Summer Animals

by ANDREW FURMAN

During summertime in south Florida, gloominess descends. I mostly blame the unrelenting heat and my retreat indoors. Throughout these hottest months in the subtropics, we tend to shutter ourselves inside the climate-controlled interiors of our homes, offices, and automobiles. Rarely do we linger outdoors to exchange hale and hearties with our neighbors. 

Winter in Henry David Thoreau’s Concord provides an analogue to summertime in south Florida, at least insofar as the weather curtails Thoreau’s outdoor excursions and effectively isolates him from most human neighbors during the two winters he spends at his cabin beside Walden Pond. “At this season, I seldom had a visitor,” he writes as winter sets in. While Thoreau greets his solitude with alacrity, it’s also true that he isn’t immune to loneliness, however fleeting. What seems mostly to combat gloominess for Thoreau is his continued contact with a riot of winter animals—geese, foxes, owls, chickadees, tit-mice, partridges, mice, rabbits, squirrels—many of which he seeks out by tromping through the thick snow.  

It’s a very old knowledge. We share the planet with nonhuman animals. We need them. Our fate has ever depended upon this kinship, originally realized through a sound, a smell, a glimpse, then through the tip of a spear. But not only through the tip of a spear. The oldest works of human art that we’ve discovered mostly represent animals. Consider the 25,000-year-old mural of spotted horses painted across a rock wall inside the Pech Merle cave in France. Even in photographs, there’s something awesome about the scale of the equine figures, the bold black manes and spots, the way the artists seem to have shaped the head of one horse from the natural outcropping of the stone. Note, too, the stenciled handprints above and below the horse figures—early artists’ version of a signature, maybe? But more. The hands. The horses. The conjoining of a human and nonhuman animal presence across the shared space of the stone. Kinship.

The Pech Merle cave mural was painted during the Ice Age. It may be that these early humans painted murals during their coldest months, when they were mostly sealed inside their arctic caves, when they were hard-pressed to realize physical encounters with animals, when many humans and animals surely starved to death. It’s impossible to know what these people were thinking when they produced their art, but painting spotted horses against a rock wall might have been their way of sustaining kinship with these animals by bringing them inside—images of them, anyway—shoring up hope.

As I’ve been fairly sealed indoors during this blazing heat, I’ve been wondering whether it might be the nonhuman animals outside that I truly miss most now. In south Florida summertime, the animals are especially scarce. Our manifold warblers, vireos, and buntings that flit nonstop, like blinking Christmas lights, across the scaffolding of my front-yard oaks during winter, are now long gone until the fall. Come dog days, the bluefish, manatee, mahi mahi, and various other aquatic creatures mostly drift northward along the Gulf Stream or inside the Intracoastal Waterway and its feeder canals to more temperate waters. Even the stalwart burrowing owls and gopher tortoises and raccoons sit out the sweltering daytime heat, nestled in their subterranean warrens and shaggy sabal palm canopies.

Humans, like animals, have traditionally taken shelter from the intemperate outdoors. But we’ve also taken pains to bring the outdoors, including its animals, inside with us. The Pech Merle cave murals represent just one of several such sites of prehistoric art. Around 22,000 years ago, Paleolithic artists painted and carved bison, horses, deer, human hands, and mysterious signs against the limestone walls of the Cave of Altamira in northern Spain. These representations, which extend over 270 meters into the cave, are renowned not only for their age, but also for their artists’ sophisticated techniques and treatment of the three-dimensional medium, anticipating elements of naturalism, abstraction, and symbolism. What’s most striking in photographs is the freshness of the red and black pigments. A bison’s brick-red muscular girth atop spindly legs captures my gaze. Simple loops and dots of black, demarcating eye and ear, lend life and agency to the creature.   

Our ancient intimacy with wild plants and animals increasingly slips from our grasp in contemporary suburbia. Coast to coast, we have uprooted the native placeness of our neighborhoods and replaced native trees, shrubs, and vines with lawn monocultures accented by a few meager (and mostly non-native) shrubs and specimen trees. While a few animal species have profited from our peculiar landscaping—blue jays, squirrels, and cardinals in my neighborhood, for example—most native creatures struggle to make a go of it in the bland new environments we’ve created.    

Thoreau would be aghast at the sight of our suburban neighborhoods. “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps,” he proclaims in his essay “Walking.” In Walden, he offers his own landscaping plan, a plea to forgo landscaping altogether: “No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar.” 

Here, flora marks the permeable boundary between Thoreau’s cabin and the wild outdoors that resonates throughout Walden. But animals also test the border between indoors and out, and to Thoreau’s delight, particularly during wintertime, when human company is scarce. While Thoreau describes his sturdy construction of the cabin and his attempts to winterize it, his shelter’s utter porousness leaves a greater impression. Chickadees flit in and out his open windows and pick their dinner from his woodpile; wasps “by the thousands” settle on the windows and walls and even in his bed; red squirrels wake him in the morning, “coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose.” It is Thoreau’s account of the hares that perhaps most charmingly exemplifies the paper-thin boundary between his cabin and the outdoors: “The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar,” he writes. “One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir,--thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry.”

These days, we’re much more diligent about keeping the outside out and the inside in, particularly in my neck of the woods, where our one-time pine flatwoods were grubbed out to make room for us and our climate-controlled domiciles of cinderblock, built to withstand the fierce tropical storms of summertime. When my wife and I purchased our new home, we installed hurricane-grade storm windows—mostly because it would keep my middle-aged self from having to climb a ladder to install heavy metal shutters in advance of an approaching storm. The “Low-E” glass would also keep our energy costs down, our salesman assured us, as less cool air would escape and less hot air would seep inside. As a final selling point, he added that the windows would keep all noise out, alluding, I suppose, to the mechanized noise of automobiles, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers, all fairly pervasive sounds in our environs. The windows have, in fact, shielded us from these unpleasant and incessant suburban sounds. 

In the bargain, however, they’ve also shut out the sounds of the oaks whispering secrets in the salt breeze, the squirrels scrabbling across the branches, the curious twinkling notes of frogs, and the buzzes and clicks of countless insects. They’ve blotted out all birdsong too: the bleats and cackles of red-bellied woodpeckers, the piercing notes of spot-breasted orioles, the bright tweets of cardinals, and the monotone trills and whinnies of screech owls. I didn’t foresee losing the natural outdoor sounds along with the mechanized noise. I didn’t realize how much these outdoor animal sounds mean to me. I didn’t anticipate how strange and alienating absolute quiet indoors could feel, nary a wild rabbit in my neighborhood to thump against the undersides of my floor timbers. 

Prehistoric cave art evoking the outdoors suggests, perhaps, that we have always been wary of sealing ourselves off from the world outside our shelters. The rock-art sites at Tadrart Acacus, located in the desert of west Libya, date from 12,000 BCE to 100 CE. The paintings reflect various cultural and climatic shifts in this region of the Sahara. What is now an arid landscape of basalt monoliths was once a green savannah. The paintings feature several animals, including giraffes, camels, elephants, ostriches, and horses. Mark the giraffe: its curlicue tail, disproportionately large chest spotted with red beneath its smaller head and neck, and slightly forward tilt, the legs bent just so. These features together suggest forward motion. There’s something proud, too, in the upright posture of that smaller head and neck. A personality is being painted. How did the artists and their fellow humans see these giant creatures? As food, surely—but not merely as food. Not as food, I mean to say, in the diminished sense that we have come to see or not see the avian, aquatic, and terrestrial creatures we kill and eat. 

Thoreau doesn’t hunt in Walden. He pretty much gives up fishing, too. He renounces animal food altogether as “unclean” and “not agreeable” to his imagination. His wintertime sanity depends upon cultivating kinship of a different ilk with nonhuman creatures. While most naturalists of his day studied their subjects down the barrel of a rifle, he anticipates the discipline of ethology through his close observation of animal behavior. His mode of bird study “requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.” During winter, when his excursions are somewhat limited, he listens from his cabin to owls hooting in the distance, foxes yelping after game, and geese honking overhead. He thinks long and hard about animals and plants and us. “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” he inquires. It’s a good question. We will never know why these precise plants and animals share our world. Or why precisely we share the world with these other carbon-based organisms. But that shouldn’t deter us from our beholding. 

Indeed, we have always contemplated the manifold matter—animal, vegetable, mineral—that comprises our world. The painting of a fruit-eating pig-deer, or babirusa, in one of the Maros-Pangkep caves in Indonesia, dates to at least 35,400 years ago and seems to be the oldest example of human cave art that we’ve discovered. Only a fragment of the original painting remains. The artists ground a natural mineral pigment into a powder and mixed the powder with water to create the paint. The faded lines of the pig-deer’s torso suggest hair. The pig-deer’s head and legs seem spindly compared to its inflated torso. Its exaggerated proportions, incredibly, resemble those of the Saharan giraffe, the Spanish bison, the French horses. What could these artists have been thinking inside their complex crania, across continents and millennia, when they painted such comparably thick midsections atop spindly legs? 

During his experiment living beside a pond in a modest one-room cabin, Thoreau realized an intimacy with the outdoors that might have rivaled that of our prehistoric human ancestors. However, he would return to town and join the ranks of Walden Pond’s “former inhabitants” (to borrow from the title of one of Walden’s chapters, “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors”) after two short years. His lungs ravaged by tuberculosis, he lived just long enough to see his “tight shingled and plastered house” by the pond fall into ruin. It was eventually dismantled for scrap lumber, what was left of the roof thrown over a pigsty. One wonders what he thought of its sure and steady dilapidation. He likely viewed the sunken roof and shattered windows as emblems of his own mortality, consistent with the way he viewed the moldering remnants of other human domiciles around the pond. Yet he might, too, have perceived the cabin as melting organically into the white pine landscape of which it was largely constructed, not unlike the way he viewed autumn leaves melting into the forest floor to provide the earth its essential muck, as he reflects in one of his final essays, “Autumnal Tints.” He might have been bolstered by the ever-increasing merge of cabin and woods, of inside and out, which gives the lie to the rigid divide between nature and culture, animal and human, that existed in his day and in ours. Contentment for Thoreau largely depends upon puncturing this divide. When loneliness threatens, “every sight and sound around my house” reminds him of the “sweet and beneficent society in nature [emphasis mine].” 

To gain intimate knowledge of the sights and sounds of a particular place outdoors is to gain a measure of contentment. I’ll probably never cultivate the outdoors patience of a cave artist or a Thoreau. Thoreau took daily four-hour walks in the woods and fields surrounding Concord, observed the animal and plant goings-on with almost unimaginable patience, and documented his efforts in thousands of handwritten pages that he mostly collected in his journal, unpublished during his lifetime. I may never put in enough watchful hours at a nearby or faraway swamp or pineland or hammock that it feels like home. But I’ve tried to commit greater effort toward knowing my immediate place, anyway—toward making my actual home feel like home. 

I build and install nest boxes with my kids, nurture creature-friendly native plants across my small yard, and explore the outdoors with my family far less often than I would like. We live out most minutes of our days, especially summertime, within interiors shielded from the outside. Yet we, too, have sought in small ways to puncture the barrier between outdoors and in. We haven’t painted our own walls with animal likenesses, but we’ve decorated them with a simple pencil sketch of an oak tree, a watercolor of a Florida fish called a snook, and a color photograph of a fawn. A Florida fighting conch shell with caramel and cream whorls that I collected from a nearby beach now sits on my desk. I shouldn’t neglect to mention the wildflower sprigs that our six-year-old, Eva, plucks from the plants in our yard (usually without permission) and tends to leave strewn all about the house as if marking her trail. Consider the artwork and other knick-knacks that adorn your home. To what extent do we all endeavor, however subconsciously, to bring the outdoors inside? To what extent do these efforts resonate, however loosely, in the earliest human art that we’ve discovered against the walls of prehistoric caves? 

I’m convinced that these efforts to know my place go some distance toward alleviating summertime blues in the subtropics. It’s ghastly hot here, sure. Still, it’s important to get outside. By seven-thirty in the evening, the bully sun finally begins to melt beneath the sawgrass blades and the outside temperature cools, somewhat. Florida creatures, lazy as all get-out midday, pick up their pace. My wife and I—and any of our three children who we can enlist—walk a few blocks to take the evening pulse of the neighborhood. Before our walk, however, I’ve taken to sitting beneath our largest oak tree for a while, simply watching and listening as our front yard gains curious life. I’ve suffered a mosquito bite or two. But that’s okay. Plenty of light still bleeds from the horizon so that I can see and smell and hear. I’ve paid enough attention to note certain patterns of rising activity—the crickets, for example, start chiming in much earlier than actual nightfall—but there are just as many strange disruptions that make each experience outdoors new.

This evening, I sit on my folding chair beneath the tree and listen as the pleasant cricket notes gradually overtake the less pleasant metallic clacking of what I’m pretty sure are cicadas or katydids. I breathe in deeply through my nostrils. The pleasantly pungent aroma of my white stopper plants connotes the Florida outdoors and soothes my nerves at least as much as the cricket melody. A mourning dove issues its plaintive coo from a telephone wire. A red-bellied woodpecker bleats from around the side of the house; it’s probably one of the breeding pair outside its nest box, signaling its presence to the chicks inside. Every once in a while, the automotive roar from a car motoring too fast toward the stop sign on my corner blots out the crickets and birds for a moment. Two squirrels scratch across the tree branches of the laurel oak overhead in a swirl as one chases the other, grousing at its rival or would-be mate with cheeky calls. Another squirrel roots around noisily in the crispy leaf litter just ten yards away; could it be searching for acorns it buried months ago? A curlytail lizard scrabbles after its arthropod prey on the still-hot driveway cement. A distant helium giggle betrays the presence of a downy woodpecker up the street somewhere. It grows darker. In the absence of birdsong and the waning of car traffic, the cricket melody rises more fully. But a small flock of chimney swifts hasn’t yet taken roost. I hear their Morse code twittering fade in and out of earshot as they make several passes high overhead. I glimpse their silhouettes—stubby cigars with wings—through tears in the oak canopy. It’s not much, maybe, but it’s home, and these are some of our summer animals.