Upstream

by Mary Oliver

  One afternoon I was aboard the whale-watching vessel the Dolphin when the big boat steamed past an ocean sunfish, an enormous bulbous affair, its head scarcely distinguishable from the blown body. It floated easily and without a sound; it could have been asleep.

  The flounder makes a pretty supper. So does mackerel—a squamation of snow, midnight, and the blue of a stormy sky. The sea clam, when you clean it—when you cut the hoof from the center of the body—flinches back, the pink flesh tightens against the knife. Mussels open without a sound in the steam, but they make a curious sighing sound when you first reach for them on the rocks; perhaps the picker’s shadow tells them, the darkness deepening, that their lives are almost over. Nothing tastes so good as the quahog, opened as soon as found, on the flats, in the cold gray light. You cut it loose from the filmy underpinning, slide it onto the tongue. The gulls know how it tastes. They see you do this and turn in midair. With a sudden skirl they drop, tuning their white feathers to swift descent, and stand about you on the sand, and their faces beg.

  _______

  I have seen bluefish arc and sled across the water, an acre of them, leaping and sliding back under the water, then leaping again, toothy, terrible, lashed by hunger. The fish they are after, a blood-smeared cloud, are driven sometimes in their search for escape onto the very sand. Porgies, perhaps. With chunks missing from their bodies. Half bodies, still leaping.

  Striped bass may be eighty pounds, a hundred pounds. I have never seen them in the sea, but I have seen them iced and boxed, or roped to the fishermen’s trucks, like the bodies of deer.

  Other fish I have seen by chance: cod, the mild whiting. Now and then a dead goosefish on the beach, all of it but the enormous gate of its mouth sagging under the hot sun. Once, a tautog. But, again, I remember that the fisherman in this case, who had hoped for something else, left it on the sand. Once, a sea robin, in a small boy’s pail.

  Squid occasionally beach themselves, sputtering and rolling in the swash. They take more time to clean than to gather. They taste like chicken, but are richer by far: the taste of five chickens in each tubular body.

  Little skates are common. Fishermen dislike them, for they take the bait frequently, and break lines, and use up time, and flop dismally on the sand when released. I have seen fishermen standing on their wide, crenulated wings in order to rip back the hook that dragged the skate forth in the first place. I have seen few fishermen bother to slide them again into the water. They die, and gulls eat them, or the young eagles, when we are fortunate enough to be visited by those great, dark-feathered birds. The strange face of the skate is haunting, and perhaps it haunts the fishermen, too—the human-looking, spit-releasing mouth, and the sudden motion of the thick eyelids as they descend and rise again over the bulging, death-sick eyes. I hope so. Their soft white bellyskin is plucked open in an hour by the rapacious beaks of the gulls. But their cartilage frames waste away slowly. Like small kites they drift on the tides to the upper beach, where they endure a long time.

  Merciless, too, are the fishermen to the supple black dogfish. One finds them, horribly gaffed, or hacked in half, floating out of the water.

  But not every fisherman is so knife-quick. Once I was on a boat when a fisherman—a Provincetown man—hauled in an appalling-looking creature: an enormous spider crab, like an angel of desolation, with a domed body a foot across and nearly as high. The long limbs hung limp and were stuck with bits of seaweed and shells, water sluiced out of the vague centrality of its body, between its forelimbs the eyes gazed humbly. The body shell, too, was festooned with fragments of weed and flotsam. The spider crab dresses its body to make a camouflage, reaching back with a limb and daubing itself with whatever materials are lying about. The fisherman sighed and dropped the mess to the bottom of the boat. He knelt, and worked at the hook. “Never take from the sea what you don’t use,” he said, and stood up, and swung the crab over the gunnel.

  _______

  And once, too, I gave something back. A friend left us a bluefish. I went down to the edge of the water to clean it. When I had it scaled and slipped the sharp knife into the bellyflesh, it broke open, not from any carelessness of mine but from a fine necessity; the bluefish had been feeding on small fish—sand eels—and its stomach, like a red and tensile purse, was stuffed full. Pieces of sand eels fell out, and among them maybe a half dozen were intact, squirming, unhurt in fact. So quickly, without a moment’s warning, does the miraculous swerve and point to us, demanding that we be its willing servant. Swifter than thought my hands scooped them, and plunged them into the cold water, and the film of their siblings’ death fell from them. For an instant they throbbed in place, too dazed to understand that they could swim back into life—and then they uncurled, like silver leaves, and flashed away.

  The Ponds

  Great blue herons, like angels carved by Giacometti, are common. The edges of Clapps Pond or Great Pond are good places to expect them. Occasionally they stay all winter, and I cannot imagine they have an easy time of it. We get little deep snow, for it melts usually in the salt-laden air between us and the mainland. But the ponds freeze, and the marshes. Green herons are also common; every year a pair nests somewhere along the edge of Little Sister Pond.

  American egrets come, more often than not in late summer but sometimes earlier. They are a stark white in the intensely green salt marsh at the west end of town. Snowy egrets appear from time to time and prowl the edges of the larger ponds. They hunt with small, silky motions. Their long necks bend a little to the right, a little to the left, while their eyes stare with a mad concentration into the shallow water.

  Occasionally a little blue heron, an adult bird, appears in the thick waters of summer, which stir fitfully under the spindles of its legs.

  Very early one morning, in late summer, twelve glossy ibis, flashing dark lights of purple and black, strolled the edges of Blackwater Pond.

  _______

  The center of my landscape is a place called Beech Forest. On this sandy peninsula, the tall beeches with their cool, thick, lime-colored leaves are rare, and their deep, slow lives are recognized in this name-place. Most of these ponds have traditional names. Those without, I have named. Why not? The ponds are uprisings from the water table, shallow and shape-shifting as sand from the dunes blows into them, creating mass here, causing the water to spread in a generally southeast direction, away from the prevailing winter winds which day after day bite and rasp and shovel up the great weight of the sand.

  _______

  There are pickerel in the ponds. Other fish too—I do not know their names. But I have seen them, on misty mornings, leaping from the pewter water. They are full of bones and I do not know anyone who eats them, though fishermen come in the spring and cast for them. They throw them back, or leave them, dead or alive, on the shores.

  The cattails begin to rise in April; toward the end of that month of general upwelling, the stalks are thick and high enough for one to gather the pale green nutritious plaits. Golden club rises too, especially along the edges of Blackwater Pond. The wood ducks are fond of it, and the muskrats.

  The frogs begin to sing any time from late March to the second week in April, and they will be noisy and lusty until the end of the month, both in the ponds proper and in the even more shallow marshes and ephemeral pools.

  In April, the snapping turtles wake from their long sleep. Sometimes they will float awhile, in a lonely exhaustion, on the surface of the pond, before a vigor fills their powerful bodies again. Once, on the narrow path between Great Pond and Little Sister Pond, my dog lingered, then came along slowly, mouthing something. He spit into my hand an enormous, curved claw. I knew immediately what it was. Some snapping turtles I have seen had heads like the heads of muskrats, and feet the size of a one-year-old child. One, a few years ago, emerged gargantuan and wrinkled among the pond lilies and slouched—its gassy breath coming and going softly, its pouchy throat expanding and contract
ing—across the muddy shallows. I didn’t see it kill anything. Sometimes we get just enough, not too much. Did He who made the lily make you too? I said to it, looking into its unflickering eyes. You know it, the old shag-face answered, and slid back into the pond’s black oils.

  More young geese and ducks vanish from the water than live to flex their wings. I have found the bones of birds near the dens of foxes, but it is primarily the snapping turtles, watching from beneath the pond surface for the leaflike feet of the young birds to go paddling by, who contrive these disappearances.

  Painted turtles are here too, and are common. Also I have seen spotted turtles, in Blackwater Pond, or, at egg-laying time, trudging uphill from the water, or through the damp leaves around the pond.

  _______

  An aerial view makes sense of the ponds—they are lined up and run from northeast to southwest. As wind and tide moved glacial debris from what is now the outer shore of Truro, and shoaled and packed it into the sweet curve which finishes this cape, an inner depression was formed, and therein lies one of the ponds. As the cape thickened, this depression readjusted, and another “eye” was created, and another pond. Let us send someone back in a few hundred thousand years to see what new ponds may have curled into birth. Unless, of course, the mechanisms have reversed, and there be nothing at all to report but the rising, unopposable sea.

  _______

  Mallards are here, and black ducks. The mallards stay on the ponds, the black ducks spend time on the bay as well as on fresh water. Blue-winged teal migrate through, and green-winged. I have seen green-winged with young, but the dreamlike blue-winged, with the thin white moon on his face, I see only in the spring and the fall. I saw wood ducks here for the first time in 1977. There are now many nesting pairs.

  Ring-necked ducks appear from time to time during migration, and then fly on. Red-breasted mergansers sometimes come over to the ponds from the salt water. In 1985, a shoveler spent a spring morning on Blackwater Pond. Once, in late March 1991, a single hooded merganser appeared on Oak-Head Pond.

  Winter ducks on the ponds include bufflehead, many of them, and goldeneyes, and coots, and pied-billed grebes. They all stay well into April.

  In May, and you can trust your life to this, loons will fly over the woods and the ponds—the town too—crying, in the early morning.

  Both black-backed gulls and herring gulls come to the ponds and splash vigorously, to wash the salt away. Occasionally, in summer, least terns will fly over to Great Pond, and feed there.

  The Canada geese—not the flocks that pass without a missed beat overhead, but the nesting pairs and the adolescents that stay throughout the year—are partly wild, partly tame. They are noisy in the air, secretive on the ponds while nesting is going on. Some years there are many young geese, other years there are few. Ask the turtles about it.

  One spring I visited every day with a family of young geese, among which there was one whose wings did not develop. The rest of its body grew, the other feathers sprang from their sheaths and lengthened. But the wings remained small and unfeathered. It vanished, one night, to the oblivion of the ill-made, nature’s dark throat, try again. The rest of them soon lost their shyness of me, and would climb over my body as I lay beside the pond or wait for me under the pine trees and leap out, a cloud of gray laughers, when I appeared.

  By August, the young geese are strong fliers, and the parents take them from the ponds down to the marshes and the shore, where some of them will spend the winter near the salt water. Others fly off, looking for new homelands.

  _______

  In spring the water of the pond is like blue wool, endlessly tossing. The heavy, cold water has sunk to the black bottom of the pond, and struck by this weight, the bottom water stirs and rises, filling the pond’s basins with wild nutrition. It is an annual event, necessary to the appetite of the year. In late spring, the green grasses and reeds break through, and the first foils of the lilies. The wind grows calmer.

  I sit at the edge of Great Pond. The morning light strikes the mist and begins to dispel it. On the pond two geese are floating. Beneath them their reflected images glide; between them five goslings are paddling. The goslings have only recently emerged from the grassy hummock of birth and already they are slipping along eagerly on this glassy road. As instantly as they know hunger, they begin to reach out for duckweed, insects, the tips of grasses.

  Occasionally I lean forward and gaze into the water. The water of a pond is a mirror of roughness and honesty—it gives back not only my own gaze, but the nimbus of the world trailing into the picture on all sides. The swallows, singing a little as they fly back and forth across the pond, are flying therefore over my shoulders, and through my hair. A turtle passes slowly across the muddy bottom, touching my cheekbone. If at this moment I heard a clock ticking, would I remember what it was, what it signified?

  _______

  It is summer now, the geese have grown, the reeds are a bearded green flocculence, full of splinters of light. Across the pond, the purple loosestrife (alien here, but what does that mean—it is recklessly gorgeous) has come into bloom. A fox steps from the woods, its shoulders are bright, its narrow chest is as white as milk. The wild eyes stare at the geese. Daintily it walks to the pond’s edge, calmly it drinks. Then the quick head lifts and turns, with a snap, and once again the geese are appraised. Perhaps it looks toward me too. But I am utterly quiet, and half-hidden. The wind is on my side—I am a stone with its feet in the mud. While I watch, the fox lies down beside the purple flowers. For a while it watches the geese, then the lithe body shrugs to a position of comfort among the leaves and the blossoms, and it sleeps.

  Sister Turtle

  1.

  For some years now I have eaten almost no meat. Though, occasionally, I crave it. It is a continually interesting subject of deep ambiguity. The poet Shelley believed his body would at last be the total and docile servant of his intellect if he ate nothing but leaves and fruit—and I am devoted to Shelley. But I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider Nature without this appetite—this other-creature-consuming appetite—is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past. Still, in my personal life, I am often stricken with a wish to be beyond all that. I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.

  _______

  At the edge of the land lie the watery palaces—the ocean shore, the salt marsh, the black-bellied pond. And in them and upon them: clams, mussels, fish of all shapes and sizes, snails, turtles, frogs, eels, crabs, lobsters, worms, all crawling and diving and squirming among the cattails, sea rocks, seaweeds, sea pickles, spartina, lamb’s-quarters, sour grass, arrowhead, mallow. Something eats each of these, each of these eats something else. This is our world. The orange mussel has a blue-black fringe along its body, and a heart and a lung, and a stomach. The scallop as it snaps its way through the water, when the east wind blows, gazes around with its dozens of pale blue eyes. The clam, sensing the presence of your hands, or the approach of the iron tine, presses deeper into the sand. Just where does self-awareness begin and end? With the june bug? With the shining, task-ridden ant? With the little cloud of gnats that drifts over the pond? I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.

  All this, as prelude to the turtles.

  2.

  They come, lumbering, from the many ponds. They dare the dangers of path, dogs, the highway, the accumulating heat that their bodies cannot regulate, or the equally stunning, always possible cold.

  Tak
e one, then. She has reached the edge of the road, now she slogs up the impossible hill. When she slides back she rests for a while, then trundles forward again. Emerging wet from the glittering caves of the pond, she travels in a coat of glass and dust. Where the sand clings thickly the mosquitoes, that hover about her like a gray veil, are frustrated. Not about her eyes, though, for as she blinks the sand falls; so at her tough, old face-skin those winged needles hang until their bodies fill, like tiny vials, with her bright blood. Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond.

  Once, in spring, I saw the rhapsodic prelude to this enterprise of nest-building: two huge snapping turtles coupling. As they floated on the surface of the pond their occasional motions set them tumbling and heaving over and around again and yet again. The male’s front feet gripped the rim of the female’s shell as he pressed his massive body tightly against hers. For most of the afternoon they floated so, like a floundered craft—splashing and drifting through the murky water, or hanging motionless among the rising carpets of the pond lilies.

  _______

  On these first hot days of summer, anywhere along the edges of these ponds or on the slopes of the dunes, I come upon the traveling turtles. I am glad to see them and sorry at the same time—my presence may be a disturbance that sends them back to the ponds before the egg laying has been accomplished, and what help is this to the world? Sometimes they will make the attempt again, sometimes they will not. If not, the eggs will dissolve back into other substances, inside their bodies.