January: Winter and the Totals
Borland, Hal
January: Winter and the Totals by HAL BORLAND T~Vhe geese came early, but killing frost was late, so it was anybody's guess about the winter. But as Morris said the day we watched the geese, "High...
...They came in low over the hill to the north, just above the tree-tops, so close I could hear the whistling of their wings...
...We see the light shift, are constantly aware of passing time, and are a living part of the changing seasons...
...The winter solstice, and Christmas, and here we are in the midst of winter, any way you look at it...
...Warm blood, like mine...
...Or maybe they were swapping gossip with the dark little bob-tailed grebes—we call them hell-divers—that had put an end to our perch fishing...
...We don't have to look at the calendar or the almanac to know what time it is...
...The leaves had all fallen from everything but the oaks, but the rain hadn't settled them...
...You can't take time like an endless cord and tie knots in it and say, "Now I own this much...
...Maybe that is why we countrymen insist on living where we do...
...And man, neither plant rior bird but sentient animal whose blood can freeze as easily as water, survives...
...All of them had summed up their summers, one way or another, in growth rings and leaves and seeds or nuts...
...Then he was gone again, looking for an ice-wracked tree down across the wires...
...They don't respond to that vital stimulus...
...So we took in the boat, stowed our rods and said, "That's that, till April...
...He saved the sheathing, too, took all the nails out, and stacked it carefully...
...Morris works for the power company and we saw him several times, but only momentarily...
...And there was another summary, of geologic forces and basic substances...
...Whatever they were saying, they settled down as though they had a three-months lease...
...The cord has slipped through your fingers, knots and all, before you can count up to a hundred, even as we used to do, cheating a bit, as children playing hide and seek: "Ten, ten, double-ten, forty-five, fifteen...
...For a few minutes I thought I had found a summary in the snow itself...
...It was like the distant barking of small dogs, a whole pack of them...
...The Christmas eve service...
...I pulled out the choke, turned the motor over a few times, and it caught...
...Flesh, like mine, that quivers with pain...
...I wasn't as smart as the geese, but I suspected it would be cold by Christmas and snowy by New Year's...
...So I guessed that it would be cold by Christmas, snowy by New Year's Day, and we would hear the peepers in April...
...A haze had begun to gather in the sky, the kind of haze that can mean snow but sometimes means Indian Summer...
...The ice booms on the river, and the lake echoes with its expansion cracks...
...And those of us who like the comfort of an open fire or a wood stove in the kitchen for those middling days when it's too warm for a wool shirt and muffler, not warm enough for shirtsleeves, made sure the woodpile was amply stocked...
...But one man's rest is another man's labor, I suppose...
...And I saw the tracks of a rabbit, a fox, two field mice...
...Snow whines underfoot...
...It didn't snow, but it turned raw and blustery...
...Then I came to a big rock, the one we call the Resting Rock because we go there to sit and rest, at peace with our intimate world, in summer...
...They can't do your thinking for you...
...There were more than a hundred of them, Canadas, with white chin-straps gleaming and heads and necks jet black...
...Ed has farmed that place for more than forty years, tending cows every day of all that time...
...The spray had coated the dock with ice and I almost went head over heels into five feet of water cold enough to freeze a seal's flippers...
...I came back to the house, the outsize carapace man invented when he accepted the fact that he couldn't hibernate like the turtle...
...By then, of course, we had to catch up with the seasonal chores...
...walking through the woods was like walking around in a giant box of cornflakes...
...So we roasted the turkey right on schedule, mashed the yellow turnips, creamed the onions, made the mince pies, and said our thanks not for excess but for plenty, not for privileges but for opportunities and obligations...
...Firelight and greens and a tree from our own mountainside...
...We found the birds, but they heard us coming and were gone in a roar before we got within a hundred yards of them...
...It was the summary of snowflakes, of ice crystals, that fell from the clouds last week...
...After one sleety storm he stopped in just long enough to say, "I guess I was wrong about those geese...
...I went on, and at the fencerow I saw the naked trees, the birches and maples and sapling ash, and the undergrowth of hazel brush...
...I read the other day that some architect, obviously not one of those who build towering, windowless boxes, had said that man, even in an urbanized environment, needs "the vital stimulus of shifting light, passing time, and the changing of the seasons...
...They saw it coming...
...It was a warm house, thanks to fire...
...They were tired...
...Senses keener than mine...
...I was out in the back pasture the other morning, booted and mufflered and breaking through the snow crust at every step...
...Maybe that is why we don't look on winter as such a dour, forbidding season...
...And I said we would hear the peepers in April...
...I still stand by that...
...The wind whistles in the pines, the boreal hunter summoning the hounds of ice-bound hunger...
...December...
...We went around the margin of the lake a little way, then headed for the geese to have a closer look...
...Another year, we say, thinking thus to tie it neatly in a bundle like so many old newspapers...
...Ribbons and tinsel and gay wrappings...
...Then I looked at the rock itself, a big old boulder brought here maybe ten thousand years ago by the ice sheet...
...o November passed, with a little snow that didn't stay on the ground and with rain that refreshed the springs...
...And the remembering...
...I stand by that, especially the peepers...
...The year sums up its seasons in the dormant trees, the flown bird, the hibernating woodchuck...
...The owls are loud and the fox barks on the hillside, reminding the restless sleeper how quiet is the night when the year turns on its silent axis...
...But you can't sell Christmas like a truck-load of old beams, and you can't swap Thanksgiving for Christmas...
...The summary of the flakes had vanished, oozed away into the ground, and left only a scum of ice...
...We watched as they spread out and set their sentinels, two big old ganders, and we listened to their chatter...
...We are a long, long way from Bethlehem, but on Christmas Day itself we know that the bells we hear are not ringing in either Sodom or Gomorrah...
...The old sentinel ganders stretched their necks, swam toward us, and honked a warning to the flock...
...Otherwise, he says, man would have burned himself to death before he even dreamed of civilization...
...But again, an incomplete summary, for it was a part of something far greater, worn and shaped by the ice and the journey...
...Or perhaps, being in some ways more practical than my own kind, might not bother to summarize, knowing how useless are numbers in the face of infinity...
...We just know it in our bones, maybe the way the geese do...
...We don't even have to look out the window...
...Maybe they were talking about the lake, old ones telling youngsters that it is off-limits for hunters, so they could relax...
...At my age," he said, "barn chores get to be a burden in the winter...
...No doubt he will sell those old boards, too, to someone who wants his brand new living room to look like an old barn turned inside out...
...Up here, when we build a new house we want it new, but there are those who want a new house old to begin with, maybe thinking they can buy memories and old traditions that way...
...You have to prepare for winter, even if gasoline and electricity do take most of the back-breaking labor out of rural life today...
...But we do the summing up, hopeful, reaching for certainty, perhaps for reassurance...
...It has the shortest days, in terms of daylight, and those days are far too few for what has to be done...
...Daylight begins to lengthen, though you need a sextant and a chronometer to prove it...
...We were down at the lake getting things in hand after a vicious autumn storm that swamped my small boat at its mooring...
...And I thought wryly of the friend who insists that man's great discovery wasn't how to build a fire, but how to put out the flame...
...That was when Morris said he doubted that the geese could see the weather ahead...
...The icy fang of the winter bites deep...
...We circled them, respectfully distant, made a rough count, then went back to my dock and stowed the motor in my cabin...
...Anyway, Ed sold his cows and spent most of the fall taking the sheathing off his barn to get at those beams...
...for it was chatter, not the gabbling flight talk you can hear a mile away...
...That was his idea of taking a rest...
...And the sums are all wrong, because there are no totals...
...A few days later we were up on my mountainside looking for partridges...
...Carols...
...It was the last week in October when the geese arrived...
...The winter's first full moon won't occur until the 26th, which means that nights now are dark as well as long...
...For health and strength and the persistent dream of justice and peace...
...There are no short-cuts swift enough to stop the flow of time...
...But as Morris said the day we watched the geese, "High as they fly, I doubt that even geese can see the weather two months ahead...
...I heard a cardinal whistle and a jay scream...
...Regardless of the calendar, December is the shortest month...
...They came right in, big wings cupped, long necks outstretched, webbed feet splayed, and struck the water with a rush of spray...
...The creche in the village churchyard...
...Turn a wheel or close a switch and they run, summer or winter...
...The year was fraying out like the thistleheads in the back pasture...
...Ed, my neighbor up the road, sold off his cows...
...Time flows over and through even the trees as insistently, as ceaselessly, as the wind...
...He has laid away a competence, as they say, and earned a rest...
...That, in a sense, is his own summary—man survives...
...Morris grinned at me and shoved off...
...A newcomer from the city who is building what he calls a retirement place twenty miles from here spotted Ed's old barn last summer and made him an offer for the hand-hewn beams...
...Not in New England...
...It was only the first week in November, but late autumn was upon us, winter just ahead...
...with less stamina than a wolf, less cunning than a fox, he still persists...
...Then we look out, we countrymen at least, and see the hills and we wonder, "What is another year...
...And with more Christmas merchandising than I can remember so early in the season...
...I sometimes wish I was as wise as a wild goose...
...With less sense than a wild goose, in some ways...
...So we took in the late harvest, snugged the buildings, protected the water lines, checked the barnyard fences, made sure the roofs were tight...
...We draw up our totals, out of sheer habit, totting up all the inconsequential, for our own pride and for the tax collector...
...Not for the fishing or the partridges we sometimes hunt, but for that vital stimulus...
...Thanksgiving is one antique that is not for sale at any price...
...Whatever this is, we are all in it, and the numbers can't define or explain it...
...The outboard motor got a bath, so I brought it home and dried it out, and that day we were trying it out...
...I came into the house and had a hot drink to warm my blood and bones, and I knew I was right in my forecast, back there in October...
...We looked up, searching the sky, and Morris said, "Geese...
...They must have come a long way...
...We had a good climb and saw a fine assortment of red and brown and purple oaks, and we didn't fire a shot...
...And I thought how they, too, if they could count as I do, might try to summarize, and fail...
...We had hoped for another chance or two to troll deep for the big trout, but a week later we gave up...
...They knew where they were going, for they didn't circle even once...
...he was patrolling the back roads with his crew, keeping the lines in order...
...The friendship tokens, which add the humanity, the from-the-heart sense of being, and lift the holy season out of the caves of Mammon at least toward the miracle of belief...
...And there I found where the sun had warmed the south side of the rock and melted the snow...
...But they didn't take wing...
...We are a part of the only total, and all our numbering is but finger-counting...
...We bailed out the boat, mounted the motor on the transom, and were just gassing up when I heard the clamor...
...The messages from far away...
...The dunking hadn't hurt it...
...Someone suggested that we just cancel Thanksgiving and get Christmas over with early, which might have been a good idea, at that...
...But what is a seed, a nut, but a promise of tomorrow, another year, more growth, more seeds, endlessly...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
