Upstream (4 page)

For some years now I have eaten almost no meat. Though, occasionally, I crave it. It is a continually interesting subject of deep ambiguity. The poet Shelley believed his body would at last be the total and docile servant of his intellect if he ate nothing but leaves and fruit—and I am devoted to Shelley. But I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider Nature without this appetite—this other-creature-consuming appetite—is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past. Still, in my personal life, I am often stricken with a wish to be
beyond all that
. I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own
body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

_______

At the edge of the land lie the watery palaces—the ocean shore, the salt marsh, the black-bellied pond. And in them and upon them: clams, mussels, fish of all shapes and sizes, snails, turtles, frogs, eels, crabs, lobsters, worms, all crawling and diving and squirming among the cattails, sea rocks, seaweeds, sea pickles, spartina, lamb's-quarters, sour grass, arrowhead, mallow. Something eats each of these, each of these eats something else. This is our world. The orange mussel has a blue-black fringe along its body, and a heart and a lung, and a stomach. The scallop as it snaps its way through the water, when the east wind blows, gazes around with its dozens of pale blue eyes. The clam, sensing the presence of your hands, or the approach of the iron tine, presses deeper into the sand. Just where does self-awareness begin and end? With the june bug? With the shining, task-ridden ant? With the little cloud of gnats that drifts over the pond? I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I
always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.

All this, as prelude to the turtles.

They come, lumbering, from the many ponds. They dare the dangers of path, dogs, the highway, the accumulating heat that their bodies cannot regulate, or the equally stunning, always possible cold.

Take one, then. She has reached the edge of the road, now she slogs up the impossible hill. When she slides back she rests for a while, then trundles forward again. Emerging wet from the glittering caves of the pond, she travels in a coat of glass and dust. Where the sand clings thickly the mosquitoes, that hover about her like a gray veil, are frustrated. Not about her eyes, though, for as she blinks the sand falls; so at her tough, old face-skin those winged needles hang until their bodies fill, like tiny vials, with her bright blood. Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond.

Once, in spring, I saw the rhapsodic prelude to this
enterprise of nest-building: two huge snapping turtles coupling. As they floated on the surface of the pond their occasional motions set them tumbling and heaving over and around again and yet again. The male's front feet gripped the rim of the female's shell as he pressed his massive body tightly against hers. For most of the afternoon they floated so, like a floundered craft—splashing and drifting through the murky water, or hanging motionless among the rising carpets of the pond lilies.

_______

On these first hot days of summer, anywhere along the edges of these ponds or on the slopes of the dunes, I come upon the traveling turtles. I am glad to see them and sorry at the same time—my presence may be a disturbance that sends them back to the ponds before the egg laying has been accomplished, and what help is this to the world? Sometimes they will make the attempt again, sometimes they will not. If not, the eggs will dissolve back into other substances, inside their bodies.

There are other interrupters, far craftier than I. Whether the turtles come through sunlight or, as is more likely, under the moon's cool but sufficient light, raccoons follow. The turtles are scarcely done, scarcely gone, before the raccoons set their noses to the ground,
and sniff, and discover, and dig, and devour, with rapacious and happy satisfaction.

And still, every year, there are turtles enough in the ponds.

As there are raccoons enough, sleeping the afternoons away high in the leafy trees.

_______

One April morning I came upon a snapping turtle shell at the shore of Pasture Pond, tugged from the water, I imagine, by these same raccoons. Front to back, it measured more than thirty inches. Later I found leg bones nearby, also claws, and scutes, as they are called—the individual shingles that cover the raw bone of the shell. Perhaps the old giant died during a hard winter, frozen first at the edges and then thoroughly, in some too-shallow cove. Or perhaps it died simply in the amplitude of time itself—turtles, like other reptiles, never stop growing, which makes for interesting imagined phenomena, if one's inclination is to the bizarre. But the usual is news enough. The adult snapping turtle can weigh ninety pounds, is omnivorous, and may live for decades. Or to put it another way, who knows? The shell I found that April morning was larger than any of my field guides indicates is likely, or even possible.

I saw the tracks immediately—they swirled back and forth across the shuffled sand of the path. They seemed the design of indecision, but I am not sure. In three places a little digging had taken place. A false nest? A foot giving a swipe or two of practice motion? A false visual clue for the predator to come?

I leashed my two dogs and looked searchingly until I saw her, at one side of the path, motionless and sand-spattered. Already she was in the nest—or, more likely, leaving it. For she will dig through the sand until she all but vanishes—sometimes until there is nothing visible but the top of her head. Then, when the nesting is done, she thrusts the front part of her body upward so that she is positioned almost vertically, like a big pie pan on edge. Beneath her, as she heaves upward, the sand falls into the cavity of the nest, upon the heaped, round eggs.

She sees me, and does not move. The eyes, though they throw small light, are deeply alive and watchful. If she had to die in this hour and for this enterprise, she would, without hesitation. She would slide from life into death, still with that pin of light in each uncordial eye,
intense and as loyal to the pumping of breath as anything in this world.

When our eyes meet, what can pass between us? She sees me as a danger, and she is right. If I come any closer, she will dismiss me peacefully if she can by retracting into her shell. But this is difficult; her bulky body will not fit entirely inside the recesses of that bony hut. She retreats, but still her head is outside, and a portion of each leg. She might hiss, or she might not. She might open the mighty beak of her mouth to give warning, and I might stare a moment into the clean, pale, glossy tunnel of her inner mouth, with its tag of tongue, before that head, that unexpected long neck flashes out—flashes, I say—and strikes me, hand or foot. She is snake-swift and accurate, and can bite cleanly through a stick three inches thick. Many a dog walks lame from such an encounter. I keep my dogs leashed and walk on. We turn the corner and vanish under the trees. It is five
A.M.
; for me, the beginning of the day—for her, the end of the long night.

_______

Of appetite—of my own appetite—I recognize this: it flashes up, quicker than thought; it cannot be exiled; it can be held on leash, but only barely. Once, on an
October day, as I was crossing a field, a red-tailed hawk rattled up from the ground. In the grass lay a pheasant, its breast already opened, only a little of the red, felt-like meat stripped away. It simply flew into my mind—that the pheasant, thus discovered, was to be
my
dinner! I swear, I felt the sweet prick of luck! Only secondly did I interrupt myself, and glance at the hawk, and walk on. Good for me! But I know how sparkling was the push of my own appetite. I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

_______

A few years ago I heard a lecture about the Whitney family, especially about Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose patronage established the museum of that name in New York City. The talk was given by Mrs. Whitney's granddaughter, and she used a fine phrase when speaking of her family—of their sense of “inherited responsibility”—to do, of course, with received wealth and a sense of using it for public good. Ah! Quickly I slipped this phrase from the air and put it into my own pocket!

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because
demanded
by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (
my
great ones, who may not be the same as
your
great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.

So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect. The moment is full of such exquisite interest as Fabre or Flaubert would have been utterly alive to. Yes, it is a din of voices that I hear, and they do not all say the same thing. But the fit of thoughtfulness unites them.

Who are they? For me they are Shelley, and Fabre, and Wordsworth—the young Wordsworth—and Barbara Ward, and Blake, and Basho, Maeterlinck and Jastrow, and sweetest Emerson, and Carson, and Aldo Leopold. Forebears, models, spirits whose influence and teachings I am now inseparable from, and forever grateful for. I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away. And I do not accomplish this alert and loving
confrontation by myself and alone, but through terrifying and continual effort, and with this innumerable, fortifying company, bright as stars in the heaven of my mind.

Were they seed eaters? Were they meat eaters? Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful. A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley's, like Thoreau's, cry out:
Change! Change!
But most don't say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.

I went back, toward evening, and dug in the sand to the depth of nine inches more or less, and found nothing. There, a few unbroken roots told me the turtle's paddle-shaped feet had gone no farther down. There, as I imagine it, she had shifted the angle of her digging. Perhaps she rested first. Then she began again her sweep-shoving, digging a smaller chamber opening from the original, but narrower, a
sanctum
, to the front of the
first. When she was done, a short, fleshy tube descended from her body and reached to this chamber, where the expelled eggs piled up rapidly on the nest of sand.

Into this passage I dug, until my fingers felt the first of the eggs—round, slightly soft; then I began to feel more, and I began to remove them. There were twenty-seven, smaller than Ping-Pong balls, which they somewhat resembled. They were not altogether opaque, but cast a slightly yellow interior light. I placed thirteen in my pocket, carefully, and replaced fourteen in the nest, repacked the nest with sand, and swept from the surface all sign of my digging.

I scrambled them. They were a meal. Not too wonderful, not too bad. Rich, substantial. I could not crack the shells, but had to make a knife slit to enter into each bright chamber. The yolks were large, the whites of the egg scant; the little fertility knot, the bud of the new turtle, was no more apparent than it is in a fertile chicken's egg. There was, in the fabric of the eggs scrambled, a sense of fiber, a tactility, as though a sprinkle of cornmeal had been tossed in, and had not quite dissolved. I imagined it as the building material of the shell. The eggs were small enough that thirteen made no greedy portion. I ate them all, with attention, whimsy, devotion, and respect.

The next morning I went back to the path. I wanted
to see how the nest-place was after one sheet of darkness had gone over it. None of the other prowlers—raccoons, that is—had discovered it. By end of summer, under the provisions of good fortune, the hatchlings, fourteen of them, would rise through the sand. Hardly pausing to consider the world that so suddenly appeared around them, they would turn unerringly toward the dark and rich theater of the nearest pond, would hasten to its edge, and dive in.

_______

Now, in the last hot days of June, I see no more turtles on the paths, nor even their curvaceous wandering trails over the dunes. Now the heat brings forth other buddings and advancements. Almost overnight the honey locust trees have let down their many tassels of blossoms, small white flasks filled with the sweetest honey. I gather handfuls and, for a second, hold them against my face. The fringes of paradise: summer on earth. They, too, will nourish me. Last week I ate the eggs of the turtle, like little golden suns; today, the honey locust blossoms, in batter, will make the finest crepes of the most common pancakes. My body, which must be fed, will be well fed. The hawk, in the pale pink evening, went back to the body of the pheasant. The turtle lay a long time on the bottom of the pond, resting. Then she
turned, her eyes upon some flickering nearby as, without terror, without sorrow, but in the voracious arms of the first of the earth's gods, she did what she must, she did what all must do. All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water
itself.