For All Seasons
Olson, Sigurd F.
For All Seasons Hill Country Harvest, by Hal Borland. Lippincott. 377 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Sigurd F. Olson Hal Borland is an interpreter of the Berkshire Hill country where he lives. More...
...Reviewed by Sigurd F. Olson Hal Borland is an interpreter of the Berkshire Hill country where he lives...
...And as a writer he abounds with the choice bits of knowledge that illuminate and lend significance to his observations...
...We can thank the Crusaders for having brought them west . . . those old wanderers had an eye for pretty women, fine horses, and beautiful flowers, brought all these good things back from their belligerent journeys...
...But it is Borland's feeling for the intangibles, his understanding of the influences which today are changing the life of all mankind and destroying the ancient ecology, which give his book even more meaning and depth...
...For All Seasons Hill Country Harvest, by Hal Borland...
...Hail progress and farewell to a river...
...We don't know more," he says, "than a minute fraction of the wonders that exist around us every day . . . [wonders] a good deal more useful and important, it seems to me, than putting a man into orbit...
...Kansas now has a lake and Kansans can learn to water ski...
...The vast development of science has thrown us out of balance, overshadowing other developments that are indispensable to the harmony of life...
...Quoting Walter Gropius on art and the creative spirit, he comments, "We live in a slip cover civilization...
...Borland also has a concern for all America and our way of life in a mechanized era of exploding cities...
...More than that, he combines genuine love and emotional attachment to the land with an insatiable curiosity that not only gives authenticity to all he sees but makes exciting reading...
...One might think this approach could result in a textbook, but, to the contrary, he uses his vast accumulation of knowledge in such a way it is absorbed as naturally as breathing...
...By the time of the American migrations lilacs were cherished dooryard flowers...
...Beauty and balance, yes, but control of our whole physical environment, no...
...It's really not a river anymore, just a drainage ditch, a sad monument to our stupid insistence on managing our rivers...
...This naturalist watches himself and his own reactions with lively curiosity, as keenly as though he were observing some wild creature in the field...
...Borland has the feeling of all good naturalists for the land and all its living things with the hope that some parts of it may be kept unchanged...
...He is a devoted ornithologist...
...I'll never see a lilac hedge without remembering his words: "The lilac is not a native of America or even of England, . . . originating and thriving long ago in Persia or other parts of the Near East...
...After seeing the new dam on the Big Blue River of his boyhood in Kansas, where the catfish once grew as long as your arm and there had been no change since Indian days, he says with nostalgia and bitterness: "So now Kansas and Nebraska have a lake twenty miles long but they have lost the Big Blue...
...Anyone who has a feeling for the out of doors cannot help but enjoy Hill Country Harvest...
Vol. 31 • November 1967 • No. 11
