SUMMER A Time for Perspective

...I am not sure what you mean by the term 'spiritually underprivileged.' I had thought spirituality was beyond the reach of outside restraints...

...We got the composite picture and we came home...

...And there are a hundred and one chores about the house and outbuildings, from unclogging downspouts to mending roofs, from repairing windows and putting up screens to airing out attics and lofts...

...And most of our conclusions came quite close to what has been said so often the past few years that it has become cliche: It's a big country with lots of open space...

...I suppose that is utterly parochial, but it is the truth...

...The community dumps and automobile graveyards are steadily engulfing all the gullies and brushy hollows in sight...

...Respect for those around us, for their ideas and beliefs...

...And that, fundamentally, is what is most disturbing about the whole situation now...

...Now we have graduated to the point of making motel reservations ahead, one stop at a time...

...and in nature's big, eternal spans that is only one or two deep breaths...

...And I wished that more of those in power and those aspiring to leadership had a bit more perspective and better judgment...

...But the chances of finding fundamental truth, the probability of reaching some point of perspective, are better away from the crowds...

...The rootless discontents have since time immemorial scorned the ones who put down roots and live close to the land...

...Every jet trails its smoke plume, more air pollution than an eastern countyful of cars...

...And here it is summer again, and despite all the uproar by human beings the season follows its own pattern...

...I don't think those truths have to be shouted...

...I know that for a week or more after we got home there wasn't time to worry about the troubles and tensions that had been drummed at us in print, on the air, and even in person all - the time we were away...

...Not all the landsmen, to be sure...

...Somewhere along the way we have lost sight of the one quality that might yet be our salvation...

...And I said, "We want to spend time, not save it...

...I know that sounds corny, or square, or whatever you wish to use as the scornful word...

...We could listen to the news and read the details with growing perspective...

...The lie, perfidy, injustice, disloyalty, the opposites of the whole list...

...SUMMER A Time for Perspective by HAL BORLAND We had a late spring and it came with a rush and too much heat...

...Maybe we are approaching the end of the pendulum's swing...

...I have said before and say again that the rural lunkhead is as witless as the city dolt...

...And I do feel that man has increasingly alienated himself from his natural environment and thus robbed himself of something precious, something that might give him a better perspective on the universe and his place in it...

...Man has come a long way in a brief time, geologically speaking...

...aphids in the garden, green beans by the peck, an oriole in the maple across the road, and a brown thrasher singing like mad every evening...

...A new book, "Country Editor's Boy," has just been published by Lippincott...

...And that leads right back to where we were at the start—to the place where I find permanence and predictability, where there is something to believe in and rely on...

...Every big airport is the center of a spreading pall of fumes...

...And everywhere we went, most markedly in the cities, there was an air of tension and hostility, even in places where only ten years ago there was an air of well-being...

...Everything came at once, grape hyacinths and tulips, daffodils and apple blossoms and shadblow and dogwood...

...They have called such people backward and conservative and behind the times...

...Fantastic...

...I wonder how many of our troubles can be traced to the herd instinct as opposed to the home instinct...

...He has been here, according to the anthropologists, less than two million years...

...But if there is such a thing as true radicalism—and the radical is the one who gets down to the root of the matter, right out of old Latin—it is the man on the soil...

...And if man's unique brain should get control of his primitive emotions it could make the next million years incredibly brilliant and ultimately satisfying...

...With one faction denouncing the common standards of personal and community life and trying to do away with them, and with a large faction of those in power paying lip service but violating those standards with an air of piety and self-righteousness, there isn't much encouragement for those out in the middle, who are neither openly rebellious nor expediently deceitful...

...Something has to be put in their place...

...We felt this in hotels, restaurants, television studios, at filling stations, motels, even at wayside markets...

...One day there was only a green haze in the treetops, and two days later the woodland was full of leaves, pastel leaves that were yellow and pink as well as all shades of green...

...I hoped I was giving heart and encouragement to those who might be spiritually underdeveloped or lost in the human wilderness...

...There were conclusions, too, that arose from today's immediate situations: You can travel from city to city simply by aiming at one of the dirty clouds on the horizon...

...When we said we were going various friends said, "It's only a short flight...

...And except for the small Colorado town where I grew up and one segment of Denver which we saw close-up and one mountain road that we traveled by sheer chance one afternoon, there wasn't another place in all that journey which gave us such a sense of relief, of basic certainty, as our own rural valley...

...And this lack of memory, or whatever you wish to call it, is responsible for a great many problems that some people insist must be solved by noon tomorrow and some other people insist cannot ever be solved because we have to spend so much in Vietnam and on the space program...

...Up there in the sky those jets are weaving a parasol of exhaust fumes that are going to choke us all to death, or smother us, or freeze us to death, depending on which atmospheric theory you choose...

...It isn't so much a matter of humility as of plain common sense...

...Fields and gardens have to be plowed and seed has to be planted if there are going to be any crops...

...As we did the seasonal chores and began to catch up, the tensions of the trip began to ease away...

...Also on the latest pronouncement from Washington, defending war, requesting more billions for armament, and clearly implying that dissent is virtually equivalent to rebellion...

...But what would the dissenters put in the place of the old virtues...

...And we know that trees grow, grass spreads over the bare places, daisies and buttercups bloom, and maple leaves turn yellow and red in the autumn without one bit of human help...

...Not only racial tensions, though they were unmistakable, but interclass and even interpersonal tensions that can be described only as the jitters, an atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension, dread of trouble without any clear notion of where it may come from or when...

...There have been days, now and then the past few weeks, when we resolved to stay as close to the land as we could without actually lying on our bellies Out in the home pasture...

...and you might have thought I had said by ox-cart...

...There is a kind of permanence and predictability here on the land that are not common commodities elsewhere...

...HAL BORLAND, conservationist, essayist, and novelist, is probably best known for his distinguished nature writing...

...We have found that life proceeds on a fairly even keel as long as you respect the land, abide by the seasons, and don't try to tell your neighbor how to run his household...

...That is respect...

...Pasture grass grew so fast the cows couldn't keep up with it...

...He has to fight his own greed and arrogance and plain, everyday stupidity every step of the way...

...We aren't exactly humble about it, but we do smile when we hear talk about man's obligation to run the world...

...Too many farms are being abandoned or converted into suburbs, supermarket areas, or industrial "parks...

...Respect for self, for what one says and does and is...

...I defy anyone to live intimately with spring, to be witness at the rebirth of the green world, and still think that man owns the earth...

...His many books (sixteen in print) include "Homeland: A Report from the Country," a collection of twenty of his essays in The Progressive, 1964-1968...

...In that context we had a somewhat different perspective on the latest student strike and the most recent urban uprising and police and militia reaction...

...We are trying to keep up with it, but not to outrace it or in any way supervise it...

...Hot afternoons and long moonlit nights and fireflies in the grass...

...And we remembered what an exasperating capacity man has for getting into desperate trouble before he finds, or is willing to accept, the sometimes simple but nearly always painful solutions...

...Nature gets ahead of you, especially in the spring...

...Fences need mending...

...We were too busy just trying to catch up with ourselves and the season...

...Among other things, I wrote to him that "I believe there are plenty of other belligerents around, and I hope there is room for a calm, quiet voice reaching for big truths...

...Over the years I have logged well beyond half a million miles exploring this country, and Barbara and I have crossed and crisscrossed it a score of times, always by car...

...I find that to a rather large degree they apply to the situation today, when there is so much screaming, so much defiance, so many threats, and so many actions of reprisal...

...The thing that puzzles and challenges me," he wrote, "is your seeming detachment from social problems...

...We want to see the country again...

...Dooryards have to be cleared of the winter's litter...

...When you live on the land you can't just drop three or four weeks out of the year and expect everything to go on as usual...

...Despite the rush of the throughways, the bypasses, the city traffic when we went into the cities, the clutter and grime of so many small (Copyright ® 1970 by Hal Borland) towns we went out of our way to visit—or maybe because of all this— we got a composite picture...

...One reason, of course, is that this is home, the place where the roots have been put down, where our feet know the paths, and our eyes know every tree on the hillside...

...I started with a model T and a bedroll, graduated to a tent, put in my time as a cabin-camper, all that, of course, well before the interstate throughways...

...He is there at the source, and that is where he gets his meanings, not from airy speculation but from experience and first-hand observation...

...You can't cancel out one entire set of standards and leave a vacuum...

...I miss a straightfrom-the-shoulder belligerency in your writing...

...He wrote to take me to task...

...And we did...

...Why can't we all take the time to sit in the shade, now and then, and think how lucky we are to be human and to have this earth to live on...

...And at this moment it looks like a hot summer in all ways...

...Grass has to be mowed...

...But if he doesn't wipe himself out with some colossal mistake or in a burst of incredibly reckless anger, nature may yet catch up with her biological accident or put an end to her experiment...

...And I must say again that man's prime troubles really are man-made...

...She has done it with many another species, and she could clear the planet of man with no more to-do than attended the passing of the dinosauria...

...Anyway, we wanted to spend some time, as I said, and see the country again, get a better picture than we could get from daily newspapers, weekly magazines, radio, and television...

...We made a long trip in April, out to Colorado, the land of my beginnings...

...But even if that should happen, it probably still leaves at least one of nature's long breaths, say another million years, of grace...

...To the thought that man, as a species, probably was either one of nature's accidents or a whimsical experiment to begin with...

...Out here we know who didn't make the hills, even if we aren't altogether positive who did...

...despite all the uproar by human beings the season follows its own pattern...

...Summer...

...But I do wonder how much of the uncertainty and apprehension of today comes from rootlessness...

...Those who believe in standards, not as a code but as a way of life and thought and action...

...Respect for truth and integrity and all those old virtues, trite as it may seem...

...I said we weren't flying...

...Aware of my own reaction, I was reminded of an exchange I had with a brilliant, dedicated man a few years ago...

...Pastures and woodlots pretty well take care of themselves, but even they need personal inspection...

...After the first speechless gasp, the wonder that anyone could, or would, travel all that distance by car when there were such things as jets, someone said, "But by air you would save so much time...

...I feel a lack of concern for the spiritually underprivileged...

...Respect for what we still have no better name for than "justice...

...The political factors as well as the ecological ones and the academic and sociological ones, all seem to point that way...

...There are things one can believe in and rely on, and belief and reliance are, I am sure, more important now than urbanity or skepticism or what I have heard called disillusioned realism...

...You write as though people alienated themselves from the prime natural forces, whereas it appears to me that they are isolated willy-nilly...

...How, they ask, can there be purpose or true leadership without standards, without respect for truth and justice and ideas and belief in mankind...

...And that, of course, led to further speculation...

...Pumps and pipelines have to be checked and winter damage repaired...

...by late May they stood belly-deep and sated in the green surf...

...The cities are dirty and cluttered and harried by people-problems...

...It wasn't an especially fruitful exchange, but when I look back over my own words now I find that I can still subscribe to them...

...That's one name for it, at least...

...We keep forgetting that the rivers weren't all made by the Army's Corps of Engineers and that the hills weren't piled up by a fleet of bulldozers...

...The rivers are still so dirty you can smell them through the fumes of the throughways...

...We were going by car...