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.If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score? It has the liquid, intricate sound of every creek’s tumble over every configuration of rock creek-bottom in the country.Who, telegraphing a message, would trouble to transmit a five-act play, or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and who, receiving the message, could understand it? Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code.And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that “oui” will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.It is spring.I plan to try to control myself this year, to watch the progress of the season in a calm and orderly fashion.In spring I am prone to wretched excess.I abandon myself to flights and compulsions; I veer into various states of physical disarray.For the duration of one entire spring I played pinochle; another spring I played second base.One spring I missed because I had lobar pneumonia; one softball season I missed with bursitis; and every spring at just about the time the leaves first blur on the willows, I stop eating and pale, like a silver eel about to migrate.My mind wanders.Second base is a Broadway, a Hollywood and Vine; but oh, if I’m out in right field they can kiss me goodbye.As the sun sets, sundogs, which are mock suns—chunks of rainbow on either side of the sun but often very distant from it—appear over the pasture by Carvin’s Creek.Wes Hillman is up in his biplane; the little Waco lords it over the stillness, cutting a fine silhouette.It might rain tomorrow, if those ice crystals find business.I have no idea how many outs there are; I luck through the left-handers, staring at rainbows.The field looks to me as it must look to Wes Hillman up in the biplane: everyone is running, and I can’t hear a sound.The players look so thin on the green, and the shadows so long, and the ball a mystic thing, pale to invisibility….I’m better off in the infield.In April I walked to the Adams’ woods.The grass had greened one morning when I blinked; I missed it again.As I left the house I checked the praying mantis egg case.I had given all but one of the cases to friends for their gardens; now I saw that small black ants had discovered the one that was left, the one tied to the mock-orange hedge by my study window.One side of the case was chewed away, either by the ants or by something else, revealing a rigid froth slit by narrow cells.Over this protective layer the ants scrambled in a frenzy, unable to eat; the actual mantis eggs lay secure and unseen, waiting, deeper in.The morning woods were utterly new.A strong yellow light pooled between the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of the trees I walked under were still bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves.The snakes were out—I saw a bright, smashed one on the path—and the butterflies were vaulting and furling about; the phlox was at its peak, and even the evergreens looked greener, newly created and washed.Long racemes of white flowers hung from the locust trees.Last summer I heard a Cherokee legend about the locust tree and the moon.The moon goddess starts out with a big ball, the full moon, and she hurls it across the sky.She spends all day retrieving it; then she shaves a slice from it and hurls it again, retrieving, shaving, hurling, and so on.She uses up a moon a month, all year.Then, the way Park Service geologist Bill Well-man tells it, “’long about spring of course she’s knee-deep in moon-shavings,” so she finds her favorite tree, the locust, and hangs the slender shavings from its boughs.And there they were, the locust flowers, pale and clustered in crescents.The newts were back.In the small forest pond they swam bright and quivering, or hung alertly near the water’s surface.I discovered that if I poked my finger into the water and wagged it slowly, a newt would investigate; then if I held my finger still, it would nibble at my skin, softly, the way my goldfish does—and, also like my goldfish, it would swim off as if in disgust at a bad job.This is salamander metropolis.If you want to find a species wholly new to science and have your name inscribed Latinly in some secular version of an eternal rollbook, then your best bet is to come to the southern Appalachians, climb some obscure and snakey mountain where, as the saying goes, “the hand of man has never set foot,” and start turning over rocks.The mountains act as islands; evolution does the rest, and there are scores of different salamanders all around.The Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway produce their own unique species, black and spotted in dark gold; the rangers there keep a live one handy by sticking it in a Baggie and stowing it in the refrigerator, like a piece of cheese.Newts are the most common of salamanders.Their skin is a lighted green, like water in a sunlit pond, and rows of very bright red dots line their backs.They have gills as larvae; as they grow they turn a luminescent red, lose their gills, and walk out of the water to spend a few years padding around in damp places on the forest floor.Their feet look like fingered baby hands, and they walk in the same leg patterns as all four-footed creatures—dogs, mules, and, for that matter, lesser pan das.When they mature fully, they turn green again and stream to the water in droves.A newt can scent its way home from as far as eight miles away.They are altogether excellent creatures, if somewhat moist, but no one pays the least attention to them, except children.Once I was camped “alone” at Douthat State Park in the Allegheny Mountains near here, and spent the greater part of one afternoon watching children and newts.There were many times more red-spotted newts at the edge of the lake than there were children; the supply exceeded even that very heavy demand.One child was collecting them in a Thermos mug to take home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to feed an ailing cayman.Other children ran to their mothers with squirming fistfuls.One boy was mistreating the newts spectacularly: he squeezed them by their tails and threw them at a shoreline stone, one by one.I tried to reason with him, but nothing worked
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