Rambling Through Memories with Mary Oliver

Some time in your life you must have been hugged by a poem written by Mary Oliver.

Upstream was published in 2016, not long before her death on January 17, 2019. It is both a memoir and an homage to her chosen town: Provincetown, Massachusetts. She moved there with her lifelong partner and soul mate Molly Malone Cook in the mid 1960s, and these essays celebrate fifty years of life lived in this artist haven at the northern tip of Cape Cod. 

Provincetown resembles a crab’s claw on a map. It’s a long hooked peninsula, the historic scene of the Mayflower landing in 1620. Named Cape Cod by an English explorer in 1602, who appreciated the cod haul, it remained a fishing/whaling town for centuries. It is the ancestral territory of the Nauset People, who I’m sure had their own name for this place. The Nauset are an Algonquian-speaking People, who “sold” the pilgrims the land where they established Plymouth for “2 brass kettles, 6 coats, 12 hoes, 12 axes, 12 knives, and a box.”

But I digress. 

I’m sure Oliver must have kept annotated journals as she writes:

“I saw wood ducks here for the first time in 1977” and “In 1985, a shoveler spent a spring morning on Blackwater Pond. Once, in late March 1991, a single hooded merganser appeared on Oak-Head Pond” (15). 

The beauty of Provincetown is that the historic town stretches along a curved beach fronted by ocean and backed by a wildlife sanctuary. Blackwater Pond is there along the Beech Forest Trail. Idyllic. Paradisiacal. The town swells each summer with tourists. I can see why they chose this haven known for its artists and gays. This is a place worthy of a visit.

Why is Provincetown so Gay? explains the history and its liberal beginnings way back in 1899. A train connected it to Greenwich Village, NY, so many forward-thinkers found easy access to this out-of-the-way spot of beauty and freedom.

“Over the next two decades, Provincetown welcomed not only thousands of artists, but also writers, actors and left-wing political radicals who brought new ideas on gender and racial equality, artistic expression and sexuality.”

Oliver rises at 5am to greet the sun and go rambling through the wildlife sanctuary with her dogs. She writes as she walks. Nature is as much her muse as poets past. In particular, she loves Emerson, Shelley, young Wordsworth, Blake, and Basho. She writes of Emerson: 

“The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind” (73).

The same can be said for her own work. Indeed, she writes in the Romantic Nature Tradition. Oliver is, at once, passionate and observant in her relationship with the land; her prose streaked with lines so vivid I must pause to savour them and capture them in my journal. 

She includes brief bits in Section Three on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth, perhaps gleaned from her talks, as she travelled to lecture, though I think she would have just as soon stayed at home.

Oliver sees herself as one of Nature, both prey and predator. She harvests honey locust blossoms and once digs deep into a turtle’s sandy nest to steal half of her eggs (13/27). She takes them home to pierce and drain, scramble their big yellow yolks, and devour. 

This I find horrific. It hurts my heart. I remember pregnant turtles crawling out of Bill Brown’s quarry pond north of Ajax, Ontario, and crossing Concession 5 on their way to nesting. I’d stop the car and help them cross. I can’t imagine digging up a turtle’s eggs to devour unless I was starving on some deserted island somewhere. 

“Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond” (52).

This is her point. The mosquitoes bite the turtles in the circle of Nature and she takes from the turtle, including herself in the web. She is as much a predator as the fox and the red-tailed hawk she surprises one day ripping into a pheasant. She considers stealing that too, but decides against it.

“I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same” (56).

I fear I am a sentimentalist, driven by feelings—though I’ve considered how culling the local Canada Geese flock might feed the homeless. They, the geese—not the homeless—leave such delectable hor d’oeuvres for my lab.

Oliver’s essays make me homesick for the East where I grew up. I recall the painted turtles, blue herons, hawks, and pumpkin-coloured Baltimore orioles, their nests streaming like long silk stockings; crimson cardinals against white snow, and canary-yellow finches … the great grey owl who soared over our bog, vampiric through the shadows. 

I think I must nestle into my winter quilt and read more of Mary Oliver. There is much here to learn.