Quivering, soaring, swinging flights set out over the wide marsh, and the bird fleets ride the waters. The goldeneyes follow one another bobbing along in a channel, along with mergansers and occasional buffleheads, whose white heads or sides suddenly shine out as they round a corner. A rush and glide of water shows brightly in the distance when an eider plows quickly forward. The Canada geese feed over the marsh or on the borders of its channels and ditches, honking low, the sentinel ganders with their proud heads and necks showing above the grassy levels around them. One afternoon when I was walking across the coarse cover of the marsh--which seemed to stretch far off like the pampas, with its indefinite sky and a wide-spread travel of birds--I caught sight of a deer running up behind me, some fifty yards away. It was a doe, with a dun-colored winter coat; and seeing me, she swerved suddenly and headed out toward the middle of the marsh. The waters of January are bitterly cold, but the doe swam a wide channel to get to a small island in the middle, and there she stayed, shaking and scratching now and then, stirring around in an area that became more and more circumscribed as the tide began to rise and the waters widened. I left her a couple of hours later in the gathering dusk, a dark, distant little figure, hunched up far out on the marsh. Deer can swim for several miles, even in icy waters, so she undoubtedly swam back after I was safely out of the way, perhaps after dark when the tide started to go down again. Still, I was troubled by what I had caused, and I came back early next morning to reassure myself that she was gone. When night comes on, the dark flat marsh has a look of absolute secrecy. The cold winter wind completes its isolation. A few last birds may fly up over it, or twist and cry in the wind and then drop down and disappear. What quick movements, starts, flicking actions, what flight there may be left is at last hidden, downed completely, and the wind and surf sounds wash out all else. There is secrecy and at the same time a desolation in the marsh, the desolation of life pared down to absolute essentials. It offers no luxury but motion in its tidal context, an absolute minimum of redundance. It is a spare unity, even with all its life and light, and the colors that play over it throughout the years, a whole which only accepts those parts which are necessary to it. This marsh is on its own, with ancient standards of simplicity. To find fulfillment in them would be luxury indeed. The lights begin to go on in the houses that stand over its inner shore, as evening advances. A plane drones in the sky. The marsh’s flat, wind-blown darkness is alone, and seems to say that all life is received by those bare standards, that we are all helplessly interdependent and obligated to tides that none of us can turn. XV The Uses of Light