SUMMER AND THE SENSE OF TIME

Borland, Hal

Summer and the Sense of Time by HAL BORLAND The first cutting of hay is in and under cover, the corn is knee-high, we have passed the solstice, and Summer is upon us. Another year has passed its...

...Man needs such a season lo help repair his perspective in terms of time, and he needs the annual abundance that persists even in spite of his own bungling to make him recognize, however dimly, the existence of forces greater than his own will and imagination...
...Epidermis by the yard is being exposed to sunburn...
...I have yet to find evidence that nature has any motive beyond the insistence of life itself...
...Female mosquitoes, the only ones that bite, are thriving...
...Man knows that grass makes good hay for his livestock if it is properly cured, and if he heeds the natural clock he gets his hay...
...It is heresy, of course, for any countryman to admit that there is any season of the year when he isn't driven by the clock...
...That is the dilemma of freedom in the big, theoretical sense, as we are constantly reminded, whether we take heed or not...
...The last time 1 looked, the moon was right on schedule...
...The fox stalks my meadow for mouse and rabbit...
...Besides being dubious prophets, these locusts participate in still another phase of time...
...Despite the urgencies of man's own follies, there is a kind of time that doesn't have to be measured in minutes, seconds, and microseconds...
...Now the long, slow swing of the pendulum toward Autumn begins, deliberate as the drone of a sated bum blebee on a hot afternoon...
...1 said, "Hi," and sat down beside him and waited, watching his bobber...
...Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and so does hail...
...They are among the longest lived of all insects, seventeen years in the North, thirteen years in the South...
...it will come to the full on July 17...
...Being a grownup, I made a mental calculation—at four a day, his Summer was going to be at least eight months long...
...That is up to the farmer...
...I finally asked...
...Looked at from the other side the veins form an "M," not a "W," and "M" stands for music and moderation and magnanimity and merrymaking and, if one must be crass, for money...
...But they spend most of their lives in a larval stage underground, unperturbed by seasons or sex or wind or weather...
...Apple trees that were a shimmering glory of white blossoms in May are now hung with little green apples that won't be ripe until September...
...Oh, lots of things...
...When I was eight or nine years old I knew when school closed in June that it would open again in September, but meanwhile there were countless long days to go fishing, play Pan with dandelion stems, roam the countryside, eat green apples, or just lie in the grass and watch towering cumulus clouds drift lazily past...
...I wished him well and walked on up the road, my question about boyhood and time at least partly answered...
...Another year has passed its midpoint and the countryman takes comfort in the fact that there are four seasons in every year, four spans of time that are not deHAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature of the New York Times, is the author of "High, Wide and Lonesome," "This Hill, This Valley," "The Enduring Pattern," and, just published, "Beyond Your Door Step...
...The kingfisher dfves into my river for a piscine meal...
...A periodic swallow of humility, bitter though it may be going down, never hurt any of us...
...And it is also the complication that makes security so elusive, despite the fine theories and the often frantic experiments...
...To return to that long, deliberate, insensible larval stage where time isn't even measured in weeks or months, but in years...
...And I'm making a rock collection...
...Before I got home I heard a cicada shrilling, that piercing sound that starts as a buzz, rises to a stridulous shriek, then dies away like an alarm clock running down...
...I hear them every Summer, since a few of them are out of phase, so to speak, and not members of the periodic hordes...
...I'm going to catch a thousand fish this Summer...
...I'm going to learn, this Summer...
...Big bugs eat little bugs in my garden and all my fields...
...And when we go to the shore for Daddy's vacation I'll get more shells for my shell collection...
...But for a few moments I had reached back into small boyhood, when time had wholly different dimensions...
...There certainly is neither charity nor malevolence in nature, nor any degree of either punishment or pardon...
...What it amounts to, really, is a choice between freedom and security, and the result usually is a compromise...
...And I can testify that water still runs downhill, for the Housatonic River, just beyond my dooryard, is at this moment flowing normally downstream, toward Long Island Sound some 100-odd miles to the south...
...This was a year of the seventeen-year locusts, and for a couple of weeks or so they dined and gorged on leaves and made their threat of devastation...
...The early nesting of the birds is completed and fledglings are on the wing...
...At one time and another, almost everything from an oak tree to a volcano, from a serpent lo the east wind—in addition to all the weather gods—was so endowed and canonized...
...Did you know there are beavers in the Blackberry...
...As mature insects, the periodic locusts know time only as a matter of days, even of hours...
...Eddie and I are building a tree house...
...And every time I hear them I am reminded of two-legged creatures who also shout, "Hurry, hurry, hurry...
...pendent on machines that go tick-tick-tick...
...Neither man nor nation can make hay, either literally or figuratively, without compromising somewhere...
...But the fact is that most of us actually living on the land could throw away both clocks and calendars and still get along...
...Not very good today," he said, watching a dragonfly hover...
...Here in my valley we don't have to look at the calendar to know when it is time to plant corn, or mow hay, or harvest oats, or dig potatoes...
...The cicada was a late arrival, remnant of the hordes of periodic locusts we had a few weeks ago...
...Then I thought of the day itself and all its chores and obligations, and the illusion was gone...
...But without the fact of Summer, how would we know when Winter comes that no Winter lasts forever, either...
...The farmer is free to cut hay or not, and to cut it when he chooses...
...The sun rises and sets on schedule, Summer comes when the urgencies of Spring begin to abate, and Autumn always follows Summer...
...Somehow, even business can get along short-handed for a few weeks...
...But the reasonable person must recognize that man thereby did establish an inner contradiction that still persists and on occasion can create a good deal of mischief...
...The corn is laid by...
...His bobber jiggled and went under, and he caught a fish, a rock bass and not very big, but another fish of that thousand he is going to catch this Summer...
...For instance, it doesn't matter to the grass whether the farmer cuts it before it goes to seed or not...
...But all without rancor or passion...
...Summer was an infinity of time, boundless...
...And that, if I may lapse for a moment into the kind of thinking that I have just now challenged, is one reason for Summer...
...Do you know how to polish them...
...You can't go on forever passing the buck and at the same lime issuing orders...
...And here am 1, here is mankind, to participate if we only will...
...What else are you going to do this Summer...
...Borland lives, in the Connecticut Berkshires...
...Yesterday I caught four, though...
...I wonder what we are urging ourselves to hurry toward...
...In one breath we speak of destiny and imperatives, and in the next breath we boast of our own knowledge and our powers of ultimate decision...
...Then, while out for a walk early this afternoon, I met a small boy on the riverbank, where he was fishing...
...Despite man's long habit of endowing sun, moon, stars, weather, and other natural elements and forces with anthropomorphic passions and sensibilities, it is my experience that the patterns of nature's behavior are quite unrelated to man's wishes, his needs, or even his prayers...
...The eggs quietly hatch, the new larvae burrow into the ground, and the long, dark cycle starts all over again...
...Because the red veins on their wings make a pattern like a "W," some otherwise sensible people say their appearance in unusual numbers portends war...
...Fireflies wink their mysterious lights at dusk and long into the warm night...
...The brooks have relaxed into gurgling passage across the meadows, their spate gone down to the sea...
...Then they vanished, as they always do, and we were not really devastated at all...
...The harmless robin struts my lawn with cocked head and pounces on an unwary angleworm...
...When they finally emerge they molt and become mature, winged insects which have a week or two of adult life that they spend eating, flying awkwardly from tree to tree, mating, and laying eggs...
...Hurry for what...
...That, after all, is the function of seed, to grow...
...I asked...
...Life was not complicated by either freedom or security, since I had both in large measure and was not actually aware of either...
...But it is Summer now, most of the locusts have laid their eggs and committed their inheritance to the egg and the larva, and the outdoor tempo is back in order...
...Listening to the shrill calls of the males to the silent females, I always sense a frantic urgency in them...
...Did you know there are garnets, real garnets, in the rocks on the hill right up the road...
...Nature commits no dimes...
...Standing on the riverbank soon after sunup this morning, I had, for a few moments, a sense of foreverness that now seems so uncommon...
...True, nature has her hungers and her necessities, even in Summer...
...No one who believes in the truth of nature can too much quarrel with this...
...I found seven there yesterday...
...Spring's urgencies are largely past...
...How are they biting...
...and I have never noticed that earthquake or tornado, flood or lightning boll choose among the reverent, the profane, the industrious, and the lazy when they strike...
...Time stood still for a little while, and the day ahead seemed endless...
...For those who look for it, Summer provides the corrective, the essential pause that should restore perspective...
...The sun tolls off the countdown for hay, as well as a good many other things, and the sun can be very deliberate in June...
...Besides, like so many omens, this one has two sides to it...
...Could it be the security of some insensitive larval stage of existence, too...
...Then he brightened...
...Even in the feverish tropics the seasons change...
...I'm going to watch them build a dam...
...They seem to forget that "W" also stands for welcome and wisdom and wedding and well-being, as well as a number of other un-warlike things...
...Nature does not deal in morality, which is a concept peculiar to man and, 1 find, somewhat fluctuant even with him...
...But because man seems always to have been reluctant to accept the responsibility for his own folly, he long ago conceived a pantheon of gods to lake the blame and, on rare occasions, to receive his thanks...
...Absolute freedom and complete security are not really compatible, as a good many of the new nations of this world are discovering so painfully today, and as most of the old ones find it so difficult to admit...
...If it is important to know the month, June is the time when hay is ready to be cut, and potatoes should be dug in September, certainly no later than October...
...Things seem to be pretty well in order, even to small boys still thinking that Summer lasts, if not forever, at least a long, long time...
...This morning, after that few minutes of timelessness on the riverbank, I wondered if the boyhood sense of time was something personal that vanished with my own past...
...The hay is in...
...Then they die...
...But even then it doesn't matter whether he cuts it at ten minutes after eight in the morning or at high noon, just so it is properly cured before he stows it away...
...The world abounds with natural aspects of plenty and tranquillity...
...But if he would have the security of plenty he must curb that freedom somewhat and obey certain natural restrictions...
...No Summer lasts forever, thank goodness...
...I didn't stop to listen to this lone cicada-locust today, as I might have in other years...
...Otherwise he will find himself scrounging among the roots of the field and the nuts of the woodland to keep from starving to death...
...The great green canopy of chlorophyll is spread and the deliberate leafy process of photosynthesis goes on with no fuss whatever...
...Hurry, hurry, hurry...
...And, just for once, let's not get involved in what that signifies in terms of race, creed, color, or anything else...
...If he doesn't cut it, the seed ripens and falls and fills in the bare spots with new grass next year...
...So here we are in the midst of Summer, plenty of sunlight is still available at pre-war prices, a pint of rain still contains a pound of water, nobody has rationed the number of leaves on a tree, Shakespeare's books in brooks are still uncensored, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has repealed the laws of growth...
...The countryman has time to catch his breath, and the city man and his family have time to take a vacation...
...I am rather tired of that stridulated shriek and what it stands for, just as I am tired of the superstitions about those locusts...
...And that birthright of childhood, in my day at least, conferred a special sense of time which really amounted to a kind of timelessness...
...But even those notions on nature's clock are matters of comfort and convenience rather than of compulsion...

Vol. 26 • July 1962 • No. 7


 
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