Читать книгу Now I Remember: Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist - Thornton Waldo Burgess - Страница 11
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Sand Dollars
It was my first dollar, minted by the sea, a sand dollar, a Cape Cod sand dollar. Previously I had seen one in the hands of a playmate, a boy slightly older than myself. He had graciously allowed me to look at it but would not let me touch it. He had boasted of his wealth. He had taunted me because I had none and never had had one.
Boyish envy and the taunts drove me to long, patient, persistent, careful searches along the beach from the edge of the receding tide back to the face of the barrier sand dunes between the beach and the salt marshes beyond which lay the village. So at long last, far out on a bar of shining sand exposed by the ebbing tide, I found my dollar.
I picked it up in small boy eagerness and wonder. What was it really? Where had it come from? What was it good for? To my exploring fingers it felt hard, like shell, yet it had a different feeling. Back on the beach I showed it to another boy.
“Huh!” he exclaimed scornfully. “It’s just a ol’ sand dollar. I’ve found lots of ’em! ’Tisn’t good for anything. ’Twon’t buy nothin’.”
Subdued in spirit, I took my prize home. When I asked why if it was a dollar I could buy nothing with it, I was laughed at. It was explained to me that “sand dollar” was merely a name given to any one of several forms of flat sea urchins, perhaps because of the shape, round like a silver dollar. This that I had found was a cousin of the familiar urchins shaped like small doughnuts of shell covered with prickly spines. I had often found these.
“What good is a ol’ dollar that won’t buy anything?” I protested.
“True enough, you cannot buy anything with it, but even if you could it would be nothing compared with what it has already bought,” said my smiling mentor.
I gasped, “You mean it has already been spent?”
“Yes, in a way, a way you cannot understand now but will later,” was the reply.
There the matter ended, for it was quite over my head. Anyway it was time for dinner and, as is the way with boys, appetite for food was greater than appetite for knowledge.
That was long, long ago. But to this day whenever I see a sand dollar in the spoils of a young beachcomber, a window in memory opens. Looking through it I see a long, curved white beach between irregular dunes of shining sand and the white-flecked blue waters of Cape Cod Bay. It is low tide. A long bar of wet golden sand angles far out. It is the very bar on which when I was five years old the great whale was grounded.
Beyond the bar up the coast I see a jumble of fully exposed black rocks where seals haul out and bark in the sun, the sound blending with the screams of gulls and the strident voices of terns at their fishing. A flock of slim-legged little sandpipers—“peeps” we called them—run at the water’s edge in quest of what the receding tide may have left for them. Fiddler crabs scuttle for their holes in the sand. A hermit crab hastily withdraws into the snail-shell house it has been carrying on its back and closes the door, postponing for a time the search for a new and larger house to accommodate increasing growth. I pick up and drag a devil’s apron string from a heap of kelp stranded on the beach. At my feet are small holes in the sand and from one of these spurts a small stream of water. Now I know where to dig for clams. My lips are salt with the kiss of the sea wind.
The sand dollar of long ago could buy nothing. Instead it has given me freely of rich treasure in memory ever since.
Of what the first real dollars I ever earned bought, I cannot remember a single item. But what I got from them in the earning I remember, and the memory is very precious. When in early summer I see the first baskets of berries, blue as the summer sky, another window opens. I am in Great Hollow, fire-swept and purged some two or three years back. Now the soft green of new verdure, hiding the ugly black scars of scorched earth, covers the Hollow and low hills surrounding it. Here and there rises a gray or black ghost of a tree, a monument to disaster man-wrought through carelessness or criminal intent.
The green mantle with which Nature has covered the scars left by the red terror is made even more beautiful by the irregular mosaic designs in blue of the low-growing berries. As I fill my pail with the largest and the bluest, a towhee, often called cheewink, cries from the top of a low scrub oak, “Drink your tea! Drink your tea!”
A red-tailed hawk with widespread wings, so high yet so big that my untrained eyes are sure it is King Eagle himself, rides in soaring circles, the currents of warm air rising from the sun-baked surface of the earth. A ruffed grouse (I call it partridge) flops at my feet in seeming broken-wing helplessness. I know that somewhere near are fascinating little chicks in soft brown, heeding mother’s warning cluck and now flattened close to the good earth beneath the brown dead leaves their own pretty coats so nearly match in color. They will not move until mother signals all is well.
A small green snake crawls sluggishly from under my busy fingers. His coat is dull, lifeless, and seemingly a bit loose. I know that under the bushes he has been trying to crawl out of it. He needs help and I give it. Like a woman’s long glove, the unbroken old skin pulls off inside out. It is paper-thin, transparent, and every scale is outlined. The new coat beneath it is lovely and vivid green. My small serpent is a completely changed and lively brother of the wild. I let him go. He glides away.
Cranberries in the marketplace or on the table always open still another window. I see the rich dark carpet of the bog and on it a picturesque, interesting, and delightful local phase of New England life that if not now altogether of the past soon will be. The arbutus (we called them Mayflowers) I picked in the spring, and the wild grapes and beach plums gathered in the fall for small sums added uncounted riches to the store of precious memories. Even now after more than threescore years I could go to the exact spot where once blossomed the earliest and the pinkest Mayflowers, to the very bush, if it still survives, that bore exceptionally large beach plums, and to the distant, partly fallen old stone wall smothered under the tangled vines that also climbed the neighboring tree and bore the biggest bunches of rich purple fruit to make the finest grape jelly in the world.
Minted dollars may buy pleasure, never happiness; flattery, never friendship; servility, never respect; excitement, never tranquillity; envy, never admiration; tolerance, never affection; notoriety, never honor; hate, never love; fine raiment, never character.
Sand dollars will buy nothing, nothing at all, but they may enrich life beyond measure. They are still to be found on old Cape Cod, but also along all walks in life by those who seek them.
