THE TURNING YEAR: HARVEST

...Thanks to the roots of birch and hemlock and the growth of moss and wild grass, it is slowly repairing itself...

...See my great accomplishment...

...It was neglected a year or two, then abandoned, and now it is a thicket without a blade of grass left...

...Maybe that is why Fall seems to be so important...

...But we tried to change its course, and when the floods came they showed that we didn't even know that water persists in running downhill at its own pace and in its own course...

...Right now, when we are gathering the late harvest, we are aware of ifOch fundamentals, for they are all ia the ripeness at hand, the sum of ©Id, old forces, forces which created Joan himself...

...After the flood we left the brook alone, and it is going its own way and harming no one...

...Man is the master of big achievements...

...There is the flash of sumac war bonnets creeping down a swale in the lower pasture...

...There are rabbits to run, and there is provender from the land...

...I contemplate the total harvest, and feel as full of achievement as a gray squirrel who has made good his claim to a big butternut tree full of fresh, sweet nuts...

...It is man's world, and he is constantly telling himself that he knows best and does best at shaping his own environment...

...And that was another part of the harvest —the recapitulation, the appraisal of cause and effect...

...It's somewhat humbling to admit this, but a touch of humility never injured anyone permanently...

...He didn't plant that butternut tree, though one of his ancestors may have...

...If we had left that brook alone it probably wouldn't have damaged the pasture in the first place...

...It takes another seed or another bulb to do it, and it takes soil and sunlight and rain, which are rather fundamental matters...

...I see that particularly in the Fall, when the leaves begin to drift down and I get a somewhat wider horizon, both literally and figuratively...

...Or so I think, needing the superior feeling to which man is entitled, the feeling of intelligent planning brought to fruitful conclusion...

...You look forward to another year, and another...

...Perhaps it is significant that both words, Fall and harvest, have Germanic origins that long predate the Norman conquest...

...THE YEAR has turned on the pivot of the equinox and Fall has come, quiet as morning mist, brilliant as a scarlet maple leaf, bold as the hoot of a barred owl in the moonlight...

...I am both fond and proud of those big maples, but I can't let them take over the garden with their progeny...

...That, too, is one of the values of life on the land or close to it...

...And he sometimes creates new deserts...

...Less than six thousand years...

...Borland, who lives in the Connecticut Berk-shires, will contribute his next installment of "The Turning Year" in January.—The...

...Maybe he will learn that there are still gods of the hills and fields that, if they no longer demand propitiation, at least do call for recognition...

...The growing season, though, is over and we have been garnering the late harvest, bringing in the Winter squashes, digging the late beets and carrots, stowing Ben Davis and Russet apples, picking the last few nubbins of sweet corn planted in July, picking green tomatoes for one more batch of piccalilli...

...And that is something to remember in the time of maturity and falling leaves...

...That is the way of life on the land...

...You don't live with plants that depend on the sun and the rain and have to lean with the wind without seeing that there is such a thing as a power beyond the reach of man's persistent legislative hand...

...And, since I presume the squirrel to have only a limited memory, his knowledge of rather remote cause and current effect must be limited...

...He makes the desert bloom...

...They were seedlings from the big trees that we tap, now and then, for sap to make sugar and syrup...

...Then I remember that only yesterday I pulled up half a hundred sugar maple seedlings in a corner of the vegetable garden...

...As though he had built the mountains, which can dwarf the biggest of his dams and hide them inj a lesser canyon...

...But an ice sheet, or a flood, or a slight shift in the winds which bring rain clouds can do more to change the land than many generations of man...

...Maybe it is disappointing to learn that no law on the statute books ever fended off a late Spring frost or an early Fall freeze, and that neither cut worms nor chinch bugs have yet been legislated out of existence...

...I hear a good deal from time to time about what man should do to improve his world...

...There is a harvest on every hill, in every woods and swamp...

...Rarley spoke of his short hay crop and the ear corn he has sacrificed to his silo, and he said, "I guess we just ''don't live right...

...First frost has come to many valleys, but we have been fortunate...

...Only the other, day one of my farmer neighbors, discussing the year, spoke of his short hay crop...

...Why, he often says, he can even make the desert to blossom as the rosel Of course he can...

...Charley also talked of how he plowed and fertilized and planted, and of how one field did better than another despite the drought...

...Editors...

...All I have to do now is work with the elements, not against them, to make the best use of this old silt bed, to bring my cropping to a proper harvest year after year...

...They go back to a time when all men were close to the land and knew intimately such matters as cause and effect...

...but one of the virtues of Fall is that it lures man back to the land, if only on outings to see the brilliant foliage and, largely unwittingly, to feel the presence of the gods that have been forgotten...

...We have fought that sumac steadily, and all we seem able to do is hold it at bay...

...But when he goes forth in the Fall and sees what has been happening he too often says, "See what I have wrought...

...And that maple just down the road, that shimmering flame of pink and gold, is of a species that was venerable when the Egyptians were still savages...

...When we go out to look at the flare of the swamp maples, or at the beauty of aspens pd buckbrush, or merely to see Fall if the green of live oaks on tawny, fsbe-grass hillsides, we are seeing a cycle of life that has been here a very long time and needs no help from man to go on being here whether man remains or not...

...If the year holds any moment when man is invited to go forth and appraise his own works and wonder at their consequence, this is surely the time...

...our garden, thanks to the river which flows close by, has not been touched...

...Things like that...

...Harvest is a very old word which stems back to herbs, the growing things that were here long before man came to exercise his tenancy...

...There will be time now for other tasks, and time to think, and feel, and quietly to live...

...Fall and harvest are natural consequences that reach back beyond the time of man, to a time when the land itself was rising from the depths and the ooze was pregnant with all the potentialities of life and growth...

...Down the road a piece is a field that was a good corn field only a few years ago...

...And every time I set foot in my garden I see the results of constructive natural processes which, when they began, probably would have been legislated against had legislative man been here...

...The world is in its finery now, its harvest finery, the triumphant colors of fruition...

...Maybe more so, because I had a hand—only a hand, because it was really governed by the weather—in the planting and the tilling...

...Stop erosion...

...But the point, to me, is that most of the proposals simmer down to ways of repairing man-made damage...

...I look up the mountain and see the diminishing trace of the old woods road, which was established long before my time and which was gullied and useless when I came here...

...But it would be traitorous to admit this too generally...

...Man is the creature who does this kind of thing, isn't he...

...He builds dams, and he diverts rivers, and he cuts trees and he fills swamps...

...Maybe we can do better next year...

...We had a severe drought this year in my area and many farmers had to cut corn, in ted for grain, to fill their silos...

...A beautiful thicket, right now, all gold and scarlet, but a thicket just the same...

...Then I look around my own acres and see that nature, in her own time, has been repairing such damage and, if I keep my predatory hands off, will do a splendid job eventually...

...Men knew that you had to plant if you would reap, but they also believed that unless they propitiated the gods of harvest they would probably face a long, lean, hungry Winter...

...Man can do many things, do them on a tremendous scale—tremendous, that is, by his own measure...

...Maybe when he has reaped another thousand harvests and watched the falling of the leaves another thousand times, man will learn that it is himself, not the land, which challenges the wisdom of human management...

...And we have been redding up the garden for the Winter and next year's planting...

...Man didn't invent the harvest...

...but man has yet to learn how to create so humble and effective an element of life as a radish seed or an onion bulb...

...I see, for instance, that the brook in the middle pasture which ripped out an acre or so of good grass in the flood of two years ago is peaceful in its chosen channel and now is depositing silt in the flood scars...

...The wheat in that granary was a wild grass literally as old as these hills when man first learned to use a flint tip on his hunting spear...

...and I am quite sure that neither I nor any other man could have supervised or even envisaged so effective and satisfying a project...

...And there was the whole of it, the venerable harvest god belief and the persistent farmer belief...

...About all man can do for trees, for instance, is plant them and cultivate them and provide a favorable environment for them, an environment a good deal like that in which they would grow best if left to their own devices...

...Pat, the dog, runs a few rabbits and we come back to the house, both of us pleased with the state of our world...

...But as I walk the pasture edges I see that industry and a measure of dispute with nature are necessary also for my tenancy here...

...If we don't check that sumac this Winter we shall lose another acre or so of lodino and brome grass...

...Of course, when we get in the car and travel a bit, even here in this area, I see that nature herself has harvested on a scale that makes our own efforts seem inconsequential...

...As though he coultl fashion so simple a thing as a cu3 mulous cloud in an Autumn sky...

...Even the scientists, who in their own way are more potent than the lawmakers, can't do that...

...And the shape of the world begins to clarify the natural world, the home of transient man...

...But they really aren't a fraction as big as the quiet achievement of grass taking over again after man's flocks have created a dust bowl, or as timber renewing itself after man's axes have denuded a thousand wooded hills...

...Reforest denuded areas...

...My garden is a deep bed of silt washed down from the mountain over the centuries...

...And wonder why man, with all his tall of management and planning, has se much trouble managing himself...

...I was tempted to try some erosion control, but nature got ahead of me and is doing the job in her own way, doing it better than I could have...

...There is an eternal tendency of the elements to level the hills and fill the valleys, and my valley was partly filled before the trees took hold again and tied down the mountainside...

...Restore the grass...

...For man is basically an arrogant creature who thinks he knows best about many things which are actually beyond his control...

...So mine is the more intelligent pleasure...

...Man is the master in these matters...

...Somehow the natural environmeat asserts itself more fully in the FaR than at any other time of year, per-haps because it reveals its own: strength of creation and fulfillment' then...

...When I travel this land, whether in New England or the Midwest or the Far West or the South, anywhere, I see a land essentially shaped by forces beyond the human hand or braifily land that can still hide the mal made cities among its hills...

...There was jocular reference to a harvest god who punished or rewarded, and there was basic belief in another year, another chance tp plant and till and make a harvest that- would be generous and satisfactory...

...Man is only an inhabitant of the land, a beneficiary of natural forces...

...They came out easily, but had I left them I would have had saplings that in another ten years would have me camping in a thicket...

...We can hatch eggs in incubators, and we can grow tomatoes, of a sort, in greenhouses in midwinter...

...He can harvest them for lumber or paper pulp eventually, of course, and if he takes time to notice he will see their growth rings, see that they grew well one year, did less well another year, but that each year added another ring of growth no matter what man was doing meanwhile, whether he was warring or trucing or sending rockets to the moon...

...You don't merely close out one season and say, "That's that...

...How old are the pyramids...

...Probably the washing process began with the end of the Ice Age of 15,000 years or so ago, and no doubt the hills were scoured to the granite bone by the torrential rains of that time...

...One season's work is done...

...Over the centuries man has grown away from the land and has disowned the gods...

...That knowledge was not complete, and it was overlaid with what we call superstition...

...But it is something worth pondering, nevertheless...

...And we are here to enjoy the fruits of the season...

...he merely profited by it, and he still does...

...As though he could color ten million sassafrass and sour gum leaves, or fashion a pumpkin in a laboratory, or create electronically the haunting bark of a fox on an Ochh ber hillside...

...The Turning Year: Harvest by HAL BORLAND This is the first of a series of seasonal essays by Hal Borland, distinguished nature editorialist for the New York Times and author of High, Wide and Lonesome, This Hill, This Valley, and An American Year...

...Thinking thus, I go with the dog to see how the rabbits fare and if the partridges are doing all right...

...So I now have a good garden and several deep-soiled pastures...

...which is a way of telling yourself that there is a continuity, an inevitable progression, one season to another, one year to the next...

...The squirrel, being an inferior creature, planted at random and without particular purpose...

...His world" implies ownership of this planet, which is rather presumptuous, since he is vastly outnumbered by the birds, the insects, and many humble species of animals...

...Fall winds are blowing, clearing the air, and frost skips down the valleys, precursor of snow and Winter, and another Spring, another new beginning...