APRIL: THE ROOT, THE SEED, THE EGG
Borland, Hal
APRIL the root, the seed, the egg by HAL BORLAND 9 Vj//"inter apparently ended just in *' time. The way we heard it, another foot of snow would have put New York, Chicago, and maybe another dozen...
...Infinitesimal flecks of life are all around me, on the wind, in the water...
...ter dormancy is approaching its end...
...We have, close beside our own house, one towering old Norway spruce, and every spring its male catkins fill the air with pollen...
...That spruce pollen, like the pollen from the white pines, is finer than dust...
...Rats...
...We are dealing with spring, and life renewing itself...
...But, thinking about it later, I remembered the kangaroo rats...
...But by the next morning there wasn't one in sight, and when I walked out into the pastures I didn't find a toad or frog...
...It comes to the hillside maple groves while the drifts still lie cold and crunchy in the woodland, and we always think that if sap can rise in the maples, hope can surely hold on in the human heart a few weeks longer...
...And on the front porch, where the breezes eddy, that pollen settles in drifts and ripples...
...For more than ten miles we idled along that road, fascinated...
...I can barely make out the shape of the individual grains under a ten-power glass...
...And he asked, with a grin, "sure those weren't grasshoppers you saw...
...So tiny that one common name for them is No-Seeums, they swarm in every patch of vegetation and cloud the air that the outdoor worker breathes...
...We have won through another winter...
...His books include "Sundial of the Seasons" and "Countryman: A Summary of Belief...
...The inconspicuous female willow flowers reach their receptive stage and the silky catkins ripen their yellow pollen...
...So we dug out and plowed out and went on living with the weather, doing the daily chores and watching the daylight lengthen, knowing that the vernal equinox would come, right on schedule...
...The ice went out of the river, the ducks came back, we heard the geese honking high as they arrowed north in the moonlight, and we listened for the spring peepers...
...I turned on the flashlight and in its beam were countless hordes of small frogs and toads, a seething carpet of them as far up the road as I could see...
...For all their crystalline perfection and complexity, snowflakes cannot grow or reproduce themselves...
...That was the only one he ever saw...
...The freshly graded road became a greasy strip of gumbo between two perilous ditches...
...We have survived...
...But the miracle was happening in my very dooryard...
...It seemed that the river, wide as it was, could not possibly have held so much amphibian life as was carpeting that country road...
...But when I asked the room clerk if they often saw the kangaroo rats he looked at me as though I were crazy...
...And, in the untold eons of springtime since the first frogs mated in the primal swamplands and the somewhat fewer eons since trees began strewing pollen on the marshy margins, perhaps as countless as the snowflakes of all the winters I shall ever know...
...but within another mile I was aware of strange activity at the roadside and slowed up again...
...Back in January and February, every time it snowed I thought about infinity as I watched the swirling flakes...
...Pine trees...
...It was early darkness and I had a flashlight in case a leisurely shadow might be a foraging skunk looking for a late supper...
...I went out again an hour later, and while the mass migration had ended there were still dozens of small toads and frogs crossing the road from river-bank to pasture...
...Pines...
...For a while, megalopolitan civilization hung in the balance with all its atom-smashing, jet-propelled promises of an Elysian tomorrow...
...The fact remained that even in the cities snow and ice eventually melt and seldom long outlive the vernal equinox...
...How much pollen is there in half a pint, how many grains...
...I won't admit more than a slight trace of smugness, but some of us did wonder if the wave of the future was carrying all of us into such a predicament...
...It's hard to believe in (Copyright © 7967 by Hal Borland...
...The peepers called, mated, and laid their eggs...
...Winter is over and gone, and now life will be easier for another season, with no snow to clog the streets, no ice to choke the harbors...
...We stood there and they were all around us, underfoot and blindly leaping at our legs and over our feet...
...I ran a finger across the cabinet, looked at the golden gleam of minute particles and asked, "Where are the nearest pines...
...Maple sap flowed soon after Washington's birthday, as usual...
...perhaps millions...
...And we are dealing with infinity, as far as we can judge...
...Yet I doubt that what I saw was a phenomenon of fecundity...
...Unseen creatures were moving all around us...
...The peepers mate and lay their masses of minute, gelatinous eggs in the chilly water...
...And all around us is proof that life survives, teeming life of which we are only a minor manifestation...
...We never found the old ruins and darkness caught us thirty miles north of Garden City...
...Spring comes, we say...
...And every one of those grains of pollen is a fleck of life...
...We are dealing with life, in frog eggs, in gnats, in pollen grains...
...It's pine pollen," I told him...
...How can anyone be unaware...
...The bare, sandy shoulder of the road had become a raceway and playground for kangaroo rats, literally thousands of them, lured out by the rain and the cool darkness...
...The way we heard it, another foot of snow would have put New York, Chicago, and maybe another dozen major cities out of business...
...Last spring when I went to my dentist's office he impatiently swept his hand across the polished top of an instrument case, held it out to me and asked, "Where does all that yellow dust come from...
...The air shimmers in the sunlight for days...
...We had been to the West Coast, some years ago, and were driving home...
...We watched for ten minutes, and still they came...
...There aren't any rats around here...
...And by April's end the first pollen of the season after the willows is dusting the air wherever conifers grow...
...A new book, "Hill Country Harvest," will be published by Lippincott in May...
...I sweep it up, at the peak of pollen time, to keep from tracking it into the house, and I often get half a pint of it...
...certainly with numbers beyond our human comprehension...
...A few years ago we saw it on a warm spring evening...
...late one afternoon I left the main highway in western Kansas to look for the little-known ruins of an obscure outpost of the Indian wars...
...Then my luck returned...
...We came to a hard-packed sandy road and the storm passed...
...he said, brusquely defensive...
...The batrachian eggs hatch into tiny, wriggling tadpoles...
...The slow, eternal change began to rouse life down at the root...
...We drove on in to Garden City and found food and shelter...
...I have found that a flashlight beam will delay a startled skunk's reaction long enough for a watchful walker to retreat to safety...
...We came to a place where the road was being rebuilt just as the thunderstorm built up to a cloudburst...
...There aren't that many frogs in the world...
...Barbara exclaimed, "I don't believe it...
...Can't fight the weather," he said...
...And the miracles are in the root, the seed, the egg, not in the laboratories or the machines...
...It gets all over everything every year at this time...
...I merely saw it for the first time...
...So did all the other toads and frogs that populate the riverbanks just beyond my dooryard...
...And the next morning when I asked the same question of the man at the filling station he said that a friend of his once caught a kangaroo rat and kept it in a cage for a while, but it died...
...They overwhelm me only with countless numbers...
...Count them...
...Meanwhile, the weather was somewhat on our conscience as we went on safely living here in the rural hills, our roads plowed out, our paths shoveled, our heat and light still functioning, even our contacts with the outside world in working order and bringing us, every hour, word of urban trials and tribulations...
...I couldn't say how much pollen those pines were spilling into every breeze, but I know it was beyond human comprehension...
...Most of us live unaware in the midst of teeming life...
...They were like a scourge of locusts on the march, but they were only moving from the river-bank across the road and into the open pastureland beyond...
...To me, it was only ideal weather for farm crops and revitalizing for winter-weary people...
...Mild weather came and held...
...The enduring truth of the earth, and perhaps of the universe, is implicit in April—in springtime...
...I didn't argue...
...It would be easier to count leaves...
...he asked...
...They leaped and frolicked and raced and seemed almost to dance in the beams of the car's headlights...
...Besides," he added, "we do need the moisture...
...Johnny, my dairy-farmer neighbor up the road, pretty well summed it up when he plowed out my driveway after the season's heaviest snowfall...
...It means that the incredible surge of life, the infinite fecundity of nature, will soon be evident again in its seasonal cycle...
...Then they were gone...
...Tired and hungry, I began to hurry...
...The pollen from those pines was dusting the grass and sifting into every house for several hundred yards around...
...The seed, the egg, the root—awakening and each one with its own degree of sentience, its own response...
...Those untold thousands that had spawned in the river, unknown to me, had migrated across my consciousness by mere chance, there in the darkness, and vanished completely...
...He pointed to a row of big, old white pines fifty yards away...
...The willows achieve fertile seeds...
...Only now and then are we really aware of this amazing procreative force, but when we do see it it is like a glimpse of the big, enduring secret...
...It probably happens every spring...
...What have they got to do with it...
...Thousands, did I say...
...We see a migrant robin, watch a maple tree burst bud, follow a hungry bee from one crocus to another...
...A thundercloud was rising, black and threatening, but we were on a good gravel road and with luck we would see the ruins and be in Garden City by dark...
...Sap-rise, of course, means that winHAL BORLAND is the distinguished writer on nature...
...The earth's axis moves a trace, the sun's rays are a hair less slanted, the air warms by a few degrees, and things happen...
...About all you can do is dig out and plow out and hope for an early spring...
...And by late April the midges are out, the first of those miniature hordes that no countryman can ignore...
...We walked a little way and suddenly sensed that the whole road was alive...
...They were Ord's kangaroo rats, native to the sandy areas of the Great Plains, glistening orange-brown on the back, gleaming white on the belly, with big, dark eyes and long, tufted tails...
...It was saved only by plodding men using machines and methods of snow-removal that haven't changed much since World War II...
...Then the peepers yelp in the lowlands and the pussy willows cautiously open their fuzzy male catkins...
...When I try to guess I have to say there are more pollen grains on my front porch than there were snow-flakes on my front lawn all last winter...
...There aren't numbers enough to count the flakes that fall on the roof of my house, let alone those that fall on my pastures...
...We turned and came back to the house, scuffling our feet to push the frogs out of our way...
...Maybe, we thought, it was just as well to drag our heels a little longer, until the technicians either devise a way to cope with weather as effectively as their grandfathers did or temper their boasts of omnipotence...
...And, though nobody mentioned it, by seasonal inevitability...
...miracles when the miracle-workers have to put down their magic wands and reach for an old-fashioned snow-shovel...
...But the infinity of snow-flakes is cold and inert...
...Then came the mild evening when we walked up the road close beside the river to know the smell of opening buds, the leaf-mold scent that comes with the stir of worms and the thrust of new grass...
...Within ten miles, however, my luck ran out...
...The savage tooth of winter was dulled by lengthening daylight, which all the computers couldn't hasten or delay by one microsecond...
...April isn't the time to see most of that life, but it is the time of beginnings...
...Neither are as countless as the snowflakes, but still are far beyond counting, life incredibly resurgent...
...We grow 'em pretty big around here, and there's a lot this year out on that road...
...Life...
...Hundreds of thousands, rather...
...and I don't know a more reassuring event than sap-rise...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
