, big-eyed, big-headed, with minute pin-sized bodies, running and twitching in rhythmic solidarity. A yellow perch runs by, and then a horned pout roves through the fry with apparent disregard. It passes near a sunfish nest, a little round, cleared depression on the bottom. The sunfish sallies after it in a short dash and then returns to hover over its nest, its fringed tail waving gently. In spite of our expectations, any aggression here is latent rather than actual, and need, it is clear, has room and time to spare.
Co-ordination is intrinsic to the life of an environment, acted upon by every predator. There will be no fight between the sunfish and the horned pout, but the sunfish has affirmed its ancient rights to the territory that comprises its nest. It is bold in defense of its home, up to the point, presumably, that it goes beyond a boundary which its feelings establish for it. I am reminded of those birds, like the herring gulls and their “threat postures” (described by N. K. Tinbergen in The Herring Gull’s World, 1954) assumed when two birds defend their respective positions on either side of a boundary invisible to us but strongly felt by them. In these cases a fight may never result, because the two alternate drives of defense and aggression cancel each other out. What the trained observer sees as an indication of what is going on are “behavior patterns,” types of physical action that show him what this gull communication might mean. In any case, up and down the scale of life is force and counterforce, action and reaction, in a balance that is understood in as many ways as there are species.
The lusty month of June is made up of all its encounters, many of them savage in isolation; but we may look for Roman circuses in vain. Wait all day and no life seems to devour another. Wait all year and you may never see the fight you are looking for. Now and then to be sure, as with an abundance of fish and their marauding predators, you can see savagery and greed confined, but even so the lesson is the same. It is not killing, eating, and aggression which seem paramount but an over-all rhythm and balance in which they are only elements. Later on, between July and December, the young alewives hatched out this spring in pond waters will start returning to the sea. I have often seen them as they go down the fish ladders by which their spawning parents came up. Perhaps through some attraction to the water’s force where it spills down hard over the concrete rims of each pool in the ladder, the fingerlings mass and circle before dropping back downstream. It is here that a number of eels, some of them of large size, coil and slither through the water, and eat large quantities of fish. Eels are largely nocturnal in habit, but they do go through periods of feeding by day. Sometimes they act like eating machines, methodically grabbing one little fish after another; but the alewives continually swim over them, unregarding. Where the fish idle in the stream below, in less turbulent, clearer water, perfectly capable of seeing any eels lying in wait for them, they are in no way affected, so far as I can see. The eels themselves, lying on the stream bottom for long periods after eating, pay no attention while the little alewives swim over them. Here is a strange relation between enemies.
It is perfectly true that a young alewife may not know an eel from a stick unless it is directly attacked, being in some respects oblivious to much of anything except the need to migrate to salt water. And yet the point is not that they are “stupid,” but that their crowd lives demand a cohesive rhythm, sensitive enough in action, which is paramount to all risks they encounter. It is in fact their main protection. They school and eat. They school and escape. They school and perpetuate themselves. The solitary alewife is lost. These fish move and intercommunicate in a frame of continuity to which they are forever held. But can we call it a restriction? Its terms may be quite invisible to us.