This Hill, This Valley, Page 6

  We gorged on lake trout that night and the next day, and we took enough of them back with us to treat all our friends in town. Father said it wasn’t much fun, fishing that way, but it made me feel like Bucky O’Neil, the best fisherman in that end of Colorado.

  And now Judge Jim can’t even get a strike in Lost Lake. Maybe I’m not doing so bad here on the Housatonic.

  There is a notion, a persistent idea, that anything with a depth of meaning must be hard to understand, written in a difficult language and reserved for the knowledge of the few. Yet here is May, a time of tremendous fundamentals and miraculous matters, all of them spread before us and flagrantly demanding attention. May, which speaks a language as simple as a new leaf or a buttercup flower.

  Here is the fundamental of life, the whole process of germination and growth. Here is flowering fertility and life preparing its own renewal. Here are sunlight and water being turned into food by a process called photosynthesis, which is even more profound than atomic fission. Photosynthesis goes on in every blade of grass, every leaf, every weed at the roadside, no more secret than sunlight. Here is abundance and growth and munificence, so much of it that the world seems hard put to contain it all. It constantly spills over, outreaching itself in abundance.

  Therein lies another of May’s profundities: One of the fundamental laws of this world is plenty, not scarcity; production, not destruction; growth, not stagnation.

  Showers today. Transplanting weather. We were out in the garden transplanting lettuce and weeding everything but the beans and the peas. Beans should be weeded dry, and peas should be weeded lightly if at all. Barbara has a theory about peas. She believes that you should leave most of the weeds in the pea rows to shade and cool the roots on hot days. The roots of the peas are sensitive to both heat and disturbance. That’s where the hot-day damage is done, to the roots. Pull all the weeds and you not only disturb the fine rooting but you leave the soil open to the scorching sun. So we weed the peas only a little, and we get big yields and get them for several weeks.

  But elsewhere we weed vigorously, using the hoe only to loosen the soil and hill up the rows. A cut weed isn’t even discouraged for long; but a weed pulled up by the roots and left naked for an hour in a hot sun is usually finished. Besides, weeding aerates the soil, keeps it from packing.

  We are always tempted to plant corn earlier than we should, and sometimes do. But it is our experience that corn planted in May, in this area at least, sulks and shivers and sometimes rots. If it sprouts, it usually huddles and waits for June. And the corn we plant in early June always seems to catch up with it.

  In the flower garden the Shirley poppies amaze me day by day, growing like mad. We scatter seed in the Fall, some sprout and winter over, and the others come early. All of them bloom before we expect them, pleasant surprises. There are buds on some of them already, though they aren’t six inches tall.

  I shot a woodchuck this morning, the first we have seen this year though they were out in early April. This one was on his way to the succulence of the vegetable garden when I interrupted him with a .22 bullet. I buried him unshriven, hoping Pat wouldn’t find the spot. Pat considers himself the woodchuck policeman around here, but he is not above digging up one I have buried and making himself socially undesirable. He considers ripe woodchuck an entrancing odor.

  Some years ago I wrote a lighthearted, good-natured essay on the woodchuck. I was most friendly. At that time we had had no woodchuck troubles. The essay appeared in print in February. Two months later the woodchucks began to converge. They cleaned out the beans. They ate the young peas. They made a salad of lettuce tops and beets, even depredated the cucumbers. I shot eleven woodchucks in the garden that Summer, and I haven’t had a generous thought about woodchucks since.

  No woodchuck is welcome within a hundred yards of our garden. There is provender aplenty up on the mountain, the kind of food woodchucks have been eating and thriving on for many generations. Let them stay where they belong and I shall not disturb them. But down here they are going to meet trouble, and I am a better-than-average shot. And much the same goes for the rabbits, who have the pastures and the woodland for their own range.

  We all have our summation days, when we draw a figurative line and tot up both the year and the years. Today happens to be mine, my anniversary, the day of my birth.

  I am not summarizing, however. I am thinking how fortunate I am. And I am thinking how much any child of mid-May has to be thankful for. When he is young he can say: “The robin sings for me, and the oriole, and the lilacs bloom today. The trout are eager in the brook. Summer is not yet here, but close at hand. My years begin with song.”

  When he comes to be middle-aged he can say: “Another Winter is over and gone, and the earth resumes its vigor. My years are like the season, at their flowering, new growth on old stems and the strength of maturity in the trunk.”

  And when the years amount to age he can say: “I have seen the season turn with the sun, all my days, and each year I feel the growing warmth as my world turns green. My years are Spring, all of them, Spring returning like a promise and a fragrant fulfillment.”

  Time is a strange commodity, repeating and repeating itself. Mid-May was here last year, and ten years ago, and ten centuries ago, and here it is again. I wasn’t here, but someone else was, ten centuries ago. Two hundred years ago Indians were here, on this particular land where now I live. An Indian of my age stood here and looked across the river on this day and saw the sun rise at the same moment that it rose this morning. And now those who speculate on such matters say that probably still earlier men were here before the last Ice Age, perhaps as long as 100,000 years ago. Whether this is true or not, this day 100,000 years ago was just as long as it is today. If man was here he just happened to partake of that particular fragment of time. He experienced it without altering it in the slightest. It slid over him with even less effect than on the hills around him, except that when that day ended he was one day older, one day nearer extinction.

  We try to measure time, build machines to tick it off in seconds, as though thus to gain possession of it, feeling that we can better grasp it in little bits. And all we do is harness ourselves to machines which tick, tick, tick.

  We live in the midst of time, and the more we try to possess it, the more it possesses us. The real need is not for possession of time but for possession of ourselves. Yesterday was not so much a gauge of time, of my years, as it was a gauge of me, of what I have done with the fragment of time that I have known.

  I have planned for years to keep an accurate and orderly journal of first bloom among the early flowers, but I never quite achieved it. I go poking around in early March and come home and make my notes. A few days later I look again and forget to make the entries. April comes and I make a list, knowing that I have missed a dozen entries. Then May is here and I have missed the premieres of half the blossoms, so I merely note that I have now seen them in full bloom.

  Today I have leafed back through the daily journals of half a dozen years and I find that one year I said on May 16: “Saw the first buttercup today. Columbines about to open.” Another May 16 I wrote, “Dogwood is superb.” Still another year the entry was: “Anemones out in clouds. Jack-in-the-pulpit everywhere. Trilliums (small) out, and yellow violets.” And another year my May 16 comment was: “A very nasty hailstorm brought down most of the apple blossoms and ruined most of the lilacs, which were full out.”

  These entries are less an index of blossom time than an index of my own preoccupations. Elsewhere I found a record, for instance, of rue anemone in bloom on March 20, of lilacs full out on May 5, of buttercups in April.

  No two years’ seasons are alike, and no flower ever grew which came to blossom by the clock or calendar. The Time of First Bloom is a movable feast, not quite as movable as Easter but certainly one that has scant relation to man-made dates.

  Pat has been gone all day. I wonder if he is on a binge. This is the season. But now we understan
d.

  One Spring he took off up the road and was gone all day and night. The next day Charley phoned to say that Pat was up there, with a nondescript little bitch that had strayed in from somewhere. I went up and got Pat and tied him up here at home. Normally I can tie Pat with a length of twine and he stays, observing even a token tether. This day I used a rope, and within five minutes he bit it through and was gone. That afternoon I fetched him home again and tied him with a heavier rope. It balked him fifteen minutes. Once more I went and got him, and that time I put him on a chain. He moaned all night, and the next morning he pleaded bitterly for freedom. I let him go. He went back to Charley’s.

  Meanwhile, Charley had called the dog warden and got rid of the stray bitch. But Pat wouldn’t accept her absence as permanent. He made a nuisance of himself for two more days, howling for his lost love at Charley’s and howling for his freedom when confined here. So I phoned the dog warden.

  Dave, the warden, said he thought he knew the solution. There was a farmer twenty-odd miles from here, a man who liked dogs, who would like to have such a dog as Pat. Pat should be happy there. So we bade Pat good-by and Dave took him in his pickup, and we told each other that it had been nice knowing Pat, that he had never done a mean or sneaky thing, and he was going to have a good home. We would miss him, but obviously he didn’t want to live here any longer.

  For two days we missed him everywhere we turned. Charley stopped past and we talked for ten minutes, about everything except dogs, both of us knowing we were avoiding the one topic we wanted to talk about. Then, as Charley left, he said, “I hope that fellow treats old Pat right. Hope he takes him hunting.” He got in his car and hurried off.

  That evening Charley phoned. His voice was full of pleased but controlled emotion. “Want a dog?” he asked.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, sensing the answer.

  Charley laughed. “Pat’s here! Just got here. Footsore and tired out. Ate like he hadn’t had a full meal in a week.”

  “I’ll come get him,” I said.

  “Let him sleep,” Charley said. “Just thought you’d like to know he’s back.”

  The next morning when I got up Pat was asleep on the front porch. I let him in and he greeted me with a quick lick at my hands, then looked away, shamefaced, and went to his place in the living room and lay down, as though renewing his claim. And that was that. I phoned Dave, the warden, and he said the farmer where he took Pat had reported that Pat left there the first evening.

  The next Spring Pat was gone for two days, we never knew where, and came home tired and repentant. Now he is gone again. But he’ll be back. If he doesn’t come back we shall just remember what a gentleman he was, and we shall know that he had to go wherever he has gone.

  I went up the mountain alone today, trying not to think of Pat or listen for his voice. And on a rocky slope which catches the full warmth of the sun I found a mass of columbine in bloom, a great spread of crimson and gold and silvery blue-green foliage. After looking at my records a couple of days ago I judge that they are blooming about on schedule.

  These eastern columbines have small petals and long spurs, petals yellow as buttercups, of which they are botanical cousins. Evolution somehow not only made the columbine quite different from the buttercup but all but did away with the columbine’s petals in achieving the flower’s long, scarlet spurs, which are ingenious nectar pouches to lure the bees.

  I can marvel at the results of evolution, but in the case of the columbine I am also baffled. In our flower garden we have Colorado columbines which just now are opening bud. Their flowers at their most magnificent are four inches across, with big petals and long spurs, beautiful things of a blue like the May sky in Colorado. You could almost hide an eastern wild columbine beneath one petal of those Colorado columbines.

  Here is the puzzler: Our Colorado columbines are also wildlings, the result of undisturbed natural selection and evolution. They were grown from wild columbine seed gathered in Colorado. Why did evolution, from the same base stalk, produce the little red and yellow columbines native to my mountainside here and the huge blue ones on a Colorado mountain two thousand miles from here?

  We have Baltimore orioles all over the place. Two pairs of them are nesting in the big maples just across the road from the house, weaving their pouch nests far out at the tips of swaying branches. Oriole nests are always woven, an in-and-out weaving of hairs, strings and plant fibers that forms a kind of rough fabric. Looking at such a nest—I gathered several of them last Fall, to examine their texture and materials —I can see the far-back origins of the shirt I am wearing; for I have no doubt that ancient man—more likely, woman— learned weaving from the nest-building of birds. There is nothing else in nature that could have set a similar example.

  Weaving and the knot, fundamentally allied, seem to me among the most remarkable of man’s early inventions. They called for an unusual combination of imagination and manual dexterity. The wheel was there all the time, in any rolling log. But the discoverer of weaving had to see in his mind’s eye what would happen if a certain crossing of fibers were continued, to envisage a length of fabric as the result.

  There is always the temptation to minimize the quality of the primitive mind. Within the field of its own necessities, I suspect that the primitive mind was of very high quality indeed. Certainly the early stone tools and instruments were splendidly conceived and executed. The invention of the bow and arrow was not a result of second-rate thinking; and the atl-atl, or spear thrower, was more than a display of ingenuity. But these were inventions to project weapons and missiles beyond normal manual reach, to catch food or repel enemies. Weaving, if one excepts fish nets, was essentially a domestic achievement, for personal comfort and adornment. The weaver was a peaceful person, and I pay him homage. His was one of the basic arts.

  Pat came home. He was on the front porch, sound asleep, when I got up this morning. He heard me and asked to come in, and went to his own place in the living room. He has spent a rugged two days somewhere. We welcomed him, but without the eagerness we felt inside. He is penitent, and we aren’t going to ease his penitence too much or too soon. No fatted calf for him. All he got was a big bowl of corn flakes and milk, followed by a big can of mixed dog food when he was still hungry.

  He is asleep here in my study as I write, so sound and weary a sleep he doesn’t even twitch as he so often does, or utter those muffled little yips which persuade me that dogs dream as certainly as humans do. He is sleeping the utterly worn-out sleep of a tired dog, and I won’t disturb him. I believe in letting lying dogs sleep.

  Turn of speech, as we call it, is a strange and personal matter. It sums up the personal approach to an idea. By tradition, we expect a tart economy of words from New Englanders, for example, as though they spent long Summer days and Winter evenings mulling ideas and shaping them to a few pungent phrases, whittling away every sliver of excess. Actually, some of the most talkative people I know are New Englanders and some of the most laconic are Westerners. Pungency of speech is an individual matter, not one of regions.

  Today we saw, for the first time in months, an elderly woman who has had troubles, as we say. Her most recent trouble was the death of a son in an accident. She said, “I’m glad it was a sudden death. A dying death is hard.” And, speaking of the trials and difficulties of her life, she said, “I guess you’ve got to know the low to know the high.”

  The strange thing to me is that this woman is the widow of a college professor, well read, traveled, long a city person. But she came from a Midwestern state, from a farm family. She seemed today to revert to her childhood background, perhaps unconsciously quoting phrases she heard from a pioneer grandmother. I suspect that we all, at one time or another, speak in such echoes out of our own past.

  There was a violent electrical storm today, followed by a slashing rain that lasted only a quarter of an hour.

  Thunderstorms fascinate me, perhaps because they are such in-the-raw manifestation
s of natural forces. The meteorologists say that the energy released in one medium-sized electrical storm is considerably greater than that expended in one ordinary atomic bomb explosion. Most of that energy, of course, is expended in the air, in sheer noise; but when one small sliver of lightning touches a tree, that tree often explodes, a more complete explosion than any charge of dynamite ever generated. If the whole potential of today’s thunderstorm had been concentrated in one flash directed at Tom’s Mountain, it probably would have left us, if at all, living on the verge of a chasm. And Tom’s Mountain is no mean hill.

  Our storm today, as usual, boomed and echoed and shot its bolts from cloud to cloud, and there was the sweet ozone smell just ahead of the rain smell, the exhilarating ozone created by electrical discharges through the atmosphere. Then the clean, cool rain smell, with a wind ahead of it, and after the smell came the rain, charging down the river on a million pattering feet. It rained like mad for a few minutes, then the clouds broke, the sun shone and the road steamed. But the river was littered with river-bank debris for an hour.

  As far as I can see, of all that tremendous bombardment not one bolt struck a tree within half a mile of here. Only God knows how many million or billion volts of energy were shot off harmlessly in the air. There is still, an hour later, a hint of ozone, and the air is sweet and dustless and fresh and clean.

  The first of the sweet corn is up, and we hope for an early crop. More will be planted this week, for a succession to keep us in corn until frost.

  We have tried a dozen varieties of sweet corn, and we have tried to simplify by planting what are advertised as successions, different varieties which you plant in one burst of energy on the same day and which come to ear and ripeness at different times. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. One year we planted a succession of eight varieties, which were to be ready at one-week intervals. They came along beautifully and we thought we had the whole problem in hand. Then came a spell of hot, dry weather, and every ear of that corn was ready to pick within less than two weeks.