The other night I had a rare attack of insomnia. After several attempts to overcome it, I yielded and resolved to read on into dawn. There is a strange feeling about staying up all night which I have never gotten used to, and which seems inherently unnatural. As the long hours wheel interminably on, there is a sense of gradually losing touch with the human community. One knows that the activities of men continue – that all-night parties blare on, that local police cruisers prowl the streets like cats, and invisible jets streak overhead in the velvet sky toward Europe or Boston – but they lose their universal dominance, their bravado and complacence, and dwindle to a disconnected sputtering of noise and light.
The turning point of the night passed unnoticed, and about 4 AM the whippoorwills began to sing again. The last to cease after dark, they are the first to begin in the morning. Generally speaking, the dawn serenade of birds is a reverse performance of the evening before; yet it is not an exact mirror image. The whippoorwill, for instance, does not ordinarily start his evening calls until the last of the daytime birds has quit, usually about twenty minutes after sunset. This morning, however, he was joined by a woodthrush at about 4:30 AM, and the two continued in concert together for another twenty minutes, when the whip finally ceased.
Shortly after the thrush began to sing, I stepped outside into a still, warm, muggy, clouded morning- like a bowl of soggy cereal. As I stood there, not quite sure where I was, the birds began to sing, one by one. After the thrush came the catbirds and robins, followed by phoebes, jays, towhees, starlings, song sparrows, ovenbirds and yellowthroats. There may be nothing significant or representative about this order, except that it shows that birds, like people, wake at different times.
As I came to the intersection where my dirt road meets the paved highway, the chorus was deafening. The streets were filled with song. Not even the faintest sound of a distant motor could be heard. How seldom it is during our Cape Cod summer that the sound of birdsong outweighs that of human traffic. And why do the birds sing so loudly at dawn? I had never before asked myself that obvious question; nor could I recall having read any scientific commentary on it. ‘Greeting the sun’ is the poet’s evasion, though the sun was obscured this hazy morning. Perhaps it is their way of reminding themselves who and where they are, after a night’s oblivion. We ritually read the morning paper over a muddy cup of coffee; birds sing.
I set off down the highway, the air still heavy and palpable, the darkness gradually diluting. Normally a fairly busy road in summer, it was now deserted – or rather, strangely inhabited. Catbirds, robins and towhees fed freely on the cool paved surface, casually pecking at fallen seeds or torpid insects. Faint leathery sounds whipped about my head, and I caught the fluttering indistinct forms of bats chasing late moths. A thrush flew straight at me and veered off only at the last second, as though it had not expected to see me. At one point in the road a good-sized deer stood in full view, calmly munching leaves on the other side of a stone wall. As I passed she thrust her head out over the stones to peer at me with large black eyes, as a horse will stretch its neck over a fence. Then, as though suddenly realizing what I was, she was gone, white tail flashing, ebony hooves thumping the hard ground through the underbrush.
Farther down the road, in front of a church, seven rabbits were nibbling the plantings in the empty parking lot. Nearby, oblivious to both rabbits and birds, two large cats lolled in the middle of the road like dogs at noon in a sleepy village main street. I recognized the white one with the collar; the other, large black tom, I had never seen before. It was probably a feral, invisible by day. They turned and regarded me curiously, then looked away.
I felt, and was obviously regarded as an intruder into a landscape I had thought was familiar and hopelessly man-dominated, but which, I discovered, contained a secret society wholly unknown to daywalkers. I read somewhere that snakes are frequently seen during the early morning hours on the streets of New York City, even by sober pedestrians. Where do they disappear to during the day? Sometimes I think we do not inspire as much awe and dread in our fellow creatures as we like to think, that we are regarded more as a nuisance, to be avoided if possible, rather than as an omnipotent threat. How many of us are aware that our common thoroughfares are invaded, stalked and occupied each night and dawn by such a host of alien lives? This road possesses dimensions I did not know it had.
As I passed a small swamp I heard a familiar quawk! and turned to see a night heron incongruously flapping its way down the highway at head height. The early bees were already out and crowded into the smothering honeysuckle. Deerflies congregated around me, forcing me to wrap my T-shirt about my head and run on. I began to wonder if this wasn’t a dream, or if humanity wouldn’t somehow forget to awaken.
In the deep unity of dawn and its connected lives, the aberrations of man on the landscape seemed even more glaring than usual. Ranks of large new houses sprawled down a hillside and jostled each other for a ‘waterview’ of the tiny pond they surrounded. The terminal ‘lollipop’ of a new subdivision road slopped over its banking, the asphalt already spilling like ink down the badly eroding, unstabilized fill.
In such a time and setting the very homes of my neighbors looked strange, unfamiliar, unreal. By day they might harbor the old man-made griefs, thwarted ambition, chronic resentment, vacant boredom, silent broken marriages. Now, in the quiet of dawn, all their unseen lives seemed slight and fragile. The cars, stuffed into the driveways and lying askew, looked like toys left outside by children at bedtime. A great wave of affection and forgiveness passed through me for man and all his dubious works; I yearned to steal in and comfort their hearts.
It was the same feeling one has when looking at the loose and vulnerable form of a cross and unruly child who has slipped off into the endearing innocence of sleep. Perhaps these sleeping bodies within were also innocent, their frequently cruel acts and petty grievances – their global carelessness and blind destruction merely a mask that falls off each night – only the willful acts of children lacking constructive tasks and seeking attention in a lonely universe.
When I got back to the house, about 6:30, the spell was nearly gone. The woodthrush was still singing, but with less vigor, and the peewee, last of the morning singers, had begun. The chorus as a whole was diminished, but whatever its origins, there were good clear human-enough reasons for its breakup. For there was breakfast to be gotten, territories to be maintained, enemies to be eluded, and new lives to be fed. On the distant highway I could hear the first commuters of the morning, roaring toward Hyannis.