Beyond Your Doorstep

by Hal Borland

  Every Summer comes a day—usually two or three days—when we know it is useless to go fishing. But we often go out in the boat, just the same, simply to marvel at the incredible fecundity of nature. Those are the days when the May flies emerge. The scientific name of the May fly is Ephemera, and it couldn’t be more apt. In their larval and nymph stages, these astonishing little insects live in the mud or under water for at least a year, sometimes for two or even three years, but when they finally molt into winged creatures they have a very brief life, some of them only a few hours, some a day or two. This life span is still in some dispute, and one researcher has kept winged May flies alive several weeks. But in the open they appear to emerge with wings, fly for a few hours in what seems to the human observers to be absolute ecstasy, and die. They don’t eat, but they mate, on the wing, and they lay eggs. There are a number of species, but all look much alike to the naked eye, all indulge in ecstatic flight, and all have brief lives.

  We never know when the day of the May flies will come, but we do know when it is here. The water is alive with the nymphs, tiny creatures even smaller than mosquito larvae. They come to the surface, swimming madly, and seem to dapple the water, make it almost dance. Fish swarm, breaking the surface, even leaping, as they feed, for these nymphs are a special treat. Within minutes after the swarming nymphs appear there is a host of what look like tiny gray-white moths. What has happened is that the nymphs have molted, there on the water’s surface, and the winged May flies have taken to the air. But this change is not yet complete. These new creatures have still another molt to undergo, which makes them unique among the insects. They flutter ashore or to the overhanging bushes, rest there briefly, and molt once more. And then the true May flies surge back into the air as though in exultant triumph. Often we see the nymphs on the water in mid-morning, see the first winged stage flutter ashore by noon, and by late afternoon see the mad dance of fully adult May flies, like shimmering clouds. They swirl, sweep upward, surge here and there, like mist caught in a whimsical breeze. I have had them sweep around my head in such a swarm that I had to hold my nose to keep from breathing them in. In the last hours of daylight I have seen them climb high and catch the rays of the sun after it has set and look like a silver cloud, twinkling and ever changing. If it happens to be a moonlit night, they can look like a shower of gold dust in the air, their filmy wings reflecting the moonlight.

  That evening we watch the screens and close the doors tightly, and we put on no outside lights. May flies are strongly phototropic, can’t resist light. One such evening we had to go out and, out of habit, I left the porch light on. When we returned a few hours later the whole porch floor was white with May flies and the globe on the porch light was full to the brim with their bodies, thousands of them dead on the altar of an incandescent lamp. The next morning after the first flight of the May flies the river is still boiling with feeding fish, for millions of May flies have died during the night and fallen into the water. The stream sometimes is gray with them in the eddies. A couple of days and it is all over, the flight finished, the brief life of the May flies ended for another year. But we know there is little use fishing for another week. The fish are replete, gorged on May-fly larvae and winged May flies. But for a few days before the flight and for several weeks afterward the fish, the bass and trout particularly, will rise to such dry flies as the Gray Drake, which imitates the May fly.

  There are other insects of which we are well aware. In Spring there are midges, black and biting little pests, and there are black flies, scourge of the North woods but no more plentiful here than mosquitoes. There are the big, spotted deer flies, which bite like tigers. There are the colorful but harmless dragonflies and damsel flies. There are, on occasion, small swarms of Monarch butterflies over the river, undoubtedly lured to its banks by the fields of milkweed that grow here and there.

  The river, any river, is all these things, all these forms of life. But it still is essentially water, flowing water. That is its ultimate lure for me. Water and wind are the freest of all the elements around us, the least tamed. We dam rivers and pollute them, we try to confine them in dikes, and we shunt brooks one way or another to reclaim a field or pasture, but we never really subdue flowing water. Water will have its own way eventually.

  And the age-old lure of flowing water entrances us from the time we set toy waterwheels in a draining gutter until we sit beside a river, rheumatic in joint and old and frail in body, and see the parable of life in the seaward flow. As long as there are hills upon this earth there will be brooks and rivers, and as long as there is human life there will be men to watch verdant Spring come to those rivers and their valleys, lush Summer come to the humid river bottoms, Fall sweep color like flame and flow like pigment, Winter snow and ice mask but never halt the flow of living water.

  What makes a brook or river so special? It is useless to try to answer the question, for he who asks it will never understand the answer. Rivers and brooks are special simply because they are brooks, and they are rivers.

  Chapter 7

  The Miniature World

  Tantalizingly near at hand, just beyond the curve of a lens, is another world, infinitely varied and filled with amazing beauty. The man with a hand-glass in his pocket has the key to discovery of a whole new universe even though he never leaves his own backyard.

  JUST BEYOND THE WORLD of the obvious lies another world, the world of the miniature, with brand-new vistas for the confined or the lazy nature watcher. It is the world just beyond the reach of normal vision. I catch glimpses of it often, but with my naked eyes I can see only enough of it to tantalize me. With a pocket-size magnifying glass I can enter it as though I were walking into a Lilliput world.

  I first discovered this world’s fascination many years ago. I had discarded a broken flashlight but saved the crude, molded-glass lens, being a magpie sort of person. I put it into my pocket, felt it there when I went outdoors a little later, and wondered how good it would be as a burning glass. I tried it, scorched a hole in a dead leaf, and then happened to see a head of lawn clover blossom through it. Suddenly that tuft of everyday clover was a whole bouquet of flowers. I studied it for ten minutes through that crude lens, of no more than four power, and had my first glimpse of what a good glass might reveal.

  Impatient to see more, I took the lens from my camera. The difference between that fine lens and the bit of molded glass from the flashlight was as dawn and midday. I spent an hour exploring with it. But the camera lens, made for quite another purpose, was not really satisfactory. So I went to an optical store and bought my first hand lens. It happened to be a Scelsi Doublet of ten power, a pair of polished three-quarter-inch lenses set in a one-inch aluminum barrel and pivoted in a housing to protect the lens. I still have that glass, which to me seems ideal. Also available are pocket glasses with dual lenses which can be used separately or combined for a variety of magnifications. Either type is excellent.

  With such a glass one can start anywhere, but I would start in the dooryard with a head of white clover, just as I did long ago. Focus the glass on that little tuft of bloom and you will see that it really is a closely packed bunch of what appear to be half-opened sweet peas. The individual florets are only about a quarter of an inch long, but under the glass they look ten times that big. The petals are smooth, not ruffled as in a sweet pea, and the whole flower is simplified. The petals are clear, creamy white, and beautifully curved. Staring through the glass, you seem to hold an exotic corsage in your hand. Remove the glass, blink your eyes to clear them, and it is only a head of white clover again, quite insignificant. But for a little while you were there in that other world, seeing it in the proportions you might if you were the size of a rabbit.

  Pluck a head of red clover, the kind that farmers plant in hay fields and that escapes to roadsides almost everywhere. This is at least twice as big as the clover head from the lawn, and to the naked eye it looks magenta-pink. Under the glass it is another bunch of sweet peas, these
with pink petals closely lined with hair-fine markings of deep crimson. These petals, too, are not ruffled, but simple, smooth, and beautifully curved. The outer one stands like a tall, curved Spanish comb behind the inner petals, which are shaped something like twin pink clam shells. They guard the stamens and ovary, which can be seen through the narrow slit between the shell-petals. That inner sanctuary contains the pollen and the nectar. To reach it, an insect must force the guardian shell-petals apart. Neither honey bees nor butterflies are strong enough to do this readily. It takes a bumblebee to do that. So the bumblebees are the agents of pollination for red clover, as the Australians learned when they first tried to grow this plant. It grew well enough in Australian soil, but it failed to produce seed. Australia had no native bumblebees. When American bumblebees were imported and turned loose over the clover fields, the problem was solved. The bumblebees pollinated the clover and became welcome and successful immigrants. Looking through the glass at a head of red clover one can understand why.

  The roadside will provide several other clovers for examination under the glass, since clover is widespread and has a great variety of forms. Beside my road I find the fuzzy little heads of rabbit-foot clover, the tiny yellow heads of hop clover, and both white and yellow sweet clover, which grows tall, has only a few leaves, and bears its blossoms singly up the stem. Now and then I also find a bushy, full-foliaged clover of the sweet-clover type which has purple flowers. It is alfalfa, escaped from some nearby hay field. All the clover florets are substantially the same shape, that approximation of the sweet pea. Other members of the clover family in my area include vetch, partridge pea, and tick trefoil, whose little seed pods break into tiny triangular stick-tights when they ripen. In any Autumn walk I come home with some of those trefoil pods clinging to my clothes with their minute hairy hooks.

  Before going farther afield, pick a dandelion blossom. If your lawn is like mine there will be a few dandelions in bloom from April till November, though they pass their urgency of bloom by mid-June. When I look at a dandelion head through the glass I get the feeling that I am looking at a particularly beautiful quilled dahlia or a brand-new type of golden chrysanthemum. But the glass also reveals a maze of green-yellow stamens among the golden petals, hair-thin and each with a two-pronged tip, the prongs curving downward like the traditional horns of a goat. There are hundreds of these stamens, as many as there are petals. Actually, what we think of as petals are individual florets, for the dandelion is one of the composite family, the members of which bear their blossoms in compact communities that we think of as single flowers.

  It takes patience and steady fingers, but one can remove a single floret from a dandelion head and under the glass see that it is a tube that flattens out into a single straplike petal; and out of that tube rises the greenish, prong-tipped stamen. It takes a stronger glass than my ten-power to see, but down in that tube lies the ovary from which the seed will eventually mature. And clinging to the base of that floret-tube are the beginnings of the silky hairs that will become the airy fluff of the ripe dandelion head, the fluff on which the seed will ride the air. All this is packed in a floret less than three-quarter inch long and smaller in diameter than a common pin. Some of it can be seen under the ten-power glass.

  Pause at the edge of the garden and find a flower of that ubiquitous member of the pink family, common chickweed. It should be easy to find because chickweed is in bloom, even in New England, almost every month of the year. That is why it is so difficult to get rid of. Chickweed produces seed before most other plants have wakened in the Spring and long after they have closed shop for the year in the Fall.

  The chickweed blossom is only about a quarter inch across, and to the naked eye it appears to have ten white petals backed by five long, pointed green sepals. Under the glass it looks big as a daisy, and those milky white petals number only five, as they should in any member of the pink family; but each one is slit almost to the base, as are the much larger flowers of another roadside weed of the same family, the bladder campion. At the base of each chickweed petal stand two stamens, their shafts thin as hairs and faintly greenish-white. At the stamen tips are the anthers, looking like lead-gray eggs lying on their sides, precariously balanced. In the center of the blossom is the ovary, faintly grooved in five sections, and from the top of its pineapple-shaped fatness rises the five-pronged style, curved back fountainlike. So here is a perfect flower, in all ways typical of the rule-of-five that prevails in the pink family. Five petals, ten stamens, a five-part ovary with a five-pronged style, all set in a five-sepal base. And the whole of it only a quarter inch across.

  Out at the roadside one probably can find the bladder campion just mentioned, which blooms from June through August. The flower is much like the chickweed blossom, though large enough to see all details clearly with the naked eye. The campion, however, hides its ovary and styles in a fat green “bladder” the size of a boy’s marble just beneath the petals. It takes an insistent bee to force its way in to reach the nectar there and pollinize the flower. Another of the pinks, the little crimson-petaled Deptford pink, should be somewhere at the roadside, too. A glass will reveal some of its details, but it can be appreciated with the naked eye. And bouncing Bet, sometimes called soapwort, certainly will be growing not far away. Bouncing Bet grows everywhere and blooms even after first frost. Its typical pink-family flowers are about an inch across, come in clusters at the top of the plant, and are white tinged with pink or lavender. Chickweed is blood-cousin of all these, but it takes a glass to prove it unless the observer has far better eyesight than I have.

  The roadside or the edge of the meadow will provide a head of Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot. The fluffy, flat-topped head of white is obviously complex but doesn’t seem mysterious. When one looks at it through the glass, however, the aspect changes. The foamy-looking cluster is made up of dozens of individual clusters, and each small cluster consists of a miniature of the whole head, which consists literally of a whole bouquet of small white blossoms. Single out one of those individual florets. It has five milky white petals, each notched like the mitten leaf of a sassafras tree. I have examined these florets many times and have yet to find any order or system in which the clefts in those miniature petals are arranged. They seem to be wholly at random, some to the right, some to the left. From the base of each petal rises a single stamen, its pollen-bearing anther cinnamon-brown. In the center of the flower is the ovary, a frosty white bead with twin stigmas sticking straight up. All this is in an individual floret less than one-eighth inch across. Incidentally, the “ruby” that is supposed to be in the center of each head is sometimes missing and sometimes appears double. It is a deep red floret shaped exactly like the white florets of the head, even to the lobed petals.

  The casual eye sees only that lacy head of white bloom. The ruby blossom usually found in the center may require a second look, but still with the unaided eye. Those cinnamon-brown stamen tips, though, those notched and curled petals, those twin-pronged ovaries, are practically secret. I never see them until I look through the glass.

  Go farther afield, into the meadow, and find a daisy, the common oxeye daisy of the field with its egg-yellow center and its fringe of white rays or petals. Here again is a whole community of individual florets, for the daisy too is a composite. That yellow center is a close-packed mass of tight yellow tube-flowers, each complete with ovary and stamens. The white “petals” around the edge are also individual flowers, each with a single long, straplike white petal. These ray flowers, however, have no stamens, only ovaries and pistils. They are female flowers, not bisexual as are the florets that make up the yellow center.

  Choose any of the composites, a sunflower, an aster, a hawkweed, a chickory, and the same arrangement holds true—a mass of individual florets forming the center, a fringe of ray flowers with long petals forming the blossom’s so-called petals.

  Remarkable among the composites, to me at least, are the goldenrods. Examine a plume of golde
nrod and you see that it is a whole community of minute flowers arranged along the branching stems at the tip of the plant. But that only begins to describe the goldenrod plume. Each of those individual blossoms is itself a composite flower, like a daisy. Every one of those tiny floral tufts, in most instances less than a quarter inch across, is itself a whole community of florets. Here, indeed, one must use the glass to begin to see the secrets, for there are mysteries within mysteries, florets within florets. Pluck one of those minute flowers, as they seem to be—there may be fifty or more to a single goldenrod spray—and examine it under the glass. It has ray petals like those of a daisy, perhaps only four or five, perhaps as many as nine. Those ray petals, just like the white petals of a daisy, enclose a head of even smaller individual florets like the yellow center of a daisy. And here is a place where the ten-power glass is inadequate. It can only hint at the detail, the astonishing order and organization of those individual florets, each of which is a slight fraction of an inch long and smaller in diameter than a pin. Each one has stamens and an ovary, and the stamens produce pollen and the ovaries produce seed.

  Incidentally, goldenrod pollen almost never produces hay fever. That allergy usually is caused by wind-blown pollen, such as that from ragweed and various grasses. The pollen of goldenrod is sticky, almost never carried by the wind. Unless one deliberately sniffs a plume of goldenrod held close to the nose, it is most unlikely that one will get the pollen where it might cause trouble. Even an allergic person can walk through a whole field of goldenrod and escape trouble if he doesn’t lean over and sniff the blossoms. But a hay field in bloom or a roadside patch of ragweed in bloom should be avoided by susceptible persons.