the turning year: springsong

...It is all a part of the round, the rhythm...

...Life that persists...

...Thus precarious are the conditions of spring...

...As soon as the new Congress convened it began voting money to implement them...

...But when he goes out to plow he will merely stir the soil, break it up, aerate it, mix in the winter manure from his cow barn, and probably mix in some chemical concentrates as well...

...If I had gone on up the mountain a little way I could undoubtedly have found hepat-ica showing color, because it never waits for April unless March is full of snow till the very last day...

...And not far away were the silvery little leaves of the mountain anemone with a bud stalk already in sight...

...Some insects live only a day or two, also, in the most familiar form...

...Life is good again in spring and we welcome any proof of that...

...Every year we wait for the mythical turn around the corner of the equinox, and we tell ourselves that spring is now at hand...

...Water had seeped into a crack, frozen there, and pried the stone apart as effectively as though a pry-bar had been used, and much more quietly...

...And there is a celebration of such a simple fact as life itself that is too eloquent to ignore...

...When he cultivates his corn he will be removing weeds, competitors of the crops he wants to harvest...

...It is the lengthening day and more and more sunlight each day on this northern hemisphere...

...There are the chronic confessors, of course, just as there are the chronic braggarts...

...But not as much as I misjudged it, for within twenty-four hours the sun was warm and the meadows were boggy with fresh melt, and the robins, augmented by two dozen more arrivals, were strutting the home pasture, seeking and finding food there...

...The agreements, three of them, involving construction of bases, military aid, and economic assistance, were concluded in September, 1953...

...and they like to have matters neatly parceled, with beginnings and endings...

...So spring is really much more than the passing of a mathematical equinox or the visual greening of the hills...

...The Pentagon and Mr...

...And yet, that life has been here a long, long time...

...It is only another aspect of what is continuous...

...And it is all a part of the rhythm which surrounds us and is basic to all life...

...He has good, modern farm equipment, as good as money can buy...

...Copyright © 1958 by Hal Borland) Blackmail and double-cross are hard words...

...but at the moment I could concede to them membership in this living community and satisfaction with their status...

...HAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature for the New York Times, is the author of "High, Wide and Lonesome," "This Hill, This Valley," and "An American Year...

...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshires...

...It is die migrant birds making the dawn sweet and loud again and taking up their seasonal residence, preparing to nest and egg and hatch...

...How it got there, I don't know...

...Those bees, when I went to watch them closely, were as excited as small boys let loose in a candy store...

...But there it is, ticking off the days and hours, and I do know that...

...It is there now, ticking away, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if those peepers down the road in the swamp heard it the other evening...

...cause, effect...

...Of all the machines man has devised, not one can create a living flower...

...We are weather-weary ourselves, and we like to think that nature is also pleased to have winter on its way and spring at hand, with comfortable temperatures and excuse for pleasure in being...

...Man is a strange, perverse creature, full of proper pride in his own accomplishments but also lacking in the impulse to admit his own ignorance and his own failures...

...Thus precarious also are the basic conditions of life as we know it...

...His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Current History, the Fortnightly (London), and the Economist, among others...

...All around me was the sight and smell and sound of spring in its early stages, a beginning, a preparation of things still to come...

...The round of the seasons, the round of the years...

...Not the challenging caws of crows being truculent, but rather contented caws of crows sitting in a sunny treetop on a pleasant morning...

...It is in a radish seed and in an onion bulb and in the root of an asparagus plant...

...Water, frost, ice...

...A flock of robins was working the grass in the pasture below me, making a living the hard way, but every now and then one of them paused and began to sing...

...So for millions of years this clear, bell-like, almost musical call has been echoing spring's urgency and exhilaration, and what I hear from the bogland is the springsong of life itself...

...Spring happens to be the obvious time, the season of spectacular growth and flowering or hatching or birthing in any one of a multitude of ways...

...Of this more later...

...Life that surges in me, and in them, each time the cycle of the year reaches this point in its vast and endless rhythm...

...I see the proof every year, and I am sure I shall see it recurring as long as I live...

...And despite the essentially lesser human uproars and trumpeted marchings to and fro...

...The farmer knows this...

...In the still-naked trees down along the river a couple of crows were sitting and watching the world...

...Life that is sweet...

...There, of all places, cause and effect are made evident to anyone with eyes to see and some degree of understanding...

...All of them, these humble wildlings, were celebrating life and preparing to beautify it...

...Senator Mike Mansfield, Montana Democrat, in a recent report on the subject, stated that we have provided Spain with $350 million in military equipment and $721 million in economic assistance—a total of one billion and 71 million dollars...

...Beside the rock where I had been sitting were the fresh, new leaves of the tiny, yellow-flowered cinquefoil, and close by were the equally new leaves of wild strawberry, each of which I sometimes think can thrust up through a snowbank, though I never saw one doing it...

...Dulles both know...

...Human creatures like to count, on their fingers if no other way...

...In a matter of months after the first funds became available—the first part of 1955—the Spanish press, which publishes nothing political that is not officially inspired, began LAWRENCE FERNSWORTH, now a Washington correspondent and Nieman Fellow, has represented the New York Times and the London Times in Spain and other countries of Europe...

...It is the obviousness of spring that delights our hearts and baffles our emotions...

...But the annuals grow from seeds...

...A mating song...

...Without that day, which was only a week ago, there would be no now, no today, just as without last winter there would be no spring and without spring there would be no summer...

...I walked along the hillside a little way, and I found a stone that had been split by the winter's frost...

...And from that moment on he will depend on the soil, the sun, the rain, and the more or less varying conditions of nature...

...Certainly, their flowers have another mission than provision of beauty for the human eye, but that is the effect...

...The Arriba article was full of menacing words of which this is an example: "If, after having squandered fabulous amounts of Marshall Plan aid in Europe without notable results, we were to be denied what is indispensable, the great program of aid and mutual cooperation would be in grave danger...

...At a proper time he will plant seed corn and oats...

...For feeding men, too, if these were not the escaped bees that are hiving in a hollow in the big sugar maple in front of my house...

...This became the theme song, rendered with variations from that day to this...

...It is in the earth...

...That, astronomically speaking, is spring...

...It is, in a remarkable way, an annual season of proof—proof that life does persist, despite ice ages and volcanic eruptions and earthquake convulsions...

...government's dealings with the Spanish dictatorship in matters pertaining to what are known as the Spanish bases agreements...

...We see life burgeoning, and we are made aware of it, and we sometimes celebrate its existence...

...Additional Spanish demands are now being processed...

...Spring, of course, is primitive and timeless, the recurring phenomenon of surgent life renewing itself...

...That is one reason we devised a calendar and a clock, and one reason we call sundown the end of the day...

...So here I am, and there they are, and between us there is a large measure of understanding...

...Beside the river I found spring in the quickened color of the red osier stems, and beside the barnyard I found it in the live amber look of the weeping willow, and even here beside the house I found it in an eager rosette of new dandelion leaves...

...We can incubate birds, we can artificially inseminate cattle, we can force bulbs, we can grow lettuce in a greenhouse, but in every instance we have to abide by basic rules that governed natural growth and reproduction for eons before man came out of the caves...

...They were carting that pollen home to the hive, where they would dance their mysterious information dance and somehow tell other bees where they found it...

...Not for another few weeks...

...There is cause, and there is effect, inevitable...

...This was just a full-throated paean of a living creature for life itself, for being...

...I went out on the hillside the other morning and sat on a rock and watched and listened for an hour...

...Just how far back it reaches, no one can say within a thousand years, but we know that the frogs were here to see the rise of this continent out of the shallow seas, and that was thousands of millenia ago...

...But that, too, is a life process...

...I happen to think of spring as a beginning, because my human mind and habit tend to work that way...

...Spring follows winter, summer follows spring...

...Having got the pitch, the Spanish press began chorusing that it was now Spain's turn to get a slice of the American melon, that the melon had better be juicy, that the Americans would best start producing in the grand manner or suffer the consequences...

...as a species...

...More lately, I saw spring advancing through a chill and sleety rain, when half a dozen robins arrived here in the valley, disconsolate birds that had misjudged the weather somewhat...

...It is a truth with which anyone close to the land grows up with and lives with all his life...

...The first of these threats, published in Arriba, the organ of the official Spanish party, Falange, was followed by a succession of others, each more truculent and menacing than the one before...

...His books include "Nothing But Danger," "Dictators and Democrats," and "Spain's Struggle for Freedom," published by Beacon Press, Boston, a few weeks ago, which has aroused wide interest in Latin America and has been condemned by the Franco press as the work of a "reptile Republican...

...I am a human who can read song into such sounds, but whether it was a song or not it certainly was a sound of spring, of live and flowing water moving downhill...

...The sort of cause and effect that has leveled hills and shaped this earth of ours...

...I should be amazed, to tell the truth, if they didn't hear it...

...Near where I sat a gray birch was dangling its pollen-yellow catkins, preparing the seeds for another generation of birches even before it opened leaf for its own growth...

...I saw the seep of melt from on up the hillside, increasing as the sun strengthened, trickling water that fed the brook that goes twinkling across the pasture...

...But beyond that, there's not much he can do except hope that his degree of cooperation with those fields has been sufficient and wisely planned and executed...

...It also serves to attract early bees and flies, which help with the pollination and the eventual seeding...

...It is a consequence of many things made evident only by a few degrees difference in the average daily temperature from one week to the next, by a few more minutes of sunlight and a fraction of a degree of change in the angle of that sunlight...

...What are the seeds but capsulated life, carried over from one generation to the next...

...They stand for hard facts...

...There is a continuance, a progression, or at least a continuity from one day to the next, from one season to another...

...And these facts assert themselves with increasing insistence in the course of the U.S...

...These will bring the total to about one and a quarter billion, with more to come in "fiscal 1959...

...And after summer comes fall, then another winter, then another spring...

...Yes, I know that there are annual plants, as well as perennials...

...The sun came up this morning just a bit north of east, and it will be in the sky today just a few minutes longer than it will be out of sight on the other side of the world...

...The latest of these, published within a matter of days after the ostentatious and, in Spanish eyes, subservient visit of "Foster Dulles," contained a blunt warning which was no less than a threat that NATO faced "utter failure," unless— The "unless" of the matter was that, as to NATO, Franco wanted in, and that Dulles, in failing to open the door, wasn't doing his job...

...The spring song of the peepers has been heard a good many million years...

...Thrusting up new leaves, just behind which will be coming their flower buds...

...It was here before man came...

...They, too, thought life was worth living, and said so...

...That day I went out to do a little seeking myself, and I found spring down along the brook, in a few blades of grass newly green...

...It answers the summons of no calendar, not even the calendar of the stars, for it is compounded of the basic stuff of life and the thousand conditions that must be so finely balanced to revive and maintain life...

...Spring is a pulse that throbs through the earth and quickens the human heart...

...But few matters have such neat beginnings and endings...

...It is the slowly warming earth,, frost oozing away and streams full and springs bubbling...

...As a race, that is...

...It becomes a part of him, a part which governs his way of thinking...

...Spring is quickening, but it is no more a beginning than high noon or mid-July...

...to complain that Spain wasn't getting enough...

...And that brook was making sounds that were a springsong to me, the splash and murmur of flowing water...

...I happen to call it April, and the peepers call it mating time, but we are talking about the same fundamental, which is life...

...And a few early bees were there at work on those catkins, gathering pollen...

...We didn't trust it too far, and not without reason...

...We used to try to counter it with sulphur and molasses...

...We can participate, if we will...

...I saw its signs in the shifting of the sun's shadow back in early January, when the river was iced over, bank to bank, and snowdrifts lay deep in the woods...

...The clock of the year, and especially of spring, really isn't in the stars at all...

...But the best man has really been able to do with spring is to chart it, astronomically, and then to cooperate with it when it comes...

...I sometimes wonder if mankind doesn't get itself into periodic trouble largely because it hordes itself so persistently away from, such fundamental matters as spring on a hillside...

...They depend on such essentially minor changes that we would scarcely be aware of them if nature didn't respond...

...There is planting, there is consequent growth, and there is rewarding harvest...

...Somewhere along the path of evolution, those plants found it more advantageous to trust their precious germ of life to a seed than to try to hoard it in a root over the winter...

...From time to time one of them cawed and the other answered...

...It is me going out to the vegetable garden with a fork, to see about the state of the soil, and watching the first crinkled, red leaves of the rhubarb come up and the fine, green shoots of the chives thrust out of the withered tangle of last year's growth, and hoping there will be no late frost to nip the daffodils already six inches high and in bud...

...The club in the hands of the Spanish dictator is a simple clause in the agreement regarding the bases which says that their use in wartime shall be by "mutual agreement...

...Along with the complaints went thinly veiled threats...

...but they persist as eggs or pupae or some variant...

...Spring endangers maidenheads because spring is no mere accident in BLACKMAIL in Spain by LAWRENCE FERNSWORTH the potent scheme of nature, which contrives first of all to maintain life and make sure of its survival...

...Wherever they came from, they were pleased, in the manner of bees, at finding this stuff of life...

...And I knew that spring never comes all at once...

...Other insects, such as the periodic locusts, live in the ground as grubs for years before they emerge with wings and hungry mouths for a few weeks, to eat and mature and mate and create a din and lay eggs and die...

...A little later I shall distrust those crows, for it will be corn-planting time...

...Not yet...

...And we can't change the rules...

...Down the road my neighbor, Albert, is preparing to do his spring plowing and planting...

...It isn't really that close, of course, but we cling to the old hope engendered by an arbitrary calendar...

...Pollen for honey for feeding more bees...

...but whether we will or not, spring takes hold of us, shakes us, stirs our blood, for spring is a quickening of the whole human pulse as well as a livening of the vital earth...