Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (12 page)

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. It 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.

It was, as I say, July, and the problem of the dead mare’s final resting place was gathering urgency. Finally someone suggested that Jean try the landfill down where the new interstate highway was being built. Certain key phone calls were made, and, to everybody’s amazement, government officials accepted the dead horse. They even welcomed the dead horse, needed the dead horse, for its bulk, which, incidentally, was becoming greater each passing hour. A local dairy farmer donated his time; a crane hauled the dead horse into the farmer’s truck, and he drove south. With precious little ceremony he dumped the mare into the landfill on which the new highway would rest—and that was the end of Jean White’s horse. If you ever drive through Virginia on the new interstate highway between Christiansburg and Salem, and you feel a slight dip in the paving under your wheels, then loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou drivest is Jean White’s horse.

All this comes to mind at the duck pond, because the duck pond is rapidly turning into a landfill of its own, a landfill paved in frogs. There are a million frogs here, bullfrogs hopping all over each other on tangled mats of algae. And the pond is filling up. Small ponds don’t live very long, especially in the South. Decaying matter piles up on the bottom, depleting oxygen, and the shore plants march to the middle. In another couple of centuries, if no one interferes, the duck pond will be a hickory forest.

On an evening in late May, a moist wind from Carvin’s Cove shoots down the gap between Tinker and Brushy mountains, tears along Carvin’s Creek valley, and buffets my face as I stand by the duck pond. The surface of the duck pond doesn’t budge.
The algal layer is a rigid plating; if the wind blew hard enough, I imagine it might audibly creak. On warm days in February the primitive plants start creeping over the pond, filamentous green and blue-green algae in sopping strands. From a sunlit shallow edge they green and spread, thickening throughout the water like bright gelatin. When they smother the whole pond they block sunlight, strangle respiration, and snarl creatures in hopeless tangles. Dragonfly nymphs, for instance, are easily able to shed a leg or two to escape a tight spot, but even dragonfly nymphs get stuck in the algae strands and starve.

Several times I’ve seen a frog trapped under the algae. I would be staring at the pond when the green muck by my feet would suddenly leap into the air and then subside. It looked as though it had been jabbed from underneath by a broom handle. Then it would leap again, somewhere else, a jumping green flare, absolutely silently—this is a very disconcerting way to spend an evening. The frog would always find an open place at last, and break successfully onto the top of the heap, trailing long green slime from its back, and emitting a hollow sound like a pipe thrown into a cavern. Tonight I walked around the pond scaring frogs; a couple of them jumped off, going, in effect, eek, and most grunted, and the pond was still. But one big frog, bright green like a poster-paint frog, didn’t jump, so I waved my arm and stamped to scare it, and it jumped suddenly, and I jumped, and then everything in the pond jumped, and I laughed and laughed.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind. On a sunny day, sun’s energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower. These “horses” heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world.

The pond is popping with life. Midges are swarming over the center, and the edges are clotted with the jellied egg masses of snails. One spring I saw a snapping turtle lumber from the pond to lay her eggs. Now a green heron picks around in the pond weed and bladderwort; two muskrats at the shallow end are stockpiling cattails. Diatoms, which are algae that look under a microscope like crystals, multiply so fast you can practically watch a submersed green leaf transform into a brown fuzz. In the plankton, single-cell algae, screw fungi, bacteria, and water mold abound. Insect larvae and nymphs carry on their eating business everywhere in the pond. Stillwater caddises, alderfly larvae, and damselfly and dragonfly nymphs stalk on the bottom debris; mayfly nymphs hide in the weeds, mosquito larvae wriggle near the surface, and red-tailed maggots stick their breathing tubes up from between decayed leaves along the shore. Also at the pond’s muddy edges it is easy to see the tiny red tubifex worms and bloodworms; the convulsive jerking of hundreds and hundreds together catches my eye.

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature. At first all I saw was a slender motion. Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water with a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long. It was also slender as a thread. It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over. Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm. The larvae of horsehair worms live as parasites in land insects; the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long. I don’t know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape. If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

The plankton bloom is what interests me. The plankton ani
mals are all those microscopic drifting animals that so staggeringly outnumber us. In the spring they are said to “bloom,” like so many poppies. There may be five times as many of these teeming creatures in spring as in summer. Among them are the protozoans—amoebae and other rhizopods, and millions of various flagellates and ciliates; gelatinous moss animalcules or byrozoans; rotifers—which wheel around either free or in colonies; and all the diverse crustacean minutiae—copepods, ostracods, and cladocerans like the abundant daphnias. All these drifting animals multiply in sundry bizarre fashions, eat tiny plants or each other, die, and drop to the pond’s bottom. Many of them have quite refined means of locomotion—they whirl, paddle, swim, slog, whip, and sinuate—but since they are so small, they are no match against even the least current in the water. Even such a sober limnologist as Robert E. Coker characterizes the movement of plankton as “milling around.”