The Nahant Field Excursion

The Nahant Field Excursion stands as the climax of Mary Antin's conversion to the study of nature, the day when the scattered impressions of sea and sky that had been gathering since her arrival in America finally fused into a coherent vision of life. It was the second great transformation of her girlhood, as she herself insists, as truly as her coming to America was the first. The excursion was the work of the Natural History Club, the group of young Bostonians who had taken her in as a foster sister, and who opened their homes to her so that she might learn how good Americans lived. In the least of their attentions, they cherished the citizen in the making, and on this day their gift to her was nothing less than a new understanding of creation itself.

The Day at Nahant

The club spent the day at Nahant, studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing the starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. There had been a merry luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and strange jokes, intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing away the seaweed cushions, drowning the transparent pools, spouting in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam. From the deck of the jolly excursion steamer carrying them home, the members watched the rosy sun dip down below the sea, grouped in twos and threes, discussing the day's successes, comparing specimens, exchanging field notes, or watching the western horizon in sympathetic silence.

The Welding of Knowledge

It had been a great day for the young Mary. She had seen a dozen new forms of life, had caught a hundred fragments of the song of nature by the sea, and her mind was seething with meanings that crowded in. She did not remember to which of her learned friends she addressed her questions on this occasion, but he surely was one of the most learned. For he took up all her fragments of dawning knowledge in his discourse, and welded them into a solid structure of wisdom, with windows looking far down the past and a tower overlooking the future. She was so absorbed in her private review of creation that she hardly realized when they landed, or how they got into the electric cars, till they were a good way into the city.

The Vision at the Public Library

At the Public Library she parted from her friends, and stood on the broad stone steps, her jar of specimens in her hand, watching the car that carried them glide out of sight. Her heart was full of a stirring wonder. She was hardly conscious of the place where she stood, or of the day, or the hour. She was in a dream, and the familiar world around her was transfigured. Her hair was damp with sea spray; the roar of the tide was still in her ears. Mighty thoughts surged through her dreams, and she trembled with understanding. She sank down on the granite ledge beside the entrance to the Library, and for a mere moment she covered her eyes with her hand. In that moment she had a vision of herself, the human creature, emerging from the dim places where the torch of history has never been, creeping slowly into the light of civilized existence, pushing more steadily forward to the broad plateau of modern life, and leaping, at last, strong and glad, to the intellectual summit of the latest century.

The Meaning of the Vision

The vision was not merely personal but racial and historical. What an awful stretch of years to contemplate, what a weighty past to carry in memory. The endless ages had indeed throbbed through her blood, but a new rhythm danced in her veins. Her spirit was not tied to the monumental past, any more than her feet were bound to her grandfather's house below the hill. The past was only her cradle, and now it could not hold her, because she was grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once her home, had now become a toy of memory, as she moved about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid palace, whose shadow covers acres. No, it was not she that belonged to the past, but the past that belonged to her. America is the youngest of the nations, and inherits all that went before in history. And she was the youngest of America's children, and into her hands was given all her priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the telescope.

The Culmination of a Long Preparation

The excursion was the fruition of a process that had begun long before, in the cramped years of her early life. As a child in Polotzk, she had once sat on the bank of the Polota and watched a peasant push his plow through the long black furrows of a market garden, singing a rude plowman's song. Only the melody reached her, but the meaning sprang up in her heart to fit it, a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. She sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention, feeling herself discovering things. Something in her gasped for life, and lay still. She was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon her. For a moment she had her little hand on the Great Pulse, but her fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat she knew, and then she was again a simple child. That was her first self-birth, and the Nahant excursion was its fulfillment, the moment when the fingers finally held.

The sea itself had been her teacher in the intervening years. She had come to live on the edge of the sea, she who had spent her life inland, believing that the great waters of the world were spread out before her in the Dvina. She lay stretched out in the sun, her eyes level with the sea, till she seemed to be absorbed bodily by the very materials of the world around her; till she could not feel her hand as separate from the warm sand in which it was buried. Or she crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering between the two splendors of the sky and the sea. Or she ran out to meet the incoming storm, her face full in the wind, her being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of her fog-matted locks flying behind, and stood clinging to some stake or upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. Thus courting the influence of sea and sky and variable weather, she was bound to have dreams, hints, imaginings. The world as she knew it was not large enough to contain all that she saw and felt; the thoughts that flashed through her mind, not half understood, concerned something for which she had as yet no name.

The excursion also marked the completion of her conversion from bookworm to naturalist, a change that had been prepared by the spider lecture at Hale House. Before that lecture, she had been the sort of reader who could put herself in the place of any hero of boys' books, delighting in their delights, but who never could understand the boy whose favorite reading was natural history, who kept an aquarium, collected beetles, and knew all about a man by the name of Agassiz. When Mr. Emerson had begun to speak of spiders, her nerves had contracted into a tight knot, and she had gripped the arms of her little chair, determined not to run, with all those strangers looking on. But as he wove a gigantic spider's web across the doorway, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand, she had forgotten her terrors. The drama of the spider's daily life became very real to her, his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors, the intricate safeguards of his simple existence. It was the first time the natural history of a living creature had been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she was surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history. By degrees she had come to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she began to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club. The Nahant excursion was the reward of that new attentiveness, the day when the natural world finally spoke to her in a language she could understand, and when she answered with a vision of her own place in the long story of life.