OCTOBER-AND ANSWERS
Borland, Hal
October—and Answers by HAL BORLAND FIRST FROST came on one of those still, star-shot nights of late September, and I wakened at three o'clock in the morning, lay listening and wondered what...
...Whose immortality...
...If our human lives were shortened to one summer in the sun we too, no doubt, would make much of senile complaints in our autumn...
...And first frost is one of the necessary markers...
...But there are various rules, and we, knowing many summers, abide by a different one—we harvest and hoard, cherish individual life and provide as best we can for its full span...
...To the technician, techniques are the sum, the substance, and answers consist of data, But I wondered, the other day, if my technical friend wakened in the night, as I did, and heard the quiet and wondered about The Silence...
...Barbara looked out the kitchen window and said, "Now the final hoarding...
...I, like any countryman, hoard the substance and sustenance of life, knowing that my harvest is a way of living...
...And I asked, "Can your techniques create an ant...
...The last few seeds drifted away at the touch of a finger, and the empty pod was a silent memory of summer-blossom, fragrance, bee-hum, dew, rain, sunlight, and the potency of pollen, the readiness of the egg, their fertile union...
...The maples hoard their sap, shed their leaves and prepare for winter, rest, and, in a sense, consolidation...
...With every breath, I partake of it...
...If so, whose dream...
...We went out to complete the harvest...
...You are here, sentient, listening, waiting...
...I sometimes think that autumn is the best time of all to look for meanings...
...One way and another, they hoard and protect life that it may continue, in the seed, in the egg, in the individual...
...You have seen the change coming, the subtle shift of noonday shadows, the weary look of the leaves in the elms, the first drift of milkweed floss, and you have felt the change in the look and feel of the air itself...
...changed from soft grub to encapsulated pupa...
...It looked complex as some miniature machine, with stiff legs, intricate claws, vacant eyes, open mandibles...
...I let out my held breath and heard the faint echo of a barred owl hooting from across the valley...
...Spring is sprouting, summer is growth, and autumn is ripeness and completion...
...What further answer do we need...
...We all proclaim the same thing, one way or another...
...Then I went back to sleep reassured...
...We gathered and stowed, and by noon I heard a cricket chirping in the compost heap...
...And he talked of genes, nucleic acid, heredity, and ways to manage and control...
...Then comes the relief of hearing a rustled leaf, a fox, an owl—of knowing that it is the first, frosty quiet of autumn, nothing more...
...He accepted, that is, until I pointed out that ants, with only a slight trace of what we know as intelligence, learned to manage and control long before man evolved and still, eons later, are ants...
...To what purpose...
...Right now, hearing a cricket chirp, hearing a crow caw, seeing a flurry of leaves from the big elm across the lawn, I know that management and control are not the answer...
...Flicker and thrasher and robin fly south, but jays hoard acorns, grouse fatten and feather their legs and feet, chickadees choose evergreen shelter, sparrows claim weed patches that will not be drifted over completely...
...One way...
...Or endow them with intelligence...
...And by evening a few katydids were stridulating, slowly and with a tired rasp but alive and making noise...
...Or an aphid...
...But I had lain and listened to the quiet, the night before, and I had my reassurance...
...Big as my finger-end, it weighed only a small fraction of an ounce...
...Are you alone...
...Or round because of all shapes the sphere and ovoid have the greatest possible capacity...
...On the stepping stone at the woodshed door a woolly bear caterpillar slowly uncurled and tried to reach the crack beneath the door, looking for a place to hibernate...
...A leaf that breathed, knew a pulse of sap in its veins, transmuted sun and moisture into starch that fed the parent tree...
...And I partake...
...I tried to explain about aphids and parthenogenesis, which he vaguely understood...
...When I lay listening, and knew that I was not alone...
...he asked...
...life entrusted to the fluff-borne seeds to go elsewhere and sprout and rise again from root to pod, over and over and over again...
...achieved inadequate wings, complex legs, fierce mandibles...
...In it was life, the very shape of a leaf, a tree, perhaps the dream of tomorrow's oak...
...A dead leaf, discarded by the tree, a sheet of cellulose now bright with carotene where mysterious green chlorophyll was at work a month ago...
...Or if he did, he thought of the quiet in terms of decibels, not of life...
...To waken in the night and hear the quiet of autumn for the first time can be a startling experience...
...And I took him to the garden and showed him a cabbage plant infested with aphids among which a dozen ants were making their rounds...
...A life shape, now lifeless, A squirrel was busy in the nearby oak, and its scurry shook an acorn from its cup...
...Was it round to help it roll beyond the old oak's shade and to a better seedbed...
...The cold front had passed through, but its mark was indelible...
...mated, laid eggs, died—all while I was noting time only from one equinox to another...
...Its kind were here long before my kind, and to the old Egyptians it was a symbol of resurrection and immortality...
...The feather was recently shed, perhaps moulted and already replaced but still bright with color...
...But not until you lie in the darkness and hear no cricket, no katydid, not one of the little sounds that are the proclamation of teeming, transient life, are you aware of the possibility of silence...
...The loud ones as well as the silent ones, the scratchers and stridulators as well as the quiet creepers and crawlers, hoard life...
...Autumn had come, and the quiet, but not The Silence...
...Perhaps in a remote yesterday it was a reptile scale that became a feather to launch a changing life form into the freedom of the air...
...Life, space, the universe...
...The chipmunks line their tunnel-nests with grass and down, pack their granaries with small nuts and seeds, and settle down to outlast the ice and darkness...
...Life, which creates the leaf for its own purpose, and the nut, the flossblown seed, the ephemeral beetle...
...On the land you live by the seasons and it is good to have them clearly defined, not by the calendar but by the weather...
...Now we'll have a spell of fair weather...
...He would have gone on about rockets and interplanetary messengers, but I said, "Management and control are not answers—they are techniques...
...Once life is so committed, hoarded in the egg, the insect's individual span nears its end and the fiddling and the scratching are little more than the instinctive proclamation that even ebbing individual life persists...
...With every throb of my pulse...
...he asked...
...Down to twenty-five at my house this morning...
...Probably not...
...If I am wise, I watch the trees, the birds, the animals and the insects and somewhat learn from them, for they are all a part of the same vast reservoir of life in which I participate...
...Summer's tag-ends remained, though the hoarding was under way all around us...
...And that evening, as I have said, I heard the tired rasping of a few katydids like dying echoes of late August...
...But even those we think of as improvident also hoard...
...I plucked the empty pod and carried it home, an autumn insigne...
...Can an aphid, or even an ant, orbit a rocket...
...Everywhere I turn are the insignia, complex and various beyond comprehension, of the shape life takes...
...Not much, for we had made the major harvest several days before, but there were a few winter squashes now revealed among the wilted vines, a peck or so of late limas on the blackened stems, one last picking from the late planting of sweet corn...
...The woodchucks in my back pasture hoard fat beneath their tawny pelts, clean out their dens, and prepare to hoard their spark of life through a long sleep that verges on death...
...The beetle I found was of the scarab family, kin of ancient Egypt's sacred scarabs, but when I found it, it was an empty chitin carapace from which the bronze tones of life had faded, leaving only a dull black husk...
...Last summer a man whose technical knowledge I respect said to me, "We are not far from the big breakthrough...
...Then I heard the rustle of the leaves in the big apple tree, and a moment later a red fox barked on the hillside...
...My fingers had to touch its lining, feel the texture, smooth as the flosstufts that bore the ripe seeds down the wind in a shimmering mist...
...And I said, "There they are, all three of them...
...How can you give me the answers to life without giving me the answer to an aphid...
...It rolled down the slope to where I stood and I held it in my hand, round, smooth, packed, a life germ and the food to nourish its sprouting...
...Now there was nothing but this thin, horny shell, a life-shape from which life had seeped away like water from a leaky pail...
...Autumn was here, October at hand...
...That ended our conversation...
...Intricate beyond duplication except by the bird itself, it was almost weightless...
...Everywhere I turned that day I found the substance of the meaning, which is change and flow...
...A maple leaf, shaped to its kind and yet not precisely the same as any other leaf that ever grew...
...yet it was only an empty box with strange appendages...
...It once was something that hatched, fed, crawled...
...I held my breath, listening for the insect chorus that had been a part of the night since May, and there wasn't even a scratch against the darkness...
...I asked, "Breakthrough into what...
...In the garden path half a dozen big black ants crept about like rheumatic old men, seeking sun-warmed spots to rest and ease their joints...
...The milkweed pod was shaped like cupped hands now open, a silk-lined womb where life had matured its seeds...
...The quiet was so deep that the only sound I heard was the throb of my own pulse against the pillow...
...But no cycle ends abruptly or completely...
...By midafternoon two Monarch butterflies were playing tag in the dooryard...
...October—and Answers by HAL BORLAND FIRST FROST came on one of those still, star-shot nights of late September, and I wakened at three o'clock in the morning, lay listening and wondered what had happened...
...This shell I held in my hand was the shape of life but no longer live, the miracle of life once lived and now gone elsewhere, committed to the hidden egg...
...And he said, "The big answers...
...The inner tissues and the juice of life were gone...
...They commit life to the egg, where it will outlast the long, cold, hungry days and renew itself next summer and all the summers to come...
...and like the leaf a life-shape now lifeless...
...The oaks ripen acorns and the wild grape ripens seeds within the purple fruit, hostages to their species-future, then trust them to bird and beast to plant at random in the unknowing certainty that acorns and grape seeds will sprout, in due season, and perpetuate their kind...
...By then it was mid-morning, and I found a fat bumblebee sunning itself on a shaggy orange zinnia in which it had sheltered for the night, still so arthritic it had to soak up sunlight half an hour before it could fly...
...Then I explained how ants manage and control aphids, milking them for a sweet food they make and exude...
...But now, with the glory of the woodlands spreading over the hills and with ripeness and achievement all around us, life is more insistent than data...
...Albert, our dairy-farmer neighbor, stopped on his way up the road and said, "A good frost clears the air...
...It was summer matured into autumn, life risen from root to leaf to bud, to blossom, to swelling pod...
...And we bade farewell to the tomatoes...
...The sun climbed, warmed the air, and all the vines and tender plants in the garden sagged and blackened...
...Now waste, discard, the substance of leaf mold to feed future root and stem and leaf...
...The ant and the honeybee, as everybody knows, are provident even in human terms—they gather and stow food for the winter...
...I went out the other afternoon and looked at a leaf, an acorn, a blue jay's feather, a dead beetle, an opening milkweed pod...
...Not for reasons, which probably will remain mysteries as long as man is here to wonder, but for the shape of life and possibly its purpose, just possibly...
...of the vast stream of life that flooded the earth all summer, green with chlorophyll, red with hemoglobin, throbbing, breathing, growing, and now is hoarded in a thousand different ways...
...Ducks find inlets that will be ice-free...
...Your pulse quiets, your mind banishes the specter, and you sleep again, confident of tomorrow...
...Why should we...
...I slept, and dawn came, sunrise, a chilly morning with white frost on the outbuilding roofs...
...Natural change, inevitable flow, which can no more be cancelled than sunlight or star-gleam...
...and to know that there can be no silence, summer or winter, so long as there is life on earth, is an awesome realization...
...I heard the only answer I can comprehend or accept the other night, when first hard frost came and brought the quiet...
...It was a yellow maple leaf, freshly fallen...
...They are a part of life," I said...
...Like the leaf, dispensable...
...Not being a naturalist, he did not quite understand this, but he accepted it...
...He didn't say it, but we knew he was glad, as we were, to have a proper end to summer and the grow ing season...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
