[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Over my head black hunting beetles crawled up into the high limbs of trees, killing more caterpillars and pupae than they would eat.I had read once about a mysterious event of the night that is never far from my mind.Edwin Way Teale described an occurrence so absurd that it vaults out of the world of strange facts and into that startling realm where power and beauty hold sovereign sway.The sentence in Teale is simple: “On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.” These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago.As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always into “the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds—sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level.” There they had lived without breeding “for at least eight years.” In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished.They turned silver; now they are heading to the sea.Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of northbound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die.This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures.But it was feeling with which I was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam.My mind was on that meadow.Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved blades of grass.All right: the grass at the edge of the meadow begins to tremble and sway.Here come the eels.The largest are five feet long.All are silver.They stream into the meadow, sift between grasses and clover, veer from your path.There are too many to count.All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling roughly, a one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and slide to the creek.Silver eels in the night: a barely-made-out seething as far as you can squint, a squirming, jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass.If I saw that sight, would I live? If I stumbled across it, would I ever set foot from my door again? Or would I be seized to join that compelling rush, would I cease eating, and pale, and abandon all to start walking?Had this place always been so, and had I not known it? There were blowings and flights, tossings and heaves up the air and down to grass.Why didn’t God let the animals in Eden name the man; why didn’t I wrestle the grasshopper on my shoulder and pin him down till he called my name? I was thistledown, and now I seemed to be grass, the receiver of grasshoppers and eels and mantises, grass the windblown and final receiver.For the grasshoppers and thistledown and eels went up and came down.If you watch carefully the hands of a juggler, you see they are almost motionless, held at precise angles, so that the balls seem to be of their own volition describing a perfect circle in the air.The ascending arc is the hard part, but our eyes are on the smooth and curving fall.Each falling ball seems to trail beauty as its afterimage, receding faintly down the air, almost disappearing, when lo, another real ball falls, shedding its transparent beauty, and another….And it all happens so dizzyingly fast.The goldfinch I had seen was asleep in a thicket; when she settled to sleep, the weight of her breast locked her toes around her perch.Wasps were asleep with their legs hanging loose, their jaws jammed into the soft stems of plants.Everybody grab a handle: we’re spinning headlong down.I am puffed clay, blown up and set down.That I fall like Adam is not surprising: I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive.The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall.And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all.I rise when I receive, like grass.I didn’t know, I never have known, what spirit it is that descends into my lungs and flaps near my heart like an eagle rising.I named it full-of-wonder, highest good, voices.I shut my eyes and saw a tree stump hurled by wind, an enormous tree stump sailing sideways across my vision, with a wide circular brim of roots and soil like a tossed top hat.And what if those grasshoppers had been locusts descending, I thought, and what if I stood awake in a swarm? I cannot ask for more than to be so wholly acted upon, flown at, and lighted on in throngs, probed, knocked, even bitten.A little blood from the wrists and throat is the price I would willingly pay for that pressure of clacking weights on my shoulders, for the scent of deserts, groundfire in my ears—for being so in the clustering thick of things, rapt and enwrapped in the rising and falling real world.13The Horns of the AltarIThere was a snake at the quarry with me tonight.It lay shaded by cliffs on a flat sandstone ledge above the quarry’s dark waters.I was thirty feet away, sitting on the forest path overlook, when my eye caught the dark scrawl on the rocks, the lazy sinuosity that can only mean snake.I approached for a better look, edging my way down the steep rock cutting, and saw that the snake was only twelve or thirteen inches long.Its body was thick for its length.I came closer still, and saw the unmistakable undulating bands of brown, the hourglasses: copperhead.I never step a foot out of the house, even in winter, without a snakebite kit in my pocket.Mine is a small kit in rubber casing about the size of a shotgun shell; I slapped my pants instinctively to fix in my mind its location.Then I stomped hard on the ground a few times and sat down beside the snake.The young copperhead was motionless on its rock.Although it lay in a loose sprawl, all I saw at first was a camouflage pattern of particolored splotches confused by the rushing speckles of light in the weeds between us, and by the deep twilight dark of the quarry pond beyond the rock.Then suddenly the form of its head emerged from the confusion: burnished brown, triangular, blunt as a stone ax.Its head and the first four inches of its body rested on airy nothing an inch above the rock.I admired the snake
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]