It is spring. I plan to try to control myself this year, to watch the progress of the season in a calm and orderly fashion. In spring I am prone to wretched excess. I abandon myself to flights and compulsions; I veer into various states of physical disarray. For the duration of one entire spring I played pinochle; another spring I played second base. One spring I missed because I had lobar pneumonia; one softball season I missed with bursitis; and every spring at just about the time the leaves first blur on the willows, I stop eating and pale, like a silver eel about to migrate. My mind wanders. Second base is a Broadway, a Hollywood and Vine; but oh, if I’m out in right field they can kiss me goodbye. As the sun sets, sundogs, which are mock suns—chunks of rainbow on either side of the sun but often very distant from it—appear over the pasture by Carvin’s Creek. Wes Hillman is up in his biplane; the little Waco lords it over the stillness, cutting a fine silhouette. It might rain tomorrow, if those ice crystals find business. I have no idea how many outs there are; I luck through the left-handers, staring at rainbows. The field looks to me as it must look to Wes Hillman up in the biplane: everyone is running, and I can’t hear a sound. The players look so thin on the green, and the shadows so long, and the ball a mystic thing, pale to invisibility…. I’m better off in the infield.
In April I walked to the Adams’ woods. The grass had greened one morning when I blinked; I missed it again. As I left the house I checked the praying mantis egg case. I had given all but one of the cases to friends for their gardens; now I saw that small black ants had discovered the one that was left, the one tied to the mock-orange hedge by my study window. One side of the case was chewed away, either by the ants or by something else, revealing a rigid froth slit by narrow cells. Over this protective layer the ants scrambled in a frenzy, unable to eat; the actual mantis eggs lay secure and unseen, waiting, deeper in.
The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light pooled between the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of the trees I walked under were still bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves. The snakes were out—I saw a bright, smashed one on the path—and the butterflies were vaulting and furling about; the phlox was at its peak, and even the evergreens looked greener, newly created and washed.
Long racemes of white flowers hung from the locust trees. Last summer I heard a Cherokee legend about the locust tree and the moon. The moon goddess starts out with a big ball, the full moon, and she hurls it across the sky. She spends all day retrieving it; then she shaves a slice from it and hurls it again, retrieving, shaving, hurling, and so on. She uses up a moon a month, all year. Then, the way Park Service geologist Bill Well-man tells it, “’long about spring of course she’s knee-deep in moon-shavings,” so she finds her favorite tree, the locust, and hangs the slender shavings from its boughs. And there they were, the locust flowers, pale and clustered in crescents.
The newts were back. In the small forest pond they swam bright and quivering, or hung alertly near the water’s surface. I discovered that if I poked my finger into the water and wagged it slowly, a newt would investigate; then if I held my finger still, it would nibble at my skin, softly, the way my goldfish does—and, also like my goldfish, it would swim off as if in disgust at a bad job. This is salamander metropolis. If you want to find a species wholly new to science and have your name inscribed Latinly in some secular version of an eternal rollbook, then your best bet is to come to the southern Appalachians, climb some obscure and snakey mountain where, as the saying goes, “the hand of man has never set foot,” and start turning over rocks. The mountains act as islands; evolution does the rest, and there are scores of different salamanders all around. The Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway produce their own unique species, black and spotted in dark gold; the rangers there keep a live one handy by sticking it in a Baggie and stowing it in the refrigerator, like a piece of cheese.
Newts are the most common of salamanders. Their skin is a lighted green, like water in a sunlit pond, and rows of very bright red dots line their backs. They have gills as larvae; as they grow they turn a luminescent red, lose their gills, and walk out of the water to spend a few years padding around in damp places on the forest floor. Their feet look like fingered baby hands, and they walk in the same leg patterns as all four-footed creatures—dogs, mules, and, for that matter, lesser pan das. When they mature fully, they turn green again and stream to the water in droves. A newt can scent its way home from as far as eight miles away. They are altogether excellent creatures, if somewhat moist, but no one pays the least attention to them, except children.
Once I was camped “alone” at Douthat State Park in the Allegheny Mountains near here, and spent the greater part of one afternoon watching children and newts. There were many times more red-spotted newts at the edge of the lake than there were children; the supply exceeded even that very heavy demand. One child was collecting them in a Thermos mug to take home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to feed an ailing cayman. Other children ran to their mothers with squirming fistfuls. One boy was mistreating the newts spectacularly: he squeezed them by their tails and threw them at a shoreline stone, one by one. I tried to reason with him, but nothing worked. Finally he asked me, “Is this one a male?” and in a fit of inspiration I said, “No, it’s a baby.” He cried, “Oh, isn’t he cute!” and cradled the newt carefully back into the water.
No one but me disturbed the newts here in the Adams’ woods. They hung in the water as if suspended from strings. Their specific gravity put them just a jot below the water’s surface, and they could apparently relax just as well with lowered heads as lowered tails; their tiny limbs hung limp in the water. One newt was sunning on a stick in such an extravagant posture I thought she was dead. She was half out of water, her front legs grasping the stick, her nose tilted back to the zenith and then some. The concave arch of her spine stretched her neck past believing; the thin ventral skin was a bright taut yellow. I should not have nudged her—it made her relax the angle of repose—but I had to see if she was dead. Medieval Europeans believed that salamanders were so cold they could put out fires and not be burned themselves; ancient Romans thought that the poison of salamanders was so cold that if anyone ate the fruit of a tree that a salamander had merely touched, that person would die of a terrible coldness. But I survived these mild encounters—my being nibbled and my poking the salamander’s neck—and stood up.
The woods were flush with flowers. The redbud trees were in flower, and the sassafras, dully; so also were the tulip trees, catawbas, and the weird pawpaw. On the floor of the little woods, hepatica and dogtooth violet had come and gone; now I saw the pink spring beauty here and there, and Solomon’s seal with its pendant flowers, bloodroot, violets, trillium, and May apple in luxuriant stands. The mountains would be brilliant in mountain laurel, rhododendron, and flame azalea, and the Appalachian Trail was probably packed with picnickers. I had seen in the steers’ pasture daisies, henbits, and yellow-flowering oxalis; sow thistle and sneeze weed shot up by the barbed-wire fence. Does anything eat flowers? I couldn’t recall ever having seen anything actually eat a flower—are they nature’s privileged pets?
But I was much more interested in the leafing of trees. By the path I discovered a wonderful tulip-tree sapling three feet tall. From its tip grew two thin slips of green tissue shaped like two tears; they enclosed, like cupped palms sheltering a flame, a tiny tulip leaf that was curled upon itself and bowed neatly at the middle. The leaf was so thin and etiolated it was translucent, but at the same time it was lambent, minutely, with a kind of pale and sufficient light. It was not wet, nor even damp, but it was clearly moist inside; the wrinkle where it folded in half looked less like a crease than a dimple, like the liquid dip a skater’s leg makes on the surface film of still water. A barely concealed, powerful juice swelled its cells, and the leaf was uncurling and rising between the green slips of tissue. I looked around for more leaves like it??
?that part of the Adams’ woods seems to be almost solely tulip trees—but all the other leaves had just lately unfurled, and were waving on pale stalks like new small hands.
The tulip-tree leaf reminded me of a newborn mammal I’d seen the other day, one of the neighborhood children’s gerbils. It was less than an inch long, with a piggish snout, clenched eyes, and swollen white knobs where its ears would grow. Its skin was hairless except for an infinitesimal set of whiskers; the skin seemed as thin as the membrane on an onion, tightly packed as a sausage casing, and bulging roundly with wet, bloody meat. It seemed near to bursting with possibilities, like the taut gum over a coming tooth. This three-foot sapling was going somewhere, too; it meant business.
There’s a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.
John Cowper Powys said, “We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness.” He may not be right, but I like his adjectives. The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake. The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing green and clean.
I looked away from the tulip leaf at the tip of the sapling, and I looked back. I was trying to determine if I could actually see the bent leaf tip rise and shove against the enclosing flaps. I couldn’t tell whether I was seeing or merely imagining progress, but I knew the leaf would be fully erect within the hour. I couldn’t wait.
I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as though I’d stepped not through the forest, but on it. I left the wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened. I’ll go to the Northwest Territories, I thought, Finland.
“Why leap ye, ye high hills?” The earth was an egg, freshened and splitting; a new pulse struck, and I resounded. Pliny, who, you remember, came up with the Portuguese wind-foals, must have kept his daughters in on windy days, for he also believed that plants conceive in the spring of the western wind Flavonius. In February the plants go into rut; the wind impregnates them, and their buds swell and burst in their time, bringing forth flowers and leaves and fruit. I could smell the loamy force in the wind. I’ll go to Alaska, Greenland. I saw hundred of holes in the ground everywhere I looked; all kinds of creatures were popping out of the dim earth, some for the first time, to be lighted and warmed directly by the sun. It is a fact that the men and women all over the northern hemisphere who dream up new plans for a perpetual motion machine conceive their best ideas in the spring. If I swallowed a seed and some soil, could I grow grapes in my mouth? Once I dug a hole to plant a pine, and found an old gold coin on a stone. Little America, the Yukon…. “Why leap ye, ye high hills?”
On my way home, every bird I saw had something in its mouth. A male English sparrow, his mouth stuffed, was hopping in and out of an old nest in a bare tree, and sloshing around in its bottom. A robin on red alert in the grass, trailing half a worm from its bill, bobbed three steps and straightened up, performing unawares the universal robin trick. A mockingbird flew by with a red berry in its beak; the berry flashed in the sun and glowed like a coal from some forge or cauldron of the gods.
Finally I saw some very small children playing with a striped orange kitten, and overheard their mysterious conversation, which has since been ringing in my brain like a gong. The kitten ran into a garden, and the girl called after it, “Sweet Dreams! Sweet Dreams! Where are you?” And the boy said to her crossly, “Don’t call Sweet Dreams ‘you’!”
II
Now it is May. The walrus are migrating; Diomede Island Eskimos follow them in boats through the Bering Strait. The Netsilik Eskimos hunt seal. According to Asen Balikci, a seal basks in the sun all day and slips into the water at midnight, to return at dawn to emerge from the same hole. In spring the sun, too, slips below the horizon for only a brief period, and the sky still glows. All the Netsilik hunter has to do in spring is go out at midnight, watch a seal disappear into a given hole, and wait there quietly in the brief twilight, on a spread piece of bearskin. The seal will be up soon, with the sun. The glaciers are calving; brash ice and grease ice clog the bays. From land you can see the widening of open leads on the distant pack ice by watching the “water sky”—the dark patches and streaks on the glaring cloud cover that are breaks in the light reflected from the pack.
You might think the Eskimos would welcome the spring and the coming of summer; they did, but they looked forward more to the coming of winter. I’m talking as usual about the various Eskimo cultures as they were before modernization. Some Eskimos used to greet the sun on its first appearance at the horizon in stunned silence, and with raised arms. But in summer, they well knew, they would have to eat lean fish and birds. Winter’s snow would melt to water and soak the thin thawed ground down to the permafrost; the water couldn’t drain away, and it would turn the earth into a sop of puddles. Then the mosquitoes would come, the mosquitoes that could easily drive migrating caribou to a mad frenzy so that they trampled their newborn calves, the famous arctic mosquitoes of which it is said, “If there were any more of them, they’d have to be smaller.”
In winter the Eskimos could travel with dog sleds and visit; with the coming of warm weather, their pathways, like mine in Virginia, closed. In interior Alaska and northern Canada, breakup is the big event. Old-timers and cheechakos alike lay wagers on the exact day and hour it will occur. For the ice on rivers there does not just simply melt; it rips out in a general holocaust. Upstream, thin ice breaks from its banks and races down river. Where it rams solid ice it punches it free and shoots it downstream, buckling and shearing: ice adds to ice, exploding a Juggernaut into motion. A grate and roar blast the air, the ice machine razes bridges and fences and trees, and the whole year’s ice rushes out like a train in an hour. Breakup: I’d give anything to see it. Now for the people in the bush the waterways are open to navigation but closed to snowmobile and snowshoe, and it’s harder for them, too, to get around.
Here in the May valley, fullness is at a peak. All the plants are fully leafed, but intensive insect damage hasn’t begun. The leaves are fresh, whole, and perfect. Light in the sky is clear, unfiltered by haze, and the sun hasn’t yet withered the grass.
Now the plants are closing in on me. The neighborhood children are growing up; they aren’t keeping all the paths open. I feel like buying them all motorbikes. The woods are a clog of green, and I have to follow the manner of the North, or of the past, and take to the waterways to get around. But maybe I think things are more difficult than they are, because once, after I had waded and slogged in tennis shoes a quarter of a mile upstream in Tinker Creek, a boy hailed me from the tangled bank. He had followed me just to pass the time of day, and he was barefoot.
When I’m up to my knees in honeysuckle, I beat a retreat, and visit the duck pond. The duck pond is a small eutrophic pond on cleared land near Carvin’s Creek. It is choked with algae and seething with frogs; when I see it, I always remember Jean White’s horse.
Several years ago, Jean White’s old mare, Nancy, died. I
t died on private property where it was pastured, and Jean couldn’t get permission to bury the horse there. It was just as well, because we were in the middle of a July drought, and the clay ground was fired hard as rock. Anyway, the problem remained: What do you do with a dead horse? Another friend once tried to burn a dead horse, an experiment he never repeated. Jean White made phone calls and enlisted friends who made more phone calls. All experts offered the same suggestion: try the fox farm. The fox farm is south of here; it raises various animals to make into coats. It turned out that the fox farm readily accepts dead horses from far and wide to use as “fresh” meat for the foxes. But it also turned out, oddly enough, that the fox farm was up to its hem in dead horses already, and had room for no more.