Autumn on the ridge
Borland, Hal
AUTUMN ON THE RIDGE by HAL BORLANDFOR ANYONE who lives in the oakandmaple area of New England, there is the perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October. The...
...Time, of course, is an inexplicable dimension in which we all participate but of which no one is master...
...There's no vital purpose in the color of a sunset either, I suppose...
...And I knew that they will never find all those acorns again, since they are mere squirrels...
...Before I came down to the valley and the house I climbed to the crest of the ridge, where the backbone of the hills in this part of the world lies open and exposed...
...There they deliberate what may very well be the fate of man, all men...
...He shook his head...
...One thing about my ridge, or any ridge for that matter, is that you get a sense of time and distance up there in October...
...I wonder if anyone can stand on an autumn hilltop, or out in a dooryard on an October evening, and fail to see the new expanse not only around him but in him, too...
...Squirrels don't know this, but men do...
...I stood there looking at the patches of lichen, like miniature gray and green maps of imaginary places, and I remembered my surprise when I first learned that lichens are dual plants living in symbiosis, a fungus and an alga neither of which could exist in such a place alone...
...They were storing those acorns for the winter, driven by the instinct for survival...
...And at the very crest is a huge table-like rock, weathered and gray and patched with lichen...
...The leaves were drifting down like giant gold and crimson snowflakes and my chemist friend picked up one of them and asked about the process of leaf coloring...
...It is too common a commodity...
...Albert shook his head and said, "Sometimes I wonder what they're writing, up there...
...It's a kind of leftover...
...And I dug down under the crisp leaves to the maturing leaf mold beneath...
...I forget who said that if autumn came only once in ten years we would hold national and international celebrations for the event...
...And there it was...
...There is something of a jumble of rocks up there, and few trees of any consequence...
...The more I considered the idea, the more persuaded I became that people, and especially those who make the big and fatal decisions, have worked themselves into a serious case of cabin fever...
...They can't create a tree...
...Lichen-maps, which are living, growing examples of symbiosis, of two separate elements of life that thrive in mutual give and take...
...Watching the harvest moon, which came early this year, on September 24, I wondered if the plan to rocket a man to the moon will rouse interest in the moon itself or merely.pique morbid curiosity about the fate of the lunarnaut, or whatever the multibillion-dollar sky-rocketeers choose to call him...
...but it is also a time of breadth and depth and distance annually brought back to our attention...
...And Albert drove on...
...but they seemed new this morning because they were newly seen after weeks and months when they were hidden...
...The weather has worn away the marble faster than it has worn the quartzite, but the lichen is slowly eating into the intractable quartzite...
...There is little novelty in moonlight...
...Man-made walls...
...I hope they don't forget to send a woman along, if that is actually the reason...
...How often does the average person, even the nature-sensitive person, go out especially to enjoy the full-moon brilliance of the night...
...While we stood there talking there was a thunderclap in the cloudless sky, and we saw a needle-nosed jet, mosquito-small, racing toward the horizon, a contrail in its wake...
...I saw those vistas opening this morning, there on the ridge, and my eye could see brand new horizons...
...All they can do is cut it down and disintegrate it...
...Men are bright about such things...
...Men are so intelligent that when they grow more wheat or corn than they need they hide it, not where it can grow and feed hungry men tomorrow, but locked away safe from all natural laws except those of rot and mildew...
...I'm just reactionary enough to hope they keep their secret...
...They get so suspicious and so resentful of each other that they often commit mayhem, sometimes murder...
...It might...
...I notice that the trees go right on counting time by years, ring by annual ring, pretty much as the earth tallies time in its sediments...
...The more laconic natives, especially those not in the tourist business, speak of "the color" and let it generate its own superlatives...
...Right now...
...It was a vivid world, and I must say that "the color" is quite inadequate to describe it...
...For the moment, however, I will say only that even a color-blind person must now be glad to be alive and able to get outdoors...
...It is as though they were afraid to face the dimensions of time and distance and must even roof themselves away from the eternities of the sky...
...Distance is the length of a man's stride and the reach of his eye...
...It is almost as though there were a fixed ratio that keeps the days in balance...
...What it means...
...But as I walked the ridge in back of my house and pastures I was thinking not only of the color but of the season itself, which, even in anthropocentric terms, is more than a colored leaf, a ripe acorn, or a migrating goose...
...He studied this for a. moment, then said, "If we could achieve just one chemical cycle that would feed on its own wastes and build something as substantial as a tree...
...I said, "That depends on what you mean by purpose...
...Nature does it so much better, and with so much less obvious effort, that I feel embarrassed...
...I went out for an hour the other morning and came back reluctantly...
...but I am not quite that laconic, being a word-man by trade...
...I said no and thanked him...
...Need anything in the village...
...The color serves no vital purpose, then...
...There is the time of the universe, and the time of the rocks, and the time of man, and about all we have ever done is split time into fragments so that we can count the fleeting bits...
...Perhaps the light and air of autumn would ventilate not only the mind and thinking but the problems themselves which, after all, are man-made problems...
...He had seen the truth in a leaf...
...Today...
...Some of those acorns will remain hidden and will sprout and grow into new oaks and ripen crops of acorns to feed other squirrels twenty and thirty years from now...
...I turned and came down the slope, watching those new horizons through the thinning leaves, admiring the purple tinge of viburnum leaves and the deep crimson of blueberry...
...After a few decades we probably would accept a decennial autumn pretty much as we now do the annual occurrence...
...Men, who now plan to plant a man on the moon for some reason connected with survival of the human race...
...Then a couple of gray squirrels, harvesting acorns in a big white oak, chattered indignantly at my intrusion and brought me back to earth and reality...
...Up to now man seems a bit slow in mastering parthenogenesis, though the aphids in my garden, which probably can't count to two, achieved parthenogenetic birth a long, long time ago...
...Achievement of the microsecond hasn't altered the individual life span one iota...
...It is the height of a mountain and the breadth of a continent or an ocean...
...We discussed chlorophyll, sugar and starch, and such pigments as carotene, anthocyanin, and xanthophyll, and he said, "Waste...
...He was admitting that while the technicians can extract all kinds of things from wood, from turpentine to alcohol, from tar to paper, they have to start with a tree...
...In a sense," I said, "yes...
...I did spend a few subversive moments wondering how many classrooms and hospital wards could be built for the cost of one moon rocket...
...Well, I've got to get along if I'm going to get that corn in the corn house...
...A rock already equipped with maps of a possible tomorrow...
...One autumn afternoon an industrial chemist who didn't know a bluejay from a bluebird walked that ridge with me...
...even the best ordered of human habitations now seems dull and prosaic...
...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshires...
...Not exactly new, of course, since they have been there since this earth assumed its present shape...
...Nobody ever got cabin fever on an open hilltop in October...
...It might work, particularly if the generals and the admirals were left behind, for once, out of earshot...
...A council seated around such a rock, with the glory of autumn all around...
...New vistas open...
...They might not know it, but I, being an intelligent human being, knew it...
...I said, "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin...
...It was a magnificent world, full of gold and scarlet and tan and brown, and every shade of red I ever knew...
...I don't know why, but it is the long-time habit of our leaders to hold their crucial conferences within four walls...
...The color is just a by-product...
...What's that...
...Albert asked...
...They, too, have been there a long time, but I couldn't see them from the dooryard all summer...
...Sheer waste...
...Each does its job and together they persist in this difficult environment where either would perish by itself...
...and I wished they would come and sit down around that old rock and talk...
...If you don't know that term, cabin fever is a state of nerves achieved by men who have been confined too long in a small cabin, usually in the depth of winter...
...The cyclic event loses its distinction and even becomes tiresome with repetition...
...Then, approaching the far side of the pasture, now showing bronze in ripeness, I wondered why there shouldn't be an autumn conference on such a hilltop as mine...
...Moss was growing in some of those patches, grass in others, and I even found a small cedar tree growing in one patch where there was a deeper accumulation of soil than elsewhere...
...But the chemicals in the leaves, even the pigments, reach out into the soil and the tree undoubtedly uses them again...
...With a rock for a conference table...
...The strange thing is that autumn, especially on a wooded ridge, changes the relationship of time and distance...
...The lichen not only persists but even flourishes, slowly wearing away the rock and building little patches of soil...
...And I know that tonight I can look up from my dooryard, through the branches of the big sugar maples, and see the constellations of Pegasus and Andromeda...
...The tree could live and grow without the leaf color, couldn't it...
...I mean the color doesn't contribute anything to the tree...
...That is what I meant when I said earlier that autumn is a corrective...
...But autumn on my ridge is neither the time nor the > place to dwell on such human super-pranks...
...The marble is a form of limestone and somewhat softer...
...There is some truth in that, but not the whole truth...
...The days shorten, and at the same time they increase in height and breadth...
...The rock is mostly quartzite and marble, with some mica schist...
...I came down the hillside, and the farther I came the more I wondered why the leaders who hold this world's critical decisions in their hands don't meet for a conference on such a hillside at this season of the year...
...I turned and looked at the color on the ridge, and at the stark white contrail still there in the cloudless sky...
...The fungus collects moisture and the alga manufactures food...
...It can even be the closeness or the remoteness between two men or two nations and the ideas which dominate their thinking...
...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 "The Enduring Pattern...
...Then I came across the pasture and to the house, and before I came indoors my neighbor on the next farm came past and paused...
...Corn picker broke down," he said, "I've got to get a new part...
...Not much except beauty...
...Just an old saying...
...Autumn is both a corrective and a reminder, and anyone living close to the land or even periodically visiting the country with an open eye and mind must sense this...
...Distance is something else again, whether we measure it in light years or millimeters...
...The leaves begin to fall and the eye begins to reach...
...It is color and ripeness and a season of natural completion...
...The quartzite is a metamorphosed sandstone, in geologists' terms, hard and durable...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
