Nature’s Year!

Our book today is a re-read, one of the many, many such re-reads I tend to do during any given month: John Hay’s 1961 classic Nature’s Year, with beautiful illustrations by David Grose. The book is sub-titled “The Seasons of Cape Cod,” and that’s probably why I re-read it, since the waning days of summer tend to trigger in me a yearning melancholy for all things Cape Cod (and since the altered geothermal signature of the planet now insures that New England will feel like the waning days of summer from roughly the middle of August until roughly the middle of December), and this book continually rises in my estimation as one of the best evocations of the Cape ever put on paper.

I have no idea why late summer provokes this response in me; as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been lucky enough to know the Cape in all its seasons and in all the moods it can field in its various regions. My best guess – not a big surprise to those of you who know me – is that the association is dog-related: during one late-summer visit to the Cape many years ago, I was accompanied by five beagles, one of whom was in the stiff, echoing period that comes so abruptly to beagles, that antechamber time when vitality suddenly stops renewing itself and a quick glide downhill begins. Beagles – the most robust dogs on Earth – don’t like this period any more than their human friends do: they become withdrawn and quarrelsome, and my boy was no exception. Suddenly he had no patience for the river-flowing antics of his brothers and very little patience even for my increased solicitude. He simultaneously wanted the reassurance of our presence and also to be left alone.

We were staying in the house of an old friend who’d decamped for the Caribbean, and one day when the lengthening shadows of August were just starting to carry the hint of a chill (an antique description, but it really did happen back then), that old beagle consented to a walk with me along the beach at Truro. I told the others to wait in the house, and he and I made our unhurried way up the strand, him laboring along, me keeping pace at his side with my head down. The gulls cried, and we could smell pine in the air, and the foam hissed and bubbled around our feet, and we were silent all the way out and all the way back.

Much else happened during that trip, and that dog lived for three weeks after our return to Boston, but I don’t remember much of it. I remember every moment of that walk, and only much later, when it was all over, did I realize it was the last one we took together. A realization like that can mark a place. Always after that, late summer reminds me first, for a sharp instant, of that walk and that beagle, and then right after that of the broad wonder of the Cape itself, the gorgeous intricacy of the place, the strange surrounding insistence of nature in the place that seems stronger even than some much wilder regions.

Hay understands that insistence better than any other Cape writer, and I sometimes forget how well he captures it in Nature’s Year, maybe especially the parts of the book dealing with the end-of-summer changes I’m talking about:

I feel as though we were hesitating on the brink of new necessities, swinging between one resolution and another not yet found. The season is beginning to join the winds. Some migrant birds have already flown away. Other birds fly through the leaf canopy feeding seriously and silently. A warbler, a female yellow-throat, skips lightly along a patch of briar and vines. A brilliant oriole jumps into a patch of oaks and moves on down sunlight-yellow ramps of leaves, and a black-billed cuckoo, a large brown bird with a handsome, long tail, stops in on a branch with a look of eagerness and seeking, then flashes off again. There is a change in their action and timing.

The luminous current running through so many of Cape Cod’s joys is evanescence – of moods, of company, of the seasons, even of the place itself, which loses front-porches of ground to the tides every year (and which would be summarily drowned if the ocean’s levels rose less than a house’s height). Hay understands this too – that mood of always almost-losing things is all through this book and all through Grose’s illustrations too, especially when the subject is the death of summer:

When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.

For the eighth straight month, I walked around Boston today in my shirt sleeves, wiping my forehead in the heat of midday, but the memories of that seasonal change – the change of the land to the strict and clean ordering of winter’s forerunning – linger stubbornly. When the days shorten, no matter how hot those days are, I think about the Cape. When the leaves change color, I think about that silent walk with that old departing dog. And I can bring it all back with Nature’s Year, which is quite an allure for a book to have.