Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 2

ONE thing you cannot deprive us of entirely when you put up your houses and factories and churches around us, and that is the sky. You may poison the air for us close to the earth with your smudge, gas, vapor, dust, and evil cookery; but we can always look out from our wells of brick and see the air away up where it is untainted—a sheet of sapphire or turquoise, with pearl or silver fretting; iriscent, too, for there is a surprising amount of color in clouds.

The other day one of the grandest mountain-ranges above the world was revealed after the passage of a hurrying mist. The Himalayas boast no such peaks as the afternoon sun fell upon when the fog floor had been rafted off on a western wind. ​They reached for miles toward the zenith, and spread north and south for leagues on leagues. Their tops were dazzling white, and their sides were ruffled into countless snowy bosses, softly edged with gray and mauve; while descending valleys and caverns, that would have held the nations of the earth, were revealed in slaty shadow. From a height of perhaps a thousand feet hung a long curtain of dark, which at its northern end was pulled aside as if by an impetuous giant hand. It hid the base of the mountain-range, and seemed to be made of rain. Not until next day did we learn of the cyclone that had worked in that belt of dark, felling houses and trees within five miles of us, and then bounding up and whistling away to sea.

We lose much fine scenery because of our habit of looking down. We look down so much because that is where most of the dollars come from.

A friend whose word I never had cause to doubt, and whose any statement was as good as gospel, nearly strained my credulity once, and I made him tell the thing ​over to be sure I had heard aright. He was walking in a park on a balmy day, delighting in the May-time budding and twitter, when he met an acquaintance who was taking a short cut across the park from his house to his shop. After the manner of our kind, my friend nodded to the tradesman, and said it was a fine morning. The tradesman looked up in a casual way, as if he had heard the statement before and agreed to it; then, catching a glimpse of the blue, as he raised his head out of his commercial meditations, he asked, “That’s what you call the sky, is n’t it?” And he was sincere about it, apparently.

One of the occasional benefits of town life is the chance to get up into the fifteenth or twentieth story of one of our office-buildings and look at the sky. It does not strain your neck in that way. It is nearly equivalent to being on a hill-top. It makes us feel as if some oxygen had suddenly entered the atmosphere, and as if we had found room to open our lungs. Our imaginations feel the widening of our environment, and our eyes are so constantly ​invited to the distance that I wonder how any work is done in the top floors of the sky-scrapers of New York, where the clerks have only to look up from their letters and ledgers to see the rolling country of Long Island, the Orange Hills, the glittering harbor with its islands, and the hurrying rivers. But poets ought to be made in such an eyrie.

When we look away to the horizon we gladly cheat ourselves; we let our fancies wander into things that are not there. Beneath those heavy cumuli must be a country where the people are good and wise, where there are no Reginald McGonigles, where every home is a palace, where speech is music, art the daily life, and love instead of self-interest the cohesive social force. But we go and stand under those clouds; then we discover that Utopia is some leagues farther on, and Arcadia some miles behind us.

It is not often that we appreciate the size of clouds. You may see them in Colorado so much bigger than the Rocky Mountains that the tallest peaks become ​insignificant by contrast. Warmed air is constantly rising from the earth, and as it ascends toward the chill of the immensities, the moisture it holds condenses into fog and occasionally into rain. The upper edge of the bed of warm air defines its shape by the form of the cloud-bottoms that rest upon it. Floors of heavy cloud average level; but there are innumerable protuberances and depressions. At the top, the air being thinner, the clouds expand into any shape they please. Away up, miles overhead, where the air is too light to contain or support masses like the cumuli, the vapor feathers into cirri. The cumuli, the summer clouds, which deepen into thunder-heads, are Alpine in their scenery and imposing in their volume; but there is something equally fine in the cirrus when it is drawn into streams of pallid white, like the banners flung from the top of the world and blown by electric currents into our heavens. Indeed, on some nights, when the sky is charged with cirri that faintly reflect the city lights, it is hard to say whether or no they are the au​rora borealis; for with gas-lights and lamps and electric glares in one’s eyes, it is not easy to see whether they are pulsing. Only after midnight, from our yard, can I be sure of this.

These streams of cirrus cloud must be of enormous length sometimes. You realize it when you see their parallel lines drawn together in each direction at the horizon, like ridges on a muskmelon. But they are not drawn together. They appear so to us because they are in perspective, as the sides of a street run together toward the vanishing-point; and as we can see a mountain at a distance of a hundred miles in a clear air, so in that clearer air above the humid stratum we doubtless follow these lines at least as far in each direction, or two hundred miles in all. Occasionally a cross wind scores these high clouds and combs them into sections. Then, instead of being streamers, they become endless regiments marching in platoons in the same direction as the original lines.

Occasionally, too, the cirrus is so far and thin that we do not see it in full day, ​probably because we do not look for it; so we are surprised when at sunset the red lights play over a web that tents in the whole sky; and as the lights change in color and climb higher with the falling of the sun, we see that it is not merely one film of cloud, but one on another; half a dozen, perhaps. Yet we said that the sky was clear. What weak seers we are!

In storm, especially a hot-weather one, the riding up of the celestial navy to fire its bolts is a glorious sight. The sky is an inverted ocean, and whirling on its tempestuous surface come the black and threatening squadrons, pennants of darkness streaming in their wake, woolly films wreathing at their bows. They speed across the void, whirling, twisting in maelstroms, rising and falling, occasionally lost behind the black sails of swifter craft, emerging to view again, darker and more wicked than ever. Then comes the shot we listen for: the air blazes, and a roar of wrath goes out. The musketry of rain follows; and when the impenitent earth has been properly battered and drenched, the ​fleet rides off to other shores, and the sun is out again with healing. But in all this time mankind has been fussing with its umbrellas and waiting in doorways for a trolley-car.

Our yard has a hammock that the children use, but that is a little too public for grown folks, unless it is after dark, or is brought near to the house. And it is an invention that ought to attach to every residence, or, rather, to some tree near it. If it could be occupied by some lazybones who would manage to keep his eyes open, there is hardly a doubt that he would accumulate some truths in the course of a summer; especially, perhaps, if he slung the hammock under the apples or the shade maples.

For the nearest approach to a new experience is to lie under a tree. It is even more strange and more an inversion of our conceit than it is to look about under water. In the bed of a river things appear much as they de when you look toward the bottom from the bank, and the distress of holding your breath after the first half ​minute is likely to make you neglect the landscape; but lie flat, face up, beneath a tree (if you have n’t one, a big azalea like the one in our yard will do), and you will realize that you never appreciated arboreal anatomy before. How light and strong it is, how full of lessons for engineers and builders and painters! And it is so unaccustomed; the tangents in the boughs are so unexpected; the masses of leaf, flower, and fruit are so remarkable; it is so inspiring to see that castle in the air, so light, so fairy-like, yet so sturdy and tough, with the birds and bees and butterflies seeking its entrances!

Strangest of all is that it impresses one in a vague way with a consciousness of its strength and purpose. What made it bend this bough to avoid another? Why did it thin out its leaves here, where it was likely to clash them against another branchful? You wonder if they hear and know, these trees, all that is said and done by the clumsy black beetles on two legs that crawl over their roots.

If you can’t look up into a tree for ex​perience, look at the clouds. The sky is so common a luxury that we deny it to ourselves. But if your eyes are strong, lie on a bank of wild thyme, or something, and just stare into the zenith. It is not so poetic if you have to wear blue glasses; but the light of the sun reflected from mountains of snowy cumulus, or even the far-off and filmy tissues of the cirri, nay, even the light that fills the unclouded air, is more piercing than you have supposed. So, if your eye can endure it, sprawl on the wild thyme in your yard, or in your hammock, close enough in the shadow of the house to be out of view of the neighbors, and watch those moving mountains, more vast in bulk than the Balkans, as magnificent in scenery as Greenland, piled into space for miles above your head—watch these marble domes as they are wheeled across the heavens in the wind’s track, sometimes crumbling down in misty ribbons at a distance, sometimes turning black and bellowing and belching flood and fire and terror near at hand. The life of the air is a revelation. It is as much so as the life of space ​as we view it through the telescope, or the life of stagnant water when we see it in the microscope, or the life in the ground when we stir the earth in spring, What are those birds that cross the vision at mountain height, mere specks against the argosies of silver? Eagles, are they, or hawks, or condors and such strange winged creatures of other lands, spying out the country? Or are they archæopteryces, plesiosauri, and pterodactyls left over from the age of saurians and afraid to come down, knowing that man, the fiercest of destroyers, would stuff them and put them into his museums? Youngsters make more use of their eyes and nature than we, and they can probably tell us more about the sky than we see. Their fresh fancies find odd creatures in the air. My youngest, standing at the window, called to his mother to look at the horses. She, hearing no sound of hoofs on the pavement, answered that there were no horses near. “Yes,” he insisted; “cloud horses, galloping in the sky.”

How apt these babes are in their speeches! There is beauty in their abso​lute simplicity. It is like the poetry of the Indians. A little relative of mine died on St. Valentine’s day, and one of his playmates said, “He will be God’s Valentine, mama.” Harold, in the yard, says, “The dandelions are getting old: see their white hair.” Like all infants, he amuses us by the quaintness and unexpectedness of his observations. Seeing a hearse returning from a funeral with the driver's official tile inside, he whispered impressively, “That man’s going to bury his hat.” And talking of a young man who speaks in a meek, high soprano, he informed us that “Mr. E——— had feathers in his voice.”

Even a town yard is incomplete without children. They are trying, sometimes, and they do not value the pet plants as you do; but you may console yourself with the thought that if they did not break them, Reginald McGonigle would; and if he did n’t, the beetles, caterpillars, lice, and worms would eat them. The views of youngsters on nature and mankind are the only original ones that we hear.

To look skyward again: One night, after ​the passage of a thunder-storm, I looked southward, and there, through the haze, appeared a long jag of lightning photographed on the sky. It did not flicker: it simply stayed. It was much more startling than a lively flash. And two or three seconds elapsed before I made out that the seam of pale light was merely the edge of a cumulus cloud, high up, showing through a rift in the reek, and lighted by a moon invisible from the earth.

And these things are seen as easily in the town as in the country, and we make a pretense of liking them as well through the window as in the pasture, Perhaps the restriction of our ground scenery forces attention to the sky. I know that certain sunsets and sunrises have been beautiful, though roofs and spires have risen against them. I know that the fan of sunbeams piercing holes in a cloud blanket—what country people call “the sun drawing water”—is at least as striking from the yard as it is when I see it from the favorite hill in Vermont, though one cannot see the lighted spots in the landscape where these ​rays fall. I know that when snow flies the flakes spring out of the gray emptiness in the same bewildering way as in the fields, and that each flake is as marvelous a crystal as if it fellin Canada. I know that even in these dull precincts the color splendors of the clouds are as obvious as in the country—and as unregarded. We seldom realize these colors. But put a tub of water in the yard on a cloudy day, stand where the sun is reflected in it, and as the clouds pass watch this water mirror and mark how they kindle. They do not show rainbows, but delicate and shelly lusters, fleeting, tender, fairy-like. You can bear to see these reflections, because the whole sky is not blazing into your eyes. Then, the clear, open firmament: nothing is finer. The winter of space is suggested, merely, and glorified in the turquoise, windy skies of autumn.

It is in autumn that there is a kind of glow in the air as well as in the trees, The leaves seem to throw their color to the sky, where it is reflected back upon the earth, as the white of a polar ice-cap shines into ​the clouds above it. And this is not all illusion, for the southing sun loses its heat-rays, and the chemical light that comes through the air is red.

Looking skyward one is face to face with eternity. How futile, yet inevitable, to put the questions suggested to himself and to unanswering space and time by that vision! He tries to think back to the time in eternity when matter did not exist, and concludes it always did exist, And he wonders if the universe is evolution or creation, And is order mind, or has mind developed from order? And in the future suns burn out, only to have their ashes swept up by comets, scouts and scavengers of space, and hurled together with such fury that they become gaseous with heat, condense, reform into suns and planets, and the drama goes on again, endlessly. With a spectator? Ah, useless to ask and wonder. Truth is in a well, so deep she cannot come to us, nor we descend to her. Let us be content to love and admire, create and maintain, live and improve. It is all—and the best—we can do.