JULY: THE GREEN ACHIEVEMENT
Borland, Hal
JULY the green achievement by HAL BORLAND By July it is so summery that it is easy to forget spring. We are surrounded by so much evidence of achievement that what went into it, like the details...
...But that's something to ponder in October, not just now...
...They called to their fledglings with more than the usual apprehension...
...So we cut grass and chop brush and repair the fences and try to keep erosion from gullying the pastures, work that doesn't show, except in its neat results, in July...
...As I said earlier, we plowed and re-seeded the home pasture last spring, not because there wasn't grass in it but because the grass had thinned out and weeds were taking over...
...A gust of wind swept down the river and the dancing water was like a hurrying wave...
...Now we live in the midst of green achievement, April brought to July's fulfillment...
...The darkness on the woods far up the mountain turned to gray, and the gray marched down the slopes...
...He knew that a compromise was, at the root, a mutual promise— nature would do her part and, if he would survive and prosper, he must do his...
...Maybe it is Eden, after all...
...Their leaves rustled and pattered...
...Nature tolerates him, I suppose one could say, simply because he invented the axe and the plow...
...But the land doesn't "just run itself...
...The trees shook...
...You go out in the morning to tend your crops, and you feel like the master of the land, if not of all creation...
...Of all the seasons, summer probably is the least demanding...
...We happen to prefer a pasture, with Albert's cows, which actually isn't half as much work to maintain...
...You remember that summer is a consequence of spring, not a season remote in time, here forever...
...You admire the sweet corn, silked out and already fattening ears...
...Maybe we need a late, cold spring now and then to keep our perspective healthy...
...It could be that the very name of fall has a dual meaning...
...It makes you think of Eden and forget what happened after Adam ate the fruit...
...you remember May, and the incredible green explosion...
...Summer is deceptive that way...
...that was all there was to it...
...You have to make obeisance to the soil with which you made that compact...
...This was the year to plow and re-seed the home pasture, and Albert was frosted out twice before he got the old sod turned and harrowed to his liking...
...The maples swished and roared and their gray trunks turned black as the rain streamed down them...
...But life isn't that simple, as we are reminded year after year...
...So he plowed and harrowed and seeded, and now the new grass is almost knee-high...
...Spring seldom begins on the vernal equinox, and I have yet to see a summer that waited for the solstice...
...The sky seemed to darken, though the sun still shone clear and brassy...
...and maybe we, too, lose our summer-Eden only when we eat the ripened fruit of September...
...The almanac, though mathematically accurate right down to the second, is only approximate in the practical terms of the earth itself...
...Maybe it would, if one wanted a nine-hole golf course...
...It became a darkening bank that covered half the sky...
...I weeded, and sweated, and stopped from time to time to admire the sweet corn, tall and green and sturdy...
...The cloud rose swiftly...
...It was a silvery world, the air laced with silvery threads, almost glowing as the rain sheeted down...
...By now we are almost as sated as the noontime bumblebee, accepting this green world as the norm, forgetting April...
...A summer vacationer stopped past the other day and said, "If I could find a farm like this, which just runs itself, I'd be tempted to buy...
...Then a thunderstorm comes, clapping your ears with thunder, soaking you to the skin, and flattening your carefully tended corn...
...On the mountainside we could see the trees swaying and we could hear the rush of wind coming...
...Happily for those who would starve without his crops, he knows even in July that though the living is easy now he will go hungry next winter if he plays proverbial grasshopper instead of emulating the ant and the bee...
...It was one of those hot, still days when even such a minor chore as hand-weeding the lima beans brings out the sweat...
...But still there was not a breath of wind down here, the air tautly calm after that one breathy gust down the river...
...There wasn't a cloud in sight all morning, but the sky was that steely blue that seems to intensify the sun...
...Summer provides its own correctives...
...When it was all over, the sun shining in a clean, clear sky and the air cool and refreshing, the trees still dripping and the roadsides like young brooks, I put on my mud-boots and went out to straighten up the sweet corn in the garden...
...A pause, another flash, closer, and the thunder bounded from hill to hill, echoing, seeming to shake Tom's Mountain...
...Lightning flashed across the cloud bank, turning it black and ominous for a quick instant...
...Among his other books are "High, Wide and Lonesome," "When the Legends Die," and "This Hill, This Valley...
...There is the foreverness, this almost droning completion...
...Summer brings this dual sense of time, particularly in the country...
...There was work to be done before May and June...
...Half a minute later the thunder rolled down the valley...
...The trees trembled...
...The earth prepares its own bounty...
...That's the way it is in July...
...We are surrounded by so much evidence of achievement that what went into it, like the details of so many beginnings, is a part of some dim yesterday...
...He was aware of the stars and their moving patterns, but his feet were on the ground...
...He can lie in the shade or go fishing or do the work that should be done...
...Still another flash, and a crashing roar of thunder shook the house and made us wince...
...He felt the pressures, even as the trees and the grass...
...We take care of the dooryard, tend a big vegetable garden, encourage quite a lot of flowers, and do our best to keep the brush and weeds at bay...
...But if I had said that to Albert last April, when he was plowing the frosty soil to keep ahead of May, he would have thought I was out of my mind...
...The urgencies carry over into June before they begin to ease toward the fulfillment of July...
...You have to admit that you are only a man, after all, not a god...
...He has the choice, so he works, takes care of his crop, insures its yield...
...Now it is a beautiful green pasture, and my vacationing visitor thought it would be an ideal place to lay out a nine-hole golf course...
...To the countryman they are a kind of delayed payment for the short days of abbreviated demand that were his in January...
...The best we can do is split the year into quarters and make our compromises with the seasons as they come...
...look in the almanac instead of watching the ground underfoot, to turn to statistics instead of seeing the obvious facts...
...and there is the day to day urgency and the sense of time passing swiftly...
...You know you made your deal, your compromise, promising to give it your sweat in return for the soil's fertility...
...Even a July thunderstorm has a majesty quite unlike the warm, all-day rains of spring, a special atmospheric achievement...
...The apple trees shook and spattered small green apples on the grass, wet and shiny...
...I had to tell him to resist the temptation if that was the way he felt...
...Nature's function is growth and proliferation, and unless a man is ready to maintain his foothold he will lose his acres...
...The fertile blossoms drop their petals and fatten the seeds in their ovules...
...If so, it is a good arrangement, having our Eden every year, forfeiting it, then working our way back into grace through winter and spring...
...We could hear the rush of rain, the pelt and swish and muted roar...
...The whole valley seemed to shiver...
...You remember that only a few weeks ago there was frost in that soil, that you had to stir it and plant it...
...The major work of the year, the sprouting and the leafing, is done...
...There was so much frost in the ground the third week in April that it was like plowing shale, and Albert, bundled in winter clothing when he should have been in his shirt sleeves, said, "It's ridiculous, plowing in weather like this...
...There was a swish, far off, as of sudden wind in the trees on a far hill...
...If we left it to itself, the pastures would be overrun by birch and sumac, the fences would rot and rust, and we would soon be living in a tumble-down house crowded by a thicket...
...Not a bird made a sound...
...The vast canopy of chlorophyll is spread and transforming sunlight and air into basic foodstuffs without a murmur...
...A few more flashes of lightning, a few more thumping, echoing peals of thunder that rattled the windows, and the violence of the storm had passed...
...Summer on the land is spring completed and fall in the making, time in both its strange dimensions...
...Yet he lives in the midst of a world that has done its hurrying, passed its springtime urgency, a world where grass grows silently, and high cumulus clouds drift lazily across the sky...
...Then the rain came down the river, a gray, steely curtain...
...But we can't wait any longer...
...Man is essentially a transient tenant on the land...
...But the rain continued another twenty minutes, such a downpour as we get only in one of July's more spectacular thunderstorms...
...If it were all bee-drone and clover-sweetness we might forget that there is a wholeness to the year, every year...
...The air was breathless, leaves hanging listless on the trees...
...We might forget that honey is concentrated labor as well as pollen and nectar free for the bees' taking...
...It is an achievement, something you, like April, gave jts start and now see coming to July's fulfillment...
...where fireflies sparkle the night, luna moths fray their fragile wings at screened windows, and whippoorwills call monotonously...
...Looking at it the other day, Albert said, "You kind of forget, in March and April, how the season always evens out...
...Then you remember spring, and beginnings...
...He can tend his fields or let the weeds take over...
...His new book, "Countryman," is a summary of his philosophy of life and includes some of his previous articles in The Progressive...
...We had such a storm only a few days ago, and I am sure we shall have others before the month is out...
...So now you have to get down on your knees in the mud, straighten it up, give its roots new and firmer footing...
...We had a late, cold spring up here in the hills...
...Even the farmer has his options now, though his choices are dictated by his own needs and ambitions...
...You can almost taste its sweetness...
...Days are long and full...
...It seems impossible that today's bee hum and insect buzz, reaching corn, ripening oats, and new hay in the barn were egg and seed and wakening root only a few weeks ago...
...When man lived close to the land he knew, every day of his life, that you have to lean with the wind and dress for the weather...
...Then deep, tense silence again, until another flash was followed in no time at all by the crash of thunder, a strike too close for comfort...
...There is the temptation to HAL BORLAND, the distinguished nature writer, writes the editorials on nature for The New York Times...
...The grass grows in every pasture and hayfield, even at the roadsides, fundamental nourishment for all red-blooded life, and no one is compelled to acknowledge the intricate food-chain that leads from a grass root to his own sentient flesh...
...He can make hay or let the grass go to seed...
...Then the rain struck the house, in a rush, and the whole river was leaping in little spurts to meet the rain...
...It might be simpler if you could say with certainty that the equinox would mark the absolute end of freezing weather...
...About one o'clock a low thundercloud appeared in the northeast...
...And as swiftly as the rain came, the darkness passed...
...We have reduced the running to what is, probably a minimum, by leasing the pastureland to the dairyman just down the road and letting the woods grow pretty much as they would if we weren't here...
...you remember how those seeds sprouted and grew...
...Berries ripen, pods mature, roots and tubers and bulbs stow their stores of nourishment...
...No farm runs itself, even though it may seem to in midsummer...
...July seems so complete that it might have been here for years and so enduring that it could continue for another decade...
...You are aware of time's other dimension...
...Spring is pressure building up to the green explosion of May, and May itself is such energetic haste that it seems impossible that its major sounds (Copyright © 1965 by Hal Borland) are birdsongs...
...When a crow cawed the sound echoed as in a vast, closed room...
...But by noon there was a vague tension in the air that made the birds restless...
...Now he buys his winter leisure...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
