PREVIEW: Late in the Season by Peter Matthiessen

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 myerious life.

When my family moved to rural Conneicut, 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 contradiion 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 airrip. 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 airrip, 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 inruions 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 ecosyem 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 fireorm of vigilante juice. I didn’t know then that his name was E. J. Watson and had no idea that I’d make him the central charaer 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 fiion as well as non-fiion. In journalism one could go only as far as the fas permitted. In fiion, 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 powar 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, moly 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 hiory, 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 fiion, 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 inveigative 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 fiion and the Florida frontier. In entrepreneur and killer Edgar Watson, I recognized a charaer who embodied the American frontier spirit in all its aspes: tough, tenacious, with a grim, dry wit, but also brutally deruive of the wilderness around him and those who got in his way. That ory kept growing, one novel, then three, and finally the revised, diilled, 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 fiion. 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 aion taken by the protagoni. Turtles are among my favorite creatures: hardy, pre-hioric 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    

[]

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 aer 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, seleing the untruth which suited her mood.

The small eyes faened 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 moner,” she whispered to the turtle, “It’s []