One wet, brooding, windy afternoon last week I took a walk north from the Doane Rock picnic area in Eastham along an old wood road that soon petered out among thick stands of pitch pines. I must have wandered for close to a mile without seeing a person or a house, save for one chimney glimpsed over the treetops.
This area was part of the writer-naturalist Henry Beston’s ‘belt of wild, rolling, and treeless sand moorland’ that ran inland from the beach for nearly a mile only fifty years ago. Even then, however, the pitch pines had established themselves well enough further inland so that, as Beston observed, ‘people on the outer Cape have their woodlots as well as inlanders.’
At one place I came out of the woods into an old meadow, generously sprinkled with well-spaced junipers, or red-cedars, and broad, lacy, wheat-like stands of young locusts. Though the field was ringed heavily with pines, it is these two other pioneer species that seem to seed in first in this area of the Cape. The locusts had nearly completely lost their leaves, but the dark green junipers were lit up with bunches of bright electric-blue ‘berries.’
These shot-sized fruits, an oddity among evergreens, are really modified cones, since the seeds remain technically naked, rather than enclosed in ovaries as in deciduous berries. Yet Rutherford Platt, a man magnificently obsessed with trees, sees in these juniper berries an evolutionary trend, an example of a conifer gradually altering its nature to adapt to conditions of the hardwood forest, perhaps producing in time ‘a forest more stalwart than the coniferous, more lovely than the deciduous.’
It is very difficult to feel the reality of such evolutionary drama, impossible to slow or speed one’s eyes up enough to catch a sense of motion. We can only apprehend it mentally, imaginatively, and I do not know enough to say for certain what the cedar might be up to, back here in this neglected field. I reached out and crushed its berries, smelling the sweet, incense like aroma. Were I more of a drinker, I might have recognized in it a common flavoring for gin. What marvelous opportunists we are! Here is this tree, on a slow and stately march toward some unimaginable future, and we pinch its fruits to spice up our booze.
At one end of the meadow was a stand of dead pines, with no oaks grown up beneath them. Their dead, truncated forms swung stiffly in the wind, like gallows. There was no sign of fire, and they were not low enough to have been flooded out. Nearby stands seemed healthy. What then? A local infestation? Had the trees simply overtopped their protection and been withered by the winter salt winds? Nature, like human history, does not tend to record its failures.
Most of the field was marked out with flags of milkweed pods, the open ones all but scoured out now by the wind. Others still remained closed and green, warty and grotesquely bulbous in shape. Milkweeds seem to be among the last of the tall, stiff field weeds to fall; the banners of the mullein and sumacs have been down for weeks. Most of these were the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) but there was another species present, the wavy- or blunt-leaved milkweed (Asclepias amplexicaulis). This plant also likes our dry, open fields, but is somewhat smaller, with rounded, wavy-edged leaves and smoother, more slender, reddish-brown pods.
I lay down in the field beside the plants to study them more closely and to feel, under the open sky, the uses of this dry wind. I watched the gusts tease the seed silks out of the split pods and send them shooting like bits of fleece into the air, where they vanished almost immediately. When I was a boy we used to call the detached silks ‘money makers’ and would chase them across gritty vacant lots and graveled playgrounds more as a physical challenge than an earnest pursuit of quick fortune. I think we sensed in that buoyant, passive energy, that groundless good spirits with which the seedless silks went bouncing along, our own childhood faith in wishes that is so completely independent of any need for fulfillment.
The milkweed seeds themselves are brown, thin and light, like pine seeds, and are packed inside the pods in overlapping rows like shingles, with careful, geometric economy. I later took one of the slim pods home with me and placed it on my desk with other accumulating odds and ends from my walks. I forgot about it, but about four nights later I turned on my desk lamp and found that the pods had split open. The seeds had risen up on their own like souls at judgment in their silken garments, had spread them into wings, and had spilled and flowed out over the desk top, waiting for wind. I picked one up and dropped it from head height; in the perfectly still room it took over twenty seconds to reach the floor.
But back there in the field, under the racing, backlighted clouds, where the pines shook, the oaks rattled, the cedars bent over like topknots, and the locusts boomed and shuttled the wind, the broken milkweed pods sent off their bursts of life into a breeding sky. That afternoon the meadow belonged to the plants. The field was vegetably alive, trembling with dispersal and exposure, while all animal life, for all I could see, remained hidden, huddled and perched against the season’s blasts.