Long before I began to understand a winter like that of Montreal--<<Ce n'est pas mon pays, c'est l'hiver...>>--I used to look forward to a sign that there would be no more cold weather in my home near Savannah. That sign was something I never saw but only heard--the song of the whippoorwill. It always came just after dusk from a westerly direction in the deep woods across from our house. Not even the nightingale of Keats and the other Romantic poets could begin to alter for me my gratitude to this unseen spirit of the air which truly marked the end of winter. Never was there ever a cold day after I heard that magical sound. I listened with a rapt joy rarely excelled in my life. Gone were the bitter winds that buffeted me in my leather jacket as I sat outside on the south side of the house trying to soak up what warmth I could from the rays of a sun still in the thrall of the constellation of Orion, all too visible in those chilly night skies that were now a vague memory. The wheel of the seasons had finally rotated where I could count on the rebirth of sun-worshipping plants.
Of course, in my pantheistic excesses of romantic sentiment, I forgot the summer heat on the way or the hordes of biting insects or the poisonous vipers that would soon awaken to waylay me on my urgent errand to the outhouse some fifty yards from our back door. Copperheads would soon be sunning themselves in that path covered in old brown oak leaves that resembled all-too-well the patterns on this sluggish viper’s outer coating. I always hated to disturb their naps but needed some clearance to get by them without risking a sudden awakening of these deaf creatures whose eyes never closed even in deep somnolence. They crawled off slowly as though disturbed from a trance. I passed by with a safe clearance to my meditative reveries over the deep hole in the earth that constituted our ecologically correct disposal unit, well before compost toilets became fashionable. The only sign of such compostings were rectangles of deep blue-green grass scattered about the large back yard that held our version of a purely natural septic tank. (The outhouse was moved at regular intervals when the hole was nearly full.)
Despite these healthy doses of reality that might challenge even Jonathan Swift to describe in detail, I nevertheless managed to maintain my romantic image of the Great Outdoors, called “Nature” by more insistent folk. I took the snakes, mosquitoes, yellow biting flies, and chicken hawks as part of this great realm beyond human creations. When I read Spinoza on the presence of God in Nature, I did not exclude the great inconveniences of outdoor life. Pantheism was not for me a great sappy faith in the kindness of natural surroundings toward human beings. I may not have said with Thomas Hobbes that life in “the State of Nature” was “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” but I did believe hurricanes and nasty lightning strikes were a part of this non-human realm. I read John Muir’s description of being caught out in a thunderstorm with considerable understanding of the excitement he experienced with his racing thoughts as well as the terror that was a part of that event, having myself been nearly struck several times in my youth. Still the realm of Nature was exciting for me. Maybe it was the “sturm und drang” of my hormones but I doubt it. I was reading philosophy at fifteen and I got more excitement in those days from Bergson’s “élan vital” and all those other heady ideas by which I filtered my experience. I even remember counting flower petals to confirm my belief in the “argument from design” that hinted at some great divine force beyond all this “phenomena.” I’m not sure my theology has ever advanced much from this adolescent revelation handed down, no doubt, from some student of Thomas Aquinas. (It would be years before I undertook more systematic examinations of some of those great notions from theological studies.) Mathematics and science were my two passions and Alfred North Whitehead my guide to what he called in one book, “the adventures of ideas.”
The song of the whippoorwill is still a touchstone for me of the glory of what we call “Nature.” I love spring in the far flung world of New England which brings bird symphonies every morning just before until just after the first light of dawn. Mockingbirds, cardinals, and song sparrows are strong players but every bird seems to know how to join in this harmonious exuberance that marks early spring. It nearly matches the magic of the whippoorwill. There are tornados, to be sure—just ask the people of Monson—but I do not reject nature for the realm of human beings alone because of it. Nature, for me, has the same terrifying beauty it had for Saint-Exupery caught in a whirling gale off the coast of South America. He was too busy trying to save his life and his cargo as he plunged and dived in the grips of this monster to notice the beauty of the Andes in that moment. But he reverently and soberly acknowledged the beauties and wonders of these terrifying places for an airman in his open cockpit airplane despite the dangers. We will all disappear, as he did on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in World War II, in some mysterious way that we will never understand this side of the Mystic Veil that covers life for us.
