AUTUMN and the forgotten certainty

...It still stands, now made over completely, the residence, fittingly, of a schoolmaster, the head of one of our regional state college^, who drives thirty miles to his office every day...

...This really is the aftermath of turmoil and violence in the dark canyons and infested caves of the human condition today...

...but they made yarn for their knitting...

...There is something basically wrong with any culture that submerges the individual, exalts the machine, and deliberately isolates itself from the land itself, no matter how many automobiles, color television sets, and electric toothbrushes it may make each year...

...The late garden harvest—potatoes, carrots, beets, squash—were dug and picked, stowed in the cold cellar...

...He only treed that one," Jim said...

...Late apples were gathered, the cider press set up, the kegs and barrels readied...

...It is as simple as sap-rise in March and as complex as the chatter of wild geese high overhead and arrowing south in November...

...So far as I know, Old Rock never treed another coon, there or anywhere else...

...AUTUMN and the forgotten certainty by HAL BORLAND A fter the summer's turmoil it was a relief to have the autumn equinox occur not only on schedule but without threats or defiances and with no disturbance whatever...

...but I know it would do no good...

...And the excess couldn't be let go to waste...

...Jim hesitated, grinned apologetically, and said, "One...

...That's one reason I don't holler at the maple trees...

...So the butchering was done, in clouds of steam and smoke...

...Make sure there is enough firewood in the woodshed...

...Lacking the continuity of the seasons and the certainty of the great rhythms inescapable on the land, he has achieved a strange arrogance that mistakes data for knowledge and makes gods of his machines...

...It's a relief, not having to go out every night and see if he's finally got another coon treed...

...On this particular farm the cash crops included tobacco, fruit, butter, eggs, an occasional calf or steer, saw-logs and, in good years, hay and oats, or at least oat straw...

...Not the whole harvest, for a good deal of the harvesting was done throughout the summer, but the last big reaping and storing...

...While these dooryard chores were under way, corn was waiting in the field, ready to be cut or husked...

...But it was a largely self-sufficient establishment for years...

...See that the roofs are sound on the outbuildings, that the doors don't sag and there are no broken panes in the windows...

...Autumn is itself a kind of remembering, a recapitulation, but wholly apart from the doings of man...

...Autumn meant harvest...

...That winter a rabbit hunter from down near Bridgeport, according to the license on his car, stole him, got him into his car and drove away, and Rock never came back...

...It hasn't been grown here in many years, but there once was a tobacco barn beyond the big old cow barn that still stands...

...It would put me in the same class with Old Rock...

...HAL BORLAND is the distinguished writer on nature...

...And, like Jim Nowell, I have time to catch up with the chores...

...Civilization and culture should include respect for the individual and some understanding of the world around you...

...His numerous books include "Sundial of the Seasons" and "Countryman: A Summary of Belief...

...but until the sun reaches a certain point in its southing and the air cools to a precise degree, nothing would happen...

...Maybe I shouldn't be remembering...

...But that is nonsense...

...Check the springhouse, make sure the porcupines haven't gnawed the door off its hinges, as they did one year, or ripped half the paper off the roof...

...To be truthful, I never actually tried standing under them and shouting...

...The past, too, had its evils...

...and there was also a big berry patch, raspberry and blackberry bushes and strawberry beds...

...Then, at the time dictated by this particular autumn, those maples turn to shimmering gold without so much as a whisper from anyone of my kind...

...Old Rock was a coon hound, a beautiful dog with a marvelous voice...

...Cows have to be tended to day after day, and so do chickens and ducks and geese, all of which were in the flocks here...

...I got one coon out of those popples a year ago last week...

...And from that feed-yard corn the womenfolk gathered the soft inner husks to stuff ticks for mattresses...

...There was a time and there was a way of life in which we had other purposes and other gauges of achievement...

...Bring in the late garden-get and see that it is properly stowed...

...This never was a really isolated farm...

...And feather beds...

...But basically it was set up to sustain those who lived here...

...The government hadn't yet begun to look after them, nor had the state, and there was a limit to what the neighbors could do, willing as they were, in emergencies...

...The big kettle for apple butter was scrubbed, its chain and tall tripod put in place, with firewood handy...

...But it is debatable whether automated, group-dominated urban life, almost wholly isolated from the natural environment, represents that ultimate either...

...It is in the bud, the leaf, the blossom, the seed...

...The grannies probably spun yarn now and then, from special wool they had saved out when the sheep were shorn and the wool marketed...

...The first year we lived here Old Rock began barking coon in September and kept it up well into November, always at the same clump of popples high on the mountain...

...It is all around us and quite apart from the hot-handed maneuverings of man...

...Actually, the pluckers took only the loose feathers that were about to be shed...

...The evidence is all around me and in the records I can read...

...Old Rock is pretty stupid...

...Nobody in his right mind would argue that isolated life on the land, wholly dependent on the seasons and made comfortable only by individual effort, represented the ultimate of human achievement...

...We haven't achieved certainty, about ourselves or even about our purposes...

...And for the youngsters there was school, at the Weatogue School a mile and a half down the road...

...There was certainty in the spinning earth and its orbit around the sun, and that certainty made some form of perpetuating life possible and probably inevitable, no matter what upstart man may do to himself...

...I don't know how long the old corn-husk mattresses persisted, but some of them were still around, I am sure, fifty years ago...

...He belonged to Jim Nowell, who lived just over the mountain from me...

...Man has become one of the most unpredictable creatures on earth, and for that reason one of the least reliable...

...It had various cash crops, none of great consequence in total income but all requiring hand labor...

...I failed to mention hogs among the farm's livestock, but they were inevitable...

...Then came September, autumn, October...

...But you can be sure the women went to the village on bright autumn days, while the road was still in good condition, and traded eggs and butter for bolt-cloth, yards and yards of it, to make up into dresses and shirts during the winter...

...Even by road it never was more than four miles from the village, and less than half that if one cuts across-lots on foot...

...His latest book, "Hill Country Harvest/' has just been published by Lippincott...

...But this is not nostalgia...

...There were the certainties of the season, even as now, and unless the folk who lived here abided by them they were courting trouble...

...Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him...

...I start remembering when I am doing those seasonal chores...

...The swill-barrel and the pig-pen constituted the farmer's highly efficient garbage disposal unit...

...Some years, when the calves all ran to heifers, the farmer and his son went up on the mountain and brought back a couple of fat young bucks, and venison took the place of beef...

...it is now a matter of choice what he will do with that means, and man has steadily diminished both the area of choice and the willingness to choose...

...Finally I asked Jim how many coons he had taken out of that place...

...That was the first purpose, and it was a key to the kind of people who lived here and to the basic attitudes their kind had...

...That is a part of the certainty...

...but the fact of ripeness is something in which he has no hand whatever...

...It was canned or jammed or jellied, or it was made into cider and wine and vinegar...

...I asked...

...It is in the lushness of pasture grass and hayfield, in the ripening ear and the bearded head, of corn and oats and wheat and even the wild needle-grass...

...There were a few sheep, but there wasn't much spinning done here fifty years ago, and no weaving, I am sure...

...The plucking of the geese was done before the autumn moult, for the geese were plucked live...

...Tobacco was an all-summer job, I am sure...

...But he's got a wonderful voice, hasn't he...

...The bounty is there, the ripeness and the maturity, his for the harvesting...

...Unless he holes himself away, deliberately, he will participate to some degree, since autumn doesn't pause at municipal boundaries...

...It is in the egg, the chick, the crawling worm, the midge, the moth, and the cawing crow...

...Jim saw it happen and never lifted a finger...

...And by then flax was just a pretty blue flower in the garden...

...He can plant in the spring, he can till in the summer...

...Ever since, he's been barking up that same tree, just hoping there's another coon up there...

...The whole spectacle of autumn is there, his for the seeing and understanding...

...Turn the compost and make new mulch piles of the leaves from the lawn...

...They really don't amount to much, compared to what had to be done right here on this farm fifty or sixty years ago...

...The fruit came from a big orchard, apples, pears, peaches and probably cherries, that grew in what is now the home pasture...

...He can harvest or not, as he chooses, and he can see or not, understand or ignore...

...There was school, with chores to be done before they went and after they got home, barn chores, yard chores, house chores for every youngster beyond the toddler stage...

...Fruit is also an all-summer job, tending, picking, marketing...

...And do a bit of remembering...

...It is a look back at who we were and where we came from, trying to find recognizable faces in the frenzied crowd shouting, "Kill...

...It is saying that we once knew certainty, lived with it and by it, and that we moved away and forgot...

...the lard was tried out, the sausage was made, the meat was salted and pickled and hung in the smokehouse where hickory smouldered for days...

...The remembering is one of the seasonal necessities, particularly in the country, and particularly now...

...Burn...

...I could stand under my sugar maples and shout myself hoarse ordering them to turn yellow, as they did a year ago...

...Biologically, he came late on the scene, and now he has achieved the means of removing himself early...

...So they made the most of what they had...

...and when the hogs had been properly fattened on a supplement of corn they provided the ham and bacon, the sausage and side meat, to go with eggs and sauerkraut and beans and potatoes...

...That to be husked in the row was left for later, but that to be cut for fodder was brought into the feed yard and the ears husked out there and stowed in the corn-house...

...We even had the benevolence of the Harvest Moon, which came to full so close to the equinox that it still lit the sky soon after dusk had dimmed to darkness...

...Another woman-chore was renewing the feather beds and pillows...

...Maybe I should be examining the present...

...What happens to all the rest of those coons he trees...

...We hill country people live by that certainty of the earth and its seasons, as do all who live close to the land...

...The best I could do would be to go out every day and shout, and eventually they would turn and I could say I talked them into it...

...It generates itself and it sets its own schedules...

...But he will become a part of autumn only as he achieves some degree of ripeness and maturity himself, and as he remembers...

...Nobody retted flax or spun linen thread at home...

...Then, as soon as hard frost whitened the mornings, came butchering...

...The pantries were full...

...Saw-logs are a winter crop, but oats are harvested early and hay is cut in June, again in July and, if the season favors, again in August...

...He didn't exactly say good riddance, but he did say, "Now maybe I can get my night's sleep and catch up with the chores...

...Remembering all this now, this quiet rural autumn morning, I wonder what we have gained and what we have lost as we, a nation, have become so largely an urban people, not only living apart from the land but alien to it...

...Grapes were picked and pressed...

...No matter what mischief man had been up to, the rhythms by which life abides here on earth were constant and predictable, ticking off time as they have since the oldest rocks were ooze and the first flecks of life were an equivocal phenomenon...

...I let them color in their own time, knowing that the one at the end of the big barn, which was just a sapling when we came here and now is higher than the barn and the most beautifully symmetrical maple I ever saw, will turn pink and gold ten days after the big maples in front of the house turn yellow...

...And a little later, when the cold had really settled in, a young steer was butchered, too, for steaks and roasts and soup meat and hamburger and corned brisket...