Late In The Season p e t e r m at t h i e s s e n
Late In The Season
peter m atthiessen
thor n w i ll ow pr e s s 2011
copy r ight Š 2 0 1 1 by peter m at t ie s sen
introduction
I
was born in Manhattan and attended St. Bernard’s school: unlikely beginnings for a life of exploring the natural world. But we lived on the Hudson, and on Fishers Island, off the New England coa, where I became fascinated by tidepools, full of myerious life. When my family moved to rural Conneicut, my brother and I discovered snakes. We caught copperheads from a big den on our property and put them in cages with glass doors, and invited the kids in to see the feedings; we dropped in mice and frogs with dramatic results. My mother had an elaborate bird feeder, where my lifelong intere in ornithology had its art, but like mo boys, I saw no contradiion in admiring birds and blazing away at them. My father taught us to shoot, and I hunted birds avidly until I was about 33, when I put my guns away for good. A whole new natural world opened up when we went for school vacations to Captiva Island, off Florida’s Gulf coa– new species of elegant herons and other water birds. The snakes in Florida were more exciting than those up north, with four or five poisonous species, and in time I caught them all: diamondback rattlers, coral snakes, pygmy rattlers and cottonmouths, or water moc[]
casins. One spring, I was birding on a Gulf coa bayou– by now in my twenties–with a friend who epped on a big moccasin. He owned the little Piper that had flown us to a nearby airrip. He jumped back, ashen-faced. I was scared, too, but I wanted that snake for an undamaged specimen to take home. I found a rong ick, pressed it down right behind the snake’s head – hard but not too hard – and while he was pinned, grabbed him at the neck, forefinger and thumb tip under the lower jaw as he writhed, mouth open to show the cotton-white interior. Back at the airrip, I took a two-gallon jug, filled it with water, and slipped the snake in, ill very much alive, making the pilot very nervous because the Piper was a two-seater and I held the jug on my lap; the landing at New Orleans was light as a flower petal to avoid breaking that jug. We left inruions to clean and refuel the plane, but next morning, we found four of the airport crew surrounding the untouched plane in horror, even though that snake had died overnight. In Florida I came to appreciate how harshly a century of settlers had treated this fragile ecosyem and its native peoples, draining the swamps and filling in the Everglades. They’d hunted out this frontier’s la big game, and also the egrets whose valuable breeding plumes were used for []
ladies’ hats. On a fishing trip up the Gulf coa, my father showed me on the chart the site of a notorious settler from the early 20th century, who grew sugar cane up a wild river. Apparently this planter had killed some of his workers, only to be killed by his neighbors in a fireorm of vigilante juice. I didn’t know then that his name was E. J. Watson and had no idea that I’d make him the central charaer in a va novel that would occupy, off and on, thirty years of my life. At the same time I felt, from many trips to Florida and elsewhere, that I wanted to speak out for the wildlife and the environment, and report on ways mankind has degraded its own habitat, its flora and fauna and, mo tragic of all, its native peoples. I would do this in fiion as well as non-fiion. In journalism one could go only as far as the fas permitted. In fiion, one could reach a deeper truth. My fir two ories, sold to the Atlantic Monthly while I was in college, both evolved out of rough encounters between man and nature: a dog trainer who, while drunk, kills his be hunting dog; a drowned boatman whose body mu be retrieved offshore. Those ories were followed by my fir novel, begun in powar Paris, where with George Plimpton and Harold Humes I helped found the Paris Review. []
In 1953 I came back to settle on the ea end of Long Island with my fir wife, Patsy, and fir child, Luke, and worked on my second novel. In that flat, clean landscape of woods and ponds and cultivated fields, with the Atlantic on one side and the bays on the other, farmers and fishermen were ill important in the economy, and Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were two of the many painters who were neighbors. To help support myself as a writer, I became a commercial fisherman, scalloping in the bays and ocean haul-seining, using beach trucks and a big pine dory to set nets for fish migrating along the coa. Later I ran a charter boat, taking clients out of Montauk for school ripers, tuna, and blues. Working two six-hour charters each day, I came home smelling of fish, and was often so tired that I’d nod off at the table, but every day of bad weather and all winter, I was writing: a perfe writer’s life, but not so great for a marriage. When ours broke up, I made my living writing articles, moly for the New Yorker. For the next twenty years or so, its legendary editor, William Shawn, underwrote expeditions to the world’s mo remote places, and many of these reports became books. I also wrote two books of natural hiory, Wildlife in America and The Shorebirds of North America, more short ories, and one novel. []
Though I wish now I’d spent more time on fiion, those explorations are present in the novels. The Cloud Fore, about travels in back country South American wilderness, is a foundation of the novel At Play In the Fields of the Lord, while a New Yorker piece, “To the Miskito Bank,” about green turtle fishing in the Caribbean, led to Far Tortuga. In the Sixties and Seventies, there were social causes I felt drawn to as an inveigative journali: I wrote a book about union organizer Cesar Chavez and the exploitation of farm workers in California, and two about American Indians, one of those concerning the case of Leonard Peltier, framed, I felt, for the murders of two FBI agents in South Dakota. Finally in 1978 I returned to fiion and the Florida frontier. In entrepreneur and killer Edgar Watson, I recognized a charaer who embodied the American frontier spirit in all its aspes: tough, tenacious, with a grim, dry wit, but also brutally deruive of the wilderness around him and those who got in his way. That ory kept growing, one novel, then three, and finally the revised, diilled, one-volume Shadow Country. The short ory that follows here is very different. It was written in the early 1950s, when I was ill feeling my way with fiion. And whereas I spent roughly a third of my life on Shadow Country, I probably spent []
ten days or so on “Late in the Season.” Yet perhaps some small seed of Shadow Country may be seen in the violent confrontation between man and nature that occurs on the night of the ory and in the harsh aion taken by the protagoni. Turtles are among my favorite creatures: hardy, pre-hioric and, in the case of the snapping turtle, a little bit dangerous, too. Confronted by a snapping turtle caught in the open on the road ahead, vulnerable to being run over and squashed, what, given its ornery nature, would you choose to do? p e t e r m at t h i e s s e n sagap onack, new york j u ly
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late in the season
I
t wa s just at the edge of the late November road, a halted thing too large for the New England countryside, neither retreating nor pulling in its head, but waiting for the ation wagon. Cici Avery saw it r, a dark giant turtle, as solitary as a misplaced obje. It was something le behind aer its season. She nudged her husband and pointed, unwilling to break the silence in the car. Frank Avery saw the turtle and slowed. If he had been alone, he would have swerved to hit it, Cici decided, seleing the untruth which suited her mood. The small eyes faened on the man. The tail, ridged with reptilian ns, lay ill in the du like a thick dead snake, pointing to the yellowed weeds which, leading back over a slight cre and descending thickly to the ditch, were flattened and coated by a wake of mud. Cici, hands in her trousers, moved in unlaced boots pa her husband. The tips of her laces flicked in the du like broken whip ends. “Poor moner,” she whispered to the turtle, “It’s []