On that night I was alone, and rather than go into my cottage, I lay down in the grass and watched the bats course the sky. They were like porpoises of the air, gliding through the sea of the atmosphere, incessant in their passes, diving closer and closer to the ground, twisting and darting earthward, fluttering up again in silence. There was only the darkening green sky, the energetic bats, and the pulsing night chorus of the late-summer insects. But the reverie was suddenly shattered. There appeared above my head an immense bat, five times the size of the others. As soon as I spotted it, it began a deep, descending dive toward me. Just above the tree line it broke its dive, rose again, and disappeared. It took me a second or two to come to my senses and realize that this was not some immense tropical bat far out of its range but a nighthawk.
As I watched, another nighthawk appeared, and then another. One by one, in a loose formation, they moved above the clearing, dipping and lilting across the evening in a slow, lazy flight. They would keep on in this manner for days and weeks until, finally, they would come again into summer—this time in Argentina. On any evening between the twenty-second of August and the first of September from my corner of the world I could look into the sky from the ridge and see them passing; they were a part of the great breathing of the seasons, an inhalation that draws them southward each year along with their fellow travelers the shorebirds, the warblers, the thrushes and sparrows and hawks. Watching them, I realized the summer idyll was at an end.
5
The Interior River
THE NIGHTHAWKS had disappeared from the sky above the clearing by early September. There were fewer and fewer bats, and from the long grasses and the surrounding forest the full chorus of the night-singing insects came up to pitch. Katydids whispered from the trees, and the snowy tree crickets throbbed and pulsed in the surrounding shrubbery against the background of a steady buzzing of long-horned grasshoppers, meadow crickets, and field crickets. I would go to sleep with the sound beyond the screened windows of the cottage. Sometimes at night I would wake up and hear them, and even at dawn, just before sunrise, they would still be singing, as if all the intensity of six months of growing, all the energy of the sun and the warm rains, had been channeled into insect song. They were like a blossoming crop. But their season was coming to an end.
The wheel turned. The Milky Way drifted across the sky, the summer constellations rose earlier and earlier, the Swan slowly turned her head southward; and down on earth, in the little clearing, migratory birds began to pass through. The sibilant white-throated sparrows appeared, and small, whining flocks of blackpoll warblers. I saw sharp-shinned hawks above the clearing; a few days later a flight of broadwinged hawks went over. I saw ospreys, high, circling red-tails, and once, in the field across the road below my house, I thought I saw a passing eagle.
I too became restless, and began wandering beyond the confines of my meadow. I found myself taking longer and longer walks in the woods behind my cottage. I left my ridge, crossed through the lower fields on the other side of the road, forded Beaver Brook, and climbed a hill above the highway, which separates my world from the world of Digital. On the other side of the valley of the highway, where the river of cars ran like a stiff stretch of rapids, I saw the rising Digital plant, completed now and scheduled to open in a month or so.
During the spring my brother Hugh, who lives in Rochester, New York, had been working on my father’s journals. He reread and edited some three hundred pages from my father’s years in China, made copies, and circulated them to various authorities on Chinese history. One day that month he brought me a fresh copy and stayed on for a few days in my cottage. He is by avocation a poet, a man at once fascinated and horrified by the metaphor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he once won an award for a series of poems he wrote about the experiences of a survivor of Hiroshima. One could make a case, given his obsession, that the sins of the fathers are indeed visited upon the children, since my family’s connection with the events at Nagasaki is more direct than that of most American families.
While he was teaching in Shanghai, my father would regularly travel to Japan on vacation. It is clear from his journal that he came to love the country and the people; the cleanliness, the sense of order, the traditional desire for serenity impressed him deeply. One of the cities he traveled to during these visits was the Christian city of Nagasaki. He kept careful journals of these trips to Japan, and, as always in the East, he carried a camera. All his life he took pictures, but his photographs from the Orient are the most sensitive, the best composed. One of the places that he photographed during his visits was the busy working harbor of Nagasaki. Years later, on a winter afternoon in 1943 or 1944, two men in overcoats appeared at the door of our house and announced that they were from the federal government and would like to speak with my father. They retired to his study. My father closed the door, as he often did when visitors arrived, and the three of them talked for a while. It turned out that the men were from the FBI, and when they left, they took with them my father’s pictures of Nagasaki harbor. It was not until August 8, 1945, that he understood why.
My brother Hugh, who happens to look very much like Abe Lincoln, has always been involved in social causes; he seems to have inherited a radical version of my father’s sense of social commitment. When he was very young, he managed to absorb the idea that black people were disadvantaged, and to counteract this he would wander down to a nearby black neighborhood and distribute candy to the children. One afternoon a group of boys beat him up and took all the candy for themselves. Undeterred by such early setbacks, he went on to become a social worker. He found jobs in various settlement houses in New York until, finally, he happened on what he believed to be the segment of our society that is most discriminated against—the retarded. For twenty years now he has worked to liberate them from their infernal institutions and integrate them into society.
A visit with Hugh is a prolonged lesson in social justice. He hardly seemed to notice the way of life I had chosen for myself; he only glanced at my carefully constructed Victorian cottage with its filigree trim and its scrollwork swan, and he barely paused to admire the healthy snapdragons and cosmos in my garden. We went for walks; we ate on my terrace; we swam at the lake, but mostly we talked. We spent hours discussing my father’s writing style, his life in China, his psychology, his motivation, and for one entire evening we reminisced about an extended trip we had taken one summer through the American West.
One morning I managed to get Hugh out in my kayak for an expedition on Beaver Brook. The part of the brook that we canoed snakes from Route 119 in Littleton north-northwest to a bridge over Beaver Brook Road in Westford. As the crow flies it is a distance of no more than a mile or so. As a fish swims, however, or a small boat or muskrat travels, it’s a trip of three or four miles—I don’t know how long exactly, never having bothered to measure the distance. Time and space tend to dissolve on the stream.
We rose early that day, wrestled my kayak through the cattails, and launched the boat into the narrow channel. Almost instantaneously the modern world seemed to fade away. Paddling among the grasses, on the flow of the amber-colored water, we could feel a palpable stillness descending. This happened to be one of those evocative autumnal days, the type of day that tends to mix memory with immediacy. There was a low mist hovering over the marshes, shot through with the raking light of the rising sun and infused with the calls of birds. The quiet pools in the backwaters were obscured; the air over the marsh was dank and warm, with a rusty, September sort of smell that was filled with promise.
Beaver Brook was created some twelve thousand years ago when an ice dam holding a glacial lake burst and the waters of the lake drained off, leaving behind a series of braided streams. In the mid-seventeenth century Europeans moved into the region and named one of these streams Beaver Brook. Partly because of the good, arable soils here, the industrial revolution that swept through this part of New England two hundred years later skipped over most of the area around B
eaver Brook. Up until a few years ago, the fields, the woods, and the marshes along the stream looked pretty much as they did three or four centuries ago. There are now a few buildings in sight where roads cross the brook, and at a point just south of a narrow section of the stream that once served as a ford between two farms, there is a hideous strip of power lines. But other than that Beaver Brook is undeveloped. You set your boat in the narrow stream beside the road, give a few strokes, and you leave our time.
I have been on that section of the brook in all seasons. I skate the full course in winter when the ice is good, ski it when the snow cover is heavy, paddle through it in spring, summer, and fall, and regularly swim in it whenever the water is warm enough. But early autumn is the best time. The stream and its wildlife have grown old and comfortable then. The waters run slower and are thicker with plant life; the brook reeks in backwater sections, a thick, tropic redolence. The grasses have been cluttered with nests; the crops of young birds, of fish, reptiles, and amphibians are abundant; and everywhere the world seems lush and fruitful.
Before we had taken a dozen paddle strokes that day, we rounded a bend and surprised a family of wood ducks. They sprang into the air and went whistling off across the marshes. We saw them—or perhaps another group—about half an hour later. The wrens were chattering loudly, the red-wings were still calling, and periodically we could hear the low grunts of bullfrogs and green frogs. Mysterious splashes and squawks rose from the wet mists in the interior of the marsh, and along the banks nightshade, pond lilies, and arrowheads still bloomed.
We pushed on. Curve by curve, bend after bend we snaked through the marsh, winding through the tall grasses in some places, crossing open expanses in others, cutting close to wooded banks, only to move off again into mid-marsh. As the sun rose and the day warmed, the calls of the birds dwindled to a few idle chatters, and the frogs and the turtles and snakes emerged to feed. Great fat-bellied bullfrogs squatted resolutely on exposed clumps of mud at each bend. We saw the bright slitherings of water snakes and ribbon snakes. Painted turtles swam beneath the surface or basked on exposed logs and hummocks, and at one point, in a wide section of the brook, we saw an immense object that looked at first like a moving boulder. It was a snapping turtle—huge, primordial.
For long sections of the trip the grass was so tall we could not see over it, and contrary to everything my brother and I had been taught about small-boat handling by our boat-loving father, we stood up and sculled through the channels like gondoliers.
Beyond the wide flood plain of the brook, the banks to the south and east were wooded and as yet undeveloped. The hills ran down to the flat marshes, the marshes flowed north to the slopes of high ground, and no structure marred the view. With deep, easy strokes we sculled through this world of wrens and rushes, and every bend revealed more birds, more turtles, snakes, and frogs.
I rarely see another human being in the marshes. The few fishermen who come to the place never venture far from the nearest bridge, and canoeists have yet to discover the inner sections of the brook. But there is an old man I occasionally see. He is heavyset with patchy skin and few teeth. Each year in autumn I see his truck parked on the Great Road, and sometimes I meet him, or see him in the distance, poling along the stream. He comes to trap muskrats, and he goes about his business religiously, setting his traps and then checking them each morning. I used to spring his sets sometimes in order to give the muskrats a fighting chance, but after one or two long conversations with the man, I stopped. Vicious though his trade may be, he turned out to be the gentlest of men, simple in his outlook, a conservationist in his own way, and a man who, unlike many of the other local people, clearly appreciated the marshes.
Once in autumn I met a family of Indians in the Beaver Brook marshes. Not far from the road I saw two women and an older man standing in the shallow waters among the grasses, collecting something. I ran my boat up onto a hummock and sloshed over to talk to them. They told me that they were Wampanoags from Cape Cod and that they came up here each autumn to collect a species of grass that they could not find in their region. They would later dry the grass stems and use them in baskets. It seemed curious to me that they should travel nearly a hundred miles to collect a grass that I felt certain must grow somewhere on Cape Cod. I had studied the vegetation of the marsh, and it seemed to me the grass—it was actually a species of rush—that they were collecting was fairly common. I suggested as much; I asked them if they could not find the grass closer to home, but they said no, only here. It was important, they explained, to gather this grass in this spot at this time of year. Only then would their baskets be good. I left them to their work, but I couldn’t help wondering how they came to this obscure marsh so far from home.
My brother and I pushed on through the marsh as the sun grew hotter. I was in no hurry. I wanted to show him the essence of the place. I wanted to slow him down. The point of this trip, the meaning of this place for me, was a reordering of time so that the diurnal schedules of frogs and birds, and the slow clock of the seasons, would take precedence over the faster-paced schedules of the human world. And yet the brook has a flow. The boat was carried onward in spite of itself, and toward midafternoon, even though we had taken several long stops, we found ourselves approaching the end. We came to the set of power lines; we passed under a footbridge near a housing development and came into a section of the stream that is sometimes visited by fishermen. Slowly, as we paddled through the marsh, the outside world began to reassert itself. We heard a horse whinny from a nearby pasture; a car sounded its horn in the distance. And then I saw, washed up on a clump of reed canary grass, the essence of American civilization—an empty beer can.
As we paddled, my brother and I had been talking about Henry Thoreau and his love of the Concord River, and it occurred to me later that it was about the same time of year, early September 1839, when he was twenty-two, that Henry and his older brother, John, took their famous trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. Their plan was to row their home-built boat north, travel overland to the White Mountains, climb Mount Washington, and return. But what was intended originally to be a mountain-climbing expedition, in Henry’s mind at least, evolved into a river journey. In his journals, and in his subsequent book (his first), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he focused on the going out and the return rather than on the far more adventurous ascent of Mount Washington. He compared the Concord River with the greatest rivers of the planet—the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile. Rivers were the constant lure to distant enterprise and adventure, he wrote. “Dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their current to the lowlands of the globe or explore the interior continents.”
The two brothers left from Concord on August 31 and spent the night not far downstream, listening to the water sounds around them and barely sleeping in the excitement of their first night out. The next day they rowed downstream to Lowell and were locked through the city to the Merrimack River, where they turned upstream. They camped the following night near Tyngsboro, rowed northward, alternately resting and swimming, and then spent the next night beyond Nashua, New Hampshire. By Tuesday afternoon they were at the mouth of the Souhegan River, and that night they reached Bedford, where they camped by some waterfalls. They locked themselves through the manufacturing city of Manchester, bought supplies from a local farmer, and spent the next night at Hooksett. In the morning they walked to Concord, New Hampshire, and from there went overland to the White Mountains, returning to Hooksett by the twelfth of September. The rest of the voyage was downstream and, fortuitously, downwind.
The trip was a lark for the two brothers, a true vacation. They were living an experimental life; they were teaching in the decidedly untraditional school they had started in Concord; they were both in love (with the same woman); and they were, in spite of the potential for competition, good friends and confidants. John’s health was questionable. He was thin, sometimes had nosebleeds that would not stop, and was often sick with what was at
the time called the colic, but was in fact tuberculosis. Nevertheless, there was no reason to suspect, in the bright autumn of 1839, that in a little more than two years John would be dead.
Coincidentally, I had taken a river trip with my brother Hugh when I was twenty-two, the same age as Henry when he took his Concord and Merrimack trip. One summer a few years after he graduated from college, having got together a little money, Hugh announced that he was going out West to look around. Hugh was then a budding poet who was moved by the metaphor of America, and since I was footloose myself at that point, I accompanied him across the continent while he searched for whatever it was he was looking for. We drove out through Ohio, sleeping rough in the open air, then headed north for the Chicago stockyards, one of his favorite images from American literature. We found, upon arrival, only acre on acre of empty corrals. The butchery had moved elsewhere.
We drove on through the northern prairie, crossed the Rockies, dropped down into California, and subsequently found work in Fresno. He sold bibles; I sold Fuller brushes and worked in the lettuce fields. We grew restless, so we left, camped in the desert for a while, and then found jobs in a restaurant in Nevada, just over the California line. He pumped gas and acted as mechanic, even though he knew little or nothing about cars. I worked the night shift in the kitchen, having learned a thing or two about cooking the year before in a restaurant in France. After a few weeks we had earned enough to head south to Texas, where we had cousins.
Living at the End of Time Page 7