Saving the World

July becomes August. Heidi, as usual, decides to stay one extra week, then two, but there is no postponing the sense that things will end soon. One day on my way to the beach to see Noah, Addie, and Heidi, I hear a familiar cry, close and loud. I look up over my shoulder and right there, twenty feet above me, just as I climb the hump of Highland Road, one of the harbor fledglings flies over my shoulder.

On the marsh, summer streams by. If you look closely enough at the plant life you can see the future, and the future is desiccation and decay. Green reddens, or withers to brown-yellow. The heads of the grasses give parts of the marsh the look of a wheat field, while the poison ivy gets an early jump on the season, edging toward a flashy red. But what really signals the change is the glasswort. These rubbery little plants rise like fuses from the marsh, and fuses they prove to be. At the moment they’ve just been lit at the bottom, climbing the green with early blazes of red and orange, but soon their tips will spark red, as if momentarily both match and fuse, igniting the entire marsh. In September, when the ospreys leave for their trip back south, the glasswort will explode in an assortment of blazing pink, orange, red, and the pink-purple of Western wildflowers. Sea lavender, now just beginning to bloom, demurring from the spotlight, will add more subtly to the conflagration, flaming at a lesser heat with a subtle blue-purple.

Meanwhile the beach plum, which by late August will be a deep, almost blue, purple, is still a week or two from being edible. Some are slashed with red, others the color of peach, and a precious few close to the bruised-thumb purple that signals their tart ripeness. By August’s end the bayberries will have changed from green BBs into a waxy gray; and we can soon expect chittering masses of immature starlings roosting on the wires and the annual staging of thousands of tree swallows. Though nature’s story is a gradual one, there are certain times of year when the plot speeds up, and this is one of those times.

I know that I won’t be coming out to the nests for too much longer. As always, the end of something fills me like nothing else with appreciation. I’ve seen just what I’d hoped to see this spring and summer—hunting, birth, death, first flight—and while I can’t complain, I still feel sadness that my osprey time is ending. I’ve become connected to these birds, enough so that the coming break in this connection will cause some pain or, at least, discomfort. “I have now had a love affair with terns for many years,” wrote John Hay in The Bird of Light. It’s taken me longer to use the L-word, but now that my time is ending I can’t avoid it.

On August 12 I travel to Long Island to visit Art Cooley, one of the founders of the Environmental Defense Fund. I have some questions to ask, but nothing substantial, and I’m not really sure why I make the trip. Maybe it’s because I feel a debt of gratitude to him. He and his partners, after all, are almost directly responsible for the fact that I have ospreys to watch on Cape Cod. The phrase “saving the world” has become at best a kind of hip, ironic joke, a derogatory description for those who indulge in quixotic causes. But this man took the joke seriously, and, among his tangible results, he can point to the birds that once again crowd Long Island.

As the ferry pulls into Orient Point, Gardiners Island rises out of the haze. Gardiners is the place where great colonies of ospreys once nested on the ground, unthreatened by predators; the place, too, where the greatest predator of all almost wiped them out entirely, and where the birds were saved by the same species when, over thirty years ago, Dennis Puleston collected egg samples and brought them back to Charles Wurster’s lab for testing. For a while the Gardiners colony was back and strong after DDT was banned, but lately there is cause for worry, as the numbers have begun to drop again. A reduced supply of fish is one suspect.

But if the numbers have fallen slightly on Gardiners, there’s no question that the birds are back on Long Island. As I drive in from the eastern tip of the north fork, through a moraine landscape formed by the same glacier that scraped Cape Cod, the birds form a virtual greeting committee. Within the first few miles I spot three active nests above the marshes, and then a fourth, on a forty-foot-high platform right near the road, with three large fledglings flapping around—on and off—the nest. At one point, as the road opens up after a corridor through some apple trees, a large osprey flies not forty feet above my car with a fish, torpedo-turned, heading to his roost to eat.

The local human animals are obviously well aware of their feathered neighbors’ revival. I pull into a store called Osprey Gifts, with the bird’s Latin name—Pandion haliaetus—stenciled on the window, and then pass a vineyard called Osprey’s Dominion. It’s a good name, since I do feel as if I’ve stumbled into the bird’s very dominion. I find it powerfully reassuring that the birds have managed to reclaim this particular island, sprayed in its entirety with DDT on at least four occasions. True, Gardiners, where three hundred pairs nested on the ground at the beginning of the century, could more truly be called the bird’s dominion, but how hopeful that they have a foothold here, on this crowded extension of New York City.

I find Art Cooley bodysurfing at the Surf Club in Quogue. He invites me for a swim and I join him, and for ten minutes we let ourselves get tossed around by waves rolling in across the Atlantic. Considering my subject matter, it seems appropriate that I have now dived into the surf with both Alan Poole and Art Cooley. Though Art must be in his sixties, I’m struck immediately by his immense vitality. With slate-blue eyes and curly white hair, he reminds me of a larger, more fit Norman Mailer. I remember the description of him in Acorn Days, the memoir by Marion Lane Rogers, the secretary for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I always felt that, like LBJ’s, his physical vitality helped subdue many a dissident whose point of view had been thoroughly aired,” Rogers wrote. “You suspected that Art could easily pick up any offender and toss him out of the meeting bodily and this generally held perception helped keep the meetings moving briskly along.”

Since I haven’t offended him, Art doesn’t toss me farther out into the ocean, and after we dry off, we retire to the club’s deck to eat fried chicken nuggets and talk about the old days. Between bites he describes the EDF’s origins.

“The founders were all scientists, but we wanted to be scientists against something,” he says. “And for something.” He talks about those days with justifiable pride while I try to imagine the excitement of the early meetings, when they moved from house to house, stayed up late into the night ignited by their ideas. When did it first begin to dawn on them that they might actually be able to do something about the problems they were discussing? During the late ’60s and early ’70s everyone was talking about changing the planet, but they set up an organization and went about doing it. I don’t ask, but I secretly wonder if that phrase—“saving the world”—ever came up. Probably not. They were scientists, after all, and the emphasis was on saving a part of Long Island or a part of Michigan. But there must have been a great sense of passion and excitement when they began to discover that impotent frustration and rage could be turned into potent action, that mere enthusiasm could be alchemized into solid, effective law.

“We didn’t understand the real world at first,” Art says between bites of chicken. “We were more mad than bright. But we slowly started to figure some things out.”

I know the story of those first lawsuits by heart, of the halting of DDT use, but I listen closely as he retells it, like a child hearing a favorite bedtime story.

“At first we never knew if we would survive from year to year, from week to week. We were a national organization to save the environment but we had no staff, no money, no officers. And the forces against us were formidable. They called us ‘sexual perverts’ because we were against DDT.”

“But we had a lot of fight in us. Our unofficial motto was ‘Sue the Bastards.’ The thing is, when you’re used to fighting you keep fighting. Some of us like the fight more than the victory. Once one fight is over you go looking for the next one.”

He explains how, as the EDF grew, they would pull in some of the best young lawyers, recruits choosing meaning over money, content over cash. I feel like shouting “Hallelujah!” Fortunately, I manage to bite my tongue, and, at that point, one of Art’s former students interrupts us. I’m reminded that the whole time he was working for the EDF he was also a full-time high school science teacher, a position he held for thirty-three years, and that within the school he founded an organization called Students for Environmental Quality, his students passing five pieces of local legislation. In fact, the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee, the organization that would later morph into the Environmental Defense Fund, was founded after Cooley described a local environmental problem to one of his students. The student responded by asking, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” The BTNRC, Cooley’s answer, fought local environmental battles, at first operating within more or less conventional means—letter writing, phone calls, and one-person campaigns—before discovering the effectiveness of the law.

After receiving a hearty pat on the back, the former student goes on his way. We return to our talk and the chicken nuggets.

“One of the great ideas that came out of that time was the NGOs, nongovernment organizations. These organizations have expanded the notion of democracy to a much larger group of folks. By now they’ve become like a shadow government that keeps lobbing in new ideas. If you’re worried about your land on Cape Cod, that’s what you’ve got to do. Get together with likeminded people and form an organization.”

It all sounds so simple, maybe because it is—or at least it was for Art and his cofounders. He keeps mentioning the importance of the idea, the seed, that first led to action. He has stressed this before during our phone calls, the fact that the EDF’s victories aren’t as important as the idea itself. Likewise I realize that it isn’t the EDF that I’m interested in—though I find what they’ve done fascinating—so much as the notion that Art describes, that an idea can end up having such a huge effect. Think of it: in our complicated world, a thought led to the physical fact that there are now ospreys flying all over the north fork of Long Island. It isn’t that simple, of course. But it starts that simple. And that’s what is most encouraging, as hopeful in some ways as the osprey’s return. That a creative idea, followed by extensive action, could have actual worldly results.

I run out of questions fairly quickly. The truth is, he’s already answered most of them over the phone or through e-mail. This trip wasn’t so much about questions anyway, as it was about being in Art’s presence, trying to get a little feel for the mood of those early, heady days. After lunch he walks me back to my car, still wearing just his bathing suit, and as I drive off he stands there, hands on hips, Charles Atlas–style, burly chested, smiling an even-toothed smile.

On the ferry back I stare out through the haze but can’t find Gardiners Island. My time with Art affects me like two cups of coffee, setting my head spinning with thoughts of my own involvement, and noninvolvement, in local politics. In the fall of 1997, half a year after Nina and I returned, a referendum called the Land Bank was defeated on Cape Cod. The Land Bank, which marked my first minor foray into volunteer politics, was a modest and sensible proposal for putting aside some money to spare the remaining undeveloped land on the Cape, to stop it from going the way of the Jersey Shore. But because that money would come from the profits of the sellers of real estate (1 percent on sales over $100,000), local conservatives decided the time was ripe for another Boston Tea Party. The real issue was that developers and real estate agents and builders wanted to keep on developing and selling and building, but of course they couldn’t come right out and say that. So they pooled a pile of money and called in a big telemarketing firm from Washington that proceeded to reframe the debate entirely in terms of that highly original catchphrase “No new taxes.”

In the wake of this loss I found myself feeling particularly pessimistic about the possibility of effecting change. But then a year later an altered bill that took the onus off the sellers of real estate passed, and hope returned. I do believe that deep down there is a desire, however it may conflict with the monied interests, to save at least some of the great natural bounty we’ve been blessed with. The question is whether or not this desire will prevail.

Like most people, I resist the dogmatic aspects of environmentalism. Other than essayist I don’t like anyone pinning any -ist tails on me. But despite bristling at doctrine, I’m beginning to feel I don’t have any choice except to take action. That action, political action, must soon follow the course of my newly political thought. Circumstances have forced my hand. Unless I want to turn into an embittered old man, grumbling about the big house up on the bluff, I need to do something.

As we dock in New London I make a decision. When I get back to the Cape I will fill in the card at the town office, applying for a spot on the conservation commission, the spot vacated when Norton Nickerson died. I know I can’t do much, certainly nowhere near what Art Cooley did in his lifetime. But if I can’t save the world, I can at least try and save a small part of Sesuit Neck.

Enough stump speeches. Time to climb off the soapbox. My real work is with ospreys, not politics. What I see at the nest during mid-August amounts to a great preparation. I have yet to witness a single fledgling coming back to the nest with a fish in its talons, but they are becoming increasingly comfortable in flight, and I’m beginning to accept that it’s only a matter of time until they make their first catch. As for taking a four-thousand-mile journey to the Amazon, that’s another story. Who thought up this plan? How can they possibly pull it off? To make matters worse, I know that the fledglings will be flying south unchaperoned. Through some not-so-brilliant stroke of evolution, the parent birds will leave a couple of weeks before their offspring, abdicating responsibility right before their work is done. This means that the fledglings will make their trip aided only by some mysterious inner compass, an instinct that even scientists don’t pretend to understand.

Still, when I manage to quiet my worries and keep my mind from jumping ahead to migration, I find my time at the nest more fulfilling than ever. There’s something purely joyful about watching the young birds improve in flight, an emotion that I sense in the birds as well. It may be wildly anthropocentric to suggest that they take joy in the movement of flying, but perhaps it isn’t as preposterous as it first sounds. “Joy is the symptom by means of which right conduct can be measured,” Joseph Wood Krutch said of Thoreau. We get a physiological lift from using more of ourselves, from being fully functioning, so why shouldn’t the birds? In When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Masson speculates that animals feel funktionslust, the “pleasure taken in what one can do best.” I see that pleasure in the fledglings as they swoop and quarter the marsh. Or do I just imagine that I see it?

When I e-mail Alan, asking again about the possibility of the birds feeling joy, he writes back: “Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe new fledglings do feel joy, maybe terror. Seems an easy trap for humans to ascribe our own emotions to other species, however. What does seem clear to me is that to wonder about this is distinctly human, and part of the delight of it. I strongly suspect ospreys aren’t wondering about what brings us pleasure.”

Cautioned, I press ahead. I think of how for us, for humans, that is, it’s the times of change that give us the most animal pleasure—the change from hot to cold, cold to hot, stillness to movement, hunger to satiation. Growth excites us at a level below our brains—and can any human growth compare to the changes the birds are currently experiencing? I think of Noah, and the fact that he now speaks, and admit that the beginnings of language are an enormous leap. But flight is as dramatic. A couple of weeks ago all the young ospreys were good for was sitting on the nest and staring up at the sky. Now they soar, bank with the wind, adjust their feather fingers, glide up toward the sun. They play with each other, and while it’s play with a purpose—they are, after all, learning the osprey rules—it certainly looks like fun. Though they retain the black-and-white checkering that makes them easily distinguishable from their parents, with each passing day their skill as fliers grows closer to that of the older birds.

Soon they will be developing yet another part of themselves, finally finding out what those sharp toes are for as they learn to plunge for food. With all this sudden growth, is it too much to suggest that it registers as pleasure or excitement somewhere in their avian brains? Doesn’t it make simple sense, even evolutionary sense, that they should be pleased? Before they were sitters; now they are fliers. Unless we accept the notion that these magnificent animals are completely without sense, then how can they not feel this?

Love brings a terrible vulnerability.

I think this every time I visit the nests, imagining the coming days when the ospreys will be gone. I think it, too, this morning as I watch Nina sleeping, curled around our two cats. And I think it later again when, out for my morning walk, I see Sukie, our Maine coon cat, dash across the road by the harbor, too far from home.

If I sometimes have doubts about the risks of love being worth it, days like today convince me differently. Because on this day in August the coyote’s return to Cape Cod changes from a quick glimpse and something I have read about in books into something real. She is a husky, strong, young coyote, entirely brazen, who hunts not twenty yards from me in the big field in front of the enormous house on the bluff. In an effort to further tame our neighborhood, our new neighbor recently mowed down the wild grasses in this field, but he’s brought about the opposite of his intended result. The field has inadvertently invited the wild in, the cut grass revealing a virtual smorgasbord of voles, moles, and mice. Apparently emboldened by the plentiful food and late-summer sun, the coyote isn’t about to wait for nightfall to dine. After our run together, my friend Brad spots her and we watch as the coyote, ignoring us, trots, waits, and then pounces in what Brad accurately calls a “half canine, half feline manner. After watching for a while we head home for showers, but as soon as I get home I find myself jumping on my bike and hurrying back up to the fields. The coyote is still there. While she hunts I study her varied coloring, which changes abruptly at different parts of her coat, as if by whim. Gray on the face, she is fox red behind the ears until her shoulders. Then the coloring shifts from red to gray to brown, with a strange circling marking on the saddle of her back that looks like the charred gray-white remains of a just-extinguished campfire. I stand here close to a major predator, blessed to be in her company, and when a flock of two hundred or so tree swallows flies overhead, leaving both of us, canine and human, momentarily speckled with shade, I feel doubly blessed.

Of course, the inevitable worries rush in. Be careful what you wish for, they say. A few months ago I claimed I wanted to be skinless, to experience the world more directly. Well, my skin has grown thinner through the summer. Now at times I feel like I’m virtually tingling with this place, a tuning fork of love and anger, which isn’t always a pleasant experience. Vulnerability again. Will the new owner allow a wild creature to roam on his property? How soon until he decides the wild has to be eliminated and repeats, on his small scale, our familiar national tragedy of domination and death?

“Do wild coyotes in the suburbs threaten your pets and children?” This was the inane teaser for the Channel 5 news the other night. But while I rush to mock that sort of alarmism, I must admit that the same question worries me. What if this coyote killed Sukie or Tabernash? A coworker of Nina’s recently saw a coyote dash across her driveway and scoop her cat up in its jaws (only to cough the pet up unharmed when the woman took chase). I’d feel a tear in my heart if anything happened to either of our pets, but not near the tear I would feel for my wife, who is more emotionally entangled with the cats. To a non-pet owner or, more accurately, a non-pet lover, this may sound like overstatement, but Nina’s investment of love, both human and animal, is of the deepest sort, which opens her up to the possibility of the deepest sort of loss.

For all the possibility of that loss, I can’t help but be happy, thrilled even, to be close to my predatory neighbor. Having the trickster dancing and pouncing for all to see in the newly mown front yard puts the lie to my neighbor’s attempts to control the bluff. Of course, this won’t stop him from trying. The other day I rode my bike up to the town office to study the plans of his attempt to “build a beach” by clearing rocks, laying down an undersurface of coconut fiber rolls, and dumping in imported sand. We can only hope that, just as cutting the grass produced an opposite result, this plan, too, will backfire. Certainly the town’s environmental officer thought it would. When I spoke to him about it, he shook his head skeptically, certain that the winds and sea would not stand for a beach where one shouldn’t be.

“It will be a nice beach for someone,” he said. “For someone down in Barnstable.”

By the third week of August I notice that the wings of the Chapin fledglings are sometimes wet, sometimes tinting their soaked feathers with silver. For a week or so now they’ve begin to dive down into the creek between the spartina, making not full adult hovering dives but more of an insect dip and cut, as if they were giant swallows. Flight is contagious, even No. 3 getting up to speed. They try everything—gliding low right over the spartina, hovering over the nest, quick downward plunges and rises—though I’ve yet to see a full-fledged dive. They screech at each other as they weave back and forth, building up a good shrillness. It’s a more vocal nest, though sometimes quieter in terms of actual activity. Encouraging self-reliance, the parents are bringing even less food. When they do return with a fish the nest becomes a great swirl of high-pitched begging and aggression.

For the first weeks of flight the fledglings restricted themselves to the immediate marsh area, as is respecting the boundaries of the pines to the south and the phone wires to the north. But now they flap directly out to the sea, and to the east, in the direction of Scargo Lake. More and more their primaries look frazzled, roughed up, as if wet, but I still haven’t seen one return with a fish. This could be for the simple reason that many of their early dives have been unsuccessful or because if they were to catch a fish the nest would be the last place they’d go. Rather than head back to this hotbed of competition where food would have to be shared or, possibly, even torn away, they’d likely roost at a far-off tree gorging on their own. Sometimes when I come up on the nest they’re already eating, with the mother nowhere in sight, but I suspect this is still “delivered” fish.

Eventually, No. 1 gets the bright idea to simply fly off with the fought-over fish. It happens one day when No. 1 and No. 2 are battling over a flounder that, from my angle, looks first like a slice of watermelon and then like a dinner plate. Tired of having to block her siblings out, No. 1 picks up what’s left of the fish in her talons and flies off for a roost in a nearby pine. While this isn’t catching fish, it’s edging closer.

One of the best things about this new development is that, after months of my coming out to visit the birds’ homes, they now visit mine. On August 20, I have my first real evidence that the young harbor birds may actually have learned how to dive into the water and come up with a fish. It is 6:45 p.m. and I’m on the back deck with Noah. The weather has cooled enough so that we both wear coats. When the light dies we begin to head inside, but my nephew stops and points to the sky.

“Is that one of your birds, David?” he asks.

I look up and see an osprey flying right over the deck with a fish turned forward, as usual, in its talons. It’s hard to be positive in the dying light, but its coat looks checkered, marking it as a fledgling. I can’t be sure, of course, but we could be witnessing the young bird’s first successful catch.

Though Addie is too young, I’m glad Noah gets to see the harbor fledglings fly before he goes back home. Maybe next summer we’ll hike out to Simpkins Neck. Noah’s dad, Mike, has a deep attachment to the mountains of North Carolina, and has already carried Noah into the woods. It pleases me that my nephew will be close to both mountains and sea, north and south.

On his last day I take Noah down to visit a friend of mine who is living temporarily on a huge boat at the harbor. I lift my nephew up over the side of the boat to hand him to my friend, but as I do I knock my sunglasses off and look quickly down. At the same moment Noah squirms and I lose my grip. He falls toward the water between dock and boat. By sheer luck I catch him right before he hits the water, but his arm knocks into the boat and he starts to cry. He is fine and stops after a short while. Still, for the rest of the day I can’t stop shaking.

The next morning Heidi, Addie, and Noah are gone. Immediately, I miss being nagged to go to the beach. That end-of-summer, school’s-coming feeling pervades the house. During my morning watch two of the harbor fledglings sit on the crossbar above the nest, looking like twins, exactly the same size, occasionally tilting their heads toward each other. Having witnessed a murder I have no illusions about brotherly love among ospreys, but still there’s something companionable about their postures. I think of my easy relationship with my sister, how even when we don’t say much, we are comfortable living side by side.

As September closes in, the fledglings spend less time on the nest, entering the final preparations before beginning a brutal journey from which fewer than half of them will return. The Quivett nest cleared out first, which was no surprise. In mid-August they flew off ignominiously, tails between their legs. Next come the Simpkins adults, soon to be followed by their young. I’m not so worried for the older birds, but more and more my mind jumps ahead to the fledglings’ migration. I don’t like to think of them making this trip; there is too much at stake, the odds too long. I can’t picture them flying over the Caribbean, particularly with hurricane season coming on. They will also face an enemy as fierce, quiet, and relentless as a great horned owl: starvation. They will need to learn on the job, their fishing apprenticeships cut short. Some won’t be ready.

Since the Chapin fledglings are often away from the nest— preparing for that dangerous journey, out exploring and even fishing, for all I know—I spend a lot of time at home, watching the harbor young, which is a little like watching reruns of Chapin. In fact, I’ve begun to spend fewer mornings “in the field,” more time up in my study. I know I’m not-so-secretly preparing for the coming separation, for the distance that will soon enough be between me and the birds. My new friends will be wintering in the Amazon, and there will be no long-distance phone calls. I won’t see them till next spring, and, defensively, I retreat to old habits, to writing about life, not being out in it. I’m not completely turned inward, however. The clatter of my typing is occasionally punctuated by a sound made sweet by repetition—high-pitched and pleading. Then I stop working and lean back and close my eyes and listen.

When I do get back out to the marsh I catalog the many changes. Starlings, while not particularly beautiful, impress with sheer numbers as they belly up to the phone wires. They gather in a great squeaking mass on the sand shelf behind the osprey nest. For all our wonder at the ability of animals to “live in the present,” they are always looking ahead, anticipating the next season, the next step. Now, as the world prepares for movement, the tree swallows begin to stage. By mid-August they were already practicing, sky-skimming the marsh. With their darting flights and boomerang wings it’s as if they were carving the air into sections, and by month’s end hundreds of them fill the air, spilling across the sky. From a distance they look almost exactly like the swarms of insects that they feed on.

The vegetable world continues its changes, too. The sea lavender begins to show its colors, spouting tiny purple buds, miniature bouquets that look like red paintbrushes that have been briefly dipped in white. Meanwhile the beach plums play out their increasingly edible story of daily change. In late July I was first willing to call them blue, though on closer inspection, the blue proved a chalky mirage, easily rubbed off with my thumb, leaving them green as peas. But more and more the blue stuck, then purpled, until finally, by August’s end, they were the deep purple of Concord grapes and I was regularly popping them into my mouth, savoring their tart sweetness.

The seedy head of the three-square, the sedge that Lee Baldwin first identified for me, moves from green to a lighter green to yellow, giving the fields a wheatish complexion. The marsh is slowly cycling back to where it was when I first came to it in February. Then I watched the land move from brown to green, and so now I witness the change from green to red-yellow and back to brown. While I’m not coming out here as much, I appreciate just what a fine thing it was to be outside through the spring and summer. Alan Poole was right: sitting and watching the birds is a discipline, a practice. Like all acts requiring patience, it isn’t easy. But it can become habitual, and many mornings I went automatically through my routine: making my tea, stretching my back, driving out to the beach, pulling on my ridiculous knee-high rubber boots, hiking across the marsh with my telescope over my shoulders, unpacking my backpack, unfolding my chair. I know I’ll miss the ospreys when they leave. I miss the routine already.

I’ve been absurdly lucky to see all I’ve seen. Maybe it’s as simple as this: when you expect the miraculous, the miraculous occurs with regularity. Or maybe it’s a cycle. Having witnessed the miraculous again and again, I come to expect it. If grace is an unexpected blessing conferred, then there is also a sort of moment of wonder that you earn by putting yourself in the right place. By coming out here every day I’ve seen more than merely being lucky would have ever gotten me. One evening in August I stood up from my chair at Simpkins, ready to pack it in, when behind me, in the marsh elder bushes, I saw a large buck, the biggest I’ve seen on the Cape. It noticed me and vaulted into the bushes, then hard into the pines. I was left standing there, listening to the electric pulse of crickets stopping and starting, thinking how that sight had returned me to a better, older place.

If you listen to the world long enough you will hear what it asks for, and it turns out to ask for quite a lot. It calls for nothing less than a new way of looking, a new way of being. I need to continue to find a new way to be in this world, to develop what Jack Turner calls a “sacred rage.” In the spirit of Art Cooley, I need to learn to love the fight.

But at the moment I don’t feel like much of a crusader. The first hints of fall cool the summer nights. There are still days when you feel the full summer heat, but there’s no kidding ourselves. We are at the end of something.