JULY: SUMMER AND REALITY
Borland, Hal
JULY Summer and Reality by HAL BORLAND T ooking back now, it seems impos-sible that our spring was so late, so cold, so wet. Even city folk, to whom such weather is primarily a weekend...
...Listening, not so much with our ears but with our awareness...
...This year it was as obvious as the nose on a man's face...
...Meanwhile, we have the problems of everyone else shouted at us day after day...
...If anyone can create a neater package than the bud on a maple or a dogwood, I would like to see it...
...We have pretty well lost our perspective...
...I don't know why unless it is that we prefer to talk rather than listen...
...Anyway, the way I'm going it looks like the season's going to catch up with me in another year or so...
...A new book, "Hill Country Harvest," has just been published by Lippincott...
...No wonder we can't find easy solutions...
...Whether my individual life is important or not is pretty much up to me, in the long run...
...What looked like the tag-ends of the year last November turned out to be April's ideal rootbed for new life...
...And when it comes to those, I doubt that there ever were easy solutions...
...Life," he summed up, "is becoming so complex that it contains no easy solutions...
...Complex, yes, but still tidy because it was purpose being fulfilled...
...The next year he fell behind by another week, and an early fall frost cut his corn crop by half...
...But the tidy package is a vanishing luxury...
...Now we get it every hour on the hour, fresh, hot, undigested...
...Shadblow and swamp maples came to blossom, then poplars and sugar maples...
...The forces that run this earth maintained fundamental order and system even in the face of difficulties, including human doubt and disillusionment...
...We did get the spring plowing done, and the planting...
...we are practically ordered to...
...How it began, I don't know, but five years ago I noticed that he was two weeks behind the season...
...I am not sure about the easy solutions because I don't know what are the problems, but apparently they are human problems...
...He didn't start his spring plowing until May, didn't get his corn planted till the first week in June, and didn't start cutting hay until July, when the grass was all headed out...
...Man can get himself thoroughly snarled up, of course, right in the midst of the land's inexorable order and seasonal insistence...
...Being here, we work with the land, cooperate...
...But he shook his head...
...Meanwhile, we have been cutting hay...
...It happens to be hard, sweaty work...
...for most of this earth's work is accomplished very quietly...
...It is summer on the land as well as in the almanac, and despite the late spring we weren't overwhelmed by chaos and senseless futility...
...There is an old country saying, so true that it is trite, that a late spring means a busy May...
...and after the blossoms came the leaves, pastel-pale and even pink and yellow when they first appeared, then all degrees of green as they spread and were suffused with chlorophyll and got down to work...
...That was the sequence, old as time, old as growth itself...
...I have just experienced another spring, and I am entering another summer...
...Early May was cold and cheerless, but once it warmed up there was so much going on that nobody could really keep up with it...
...and unless the averages and the clinical judgment of my doctor are wrong I shall know the exaltation of autumn and the cold beauty of winter and participate in still other springs...
...I am prompted to this reminder by the pronouncement, back in April, by one of the more moderate critics of life and art...
...He was indulging in homo mensura, the all-too-common habit of mistaking personal confusion for universal disorder...
...That critic was still back in November, unaware in the midst of change...
...Out there in the pasture or on that old rock, yesterdays and beginnings are all around me, implicit not in me but in life itself...
...It is human nature," he said, "to want every package to be tidy...
...There weren't any loose ends...
...Then we began getting it every day and had only twenty-four hours to assimilate it and assess its importance...
...Last fall there was a bit of jumble when the leaves fell in absolute disorder and empty milkweed pods, goldenrod stems, and wild carrot heads made jackstraw tangles at roadsides and in fencerows...
...Even city folk, to whom such weather is primarily a weekend inconvenience, resented it...
...The truly remarkable fact was that it was all achieved and not one step was skipped...
...Nothing is less aurally audible than the growth of grass, the process of photosynthesis in a woodland's leaves, the pollination of a blossom, the quickening of life in an egg...
...but that, too, is a part of the season, the work...
...All I have to know, to accept, is the fact that neither here nor now, neither I nor the living HAL BORLAND is the distinguished writer on nature...
...I asked why, since he knew he had to have the operation, he didn't go in February...
...Life is complex...
...In my boyhood we got the world's news, good and bad, once a week and had six days to digest and assort it before the next consignment arrived...
...Maybe there are no ultimate answers, but I will rest on that...
...If I were eighteen or twenty years old, growing up in a crowd, yammered at day and night by broadcasters telling me what a disordered world this is, I probably would want to turn my back on it too...
...Whether Adam's story is history or fable doesn't much matter...
...But it is even more than that...
...and here in the country we kept seasonal schedules with difficulty...
...The origins of the word "work" reach back to words which meant rites, rituals...
...Adam was a rebel, and he had to solve his problems by sweating it out, making his peace with the soil...
...I feel engaged with fundamental matters, not alienated...
...Merely by being there, I am a participant—simply by acknowledging that I am a part of life, not the whole of it, I accept the fact of order and system...
...I decided that the oracular critic was wrong on at least two major points...
...As a dissenter, then, as a countryman forever aware of the land and the environment that fostered my own kind and still tolerates us, I must insist that change is not necessarily chaos and that proliferation is not confusion...
...The earth kept spinning, the seasons did follow their eternal sequence, and the urge to sprout and grow didn't even falter...
...I watch flowing water and falling rain, and I am in the midst of such life as growing grass and trees and nesting birds and burrowing beasts, winged insects and crawling worms...
...The problems that won't wrap up in neat, tidy packages arise not from life but from the way we have complicated living, the routines of our days and weeks...
...Meanwhile, I do live, and I know sunrise and moonlight, starglow and dawn...
...How can I, or anyone with eyes to see and any degree of understanding, forget to that degree...
...Then the haymakers went to work...
...And few accomplishments are more strictly ordered, more committed to sequence and completion...
...I become aware of things beyond myself, of the whole environment which fostered my own kind and thus far has perpetuated it...
...I couldn't alienate myself if I tried...
...Then he added, with a rueful smile, "I can't seem to catch up...
...I am a part of the whole...
...Hepaticas bloomed, then bloodroot and anemones, then violets and columbines, and only then came apple blossoms and lilacs...
...I have no choice— I am a part of them, simply by being a part of life...
...It is a rather strange feeling to be a radical, at least in the root sense, by holding to fundamentals...
...Maybe we should more often, particularly in May or June, spend an hour on a hillside or in a meadow and renew contact with basic realities...
...Redwing blackbirds and robins arrived, then flickers and thrashers, then swallows, and the first wave of warblers...
...That is the way the countryman's life is summarized, by the seasons, not by fretful days and restless nights...
...All of spring's unfinished business had to be attended to before June arrived...
...Spring, the rootbed of summer itself, was about as tidy a package as one could wish for...
...Oats were planted, then corn, and then the kitchen garden...
...A hickory bud, I will admit, looks rather (Copyright © 1967 by Hal Borland) disorganized when the bud scales open and that silky membrane is torn apart, but as leaves, blossom, and tender shoots emerge I am always filled with awe at the neatness and economy with which that astonishing bud is packed...
...It sometimes seerns that the simplest truths are the most difficult to understand and accept...
...And there were practically no loose ends in sight...
...world around me, can be isolated in time or space...
...I don't have to go back to the cycads to recognize an oak tree and know that it grew from an acorn...
...But life itself is no more complex than it ever was, really...
...In a sense, we are performing a rite, for we are participating in something far greater than ourselves...
...I might welcome alienation and decide that my own frustrations were the only reality...
...Just a few miles down my valley there was a man who got hopelessly lost in time some years ago...
...And he was out of step with the seasons...
...Among the oldest folk tales we know are stories of conflict over thine and mine, and the oldest codes of which we have record consist of thou-shalt-nots...
...Instead, I am a man well along in his middle years who, simply by living on the land and apart from the crowds, has become one of a dissenting minority...
...I must believe in the past, as I am aware of the here and now, just as I believe in the seed and the root, being aware of growth and maturity...
...Perhaps if I could forget such an apparently minor but ultimately marvelous and mysterious a thing as a seed I, too, could think of life as senseless and chaotic...
...This spring looked like his chance to catch up, but he went to the hospital for a hernia operation in the middle of April...
...We are a part of the season, a part of time itself...
...At the height of spring, early or late, I can walk across my pastures or sit on a sun-warm rock in an opening in the mountainside woodland, and know that there is both order and meaning all around me...
...Two years ago he was planting corn on the Fourth of July, when everybody else's corn was knee-high...
...I marvel at the seasons and I wonder at the hatching of an egg, whether it be the egg of a mantis or a spider or a domestic hen or a human ovum...
...The pulse in my wrist is not my pulse alone, separate and apart, but somehow and quite mysteriously a part of the rhythms that beat through the earth and, very likely, the universe...
...And by June the hayfields were glistening in the sun, rippling in the breeze, green abundance ready for the first cutting...
...I have to believe in life, not in its romance but its reality...
...I didn't have time," he said...
...but eventually that litter becomes the root-bed for another spring, in ourselves, and the maturity of another summer...
...I put on a coat, went out, and life all around me, even at that tentative stage, was about as tidily packaged as I could imagine...
...With this late start," I suggested, "why don't you take this year off and start fresh next spring...
...Every day of my life I see the proof...
...The point, though, is that now things have pretty well evened out...
...in it are countless generations of experience that add up to practical truth...
...I don't have to recapitulate the evolution of the lung to know that both frogs and toads are hatched as tadpoles...
...I don't even have to date the last ice sheet to know that a glacier carved this valley...
...But that would mean that I must forget all the yesterdays, all the beginnings, both remote and immediate, that add up to here and now...
...That is a part of the season...
...No one knows that better than the countryman, who lives in the midst of it...
...Not talking about them, but listening to them, letting them seep into us...
...but we don't expect to have to wear winter mittens while planting corn...
...But winter's snows smoothed things out, and by April all that disorderly discard was turning to leaf mold and humus...
...Loose ends make us nervous...
...We aren't merely allowed to participate...
...We can't even decide which ones to solve and which ones will solve themselves before sunrise tomorrow...
...I haven't got time to take the year off...
...Periodically we have to endure the autumn and winter of the emotions, littered with disillusionment and alienation...
...His books include "Sundial of the Seasons" and "Countryman: A Summary of Belief...
...I read that during one of our dour, discouraging weeks of reluctant spring, but even then I wondered what life he was talking about, what loose ends were making me nervous, what tidy packages now were so rare...
...We are all a part of some infinite, mysterious system, something that adds up to order even if I am not certain of purpose beyond life itself...
Vol. 31 • July 1967 • No. 7
