APRIL: SPRINGTIME AND BELIEF
Borland, Hal
PRIL Springtime and Belief by HAL BORLAND Being rather well acquainted with woodchucks and weather, we have a slight variation on the Groundhog Day legend. (A groundhog, of course, is only a...
...I wondered if I were being a traitor to the race...
...Anyway, there was my answer, and I didn't even feel guilty about it...
...Everything that mattered, from a root in the ground to the orbit of the earth around the sun, was exactly as the big schedule of life and time required...
...But we do remember the legends...
...April is what it is, and no pretense about it...
...When I checked the calendar I found that it was only four weeks until the vernal equinox...
...Early spring or late, we are still a part of it...
...We reject the demand that we chant "Mea culpa" morning, noon, and night...
...Up here in the hills we hope the groundhog will see his shadow and assure us of only six more weeks of winter...
...Somewhere along the line someone is going to have to stop tearing things apart, society as well as the physical world, and accept the fundamental truth that man's tenure here is a consequence of biologically fortuitous coincidence, as nearly as we can trace it, and could be terminated as easily as was that of the dinosaurs...
...Where we go from here, of course, is anybody's guess, and it has seemed, the past few weeks, as though there were a great deal of guesswork going on in places where there might better have been substantial tallying up of facts...
...That way I would be asserting my dominance over the environment, wouldn't I? I, would be showing somebody, or something, how all-powerful I am...
...Or perhaps we become acquainted with woodchucks and weather and try to live with the world and ourselves...
...It is hepaticas in bloom and violets in bud and the youngest of tender young leaflets showing tips in the underbrush of the woodland...
...A man has to appear needed and busy at important tasks, no matter what he may be thinking when he lies awake at two a.m...
...Not wanting to carry the message any further at that moment, I got back to work at those pretentious chores that proclaim my tenancy here...
...So our lives, at least here on the land, are bounded by truth, the truthful elements...
...But by then the affairs of man were in such a state that we didn't pay much attention to mythical portents...
...but even their sleep seems to be pretty' restless...
...It is, as I was saying, spring and beginnings...
...Winter is an introspective time at best, a season in which the ordinary follies of mankind become a burden on the conscience...
...We remember when everyone knew April...
...April, of all times, is the very epitome of integrity, of truth in action and in being...
...So we shoveled snow, pitched hay and ma(Copyright © 1968 by Hal Borland) nure, cut wood, built up the fires, and waited for the January thaw to bring a breather...
...The temperature got up to thirty and stayed there several days, dropping only into the low twenties at night...
...Compared to the lows of only a week earlier, the temperature had risen fifty degrees, and that's- a thaw in our language...
...April is what the best dreams and the highest motives might make of life, for it is spring and beginnings...
...The truth of the air and the sky and the sunrise, of the rain, the dew, the thunderstorm...
...We reject the crowd, which too often is a headless, mindless, merciless beast...
...We sometimes get snow in May here in the Connecticut hills...
...I considered guilt, I admit...
...There were so many real portents that we sort of let the seasons take care of themselves for a while...
...We welcomed the weather we got at the turn of the year—a foot and a half of snow and temperatures down to fifteen and twenty below with several days in a row when the high was less than five above zero...
...We know or we go on being arrogantly ignorant in our scientific, machine-fed, computer-dictated race to oblivion...
...It is the hylas calling frantically for mates and all their tribe laying eggs in the chill waters of the swamps...
...But I rejected that idea and the whole guilt fixation, knowing that if one starts accepting guilt for today's cult of violence, say, one must go on from there and accept guilt for the ritual killing of the virgins by the Aztecs, or for the vengeance murders in ancient Greece...
...There really isn't time for that, in the big scheme...
...I, individually, didn't have to show anybody how all-powerful I am —if I am...
...We reject them, and we laugh at woodchuck shadows and make our own variations on the legends...
...The truth of a pasture, for example, where the grass will grow from its roots if wq, give it half a chance and keep our hot hands under control...
...And there it was again, staring me in the face, that same old lesson that man never seems to learn: Man is dispensable...
...It doesn't await our discovery...
...It is grass green, young, tender, reaching out to cover the whole of this scarred, battered earth with healing green...
...I went up on the mountain and cleaned out the springhouse that provides our water a good part of the year...
...When I ask it here at the foot of the mountain the answer is that truth is the way things are, not the way we shape them or contrive them or wish they were, but the way they are...
...It was high time to get back to fundamentals...
...And if we would only look for truth rather than for visions, for reality rather than abstractions, there it is, waiting...
...We find them or we don't, and that's the whole of it...
...I cut a clump of sumac that threatened to take a grassy bank along the river in front of the house...
...We remember when there were dreams, not nightmares...
...What is truth...
...We worried right through Lincoln's birthday and Valentine's Day and Washington's birthday...
...We reject the circumstantial lie and the expedient half-truth, preferring the acid-bite and even the gut-agony of truth itself...
...The next day was Friday, the moon was in its last quarter, daylight had increased more than three-quarters of an hour since Groundhog Day...
...His books include "Sundial of the Seasons," "Countryman: A Summary of Belief," and, most recently, "Hill Country Harvest...
...And if winter really lets go its grip by the first of April we call it an early spring...
...I note this because it is so unusual...
...The thaw came, just about on schedule, though in an ordinary year we wouldn't have called it more than a break in the weather...
...I pruned the grape vines...
...April, or spring, or any season, cannot wait for man to make peace with himself and forget his absurd dreams of universal mastery, his swaggering pose of omnipotence...
...April is young, innocent only in the sense that it has committed no crime, and full of the year's wisdom...
...Each spring, we ask no more than that, expect no more...
...That old question has had so many expedient answers that you have to be careful where you ask it...
...I began cleaning up the winter's trash under the big weeping willow out by the old milk house we use as a garage...
...It is every kind of mating there is, animal and plant, and no prurience...
...The truth of a brook, water that flows downhill, that is sweet to begin with and will keep itself clean if it has half a chance...
...And we despise the liars...
...But this year the madness of mankind, combined with the load of guilt we have been told is ours to carry until the end of time, was almost overwhelming...
...Without belief, what is there left...
...The giant reptiles, according to an eminent geneticist and a well-known astrophysicist, may have been wiped out by massive doses of radiation from the nearby explosion of bright stars...
...the cities, and the realities of politics, taxes, and war...
...The answer, of course, was as plain as the prominent nose on my own face...
...It was all good exercise, and it accomplished things that had to be done if we are to continue to live here in comfort and satisfaction...
...we who live close to the land are fortunate, as I was saying, in being in the midst of truth...
...But time after time I found myself wondering why I was doing those things instead of cutting trees, rooting out vines, dumping my trash and garbage on the riverbank and in the river, fouling springs and using brooks as sewers...
...That kind of weather is almost as good as an early spring to keep a man busy and divert his mind from mischief...
...A groundhog, of course, is only a woodchuck with a publicity agent...
...We expect to awaken to birdsong in April...
...By Groundhog Day there was enough sun to cast a visible shadow...
...April is now on the threshold, and the genesis of tomorrow, which may or may not be a better tomorrow but certainly will have all the mating and rooting and sprouting and greening that belong to the season...
...They say it interrupts their sleep, I know...
...the earth doesn't need him...
...What we make of those lives is another matter, and I would rather not go into it too deeply just when April is near at hand...
...The competition by which we live most of the time may be between man and man, but the conditions of our continued existence are between man and earth, his environment...
...We are even skeptical of the System, which turns its back on all the Aprils of the race and the world and tries to wall us off in a timeless, airless, sunless, megalopolitan synthesis dictated by the computers to fulfill our unrealized potentialities...
...Away, way back, February was a purification ceremony, remember...
...It is sex without a snicker or a leer...
...Actually, the earliest I ever saw a woodchuck out of his den was March 10...
...Incidentally, I have wondered if the early chorus of birdsong is so annoying to many urban visitors to the country simply because it interrupts their worrying...
...If one must bear the load of guilt for the whole human race, we have a damned species from the time of Cain...
...It is rather difficult to live with April, where April has a chance, and not somewhat partake of the season's elements...
...It is melt and ooze and flow, the sweet runoff of this earth's innocent waters from the uplands where trees still grow, rocks still are mossy, the land is still clean...
...It is birth...
...The truth of a woodland, where the trees can't falsify a leaf or a nut or a key, and set down the record of each year, indelible and exactly as it is, in the rings about its bole...
...April is what we think of when we are full of idealism and hope—¦ April as a month, that is, as a season in the sun and on the earth...
...But—and this may be the very nub of the matter—April, spring, change, new beginnings, the whole of it and immeasurably more, would go on and on without any watching from us...
...There have been 182 supernova explosions, they calculate, which could have killed or greatly altered animal life on earth, possibly even created the human race as a biological sport...
...Here in the valley we usually take it upon ourselves to tally the storms, measure the snowdrifts, watch the barometer, keep track of the temperature, see that the moon's phases are in order, and generally supervise such matters...
...We are fortunate—and the "we" does not include humanity as a whole...
...It is swamp maples in bloom...
...It is pussy willows turning golden with the pollen of fertility...
...But this year we let things go for two or three weeks while we were preoccupied with guilt and worry about the state of the dollar, the plight of HAL BORLAND is the distinguished writer on nature and is well-known for his editorials on nature in The New York Times...
...And with that answer I slept somewhat better, though the dawn was coming at around 5:30 by then, the migrant birds were arriving by the flock, and the early mornings echoed with vernal music...
...April has no sense of guilt, though it may have sprung from a brutal January, a February that starved bird and froze beast, and a March that flooded many an inhabited valley...
...We got back, and found that we hadn't even been missed...
...It was quite obvious that everything was in order, right down to the quickening of the color in the red osier dogwood stems...
...I won't even try to explain, but I have found the song of birds most distracting when I am trying to worry, so I give it up at least until the birds settle down a bit, get over their first frenzy of song, which seems to be a kind of homecoming celebration that lasts about three weeks...
...Put it this way: April is the end of March and February, with January still further back and out of the picture...
...Remembering, we look forward to April again...
...We always hope, then, for a sunny Groundhog Day and an early spring because they will involve us again in constructive fundamental matters, and maybe even will get our perspective back in working order...
...It is the tradition that somebody has to do this, and with such a relative few of us left on the land we have a double responsibility...
...They cannot wait, and they will not wait...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
