JULY: SUMMER AND BELIEF
Borland, Hal
July ? Summer and Mief by HAL BORLAND The solstice past and July at hand, we have begun to relax and tell ourselves we never doubted that summer would come. But I must admit a twinge or two of...
...It was a kind of reverence, as though everything was awaiting the daily miracle...
...he was just being a practical realist...
...I shifted my sights, let May take care of itself—it didn't do too bad in its second half, by the way—and we got the first cutting of hay in June, as always...
...We went out to see if it was real and at the far end of the front porch were greeted by such an outburst of hisses, squeals, and squawks as I had never heard...
...And I decided that if those birds could believe in summer I could...
...By then the first birds were wakening and uttering first sleepy calls...
...Time was so deliberate that when I looked at my watch I thought it had stopped...
...Anyway, out there in the garden, waging war with the weeds, I began to feel, as I had at dawn, that things were fundamentally in order no matter what capers man was cutting...
...As Albert, my neighbor down the road, said when he was planting corn in weather that demanded a winter coat and a cap with earflaps, "If you don't get the seed in the ground it sure won't grow...
...It is a tremendous happening in which man has no part except as an occasional fortunate witness...
...He edited the recently published book, "Our Natural World...
...I had boated three fish before the full light of dawn, and even then the sun hadn't risen...
...That is what I mean by perfection...
...The nearest thing to perfection that I know is a summer dawn...
...An old lightning scar left a wound that eventually rotted out the heart and made the tree a hazard to the power lines...
...It actually consists of a rather tenuous balance between romance and realism, between wish and fact...
...But the important thing about those rings was the continuity...
...Birds shouldn't build nests and lay eggs in such weather...
...If we were truly rational we would admit it and go on from there...
...And when May brought snow instead of apple blossoms in its second week, I asked serious questions...
...The seed and the egg, one and the same, fundamentally, the germ of life whether it is a daisy or an oak, a butterfly or a man...
...She didn't want lousy birds...
...I came home an hour later, cleaned my fish, ate breakfast, and was back in conventional daylight time, which demanded that I go to work...
...You can't order a seed to sprout by noon tomorrow...
...The birds began to sing again, a vast jubilation...
...Life and time, if nothing else...
...And of such certainties as life, death, and change...
...I suppose it depends on what a man is looking for, but I know that if you watch a nesting bird and experience a midsummer dawn you can't fail to believe in something...
...But I had somewhat restored my perspective, there on the river with the dawn...
...A perfect day, yes, now and then, thanks to wind and weather and my own inner climate...
...So I sat and watched and listened, and it was like seeing the earth emerge from the ancient mists...
...There were ninety-six, which put that tree's sprouting back around 1870...
...Everything necessary to the day's beginning is in order and happening on its own schedule...
...First streaks of light were in the sky and the lesser stars had begun to dim when I got up, but I brewed a pot of coffee, had a first cup, filled a vacuum bottle, gathered bait and gear, and still had only half-light when I cast off my boat...
...Darkness doesn't rise like a theatrical curtain and reveal the sun crouched like a sprinter ready to race across the sky...
...They rustled their own living somehow and even began gathering nesting materials, which seemed stupid to me...
...A new day had begun...
...And it happens with neither haste nor confusion...
...Birds are birds, and I enjoy their color and song and thoroughly appreciate their help in keeping the insect hordes in check...
...She didn't want her beautiful birds to have lice, and that's all there was to it...
...The seed sprouts, the stem grows, buds take form, and blossoms open...
...I was up at four o'clock the other morning to go fishing before breakfast...
...And that afternoon I wielded a hoe in the garden...
...None of the bushes or trees had except the willows, and the willow leaves were barely out of the bud...
...That old tree never skipped a year, early spring or late, wet summer or dry...
...mile up the river before they really began to sing...
...I and the birds who were in full voice now, a vast chorus of sheer celebration...
...This won't be a perfect summer...
...Among Mr...
...If you wanted to make one of those big, flat —and fallacious—statements, you might say that rural life persists just so that mankind won't forget the way a day begins...
...The stars aren't hooked to a switch that turns them all off at once...
...If you can't believe in May and violets and apple blossoms, what can you believe in...
...He put the seed in the ground, and it grew, in its own time...
...But the fact is that few things are perfect in this world...
...But not orioles or cardinals or the really beautiful birds...
...July will bring hot days, warm nights, storms that will send thunder cannonading down the valley, evenings dusted with stars and alive with fireflies, whippoorwills whooping it up at three o'clock in the morning, and dawns to make a man remember his youth, when time had its proper dimensions...
...Last winter we had to cut one of the big sugar maples...
...So we cut it down and made enough firewood to last ten years...
...I suspect that a midsummer dawn is so special because so few people are up and trying to manage or improve it...
...And she was not only astonished...
...But they aren't little feathered gnomes who think my kind of thoughts...
...A pair of brown thrashers were warning us off from a big barberry bush where they had built a nest and laid two eggs...
...Knowing those things, a man can live with himself and probably get along with his neighbors...
...It lasted until the first ray of sunlight lit the treetops...
...All you can do is go along with the season and the sequence...
...She exulted...
...And cripple though it was, had we let it stand it would have added still another ring this summer...
...Phoebes do," she finally conceded...
...Barbara, my wife, insists that weather is a state of mind anyway, and up to a point I agree...
...He wasn't being a philosopher...
...Nothing is hurried...
...I don't want lousy weather...
...Blossoms make seed and the cycle is repeated, seed to root and stem, flower to seed, over and over, unending...
...The temperature fell into the twenties that night, but the next day there were three eggs, and the following day, four...
...But as we talked it became apparent that while she knew all the subtle variations of color and markings so important in identification, she knew almost nothing about what they eat, where they nest, how they mate, and the natural hazards they face...
...Weather may be a consequence of cause and effect, but it isn't really rational...
...a poor bargain, firewood for a living tree, but the best we could make...
...And one mild day I went out and counted the growth rings in the stump...
...Or, to come closer to the truth, when man was still aware of time's dimensions...
...I gave up expecting a perfect season long ago...
...Borland's own books are "Countryman," "When the Legends Die," and "This Hill, This Valley...
...Especially from a brown thrasher, whose sassy independence I thoroughly admire...
...she was hurt to the quick...
...Life would be miserable without them...
...I was alone with creation...
...Then the silence ended...
...I was reminded of this in May when a bird-watcher friend stopped past after a record day with her field glasses...
...I'm not a birdy-birdy man...
...Baffled birds were all over the place, hungry for insects that hadn't hatched and without green shelter for nests...
...You have to believe in them...
...And at last came the silence, the hush—not a birdsong, not a rustled leaf...
...A good many things have changed about country life in the past fifty years, but the old sequences and inevitabilities still prevail...
...Then the pair of them settled down to the job of hatching those eggs...
...We tried to ease her shock by saying that a few parasites don't dull the color or impair the songs, but she was not consoled...
...Working with the soil doesn't automatically endow a man with either wisdom or philosophy, but it does make you aware of orderly sequences such as night and day, summer and winter, bud, blossom, and seed...
...Meanwhile, I had witnessed the deliberation of the dawn...
...The sun had risen...
...Such knowledge, I grant, won't feed the world's hungry, solve the China problem, get Vietnam on an even keel, or put a man safely on the moon...
...And now the corn he planted that frosty day is just about at the stage the corn was a year ago...
...I got my answer from a pair of brown thrashers, of all things...
...Time is reduced to its true, eternal dimensions...
...But rationality, I have found, is relative and varies with the individual...
...But it might help us to understand who we are, where we live, and what time it is, not by the clock or the calendar but by the stars and the earth on which we live...
...Normally the thrashers around here set up housekeeping in the untrimmed lilac bushes...
...Everything is right, at dawn...
...I didn't actually look up the valley expecting to see an approaching ice sheet, but I was tempted to...
...We would get very tired of it if it were...
...The birds don't bounce out of bed and immediately start singing in unison...
...There wasn't any haste about growing things, which never try to take shortcuts...
...But I must admit a twinge or two of skepticism when April seemed so unsure of itself...
...We kept the feeders stocked and put out extra suet, and we had more customers than a supermarket...
...But not when I am at peace with the world and a late frost lays the garden low...
...Which is what I mean by saying that we have varying degrees of rationality, of realism and romance...
...Spring wasn't a perfect season, by any means, but it did lead to summer...
...This is another bird story, but I am going to tell it anyway...
...As I said above, the weather had been difficult for the birds, particularly the migrants, who were caught in this area in unusual numbers...
...However, I can accept the truth from a bird as wholeheartedly as Robert the Bruce did from a spider...
...Given those, almost anything is possible that a rational man might want...
...The afternoon of May 10 it began to snow...
...What can a man believe in...
...But the brown thrashers were not among them...
...You can't cancel them, and you ignore them at your own peril...
...I had been caught up in a different rhythm, one that seemed to have no relation to clocks...
...I spent the morning at my desk, writing to meet a deadline, which is about as clockbound as a man can be...
...So our bird-watcher was triumphant...
...The chances are that we will even get ripe tomatoes before killing frost comes again, probably early in September, maybe even in August...
...We mentioned that birds have parasites and said that nearly all of them are infested with lice...
...That's what I mean by the sequence and the continuity: growth, the persistence of life, whether it is a blade of grass or a towering sugar maple...
...But it would be still another hour or two, until diurnal human beings were up and stirring, before the clock-driven haste would start all over again...
...They varied with the years, some broad, some narrow, as the tree grew or languished with the seasons, but there were no gaps...
...But when they arrived this year the lilacs hadn't a leaf...
...But I went almost half a HAL BORLAND is the distinguished nature writer who writes the editorials on nature for The New York Times...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
