THE TURNING YEAR: SUMMERTIME
Borland, Hal
the turning year: summertime by Hal Borland If there is a more characteristic midsummer sound than the dry, rasping "call" of the cicada, I have yet to hear it. This periodic locust, often known...
...Compared to it, the chirp of a cricket is an inconsequential beep and even the rasp of a katydid is quite minor...
...And that the solution is to cut down all the trees...
...We were out the other evening in the boat...
...We drove on, in the shimmering dust...
...For a few months now those small, chitin-clad invertebrates live their active lives...
...Here I am, and here is the world, and around me is midsummer...
...I remember midsummer dusks on the Colorado plains when the sky was a glory and the night hawks, which we called bull-bats, played high overhead as the swallows played over the river the other evening...
...Cut down all roadside trees, said this engineer—his name is Charles M. Chayne—and stop planting roadside trees, and we will save countless lives...
...To pluck dandelion tubes and split them into curls and watch the milky juice, or to play monotonous notes on those same tubes...
...But the hay crop came with a rush, and last month the silos were oozing the juice of their early fill...
...They nibbled and put the food away and we went on, the grownups saying, "It's just too hot to eat, and I'm being eaten alive...
...Well, where I live I hear the cicada more often than I hear the demolition crews, and for this Summer at least I can contemplate the self-healing pasture and the grazing cows and watch the tree swallows over the river at dusk...
...The mowers and the balers clattered, and there was rejoicing, for a year ago we had a drought and hay was short, as we say...
...Of all Summer memories the most vivid is of small boyhood in the Missouri Valley, and of one particular afternoon...
...One year evens into another, somehow, and we are now a bit ashamed of our earlier doubts...
...Like small boys turning cartwheels and congratulating themselves on their skill, except that only little girls dancing in un-self-conscious privacy have half the grace of a swallow...
...That hazard is the other fellow's automobile...
...I sometimes think Summer was designed for that sense of pause, for the easing of pressures...
...Highway commissioners have demonstrated their belief in it for some years...
...I don't know where we were going, but we had a box lunch with us...
...The dust was deep and gray, the horseweed was six feet tall, the sun was blazing...
...And because I was able to adapt myself to the demands of this time and place...
...By mid-May this year it was almost knee-high with a stand of grass and clover thick as the hair on my dog's back...
...To eat green apples, and watermelon, and field corn roasted over a campfire, or at least scorched...
...The root knew April, and the flower knew May and June, but it is the branch that knows July and August...
...Perhaps Summer is like rosemary, for remembrance...
...How ridiculous can you get...
...Grownups have no appetite, in Summer...
...If I were a cicada with only a week of winged life in the sun, I too would be out there on a tree trunk vibrating my membranes over my sound-chamber with full frenzy...
...Summer is growth-time, the time of quiet green achievement...
...It's too bad to waste any part of Summer in a vacation, but that is when most vacations come...
...The corn farmer relaxes a bit, his early hay in and his cornfield "laid by," ready for the hot nights that will send the stalks skyward with joint-popping vigor, the hot afternoons when the whole countryside has the warm, half-sweet smell of pollen...
...Everything green rushes to achieve its growth and mature its seeds or spores...
...That is a typical bit of human arrogance, of course, because the seasons are...
...Following Mr...
...Summer is for not being young or old, but just for being...
...If I were still a small boy I would be stretching a blade of grass between my thumbs and shrilling my delight in being alive...
...This is the vital time for the insect world...
...If I were a stalk of corn I would be reaching for the sun and straining my joints and funneling every drop of night dew with my broad blades...
...And two swallows came past, swooping close beside the boat...
...Or, if you would rather, such evenings are what make Summer...
...This evening, thanks to the season, we shall have a crisp garden salad, and we shall get in the boat and go up the river and fish and watch the dusk settle around us...
...The rest of the year their sparks of life retreat into the egg or the larva or the cocoon...
...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshires...
...When one was young, Summer was a vast span of time, days without end...
...The giant primroses spread big petals and soft sweetness, and hawk moths hovered like dark hummingbirds...
...Being a grownup and a countryman, about all I can do is to enjoy Summer, be pleased that for a little while time stands still, and urge everyone who ventures down my narrow, tree-lined, back-country road to take it easy...
...I am where I am because I decided, at a certain point of decision, that living here was worth whatever it might cost...
...There were small chores to be done, but there were still hours and hours of freedom...
...That is one of the rewards of Summer, and no other season brings it in quite the same degree...
...They then lay down a road, grade the raw soil, sow grass, and plant bushes and sapling trees, as a kind of afterthought and apology to the land itself...
...I would leave the trees where they are and even plant more of them, but I would remove another hazard, one that the statistics say causes many times as many accidents, fatal and otherwise, as do trees...
...In Fall there is a sense of ripeness, of harvest and Winter ahead...
...To go swimming down at the bend in the creek...
...We pulled into a grove of black walnuts, and I still remember the taste and texture of the chicken leg, the vinegar-mustard bite of potato salad and deviled eggs, the sugary tang of the frosting on chocolate cake...
...Another Summer will come and the chain-saws will echo across the green countryside, and there will be another scar, another grim gash where Detroit's miracles can lunge along in 400-horsepower safety...
...On a hot July day you can hear the cicada buzzing a quarter of a mile away, a sound that rises slowly in pitch and volume to shrill insistence, then fades to a whisper...
...To sit in the grass and play tunes on a blade of grass taut between one's thumb...
...And we shall be in no hurry, either to go or to come...
...There were automobiles by then, but the horse and buggy was still common, and we were driving down a country road beside a sluggish creek...
...The saplings will present no real hazard for some years—a tree grows slowly, after all...
...And the clatter of the combine crews, begun in Texas, echoes northward toward the Dakotas and the Canadian flatlands...
...But when I sit for an hour and look and listen to Summer I hear and see the tremendous energy that is at its source...
...I have the satisfaction of believing that I earn that share of simplicity and peace...
...I am paying for this evening's leisure at this very minute...
...Grownups get sunburned and mosquito-bitten...
...The apple ripens and the elderberry thickens and darkens its juices...
...And the result...
...But I suppose it is in order to remind everyone who leaves home in an automobile this Summer that if he drives off the road and into a tree, he may get hurt...
...Whatever we may sometimes think of man and his mismanagement of matters both simple and complex, the earth itself handles fundamental things quite well if it is given half a chance...
...But small boys have forever, in the Summer, and grownups have so little time...
...Every leaf on the towering sugar maple, every blade of grass in the yard, every leaf of the cabbage in the garden, is working at its utmost capacity...
...But in Summer there is only time itself, time measured by the stars...
...They swept upward with a grace of flight that was like music, and they came back over the boat and played tag and follow-the-leader for ten minutes...
...It was for this that Spring burgeoned...
...Now it is that the tree and the bush get the year's constructive work done, now the chlorophyll in the leaf works 14 hours a day...
...Summer comes so quietly, it builds itself upon the foundation of Spring with so little apparent effort, that we take it for granted...
...It began on the last day of grade school and it didn't end until after Labor Day...
...The oriole builds its ingenious nest and lays its eggs and tends its hatch-lings...
...Most accidents are caused by collisions between two cars...
...The wheat farmer watches the sky with a wary eye, fearful of hail, of high wind, of slashing rain that can bring his whole golden harvest to ruin...
...To catch channel catfish, or just to sit and watch more energetic companions fish...
...Then the cicada dies, the eggs hatch, and the cycle starts all over again...
...Did you ever watch a tree swallow at play over the water in the long and lovely light of evening...
...It was suggested that we find a shady place and stop and eat...
...Now I am a grownup, and for lunch today we are having cold fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs, good country fare in Summer...
...But it did...
...Over the centuries, man has learned to live with the year and to cut the cloth of his life to the year's pattern...
...way Safety Committee of the Governors' Conference that the way to save thousands of lives on the highways each year was to cut down all the trees along the roadsides...
...And cool dusk crept down the bluestem draws with faint chill, recompense for the blazing heat of high-altitude midday...
...Until, that is, they meet the ubiquitous other car...
...The horse wore a fly-net with red tassels on his ears...
...To pool pennies and nickles and buy a two-bit baseball and have a pick-up game on the sand lot...
...I often wish that I had the patience that I see manifest in a seed or a root...
...For a week or so it buzzes, feeds, and mates...
...But there were mosquitoes, and the heat was smothering, to the grownups at least...
...But I do get impatient with some of the persistent stupidities of my own kind of creatures...
...Brussels...
...We shall have done an honest day's work, and we shall have earned such relaxation...
...To lie on one's back and watch the towering cumulous clouds sail slowly overhead, higher than any kite ever flew...
...Not long ago I saw that the engineering vice-president of General Motors had told the HighHAL 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...
...Man, however—and woman and child—is the only thing in sight that does take a vacation at this time of year...
...We pay for what we get, most of us...
...Only the screech of a portable chain-saw can rival it, and only demolition crews ripping their way across the countryside in the vanguard of a new road use chain-saws in midsummer...
...Like sound thinking, fine music, and good writing, it seldom shows the sweat that went into it...
...Last July one pasture on my place, newly seeded the previous Spring, looked like a desert...
...Summer is for such evenings...
...He proved it, to bis own satisfaction, by running a remotely controlled car off a road and into a tree, then running another such car off a road and not into a tree...
...You might hit a tree, and then we might have to cut down all the trees along this whole road, just to save others like you from their incompetence...
...Chayne's, if he will stay in Michigan—and there will be no more accidents...
...We had a wet, slow Spring in my valley, and the farmers had trouble getting their oats into the sodden soil...
...October is really a better time to put off the day-to-day demands of the job, October or May...
...They lay out new or revised highways on a drafting board, apparently, then send demolition crews into the field to clear the way, to remove everything, bush, tree, landmark, and historic edifice...
...The bull-bats swept and swooped and made awesome dives earthward, the air rumbling through their wings, and they called to each other...
...Remove the other cars from the roads—all of them, that is, except mine and perhaps Mr...
...But we don't order things too well, and we put up with traditions, once they have established themselves...
...The woodchuck raids the clover field and, if he can get away with it, the garden, laying up preliminary layers of the fat that will sustain his long Winter's sleep...
...I never saw more beautiful patterns than they made, and as they flew they peeped softly as though in joy at their achievement...
...The cows were gnawing roots...
...And I wanted to stay and wade in the creek and catch a frog and maybe find a crawdad...
...The meadow-larks sang their goodnight songs...
...As any child of six might have foretold, the car that hit the tree was quite a mess, and the car that didn't hit a tree was not...
...Chayne's logic, I would suggest an even better solution...
...and by the time the trees are of a size to kill anyone, there will be a new road, a new tree-cutting...
...In Spring there is an urgency, a sense of time passing...
...Man just happens to be here in the midst of the seasons, adapted to their change...
...But things even out...
...We had fished for an hour or so and had anchored just to watch the play of evening light on the big maples and to listen to the sweet contralto of the wood thrush...
...This periodic locust, often known as the harvest-fly, spends years underground in the nymph stage before it makes its way to the surface, crawls up a tree or a telephone pole, moults, and becomes a winged insect with vibrating sound-makers...
...To do what...
...I paid for July last January...
...The female lays eggs...
...To take all day to mow a little patch of lawn...
...I paid for the succulence of the sweet corn now fattening in the garden last April and May...
...they they were not made for man...
...We thought it would never come back...
...And the Summer vacation is a tradition, simply because the human work of this world, the business, as we call it, slacks off then...
...This world we live in, this abounding world overflowing with the wealth of Summer...
...This is no new idea, of course...
...To watch the ants in an ant hill...
...And I do my daily stint and luxuriate of an evening in what July has to offer...
Vol. 22 • July 1958 • No. 7
