School of Fish Underwater, Photo by Leonardo Lamas from Pexels
I read nature writers the way the devout read the Bible. I go to their words for solace and inspiration. And for escape from the hectic human environment of traffic and TV’s and shrieking jetliners overhead. I can feel as though I am taking a companionable walk on the beach or in the woods with John Hay or Helen Macdonald, and they—astute, preternaturally responsive observers—point out new marvels along the way. The landscape proffered in their essays opens up to me its “lazy largesse” and intricate beauties. But like a sinner abashed by Biblical admonitions, I am uncomfortably aware that I am sitting comfortably on my couch, living not in nature but in language, not in the sensual fullness of sun and wind and water and trees, and that their very words wrap me in a civilized cocoon. Bringing, in mind, the words of these nature writers with me into the woods both draws me toward and bars me from intimacy with nature.
In that mood I turn with gratitude to the writings of John Hay (1915-2011). Hay was an American author, naturalist, and conservation activist. He co-founded the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, Massachusetts, and served as its president for over two decades. He composed more than a dozen books, among them two autobiographies and The Great Beach, winner of the John Burroughs Prize. Annie Dillard has called him “one of the world’s handful of very great nature writers.” As eloquent as Hay is, he often struggles against the limitations imposed by his medium, the inescapable tension between the isolating identifications of language and the alliances and interdependences of nature. In all his work, he aims “to be taken up into the precision and wholeness of nature,” a condition in which language is left behind. He desires a unity beyond words.
In his first book, The Run (1959), about the life cycle of alewives (migrant herring that return to Cape Cod every spring), Hay mustered the known scientific facts and expressed the emblematic meanings and mysteries of his subject without doubting his medium. Language served more than adequately to express both what is known and how he felt. The limitations were not those of the language but of our knowledge. The timing of the alewives’ run, their life at sea, their extraordinary navigation back to their home pond—we are unable to explain such marvels only because we are ignorant of the facts or confronted by an abiding mystery. And that mystery is exactly what attracts Hay to these amazing creatures. He is constantly striving to get beyond his analytic habit of mind to the great merge, the unity, the intimate connectedness of a school of alewives and, further, to the alewives’ communion with the larger forces of nature: “We are on a run together.”
I should not have been surprised that, by the writing of The Great Beach (1964), Hay was, though no less the naturalist, less constrained by data. His nature is both more expansive and more delicate. He is attuned to every nuance of weather, every shift in cloud-light, every temperature change, every “alliance” (recurring word) between elements and creatures of nature. Wind and light and the incessant sea are constant companions as he walks religiously where the land shelves to beach and salt marsh.
When my wife asked me a simple question about the book, What’s it about? I stuttered to answer, realizing that it is not “about” anything except the experience of being on the beach. Unlike The Run, The Great Beach puts me in the presence of wind, water and sky, of dunes and surf and sun, and describes the inhabitants of the beach, foxes and seabirds and fishermen, but isolates no one thing. Like Thoreau, he finds in nature not merely the facts, scientific or otherwise, but a shelving into mystery and possibility. He invites to immensities. The ocean’s constant movement, the salt tang of the air, the limitless expanse of sea and sky and sand—these inhere in his prose the way Quaker practicalities inhere in the diarist Thomas Cope’s writing. It is difficult to say how a writer’s life shapes his prose, but I do not doubt it has a fragrance, almost, of his days and loves; it is that fragrance more than a sharply delineated subject that inheres in The Great Beach. The beach, Hay says, “needs another language, and at the same time no language could really encompass it.”
In “A Dependable Endurance,” a chapter from In Defense of Nature (1969), Hay repeatedly alludes to the interplay between language and our experience of nature. The epigraph, from a book on Nova Scotia folklore, records the chosen silence of the early inhabitants, who declined to answer letters from their homeland: “if they’d write back and say it was so hard, why, the people’d say they had no business to come over [in the first place], and if they said it was so good, others might come.” Their life in nature was simply unlanguaged; it was not the “true silence” Hay seeks, “in [his] blood and veins,” the silence not before but beyond language.
In our society the one language that expresses an easy familiarity with local flora and fauna is fading away. “We are not so nearly on speaking terms with nature as we used to be,” Hay writes. “Common names, common naming, are less familiar. Timberdoodles, shitepokes, ragged robins, skunk coots… are disappearing into books. How can the three quarters of our population that lives in cities replace such terms, and all the humorous, rough, gentle, accurate acquaintance they imply?” Our nature has become “fictionalized.”
Hay pushes beyond any fictional, idealized or sentimental view of nature and, often, beyond language itself. During the Newfoundland trip recorded in “A Dependable Endurance,” Hay sketches the long history of cod fishing, the folk rituals attending the sea-faring culture, and the whole extraordinary land-and sea-scape as he watches fishermen offshore “pulling in dark bodies of codfish hand over hand” while the moon rises and a “fiery red sun” starts to set. “There was a calm wordlessness over the water,” Hay writes, ending the essay, “a savage evening brightness, the presence of quick life, quick death…. I was at home.”
-by Jim Ryan