The circus clown might well take the spirit of his antics from the actions of red-headed woodpeckers in a Southern pine forest. After scrambling in a jerky ludicrousness up a stub one would pause on the top of it motionless for a time, reminding me of an awkward boy trying to pose as Ajax defying the lightning. Then another would dive at him in full flight, driving him from his perch at the last moment, only to take it and assume the exact pose of the former, the whole thing done with the alert precision of a pair of good circus performers. Then the substitute, still motionless, would give his little treetoad-like creak, as if saying in humorous humility, “How’s that for an act?” Taine, the historian, has written of the immense loneliness of the pine barrens. But it is to be supposed that Taine was never entertained there by a flock of red-headed woodpeckers. But then, there are people whom vaudeville makes lonely.
I have not named the half of the birds I can identify of a morning in this great aviary, nor have I named the two that pleased me most. One was just plain bluebird, a young bird of a silent flock that slipped through the trees of the town. This young bird had not yet his mature plumage, and he hung behind and peered about in an uncertain way as if much impressed with the wonders of this new place to which mother had brought him, but still a bit lonesome and unsettled. I was right glad to see bluebirds. I have looked in vain so far for robins. The other is a bird that came with the cold snap and hangs about the tip of the Orange Park dock almost a quarter of a mile out in the river, without visible means of support. He hides under the stringers when I approach him, but I have had several good views, and if I know a snow bunting when I see one, this is he. What business he has so far South is more than I can tell, and he seems to feel an alien by the way he clings to the seclusion of the dock. Perhaps he came on the wrong boat and is only waiting for a return ticket. At any rate I was glad to see him and I wish him a safe return.
CHAPTER V
’TWIXT ORANGE GROVE AND SWAMP
The old Greek myth-makers sang with poetic fervor of the golden apples of the Hesperides, which no doubt were oranges, nor do I blame them for their fervor. Apples they knew, and knew, too, that nothing could be more beautiful than an apple tree, holding its dappled fruit bravely up to the pale October sun. But oranges came to them out of the misty west, a region that the setting sun set glowing with romance each night, and then swathed in the purple evanescence of darkness. Something of this delight of mystery has flavored the fruit ever since, and we taste it with mental palate before its pulp passes the lips.
I had thought all the orange trees of northern Florida killed by the great cold of a decade ago, and so in the main they were. But there are spots on the east bank of the lower St. Johns where the miles of warm water tempered the cold somewhat, so that though the trees were cut to the ground the life in the roots remained and has since burgeoned in reborn groves. The trees sprouted from the stump as oaks and chestnuts do in a Northern woodland, and now the sprouts bear fruit. At Mandarin, a dozen miles from Jacksonville, are such groves through one of which I delight to take my way to “the branch.” It is literally a branch of the level river into which it so smoothly glides with never a ripple on its black surface or a clot of foam to cloud its mirror.
Swamp and grove meet but do not mingle, the dividing line being firmly drawn by the teeth of the harrow that all summer long vexes the sand beneath the orange trees. With all its persistence this harrow barely keeps down the scutch and dog fennel and a score or two of other weeds that under soaking shower and fervid sun continually rise rampant. Even now that the almanac has decreed winter rosettes of seedlings of a score of nascent annuals spangle the gray with green that softens its glare to the eye and tempts the knight-errant grasshoppers. These zip from glare to glare, and seem to creak a bit as the tiny coolness of the northern breeze touches the joints of their machinery.
Sitting in the grateful shadow of an orange tree, facing sunward in the grove, the world becomes an expanse of glistening white sand, blotched with the deep green masses of foliage,
“In the grateful shadow of an orange tree facing sunward in the grove”
dappled with the gold of as yet unpicked fruit. Over yonder a short ladder spires above a tree and I can hear the snip-snip of the picker’s shears and the soft thud of fruit dropped into big bags. The noise fits in with the rampant listlessness of the creaking grasshopper machinery, a busy, drowsy blurring of staccato sounds that has a sleepy insistence. It fits the gray glitter of the sand and the shining sun. I note an orange sulphur butterfly, just the color of the fruit on which he seems to linger, where in the sun he may match his own shade. I have a fancy that he does this consciously, the dark tips of his wings contrasting harmoniously, as the black-green, glossy foliage does, with the golden fruit.