AUTUMN: A TIME FOR SUMMARY

...Up in the woods, the worms stripped many trees, and short-term prophets said the woods were doomed unless we aerial sprayed...

...In a few more days we shall go to the polls and, with luck, the dust will settle and the uproar die down before the first snow flies...

...Perhaps the summary I have been trying to draw up here has a touch of all these things...

...When I write about trees and birds and the view from a hillside, I wonder if they are important in the face of the elections, and foreign aid, and the Cuba situation...

...It was what we call "a bug year," insect pests in the garden and voracious inchworms in the woods...

...We had depended on that storm to come and renew the wells and springs, and when it came we said again that things even out, weather included...

...Then I felt the sun on my back and smelled the day and let my senses and sensibility tell me that this was good, this was satisfying and reassuring, just to be here on the mountainside in the autumn afternoon...

...Autumn: A Time for Summary by Hal Borland The katydids have rasped their last calls of the season, the frogs have hibernated in the mud, the whippoor-wills have gone south, and if man would only abide by the season we could settle down to a few weeks of peace and quiet...

...To be even approximately complete it should include scarlet leaves and ripened nuts and barking foxes...

...When I had satisfied myself about the birds, I sat down on a rock where I could look through an opening among the trees and see the distant hills and the clean horizon...

...As a countryman, I saw the signs weeks ago...

...Somewhere in it should be the glint of frost at dawn and the gleam of starlight on a moonless night...

...The plant summarizes growth in a seed that is pregnant with tomorrow...

...It was obviously based on statistics and, like all statistical thinking, it ignored many factors that invariably slip through the statistical net, particularly where people are involved...

...Hay was short but haying weather was ideal...

...All of them are implicit with a future, a tomorrow...

...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berk-shires...

...Autumn came well before the equinox, and a few days after the equinox the drouth was broken by a long, slow rain that, despite the objection of the meteorologists, we always call the equinoctial storm...

...And that/ inevitably tempers the arrogance that has led the human race into so many disasters...

...Things balanced out, as they usually do if you give them time...

...I had never used a flail, nor had the neighbor helping me, who has been a farmer all his life...

...But you know that there are bad years as well as good ones, just as there are bad days...

...to reach and his understanding to expand...

...A bird can either scare the wits out of you or be as quiet as a shadow...

...The year was in order, the rhythms of time and growth and change just as they had been for eons, and I was there to see and know and participate as far as man can ever really participate in such matters...

...Hating all poisons, we put our faith in time and natural controls, remembering similar devastations that failed to kill the trees in ten-year cycles in the past...

...By August the woods were green again with a second leafing and I doubt that I lost half a dozen trees, all told, on the whole mountainside...

...Both those notions were conceits and no doubt superficial, apt as they seemed for a moment...

...Try as he may, he cannot much alter the seasons or change the sequence of natural purposes...

...It should have the color of moon-size pumpkins and ripe apples and bittersweet berries...

...Having learned, they survive...

...I dismissed them and came back to the trees, the far hills, and the scattering of small farms I could identify from where I sat...

...The insect totals its brief individual life in a cluster of dormant eggs or a cocoon or a hibernating pregnant queen...

...The county fair is over...

...There was a time, long ago, when they were so tame you could knock one over with a short stick...

...Perhaps a few years hence, only a few years the way time now races, someone will find these words in a rubbish heap and wonder at them and what they stand for...

...Gardens weren't up to par, but the insects ate as many weeds as vegetables...

...I feel somewhat as I felt the other day when we were making repairs to my old barn and I found a strange implement in a pile of rubbish in a far corner of the loft...

...And there must be a quiet voice in it somewhere saying, "Man and boy, I've lived on this land seventy years, and my father and my grandfather lived here before me...

...It was the handle of a flail, and it must have been left there long before I came here...

...That thought invited parallels, including the notion that a man on his way to the polls in early November could, if he would, look around and see the world in its basic contours, and the notion that neither men nor issues can hide in the leafless woods...

...Some rocketed from the brush almost at my feet with a startling roar, and some winged away in swift silence...

...But on the land you learn to think in longer terms than one season or one year...

...And every fall I know that it's been a good life...

...We had time to pick wild grapes and make jelly from them, and to see the milkweed pods begin to burst and glisten the wind with silk, and to marvel at the harvest moon...

...I knew the birds had a good season, a big hatch, and a profitable summer...

...The tree summarizes another circuit of the sun in a closed circle of fiber that adds to the strength with which it will face the winter's storms...

...Now they are wary...

...I was up on the mountainside the other afternoon taking an informal census of the partridges which, in the terse local way, we simply call "birds...

...They represented something vital, something about mankind and man's tenure on the earth...

...You learn that nobody, not even the Supreme Court by unanimous vote, can forbid a woodchuck to raid a garden...

...Up here in the hill country, this area of small but venerable farms, we are catching our breath after tending to such fundamental matters as getting the hay into the mow, filling the silos, and stowing the garden's yield in the freezer and the root cellar...

...Even in a hurrying, impatient world that yearns for quick, easy solutions, the man on the land has patience driven into him by the trees and the grass and every growing thing around him...

...Then I. came back to the house to do the evening chores and close out another day in my small segment of time, my own life...

...So when I examine the simplicities of this present autumn, here close to the land, I wonder if I, too, am shaping a flail handle...

...But somehow, just holding that flail handle and examining its workmanship, both of us participated in the past, in the long tradition of life on the land...

...What more can a man ask...

...You need a shotgun and sharp reflexes to get a bag of birds...

...And, unless we are all incredibly stupid and wickedly reckless, there will be men here to see these things in autumn and to feel, if never wholly to understand, what they signify...

...All he can do is attempt to understand these things and work with them...

...Now, indoors at my desk a few days later, I have the uneasy feeling that I am writing a kind of memoir although I am chronicling events of this moment, this autumn of the year 1962 A.D...

...Sitting there in the sunlight and the silence, I thought how the world reveals itself in its true dimensions in the 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," "The Enduring Pattern," and, just published, "Beyond Your Doorstep...

...But we expected it and brought in the garden harvest...

...Ahy autumn is the sum of its preceding Spring and Summer...

...It should be savored with the scent of woodsmoke from an open fire and the tang of the pickling kettle in a farm kitchen...

...I've sweated and I've froze, I've feasted and I've gone hungry a time or two, I've worked and I've rested...

...Not even the rocks or the mountains endure forever...

...The hickory haft was fitted with a maple swivel, whittled and steamed to shape long ago...

...So if this should be another flail handle, let it be straight and true to the best of my ability...

...Let it represent the now and here that I know...

...This is that pause between summer and winter when a man should be able to listen to his own thoughts and call a truce in the noisy war with his environment...

...The off-year political campaign has almost run its course...

...September brought an early frost...

...Partridges learned about man quite a few generations back...

...We were, however tenuously, a part of human history...

...I had to draw that reservation, that "up till now," because back in my mind was the report, made only recently, of the Committee for Economic Development...

...But I was surprised at the number of birds I flushed from the briar patches and the clumps of wild barberry, where they were feeding...

...They embodied traditions and a way of life that, up till now, have been basic to the American pattern...

...To live with the land is to know, beyond doubt or argument, that change is inevitable...

...We had a late Spring, but a moist one, followed by a dry, cool Summer...

...That report surveyed the whole infinitely complex farm problem and recommended that the government solve it by wiping out more than two and a half million small farms and moving a whole generation of farm boys off the land and into industry...

...I doubt it, but if they are, let this be a footnote to their cold, impersonal columns of statistics, this report from a rural valley that now welcomes another November...

...We cleaned up the garden and called it another job done, another Summer completed, and we had time to watch the color come, first to the woodbine and the Kimac, then to the birches and the ash trees, finally to the maples and oaks...

...There will even, I am sure, be some men living on the land, planting and reaping and abiding by the land's own ordinances...

...Corn was slow but persistent and made a good ensilage yield...

...Then I know that arguments end, men die, and nations rise and fall, but that so long as there is an earth and a procession of the seasons there will be trees and birds and vistas from hilltops...

...Long ago it was said, "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven...

...It was a reminder of a time when the farmer who lived here made at least some of his own tools by hand...

...Perhaps the statistical thinkers are right...

...One more item...

...Autumn is a time for summaries, even more so than the end of the calendar year for those who live where the natural world sums up its seasons soon after leaf-fall...

...But since we are more and more at the mercy of the statistical thinkers and their machines, that report was like an icy wind blowing out of a dismally regimented tomorrow...

...Next year probably will be better...

...It wasn't a good year, statistically...

...Every day of his life the countryman has that truth impressed upon him...

...You know that even good years don't come for free, and that in any year you will pay for the long, hot summer days in the currency of January's short, cold days and February's miserable ones...

...You know, too, that nobody, not even the United States Senate when it can muster a quorum, can legislate a rain when the corn crop needs it...

...For a few moments, there on the mountainside, my thoughts leaped from human wisdom to human folly, from dreams to failures, from hopes to despairs...

...When it came we were grateful, since no man should be slave to a garden after ripe tomatoes begin to pall on him...

...As though to demonstrate this, after that storm we had a spell of Indian Summer, a series of days when it was good just to be alive...

...autumn, how a man's vision is invitee...