The whole idea of nature is as doubtful as organic foods. We're organisms too, and the functional difference between us and the ants is insignificant. What separates us is that, for us, picnics are fun. For ants they’re business as usual.

I’m fond of nature, but I don't take it as seriously as Annie Dillard. I thought she was going into orbit over the total eclipse in Teaching a Stone to Talk. But then she quoted a college student, who said, "Did you see that little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver up in the sky." That's more my style. Just after sunrise this morning, under a very high, unmoving, streaky sky, there were little blobs of low cloud skudding along so fast they looked exactly like time-lapse photography. That’s how I see nature.

Nature is looking good on the Cape these days. We could use some rain, but we had plenty earlier this summer. The temperature was down to 40 this morning for the first time since late Spring. The fall colors are subtle here compared with farther inland, but they're pleasing, particularly the poison ivy. The maples manage to be various shades of green and red and yellow all at once, which sounds gaudy but looks good if it's done right. As usual, the reddest thing around is Virginia Creeper, but the most spectacular colors are the bright yellow leaves and red and yellow berries of the voraciously invasive bittersweet. The gorgeous purple tassels of the equally despised fifteen foot tall common reed could have been designed to show off the wind. I appreciate the good intentions of the native species folks, those who feel nature ought to be a certain way, And I’m intrigued by the natural philosophers who see meaning under every rock. I just prefer to remain a tourist myself.

Nature isn’t really up to anything, of course, it just sits there and churns, but it’s tempting to want to know how it works. I have a friend who’s taking a community college course in precisely that. He points out that there are an excessive number of parts to a leaf. I would have said until recently that the major difference between the natural and made environments is that nature is cyclical, whereas we and our doings try our best to be linear. Nature does repeat herself, the grass grows, and the leaves fall, but not as neatly as I once thought. Late this spring, every otherwise unclaimed square inch of forest floor in the Red Maple Swamp was filled with garlic mustard, stiff little plants that stand in ranks like toy soldiers. We don't remember seeing them at all the year before. By mid-summer, the mustard was gone and replaced by the tiny white blossoms of wood anemones. Last year these appeared in only a few small patches. This summer they briefly carpeted the whole woods, as the trail guide had promised.

We saw two foxes last summer and two coyotes this year. Last year mocking birds sang at us from just a few feet away all along the Fort Hill trail. We saw hardly any this summer, but cat birds called from under every bush and zipped across the trail in front of us, two or three feet off the ground, and flew back into the thick brush as accurately as bats.

This was a summer of snakes and frogs. We'd seen two snakes in 35 years, this summer we saw 15 or 20. All but one were first spotted by Nancy. I was going to suggest special reptilian powers until she pointed out that she always walks ahead of me. The one I saw was a garter snake, enjoying the sun while draped across the bull briar a good four feet off the ground, like a miniature jungle boa. -- My relationship with the natural world was established long ago, by old Tarzan movies, in which the explorers would stop every few yards to see an unlikely jungle tableau of lions or gorillas. -- We saw one frog in the swamp last year, late in the fall. It was so stiff with cold it could hardly move. On a single day this August, and that day only, we saw at least twenty of them. They were sitting a few feet apart on patches of wet mud, not moving or chatting. We didn’t hear a croak all summer in fact. The next day they were gone.

There are reasons for all of this, naturally, but our park ranger friend suggests that they’re probably too complex to analyze, too many variables. Maybe the frogs eat the garlic, and the snakes eat the frogs, and then they all have to wait a few years before their turn comes again.

Fortunately we don't really need to know what's going on, or why. It's enough to take the trail to Coast Guard Beach on a foggy morning and watch ghost gulls fly over, soundless, white on white, and then a flock of crows, black on white but looking exactly the same in the thick mist.

October 01