Year's End

...Our lakes are cesspools...

...But it also happens to be totting-up time, and the totals don't make really pleasant reading...

...And from that inevitably comes the whole idea of human pride and arrogance, even to the point of religious faith...

...Who can even find two snowflakes alike...

...The budget was top news, and Peter said, "If I budgeted my farm outlay the way they do in Washington, I would spend sixty cents of every dollar for DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, and all the other rankly poisonous biocides...

...This city is doomed...

...But who can count the snowflakes...

...Not even a king-sized sachet spray on your rooftop can sweeten the smog over American cities...

...I am constantly made aware, as I never would be in the concrete cells and canyons, that I am but a part of all this life, not even a major part...

...Despite all the to-do and the big talk, when the votes were taken we turned out to be still far over our heads in the swamp of war and weapons, with outlays for everything from rockets to bombs to poisoned bullets enough and germs and lethal gas enough to kill everybody on (Copyright © by Hal Borland, 1969) earth and all their progeny for the next quarter century...

...And that is why a good many of us country folk insist on having fireplaces or Franklin stoves...

...A part of the life that partakes...

...I said I wasn't in the real estate business, and he said, "If I have to stay here another month I'll go stark, raving mad...

...Fortunately, the conversation was switched to the Moratorium and then to semantics, and we were on relatively safe ground...

...When the budget figures finally were revealed I happened to stop for a few minutes to talk to my friend Peter, who runs a farm that has been in his family since the early 1800s...

...It represents his mastery over a basic component of the elements, fire itself...

...All this, of course, to defend my farm, my crops and livestock, and me from cutworms, cabbage worms, slugs, aphids, gall flies, mildew, wasps, and mosquitoes...

...It is fire more or less under man's control...

...It certainly does no harm...

...Harriet Van Horne Syndicated Column...

...To air, soil, water, and—let's go back to the ancient Greeks—fire...

...So I came home and started on that roof and was almost half through when Barbara called from the house that there was a long distance phone call for me...

...and slammed the phone with a bang that made my whole head ring...

...But still you are only a part of life, 'a minor part...

...And just to make sure, I also would buy fifteen or twenty shotguns and a hundred cases of shells—to shoot mosquitoes and wasps just in case the other methods failed...

...We carry placards demanding "peace," and we live in one of the most brutalized eras of modern times...

...second, man should be boss of the fire, not the other way round...

...There is the green leaf that cleanses and renews the air he must breathe to remain alive...

...I see the great constellations brighten in the darkening sky, Ursa Major and Orion and Taurus and Pegasus...

...You see what is around you...

...he cried...

...She is Old New England, and I was born out where John Brown's Border Ruffians burned and pillaged the whole Kansas"There is truth beyond technology, validity beyond any statute law . . ." Nebraska-Missouri countryside before the Civil War...

...Nevertheless, though speech was man's greatest invention, mastery of fire was his greatest conquest...

...Mad old John was born not thirty miles from where we sat at the table...

...With fire his servant, he could carry warmth from place to place, create his own climate, become the only creature independent of the weather...

...I cannot avoid the eternal rhythms...

...We sanctify education and overflow our colleges—and we accede to the demands of plumbers and carpenters for $8 and $9 an hour...

...But a quiet little lady across the table said to me with a smile, "You are talking sedition...

...Then someone put the stove in the cellar and cut a hole in the floor to let the heat and dust come upstairs...

...Mars may have looked bleak and ugly in those rocket photos, but just take a look at us...

...We destroy our countryside to create urban sprawls that need that very countryside to survive...

...I don't know whether we simply are numbed by the word "billion" or what, but when the Defense Department people and their partisans say, "Gimme...

...No wonder Ken was going mad down there in the city, where every emotion can infect 8,000,000 people even more swiftly than an epidemic of disease...

...That was Progress...

...And for all the new, secret ones I could find or think up, including every germ in the book if it might kill a bug or a beast...

...I have faith in the integrity not of the sun or of the earth and its turning, but of something that adds up to order and continuity among the suns and all their planets and satellites...

...This is the end of another calendar year, and the next thing we know we will be shouting, "Happy New Year...

...No doubt we could fight another...

...I go outside in the first light of day and I find a world of integrity, of sunrise and daylight and even in the winter, as now, of trees that stand firm against the storms...

...This would be difficult to believe if I were always in the midst of a crowd, always being talked to, shouted at, screamed at, drummed at, nudged, •elbowed, pushed, shoved, crowded, jammed by other human beings...

...What, for that matter, is a snowflake, and why should a drop of moisture falling from a cloud become a six-fold crystal of incredible beauty...

...The other evening at an informal dinner party I suggested this and even proposed that the United States be divided into at least four independent, regional areas, each with its own government...

...Even up here in the relative calm of the countryside there were prickly topics...

...It adds up to that false god, Efficiency, and that dubious line of change called Progress...

...I step outdoors at evening and I see the evening star, which happens to be Mars just now...

...We gave up the breech clout and the bearskin robe long ago, and we put aside the stone axe...

...a box and made a stove...

...But before I let him get me completely bogged down in that financial mire I said I had to get along home and put new roofing paper on the old brooder house I use for a tool shed, it being one of the few warm, sunny days we were having just then...

...We even keep hoping that some day some wise President will order a few fireplaces built in the Pentagon and buy a few cords of wood just to remind some of the people there that a man, if he really tries, can still be master of the flame...

...But he didn't even seem to hear...

...Perhaps it is not a unique event, but I know of no other one comparable...

...Stars can be counted...

...but that time now seems irreversibly past...

...I asked, "What else is new...

...Eventually someone put the fire into HAL BORLAND, naturalist, essayist, and novelist, writes a seasonal essay every three months for The Progressive from his Connecticut farm in the lower Berk-shires...

...I find the substance of life uncorrupted, which will renew itself in a few more months, with bud and leaf and blossom, and will grow and mature and ripen, in the eternal sequence...

...From man's mastery of himself to the blind, senseless dictation of the computer...

...I said, "Sorry, we're fresh out of homesteads...

...There is the source of his food, his water, without which he perishes...

...This is a strange, unhappy way to be totting up, but even here—perhaps especially here, in front of that open fire—the sum of human activity doesn't build what one could call a structure of granite truth and enduring virtue...

...And we are spending more on war and weapons of war today than ever before in history...

...Until the retired legislator said that you can no longer pin down even such a simple, obvious word as "peace...

...Then he brought fire into his house, and when the smoke got too thick he invented a chimney and a fireplace...

...Of course we are die-hards, and all that, up here in the hills, but we can count up to ten and we know percentages even in those astronomical totals of the national budget...

...The truths of science are too often fragmented by a technology that seems to have no thought of the consequences of its decisions...

...Seeing the look in her eye, I didn't carry the idea one inch farther...

...They can't be governed...

...Ken probably was right...

...And if it happens to be an evening of snowfall instead of starlight, I am aware of infinity, in shapes and numbers, that makes life an even greater mystery than does my sight of the winter stars...

...That is what can be heard in the voice of the wind, where there are trees and woodlands, where there are hills and fertile valleys...

...Some Kiss!' Now that the learned astronomers have assured us that ours is the only green and pleasant world in all the solar system, we ought to smarten up and start tending our greenery...

...Among his other books are "Countryman: A Summary of Belief" and "When the Legends Die...

...Look," he said tensely, "you've got to find me a place up there in the country...

...I cannot even escape them, for my own breathing, my own pulse, are a part of the infinitely complex rhythms of this universe...

...There each man travels largely alone...

...Boondocks...

...But it is the simpler aspects of the open fire that appeal to me...

...Twenty of his essays in these pages, 1964-1968, have been published by Lippincott in a book, "Homeland: A Report from the Country...

...and hoping something comes of it...

...I didn't say what a short trip that would be...

...Give me credit...

...There in the winter evening I stand, facing the west, still with its afterglow of sunset, very faint now, and I think of the reliance I put on the return of that sun tomorrow...

...And when I go that far I have only one resource to turn to for any reassurance whatever—the earth, the universe, and the basic materials of life...

...Our verdant, vibrant world with its bustling people is becoming a vast, rotating slum...

...But it seems impossible that any man could fail to travel along that path some time and for some distance...

...Animals and people may disappear, too...

...And worst of all, the modern furnace linked electricity and liquid fuel in a train of fire that eventually led to the Pentagon, to Los Alamos, and to the madness of MIRV...

...If we don't, something more than dogwood trees and potato patches will vanish...

...Your environment occupies your eyes and your thoughts...

...Some kiss...

...Does anyone remember when we dropped the War Department and replaced it with a Department of Defense...

...From the open fire to the furnace to the atomic pile, for exampie...

...It turned out to be from an acquaintance in the city who until recently called me Mr...

...Well, it was in 1947, twenty-two years ago...

...And I think how it has sustained mankind, both literally and figuratively, since the emergence from the mists several million years ago...

...and he screamed, "You don't give a damn...

...When I face such questions and the absolute absence of answers I am forced to a degree of humility that probably is good for the perspective...

...Sometimes it seems that the whole human race is fundamentally irrational, which may yet prove to be true...

...It also was fire that acted as though it had some kind of brain of its own...

...And that is the summarizing beyond the totting-up, which is so dominated by human follies and senseless violences...

...The Cuyahoga and Buffalo rivers have been declared fire hazards...

...I am, therefore, whether I wish to be or not, a part of life, of the throbbing vitality that is warmblooded, cold-blooded life and that is green life and teeming life and crawling, creeping, flying, wriggling life...

...I see the winter sun cutting its abbreviated arc in the sky and know by watching shadows that the turn has passed, that the nadir of the year has been safely traversed and from now on there will be a few minutes more daylight each day until the summer solstice next June...

...You might try Alaska...

...I didn't argue...

...At noontime I can go out with the assurance of midday, of a morning complete and yet only a part of the day entire, with an afternoon and a night assured...

...I went back to my roofing...

...I sensed hackles rising here and there even over that, and only the fact that everyone there was "a gentleman," as our hostess said the next day, prevented bitter words and recriminations...

...That is what is there in the tamed flames of the open fire now, on this year-end night at the end of the sixth decade of the Twentieth Century A.D...

...Especially Efficiency as represented by a furnace, which has warped more dreams, blighted more friendships, and smothered more human impulses than anything I know except amateur psychiatry...

...I am aware of the universe, somewhat aware of the insignificance of the earth in comparison, and yet also sensing a pride that this earth somehow became the dwelling place of my kind of life, of life that I can understand somewhat...

...When they attached a thermostat and switched to fuel oil—fire out of sight in a box, fuel that didn't have to be sawed or shoveled, heat that started and stopped automatically— that was Efficiency...

...Peace has become as ambiguous as war...

...And there I hesitate, being fundamentally a pantheist in a world of creeds and total lack of faith...

...And again, I feel that I and all my own kind are a part of that order and continuity, that system or whatever you wish to call it...

...Not to warm the house, but to keep two things clear in our minds: First, Efficiency is not all...

...The economist said, "Right...

...That of course would leave only forty cents of his dollar to pay for food, clothing, repairs to his house, insurance, doctor bills, interest on his loan at the bank, his two hired hands and, of course, if there was anything at all left, for seed and fertilizer to plant and raise the crops that keep the farm going...

...It becomes your world, all the world you know...

...But there it is, that environment, that one source, the very earth of my origins, of life's origin...

...We bury ourselves under trash and garbage and continue to foster an economy largely based on a philosophy of use-once-and-throw-away...

...There is truth beyond technology, validity beyond any statute law, reality beyond all art or invention...

...Tons of fish are killed each month by DDT and the detritus of industry...

...All the cities are...

...They all are dying or committing suicide...

...A retired economist and a former state legislator, who was squeezed out of office by the one man-one vote mandate, both thought it was an inspired idea...

...We foul the air we breathe and the water we drink and excuse the fouling in the name of Progress and Prosperity...

...But we won't forego the open fire...

...There are times when this whole country seems ungovernable, with its complexity of problems and the maze of cross-purposes, regional, industrial, rural, urban, young and old, rich and poor...

...For a long time it represented man's control over himself, too...

...And remember that ardent lover who asked "only to kiss the air that lately kissed thee...

...It figured, right down to the sixty per cent...

...One hundred toxicants and pollutants have been identified in the air we breathe every day...

...they get billions the way the kids got cheap candy on Halloween, by the handful...

...And she added, "We fought one war to preserve the Union...

...Faced with the grim realities of a world-wide population explosion, our medical research has too often found means of prolonging useless life and saving physically or mentally inadequate infants...