Dawn. Across the inlet at the state park the mobile homes are silhouetted with eerie clarity against a low horizon of volcanic red shading to rose then a pencil mustache of backlit clouds, bark gray, then peach-flesh whitening through lemon candy to the now blue dome—barest, night-heaviest blue, weighty and necessary, like a cardiac surgeon donning a robe as she enters the operating theater. Boats are going out—not the scallop boats, not the commercial fleet already at sea in pursuit of tuna or fluke or whichever silvery indeterminate fish, but the loud-revved joyboats of the Jerseyites. Must be Saturday. Lost track of the days already. On this side of the water all is calm. In the shadow of the lighthouse only the breakfast places will be humming at this hour—Andy’s, Kelly’s, Mustache Bill’s, the Coffee Shack. They could be Whitman’s, all these tall grasses and reeds—they are his, I suppose, this must resemble his Paumanok a hundred and fifty years ago. Sea oats, cattails, calamus—maybe Jackson will learn to distinguish them at marine biology camp and teach me. Songs and hosannas rising from the bushes, invisible, to greet the sun. Too many birds: tern, gull, sparrow, I know the commonplace but not the exotics. Why am I awake? Green beacon on the jetty, pulsing. Clouds now aflame, revealing their depth—back to the horizon they run, gaining a third dimension, riffled and corrugated in steely gray and hot pink. A big two-masted schooner under sail far out on the horizon—now inching directly behind the tiny mobile homes so that the tips of its tall sails sit atop them like spectators at a stock car race or coronation or the burning of an unlucky heretic. Auto-da-fé. The sun. It’s coming. Now the overarching clouds are full with it, replete, grave, rain-heavy with its radiance. Bright lucent orange, narrowly contained, embryonic—even someone with no knowledge of this world, or planets, or orbits, or dawn, even a flatworm would know that something amazing was happening, that a great power is lurking, impending, that it will rise, rises, is rising—as they always knew, the cairn-builders, scriveners in paint and animal hide—a gull chuckles, where is he?—I turn back to its emergence, now rapidly it comes, half a circle, more—the sweet cool pearly light of my reeds will be lost! The crickets are dropping off, the frogs, a brave few keep up the racket. The low trills and calls of birds, cheeps, cackles, whoopo-wheeps—could that be a whippoorwill, do we have those in New Jersey?—and the steady note of the foghorn, though it is clear.
You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather’d, wooded, river or marine Nature generally. I repeat it—don’t want to know too exactly, or the reasons why. My own notes have been written off-hand in the latitude of middle New Jersey. Though they describe what I saw—what appear’d to me—I dare say the expert ornithologist, botanist or entomologist will detect more than one slip in them.
—WALT WHITMAN, Specimen Days