Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition Read online

  The summer at Paradise Beach was for me not an educational exercise planned by adults, but an accident in a haphazard life. I was parked there in what my parents trusted would be a safe and carefree environment. During that brief time, however, a second accident occurred that determined what kind of naturalist I would eventually become. I was fishing on the dock with minnow hooks and rod, jerking pinfish out of the water as soon as they struck the bait. The species, Lagodon rhomboides, is small, perchlike, and voracious. It carries ten needlelike spines that stick straight up in the membrane of the dorsal fin when it is threatened. I carelessly yanked too hard when one of the fish pulled on my line. It flew out of the water and into my face. One of its spines pierced the pupil of my right eye.

  The pain was excruciating, and I suffered for hours. But being anxious to stay outdoors, I didn’t complain very much. I continued fishing. Later, the host family, if they understood the problem at all (I can’t remember), did not take me in for medical treatment. The next day the pain had subsided into mild discomfort, and then it disappeared. Several months later, after I had returned home to Pensacola, the pupil of the eye began to cloud over with a traumatic cataract. As soon as my parents noticed the change, they took me to a doctor, who shortly afterward admitted me to the old Pensacola Hospital to have the lens removed. The surgery was a terrifying nineteenth-century ordeal. Someone held me down while the anesthesiologist, a woman named Pearl Murphy, placed a gauze nose cone over my nose and mouth and dripped ether into it. Her fee for this standard service, I learned many years later, was five dollars. As I lost consciousness I dreamed I was all alone in a large auditorium. I was tied to a chair, unable to move, and screaming. Possibly I was screaming in reality before I went under. In any case the experience was almost as bad as the cataract. For years afterward I became nauseous at the smell of ether. Today I suffer from just one phobia: being trapped in a closed space with my arms immobilized and my face covered with an obstruction. The aversion is not an ordinary claustrophobia. I can enter closets and elevators and crawl beneath houses and automobiles with aplomb. In my teens and twenties I explored caves and underwater recesses around wharves without fear, just so long as my arms and face were free.

  I was left with full sight in the left eye only. Fortunately, that vision proved to be more acute at close range than average—20/10 on the ophthalmologist’s chart—and has remained so all my life. I lost stereoscopy but can make out fine print and the hairs on the bodies of small insects. In adolescence I also lost, possibly as the result of a hereditary defect, most of my hearing in the uppermost registers. Without a hearing aid, I cannot make out the calls of many bird and frog species. So when I set out later as a teenager with Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and binoculars in hand, as all true naturalists in America must at one time or other, I proved to be a wretched birdwatcher. I couldn’t hear birds; I couldn’t locate them unless they obligingly fluttered past in clear view; even one bird singing in a tree close by was invisible unless someone pointed a finger straight at it. The same was true of frogs. On rainy spring nights my college companions could walk to the mating grounds of frogs guided only by the high-pitched calls of the males. I managed a few, such as the deep-voiced barking tree frog, which sounds like someone thumping a tub, and the eastern spadefoot toad, which wails like a soul on its way to perdition; but from most species all I detected was a vague buzzing in the ears.

  In one important respect the turning wheel of my life came to a halt at this very early age. I was destined to become an entomologist, committed to minute crawling and flying insects, not by any touch of idiosyncratic genius, not by foresight, but by a fortuitous constriction of physiological ability. I had to have one kind of animal if not another, because the fire had been lit and I took what I could get. The attention of my surviving eye turned to the ground. I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world, the animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection.

  chapter two

  SEND US THE BOY

  WHO CAN SAY WHAT EVENTS FORMED HIS OWN CHARACTER? Too many occur in the twilight of early childhood. The mind lives in half-remembered experiences of uncertain valence, where self-deception twists memory further from truth with every passing year. But of one event I can be completely sure. It began in the winter of 1937, when my parents, Edward and Inez Freeman Wilson, separated and began divorce proceedings. Divorce was still unusual at that time and in that part of the country, and there must have been a great deal of gossiping and head-shaking among other family members. While my parents untangled their lives, they looked for a place that could offer a guarantee of security to a seven-year-old. They chose the Gulf Coast Military Academy, a private school located on the shore road four miles east of Gulfport, Mississippi.

  So one January morning I traveled with my mother to Gulfport on a westbound bus out of Pensacola by way of Mobile and Pascagoula. We arrived at GCMA in the afternoon. I looked around and judged the landscape, which was classic leisured-Gulf-Coast, instantly inviting. Brick buildings with verandas and borders crowded by ornamental shrubs were dispersed over beautifully tended grass lawns. Old live oaks (I grant that all live oaks look old) and towering loblolly pines offered generous shade. U.S. 90, then a quiet two-lane road, bordered the campus on the south. A few dozen feet beyond, at the bottom of a seawall, peaceful waves rolled in from the Gulf of Mexico. I brightened at this ocean view. Paradise Beach again? It was not to be. We entered the Junior Dormitory to meet the housemother and some of the other grammar-school cadets. I looked at my military-style cot, the kind you can bounce a coin on when properly made. I listened to an outline of the daily regimen. I examined my uniform, patterned after that at West Point. I shook hands with my roommate, who was inordinately stiff and polite for a seven-year-old. All dreams of languor and boyhood adventure vanished.

  GCMA was a carefully planned nightmare engineered for the betterment of the untutored and undisciplined. It was a military academy of the original mold, all gray-wool clothed and ramrod-straight. The school prospectus guaranteed—it did not “offer” or “make available”; it guaranteed—a solid traditional education. Some of its graduates went on to civilian colleges and universities across the country. But at heart GCMA was a preparatory school for West Point, Annapolis, and private equivalents such as the Virginia Military Academy whose central purpose was to train America’s officer corps.

  All of this was consistent with white middle-class culture in the South of 1937. Young men could aspire to no higher calling than officer rank in the military. The South continued her antebellum dream of the officer and gentleman, honorable, brave, unswerving in service to God and country. He comes to our mind, the newly graduated second lieutenant, clad in dress white, escorting his bride, pretty and sweet, out of the church beneath the raised crossed sabers of his classmates, as his proud family watches. His conduct will henceforth affirm the generally understood historical truth that we lost the War Between the States for lack of arms and the exhaustion of battle-depleted troops. Our men, and especially our officers, were nonetheless individually the finest soldiers in the world at that time. They were southerners, men not to be trifled with.

  Now you understand why commanding officers interviewed on television at Vietnam firebases so often spoke with southern accents. They had thin lips and highway eyes, and they didn’t joke around. Medicine, law, and engineering made admirable careers for a southern man, and business and the ministry were all right of course. Golf champions and quarterbacks who came from Alabama were heroes, and we were all real proud when one of our relatives (his nickname was Skeeter or T. C. or something like that, in any case your third cousin Hank’s oldest boy) was elected to Congress. But military command was the profession that bore the cachet of strength and honor.

  The Gulf Coast Military Academy was classed each year without fail as an Honor School by the United States War Department. In other words, it was a boot camp. Its regimen was de
signed to abrade away all the bad qualities inhering in the adolescent male, while building the kind of character that does not flinch at a whiff of grapeshot. “Send Us the Boy and We Will Return the Man” was its motto. The 1937 yearbook, from which my childish face stonily gazes, explains the formula with pitiless clarity:

  The daily work is a systematic routine in which every duty has its place in the day and, therefore, will not be overlooked.

  By association with other cadets, each cadet begins to recognize himself as an integral part of a body and, with this in view, he assumes the correct attitude toward the rights of others.

  By being thrown on his own resources, a boy develops initiative and self-dependence and grows away from the helpless, dependent spirit into which many boys have been coddled.

  The systematic routine the author had in mind (and was he, I wonder, square-faced Major Charles W. Chalker, Professor of Military Science and Tactics, whose photograph gazes out at me from the yearbook?) emulated those of the adult service academies. It could be used today, if softened a bit, at the Marine training camp on Parris Island. For seven days a week real bugles, played by cadets proud of their job, led us lockstep through the Schedule. First Call 6:00, Reveille 6:05, Assembly 6:10, Sick Call 6:30, Police Inspection 6:40, Waiter’s Warning 6:45, Assembly and March to Mess 7:00, School Call 7:40. Then, without bugles, came calls to change class, Chapel Assembly 10:20, Intermission 4 minutes, Warning Call, Return to Class. And so tramp forward through the day, finally to dinner. The bugles resumed with Call to Quarters 6:50, Study (no radios!) 7:00, Tattoo 9:15, and Taps 9:30. No talking afterward, or you go on delinquency report.

  On Saturday the schedule was similar but lighter, with time off for leisure, athletics, and delinquency reports. On Sunday we really snapped to life: shined our shoes, polished our buttons and belt buckles (uniforms mandatory at all times, formal gray and white on Sunday), and attended church. Then we prepared for Battalion Parade, which kicked off at 3:30. We marched out in formation, to be watched and graded by unit and individual, past officer-instructors, visiting parents, and a few curious, respectful townspeople. The youngest boys, of whom I was one, brought up the rear.

  The curriculum was laid before the student in resonant single words: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, history, English, foreign language. No art, nature field trips, and certainly no enterprises with wimpy titles like “introduction to chemistry” or “the American experience.” Some electives were allowed, but only in cheerless subjects such as Latin, commercial geography, and business ethics. There was an implication that if you could not cut the mustard in the military, there was always commerce. Older cadets were trained in rifle marksmanship, mortar and machine-gun fire, surveying, and military strategy. Horsemanship was encouraged. We grammar-school students looked forward to someday enjoying these manly activities.

  The school’s coat of arms was an Eagle Volant grasping crossed sabers and rifles with bayonets and lances; the shafts of the lances were hung with matched dexter and sinister forty-eight-star American flags. The Navy was represented by a triangular escutcheon enclosing a three-masted barkentine.

  All boys at GCMA, from first through twelfth grades, followed the same daily routine and worked their way up the vertically stacked curriculum. We junior cadets, boys in the first six grades, were given a few concessions. There was a dormitory mother, Mrs. R. P. Linfield, whose first name I never knew and whose stiffly composed face in the catalog photographs makes her look exactly like what she was, dormitory mother in a military school. We did not carry a rifle on parade, nor were we trained in weapons and horsemanship. The occasional dances held with young ladies from nearby Gulf Park College were of course irrelevant. In the interests of preserving discipline, parents were urged not to coddle their sons by the dispatching of inappropriate gifts: “Do not send him eatables that will upset his digestion. Send fruit.”

  Disputes among cadets that could not be talked through were expected to be settled manfully, under adult supervision and in a boxing ring formed by standing cadets. Occasionally fistfights were quietly arranged behind buildings with no instructors or student officers present, but in general all aggression was effectively channeled according to regulations.

  Misbehavior of any kind brought time in the bull ring, an activity not mentioned in the brochures. Regular cadets marched with rifles at shoulder arms around a circular track for one to several hours, the length of time depending on the seriousness of the charge. Longer terms were broken up and spread over a succession of days. Junior cadets “marched”—actually, most of the time we just strolled—without rifles. It was a good time to get away from the others and daydream. I was a frequent rule breaker, and spent what seems in retrospect to have been an unconscionable amount of my time at GCMA traveling in circles. As I recall, most of my sins involved talking with other cadets during class. If so, the lesson did not take. Now, as a university professor, I spend almost all of my time talking in class.

  In my heart I know that I was a reasonably good kid. I was neither laggard nor rebellious, and time in the bull ring usually came as a surprise. Little or nothing was said to us junior cadets directly about discipline and punishment. We learned mostly by example and word of mouth. Infractions and sentences were posted each Saturday afternoon at 1:50 on the bulletin board next to the mail window, under “Delinquencies.” We ran there each time to see who would play and who would march. No further recreation was allowed until all bullring time was completed. We heard rumors of legendary sentences imposed on older boys for unspeakable violations.

  Wednesday afternoons were for fun, in the GCMA way of thinking. From 1:30 to 5:30, all cadets free of punishment went on leave. Buses conveyed us the four miles west to Gulfport for milkshakes, movies, and just walking around.

  This dollop of frivolity was all well and good, but I pined for my beloved Gulf of Mexico, always in full sight from the front lawn of the Academy. I could not go down to the water; cadets were sensibly forbidden to cross the two-lane highway that separated the school grounds from the seawall and beach. On several occasions toward the end of the term, I joined a group of other boys with the housemother for a supervised swim in the surf. A photograph in the catalog shows us filing down in our regulation swimsuits, complete with shoulder straps. Its caption reads, “Boys going out on the beach under supervision where in the warm sunshine they can frolic on the clean white sand and bathe in the sparkling briny water of the Gulf.” No fishing, no time during the frolic to wander dreaming along the strand, no chance to see stingrays or other monsters rising from the deep.

  The most notable event during my stay at the Gulf Coast Military Academy was a visit by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fresh into his second term of office, he came to Mississippi and Louisiana to press the flesh and extend thanks to his constituents in the most solidly Democratic of all the states. Along the coast schools were let out and businesses closed. Storefronts were painted and streets cleaned. Even the “negro kiddies turned out in their best attire,” as the Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald unselfconsciously reported. Upward of 100,000 people converged along the route to be followed by the President and his entourage. In those days chief executives were rarely seen in person, and the New Deal had made Roosevelt a demigod in the Deep South. He brought relief to what was then in many respects a Third World country.

  Arriving in Biloxi by train from Washington on the morning of April 29, the President and his staff were escorted to a motorcade of twenty-four cars already packed with local politicians, military officers, and journalists. The party visited Biloxi’s high spots, including a lighthouse painted black after Lincoln’s assassination, the Veterans Administration Hospital, and Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi home, where a band struck up “Dixie” and the last eight surviving Confederate veterans of the city greeted the President with rebel yells. At frequent intervals Roosevelt lifted his fedora and flashed his famous grin. Finally, the motorcade headed west on U. S. 90 toward
Gulfport, passing the Gulf Coast Military Academy at ten o’ clock. The entire cadet corps stood at attention in dress gray and white, forming a single line shoulder to shoulder at roadside. Roosevelt at first believed that he was to inspect the corps, and so instructed his military officers to don the formal gold braid worn by presidential aides. On learning that the schedule was too tight to allow a pause of this length, he directed the motorcade instead to slow down as it passed the Academy. We all saluted as the long line of automobiles rolled by. Somehow I failed to distinguish the President among all the passing faces, but I like to think he saw me, standing at the end of the line, one of the two smallest cadets.

  To all this strange new life I adjusted reasonably well. For the first few days after arrival I was seized with confusion and black loneliness, crying myself to sleep when the lights were out—quietly, however, so no one would hear. But after a while I came to feel that I belonged, that GCMA was a family of sorts, one moved by benevolent intention. I hated the place then but came to love it later, savoring it ever more in memory as the years passed and recollections of my distress faded. I stayed just long enough to be transformed in certain qualities of mind. I still summon easily the images of a perfect orderliness and lofty purpose. In one of those least faded, a cadet officer approaches on a Sunday morning as we gather for parade, a teenager mounted on a horse, resplendent in boots, Sam Browne belt, sheathed saber, and a cap cloth-covered in spotless white. He is poised to move in intricate maneuvers. He works his mount slowly through a tight circle, turning, turning, as he speaks to a group of other cadets on foot. He has fallen silent now in my mind, but his visual presence still shines with grace, decent ambition, and high achievement. I ask, What achievement? I cannot say, but no matter; the very ambiguity of his image preserves the power.