Читать книгу Now I Remember: Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist - Thornton Waldo Burgess - Страница 3
ОглавлениеStriped Whales
A biography is a life history as seen by others. An autobiography is a life history seen through the subject’s own eyes. The one is written objectively. The other is introspective, lacking in true perspective. This I am writing is neither one nor the other, simply a record and review of things and events that memory brings to the surface now and again, and such part as I feel they have had in molding my life through more than fourscore years. It is simply a record by me, of me, for me, and perhaps of no real interest to anyone but me.
I was born on old Cape Cod on January 14, 1874. To a certain extent man is a reflection of his environment. It exerts an influence on his character and development that he cannot escape. He may not be aware of it. He may scoff at the idea of it. But it is there, working through his subconsciousness all through life. Especially is this true of the environment of his youth. If this has been spent in a fixed locality, say the land of his birth, he is for better or worse as much a product of his native soil as other living things that spring from it. The atmosphere of his surroundings is an intangible but powerful factor in his growth and development.
I am a Cape Codder by birth and by inheritance through a long unbroken line of ancestors back to Thomas Burgess, one of the founders of the oldest town on the Cape, Sandwich. Considerably more than half a century ago I left the Cape, yet in a sense I have never left it. It has been said that Cape Codders by birth rather than by adoption have salt in their hair, sand between their toes, and herring blood in their veins. Of these they never wholly rid themselves, nor do they want to.
Be this as it may, it is true that those who have spent the greater part of their lives far from the Cape return to it at intervals. They must. It is the homing urge of the herring that brooks no denial. They are subject to fits of nostalgia for which there is no known cure. It may be brought on by the high whine of wind around a corner of buildings; by the fierce spate of rain against a window; by the honking of wild geese in the airways above the city. Others may boast of their ancestry but the pride of the born Cape Codder is the land of his birth.
In this there is something elementary, something of pounding surf, of shifting sands, the taste of salt on the lips, the flash of sun on distant dunes, the mingled smells of marsh muck, salt hay, and stranded fish, the mewing of gulls, the whistling of shore birds, the restless rise and fall of the tides, the silvery gleam of fresh waters in emerald settings, the resinous odor of scrub pines. I am sure that no man who was born and grew up on the Cape ever doubts that having created the rest of the world, God made Cape Cod and called it blessed.
It is a land where the wind-whipped sand of the shore bites and stings, the beach grass cuts, and the facts of life are hard; but where the sky is blue, the air is soft, and the harshness of life is tempered by faith—it is where the real and the unreal meet, and the impossible becomes probable. One can believe anything on the Cape, a blessed relief from the doubts and uncertainties of the present-day turmoil of the outer world. If in truth there is a sea serpent, sooner or later it will be cast up on the shores of Cape Cod. If there are mermaids—when I am on the Cape I believe in them devotedly—it is there they will be found. I myself have seen there a red-and-white whale, striped like a barber’s pole. And if a striped whale, why not a sea serpent and mermaids? Why not indeed?
In this atmosphere I was born and spent my boyhood. From it I have never wholly escaped. I can still close my eyes and see sea serpents and mermaids and striped whales. Though in my writing I strive not to deviate from the prosaic facts as Mother Nature presents them, I cannot avoid seeing them myself in the enchanted atmosphere in which I made my first field observation and whales became red-and-white for all time. Looking back through the years, I wonder if it was not then that the pattern of my life was set.
It was a Sunday morning in March, 1879. The church bells—Congregational, Methodist and Unitarian—were calling the faithful to worship. But this morning the faithful were few, for the sea also was calling and the voice of the sea was more persuasive than the sweetly solemn tones of the bells. A whale had come ashore on the beach directly opposite the village. Sunday worship was a weekly privilege, but a stranded whale the size of this one was an epochal event.
A day or two before, two whales had been harpooned off Provincetown, which lies many miles straight across the bay from Sandwich. Both had broken away, but were thought to be fatally wounded. They had headed inside the bay. All the fishing hamlets on the inside of the Cape had been alerted to watch for the stricken monsters. One had been sighted off Sandwich. It had grounded on a bar off the beach and the whalers at Provincetown had been notified. I was five years old at the time. With a cousin a year or two older and his grandfather, I went to see the whale, along with most of the village folk.
The way led past the famous old Boston and Sandwich glass works, then across extensive salt marshes cut midway by a wide creek, and rimmed on the outer side by sand dunes. Because these marshes were flooded twice daily by high tides they were—and still are—crossed by a boardwalk raised some four or five feet above the marsh, with no guard rails except over the creek. A stiff wind gathered force as it swept unchecked over a long stretch of lowland and marshes. We small boys clung tightly to the old man’s hands lest we be blown off the walk. The latter ended in loose sand behind the barrier dunes. With faces and hands stung by flying sand, breath whipped away in half-fearful gasps by the relentless winds, ears assailed by a meaningless babble of sound from shouting men and clamoring gulls on the other side of the dunes, we struggled up through the yielding sand and coarse razor-edged beach grass to the top of the nearest dune. With startling abruptness a never-to-be-forgotten scene burst upon us.
In the immediate foreground, in the shallows of low tide, was the ocean monster we had come to see. Some distance offshore, sharply etched against the flattened gray-green sea—for the wind was offshore—rode the whaling ship. Boats were plying back and forth between shore and ship, those going out deeply laden while those returning were empty save for their crews.
But it was the huge, bulky mass of the monster in the foreground that challenged and held the wide-eyed gaze of the small boy clinging with one hand to his hat and with the other grasping tightly the elder’s hand, catching his breath partly in awe at the strange scene and in part lest it be sucked away by the relentless wind. He was filled with awe and a bit frightened by the unexpected, unfamiliar, overwhelming sight of his first whale—a striped whale, a red-and-white whale. There it lay before his very eyes. I still can see it.
Since that long-ago day of my first field observation I have seen many whales, but in their black or gray drabness none has ever looked as a whale should look. None has ever appeared in what I knew to be the true colors, red-and-white stripes like a barber’s pole. Even when I read Moby Dick, the whale was the wrong color.
The explanation? It is quite simple as are most explanations of the unfamiliar and the mysterious. The flensing knives of the whalemen already had been at work, exposing the white blubber. Much of this had been cut out in long strips down to the red flesh. It was all as simple as that. Yet, knowing this, whenever I am on the sea and hear the cry “Thar she blows!” I look with a feeling of half-expectation of seeing a living barber’s pole. I almost still believe in striped whales. It would not shock my credulity in the least to see one. Not on Cape Cod anyway, for I am still a Cape Codder and vision beyond those not so blessed is my inheritance.
I am convinced that failure on the part of parents, teachers and others having to do with the guidance of the young to appreciate how extremely plastic is the child mind, how deep and lasting are the impressions for good or ill made therein by events and surroundings of daily life, is often at the root of many of the youth problems of today. There are countless striped whales among children everywhere. They are not to be ignored, denied or laughed away.
My first observation in the realm of Nature was completely in error. I found it out long, long ago. Nevertheless, whales never have looked right since. Always there is some gain in error if it leads to finding of truth in the end. It is sometimes pleasant, even helpful, to ignore the hard facts of science and exact knowledge and instead, gazing into the crystal globe of imagination, to see red-and-white whales. Who shall say that we are not the better for so doing?
The records show that that whale was no figment of the imagination. It was a seventy-four-foot Goliath, a sulphur-bottom or blue whale. It came ashore in March, 1879.
