SPRING, AND THE HILLS STILL STAND

...We will wait and plant the peas April 15...

...On the way back from the bog we took the short cut through the woods and over the hill...

...For a few minutes I had the uneasy feeling that I was witness to a preview of a drama based on the forecasts drawn up by seers who foretell the future by examining the entrails of the atom...

...The force that makes seeds sprout and buds open and flowers bloom and eggs hatch...

...On the way back to the house I found the first violet, and I picked it to give to my wife, who is sentimental about such things...

...The other evening I heard the first peepers...

...I decided that if the weather holds we should be able to get the first peas planted next week...

...Maybe that explains why there is an insistent human urge to get out and see a tree, a brook, a meadow, to look and listen, and let the land heal the hurts and bruises of civilization...

...But if everybody goes, then it is up to the insects, or the salamanders, maybe, or some other form of slowly evolving life...

...Out in the back pasture the other morning I watched a woodchuck that had just emerged from his long winter's nap...

...I am speaking, of course, for a diminishing minority...

...Aside from all the economic reasons for not draining them, which are too many to discuss here, we need the bogs and swamps to remind us of beginnings...

...I stood there watching that woodchuck, and I heard the red-wing blackbirds ka-reeing in the trees down along the river, and I saw robins and meadow larks competing for the first new worms and insects in the grass that is already sending up new green shoots...

...Meanwhile, the red-wing blackbirds came drifting back, as they always do and are now chattering happily in the catkined willows at the edge of the bog down the road...

...Oats have to be planted by the end of April and corn should be in the ground by the middle of May...

...They seldom even called it civilization...

...And I thought maybe that was one reason the hills still stand, despite the convergence of the planets and all the .other direful things...

...The first flower is an event, whether you buy it at a florist shop, grow it in a hothouse, or find it blooming in the back pasture on a sunny morning early, early in the spring...

...It was the statement by certain men of science who believe that human beings have a kind of built-in compulsion toward race suicide...

...I have not heard a by-heck joke on television in quite a while...

...Maybe he used the wrong key to break the code...

...He emerged from his fallout shelter interested in only two things—a mate and something to eat...

...We never have planted by the moon...

...Now you're it...

...But we aren't that civilized...

...Life began in the swamps, and dad is where the first little ratlike mammals took up the challenge and be- gan the long climb toward supremacy over the giant lizards...

...Two farmers were out with tractors, plowing old fields that will soon be planted to oats and corn...

...Some men give their women diamonds and mink stoles, and down in Texas they give them monogrammed airplanes...

...They called it a way of life and hoped for a better tomorrow...

...Woodchucks know how to manage underground, but porpoises, I understand, have a sense of humor...

...Up to now, at least, the human predicament has not been solved in one quick flash from outer space or anywhere else...

...As I read their words and interpreted them, man works his way slowly up from cave culture toward civilization just so he can eventually kick the props out from under the whole thing...

...But radishes, beets, carrots, potatoes, all underground crops, had to be planted when the moon was "in the decline," between the full moon and the last quarter...

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

...I decided we had better hold off on the peas, since the moon is not in its first quarter until April 11, and doesn't reach the full until the nineteenth...

...Somebody had been testing porpoises, had found them to be intelligent, and had even worked out a phonetic alphabet for the porpoise language...

...The planets converged, but the hills still stand...

...With that much of an investment in the moon, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to have the Peace Corps, or somebody, pass the word around in the Congo and Vietnam and other hungry places that peas should be planted in a waxing moon...

...I wondered if this statistical drift away from the land, from the weather and the seasons and all their inescapable evidence, might be in some measure responsible for such reports as the one I puzzled over for several snowbound days a few weeks back...

...I asked what was It, and he exulted, "The Big Bonfire...

...Then I noted that this woodchuck did not have anything that looked like a Geiger counter...

...According to census figures, only about thirty pep cent of this country's population is now rural...

...At that stage they are delicious spring greens, the first we have...

...And it now looks as though the subsidized wheat farmers and dairymen are almost as equal as the aluminum makers who have an "in" with the stockpilers...

...Rice too, I should think, since it grows above the ground...

...I would not say I am superstitious...

...Somehow, out their in the back pasture with spring all around me, I couldn't believe a word of it...

...Since these are old hills, long settled, those fields once knew the slow plod of oxen and the sweat of simple, purposeful men—men too busy making a living to wonder or worry long about the fate of the civilization they were building...

...My grandfather used to say," he told me, "that the land won't ever love you, but it won't hate you, either...

...Now spring is really in business again, and back here in the hills we will soon be planting peas and mending fence and plowing the lower forty...

...Times change...

...but we cherish the rare and take the abundant for granted...

...Then I remembered my grandmother and her kitchen garden...

...In another month there will be violets by the thousand, all of them bigger and brighter than this one...

...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...

...Apparently it was banished along with the Negro, Irish, and Jewish jokes and dialect stories...

...With that phonetic alphabet, we could hail an old bull porpoise, when the time comes, and say, "So long, Buster...

...Here goes nothing...

...Peas, she always said, should be planted in a growing moon, between the first quarter and the full...

...Those that I can see from here, anyway...

...But unless I gauge the trend all wrong, minorities are no longer a laughing matter...

...We went to the bog, and as we picked the marigold tips I wondered why our reclam-ationists persist in draining the wetlands...

...Especially now, when we are so obsessed with endings...

...This is it...

...The trees are not yet in leaf and we could look out across the valley and see half a dozen small farms with their pasturelands freshly green with spring...

...That afternoon we went down to the bog to get a mess of marsh marigolds before they come to bloom...

...From time to time some naturalist makes a report, but it seldom gets much circulation beyond the circle of other naturalists...

...What I have in mind would have fewer scientific names and more of a sense of destiny...

...A few days after I wrestled with that report, I found another one that seemed to tie in...

...Maybe the season was at work in my bloodstream and my glands, but it seemed to me that if we are ingenious enough to learn to talk to a porpoise, surely we can find ways to make ourselves understood to each other, no matter whether the language is English, Russian, Chinese, or Bantu...

...He was just a doubly hungry woodchuck, willing to fight for what he wanted but with no notion of exterminating his whole race...

...It looks as though spring is safe for another year, whatever happens to man...

...Looking across the valley at this land alive with spring, I wondered what sustained those men and women, what harvest they achieved beyond their daily bread...

...The compulsion of spring was working away, down there at the root of things, one of the oldest and most insistent of forces that I know...

...But when the Administration in Washington decides the moon is so important we should spend I don't remember how many billion dollars to send a man there and stake out a claim, who am I to laugh it off...

...Some of the daily crises will just have to wait or take care of themselves until we get the spring chores done...

...I won't attempt such a report, but if I should I might start by naming one of those little mammals George and calling the top-dog dinosaur a dragon...

...Nature, he always said, is too busy with creation to have time for hate...

...I came in and gave the violet to my wife, and she put it in a tiny vase and set it on the kitchen window sill, one small blossom that held the whole sweet promise of spring...

...We did have an unseasonable hot spell during the crucial few days, and a man who says he is privy to important matters phoned me and said, "Feel that heat...

...Then I remembered the day-end thoughts they set down in letters and diaries, old-fashioned notions about the virtue of work, and the satisfaction of accomplishment, and everything, including leisure and peace and freedom, having its price...

...If by some chance one man and one woman are left after the roof falls in, it is up to them to start the long climb toward disaster again...

...We won't be much help until that brief pause between corn planting and haying, which starts in June...

...He slept through five months of assorted dangers, including the cold, white fallout that I call snow...

...I picked the first violet, and on the way back to the house I passed the garden patch, still muddy with the departing frost...

...And the thought occurred that somebody had picked the porpoises to inherit the deadly mantle of civilization...

...As nearly as I could make out, somebody, or some thing, on Mars or perhaps Saturn or Jupiter, had pressed The Button...

...I could almost smell the fresh-turned soil, sweeter than the swamp muck by far but rich with the odors of fertility and potent beginnings...

...But it chilled off again, the river froze over and we got more snow, and I have not heard from my omniscient friend since...

...And if civilization inevitably leads to a suicidal imperative, then we should be able to find some means of not being so damned civilized...

...Then somebody, or something, has to start all over again...

...All crops that grow above the ground, she insisted, do best under a growing moon...

...Grandma was not much of a scientist, but she must have been on the right track...

...The story from there on is quite exciting, if one doesn't get involved in suicidal imperatives...

...If we had a lick of sense we would send a delegation of thoughtful observers to the swamps, just to look and listen and smell and think, and then come back and tell us what they learned...

...Maybe porpoises would be a better bet than wood-chucks, at that...

...and the disaster-hunters have not yet sent back any travelogues of the Himalayas tottering...

...And the offhand words of one old man came back to me...