Spring, and a Time to Listen
Borland, Hal
Spring, and a Time to Listen by HAL BORLAND There's something about the vernal equinox that takes me right back to fundamentals. It reminds me, for one thing, that the year began with March, not...
...He grew up in Colorado and now lives on a Connecticut farm in the lower Berkshires...
...We had the snowiest December and the coldest January on record...
...Conservationists complained of the fish kill, so Con Ed plugged the leaky screen and dumped 150,000 dead fish back into the river...
...We sleep content with the drone of rain on the roof...
...A tree, one of the most beautiful things on earth...
...And of the sophisticated disdain for all things rural, coupled with blind legislative insistence, largely of urban origin, that all farmland be vacated and all country folk be taken to the cities...
...And that green is the fundamental sustenance of life...
...He edited Our Natural World, a selection of writings on American land and wildlife...
...It is the catbird making sweet music and then making a travesty of his own song...
...You are receptive, or you are deaf, dumb, and blind, and an utter clod to boot...
...We keep hearing that population is the ultimate cause of all these environmental problems, and in many areas that is true...
...We didn't even try to discuss those factors...
...But a tree, a growing plant, a marvel of fiber and sap and bud and leaf and blossom...
...The technologists, the industrial chemists, the public officials, and most of the general public, when they heard us at all, said, "Nonsense...
...And high time...
...The taste of wild grape jelly...
...Of what possible importance can things like that be in a conservation program or an environmental policy...
...We named a few of them, but that was all...
...The smell of a newly plowed field in April...
...Without water we all perish, of course...
...Maybe disease will take care of that, or famine, or a cataclysmic war...
...Our committee, we knew, was going to try to work out a program to do just that, clean up the land, the air, the water, improve the environment...
...till 3:45, without one real pause for breath...
...A whip-poorwill calling from 3 a.m...
...It is the hummer at the petunias and the indigo bunting in the apple tree full of blossom, it is the scarlet tanager and the goldfinch and the cockaded cardinal...
...Small wonder the countryman cherishes his brooks and ponds and will fight to keep them and keep them clean...
...Others undoubtedly will discuss our incredible mountains of trash and garbage, our billions of tons and gallons of industrial waste, our mad population growth...
...But there were factors beyond those obvious ones which were almost impossible to codify and, as we said after discusssing the matter for ten minutes, those were the factors that make the life we live, as countrymen, worth while...
...You don't conserve anything that way, and you certainly don't improve environments...
...Give him a clean brook and he will fish for trout, a clean lake and he will catch bass for his supper...
...We turn our back on them at our peril, and we embrace the technologies that have done so much to destroy our environment...
...That's what really matters...
...The taste of spring water...
...First, a bird killed by DDT was only a symptom of far greater damage being done...
...Up here in the hills we know that we always have to earn spring by enduring January and February and sometimes March...
...It sounds ridiculous, in a way, I suppose, unless you have experienced all those things and know what they mean...
...Spring, and a Time to Listen by HAL BORLAND There's something about the vernal equinox that takes me right back to fundamentals...
...More than air and water and soil are at stake...
...What is a river...
...Perhaps that is why I said at the start that April is a better time to discuss such matters than January...
...it smacks of the esthetic, and this is a thoroughly practical matter...
...As I said just a few paragraphs back, in April you are receptive, you listen and try to understand, or you are deaf, dumb, and blind, and an utter clod to boot...
...We taste it when we take in the garden crop in September...
...It is understanding and a willingness to participate...
...The river was handy, and it would carry the dead fish away, to someone else's waterfront...
...But also a majestic river, a beautiful, remote brook, a sweet mountainside spring...
...Shade in summer, and shelter for nesting birds...
...The ways of the country are in our blood, if not in our hearts, as a nation...
...It is, yes, the whippoorwill yelping interminably in the small hours of the night and you lying awake, counting...
...His new book, Country Editor's Boy, will be published by Lippincott this spring...
...They are signs of full employment...
...It is open space between houses, between towns...
...It is that superb chorus which makes a summer dawn so memorable...
...The smell of fresh-cut hay in June...
...A deer in the home pasture at dawn...
...its mass of green, fluttering in the breeze, pattering in the rain, casting shade, making life more pleasant in the summer...
...But I have less fear of the standing-room-only prophecies than I have of the tendency to emulate the ants...
...Well over half of us were still there within the memory of men barely old enough for Social Security...
...Nobody has yet invented a better insecticide than the birds in our dooryard...
...The birds were the first songsters on earth, and quite probably they taught man to sing...
...Actually, we all once lived close to the soil, even here in America...
...And I am not talking about the traveler out to see how many miles he can cover in a weekend, or about the bird watcher out to accumulate a longer list than her neighbor down the street...
...It reminds me, for one thing, that the year began with March, not January, before the Roman emperors began tinkering with the calendar...
...Perhaps you begin to understand...
...Well, the best answer I can come up with offhand is that without such things life as we know it would be not merely stagnant but sterile...
...Bigger cities, bigger industry, bigger armament, bigger wars...
...But the land is also the only place where the fundamental green of the leaf grows...
...We slake our thirst, we cool our faces, we bathe our bodies with water...
...That's what some of us have been saying for twenty years or more...
...An environment is more than the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the people around you...
...As I say, John and I didn't discuss such matters...
...It manufactures the oxygen and it is the ultimate food of all of us, ant to elephant, horse to human being...
...The land, of course, is a commodity...
...Second, a songbird is more than a few ounces of flesh and feathers...
...I have heard some-«*e speak of "appreciation," but that is too precious a term...
...Can it be because they have forgotten so many things that should be remembered...
...Who cares about a little smog and smoke...
...I think we all know now that a city lunkhead is just as witless as a rural simpleton, and the averages don't vary much per thousand...
...But I intend to discuss and try to explain those matters here, or at least a few of them, so that when we are tempted to immerse ourselves in air and water and soil we can perhaps be aware, at least, of some of these intangibles...
...Later we found that it was far more harmful than that, but when we first pointed to the bird kill the chemical people scoffed at "the loss of a few songbirds...
...What I am talking about is receptivity...
...April, with blue sky, an early thunderstorm, a late snowstorm, cursed with March's leftovers, blessed with a foretaste of May...
...There are ways of life, and there are fundamentals of living, that also need conserving, if only as reminders of what is possible for man if he ever again is master of his own life...
...That is the land...
...Just recently New York's Consolidated Edison atomic plant up the Hudson from New York City sucked fish into its cooling system through a defective screen...
...We smell it when we plow a field in spring...
...We are prosperous, the most prosperous nation in the world, with the highest standard of living in history...
...It's much easier to listen to and believe the facts of conservation in April than in January, and the tide of environmental concern has been rising all winter...
...Water to refresh the air and the earth and all its creatures...
...Isn't it ironic," John said as we were driving to Hartford that day, "that we destroy so many comfortable, satisfying things in our environment before we decide it's time to develop a policy to save that environment...
...Birch trees in first leaf...
...His many books include Homeland: A Report from the Country, a collection of twenty of his essays in The Progressive, 1964-1968...
...Not board feet of lumber, or gallons of turpentine, or rolls of newsprint...
...Where else...
...However, here is April, bought and paid for...
...Even clean ocean water has become scarce along the continental margins, thanks to the filthiest animal alive and his cities...
...Not as an example of the antique or the historical, not Grandfather's way, but a simpler way of life possible even today without privation or hardship or flight from reality...
...Let this be the time to separate the men from the clods...
...That is a basic reason the outcry was first made against DDT and its chemical kindred—it killed birds as well as insects...
...It is the land around you, and the wind and rain and trees and grass, the sun, moon, and stars...
...Water, the wet sweetness of this earth, the mountaintop cloud made tangible, the morning dew gathered into a stream...
...This year, by the middle of February we began to think the price had been inflated a good deal more than the six per cent they concede for everything else...
...Conservation and environment are not so simple...
...Groundhog Day was dour and lowery, as usual, and spring didn't come early, also as usual...
...It is the eagle and the falcon and the soaring hawk...
...Be practical and point out that every one of our songbirds and even our game birds is a partner of the farmer who is producing food for the millions...
...And when we want to have a piece of that land to stand on, to walk upon, to know intimately, it is more than mere acquisitiveness...
...And we want some of the wild places preserved wild because that is where we can come close to the truth of life and the earth itself...
...its color in the autumn, sheer beauty that not even the most enterprising chemist has yet been able to sell as a pigment or a flavor or a food...
...Give the countryman a good supply of sweet water and he can make a home anywhere...
...Nuts in autumn for hungry squirrels...
...It reminds me that April is at hand—April, a teen-age girl with a bunch of daffodils in her hand, stars in her eyes, a taunt in her laughter, and an inclination to play practical jokes...
...Doubly glad this year...
...A few weeks ago my friend John and I went to Hartford to attend a meeting of the Governor's committee to develop an environmental policy for Connecticut...
...Water is water, isn't it...
...It makes me thankful that winter doesn't last six months instead of three...
...We see it when we cut and cure hay in June...
...And they missed the whole point—missed it twice, in fact...
...But we feel it, we are a part of it, when we go to a wilderness area at any time of the year...
...And it is fouled by every element of society and industry...
...It's as simple as that...
...It often seems that the urban majority of our population, now up around eighty per cent I believe, is afraid of the open country except when passed through safely inside a speeding automobile or high above it in a supersonic transport...
...And now it's another April, another spring, and maybe it will be easier to listen to what was said all this time...
...We marvel at the magnificence of a snowflake, a water crystal...
...Perhaps that sounds pretentious, but it really isn't...
...John taught English in an Ivy League college for some years, then quit and came up here and became a dairy farmer to get back to reality...
...And from that question we went on to discuss the comfortable, satisfying things in life the way we try to live it, the things any sensible policy would try to preserve...
...Not simple agoraphobia, I am sure...
...It is all those things and the subtleties inherent which go into your thinking and your dreams, or lack of them...
...And that is what this is all about, this sudden surge of concern over the environment...
...The look of a pasture after a snowfall...
...And conservation became a popular cause...
...A place to dump something you don't want or can't use...
...April, yellow rocket and shadblow and dandelions, pink buds on the apple trees, purple leaves on the lilacs, peepers in the twilight, robins in the dawn...
...Water is the most abundant element on earth, but clean water is becoming rare...
...But finally even they began to choke on their own fumes and gag on their own water...
...We are no longer aquatic, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this earth...
...And a beauty forever, with its haze of new leaves in the spring...
...Curb their pollution and we will all live much healthier lives...
...The blood that courses our veins is largely water...
...And not wholly a matter of thinking everyone living five miles from a metropolitan center is an oaf or a dolt...
...And what if the miracle pesticides do kill a few songbirds...
...Why...
...I am sure there are plenty of other writers and talkers to expatiate on the need for open space, breathing room, grass, trees, potable water, breathable air, and the lethal nature of biocides...
...It is fundamental with us, for we need to know and be in daily contact with the earth of our own origins...
...For years a handful of us have been warning that things were getting out of hand, but we were largely talking to a vacuum...
...Hal Borland, conservationist, essayist, and novelist, is probably best known for his distinguished nature writing...
...The sense of belonging to the land...
...And the equinox makes me glad I live where I do...
...Autumn in New England...
...It is song, for one thing...
...Afraid of open spaces and distrustful of their relatively few inhabitants...
...Certainly some way should be found to make 1980, or 2000, less of a terminal deadline for human survival...
...We merely named a few of them that seemed important in a very personal way...
...What does a little sewage and industrial waste matter in the rivers and lakes...
...Man is of that long line of red-blooded life which first appeared in the water...
...A catbird singing in a lilac bush...
...It is room for cities and suburbs to expand...
...In April the world around you, particularly here in the country, cannot be ignored...
...Let's stand on that for now...
...The cool air that flows down from a mountainside at dusk on a summer evening...
...And it is beauty, of form and color and motion...
...Water, to be used and abused...
...We listened too long to the factory whistles, thinking that more was better, and bigger was best of all...
...There are the three fundamentals, of course—the land, the air, the water...
...I am talking about understanding what is all around you, not merely counting or identifying...
...It is a building site, a field for corn or hay, a sand and gravel pit, a place to put a superhighway, or an airport, or a parking field...
...But beyond the scientific fact that a tree is the best source of oxygen on earth is the fact that a tree is a tree...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
