October And The Options
Borland, Hal
OCTOBER and the Options by Hal BORLAND Ever since the first deciduous tree •"-^ rose from the primeval ooze and there were birds and beasts to live in the woodland, there has been an an- nual...
...When man came along, in the deliberate sequence of evolution, here was what we now call October, his for the taking and enjoying...
...This is a land of trees...
...Whom do you want as friends, as companions, as a mate...
...And man, the ingenious, the indus- trious, the adaptable, is at his desk, tethered by his calendar and his clock, with only a few brief glimpses of what might be his outdoors if he only had time by the horns instead of his job by the tail...
...Trees...
...He, the educator now, had collected a couple more viewpoints...
...Every year as October approaches I wonder why, if man is as wise as he thinks he is, he is content to order his life this way: why he is content with a brief escape at a time when the most enduring thing he can acquire is a sunburn, or perhaps a case of ivy poisoning...
...HAL BORLAND, the outstanding nature writer and conservationist, lives in northwestern Connecticut, in the foot- hills of the Berkshires...
...What options...
...There was no ready answer...
...So we stood on our differences and Jason went on to apply his theory of interdependence to communities...
...the graphic and plastic arts have run through Pop art, Op art and all the other fads...
...I insisted that in every group there are those who rise above the com- mon level, and those who sink...
...We insist on October...
...Anyone can have July for vacations...
...His new book, "Borland Country," will be published by Lippincott this month...
...Pesticide salesmen or foresters to whom a tree is only so many board feet of lumber shout, "The insects are de- stroying the woodlands...
...Railpax has ended rail transport except between urban cen- ters...
...How about communication, such as transportation and the transmission of messages...
...But I did wonder how many of the basic options (choices) are offered to the young people now in college...
...So we accept this one, in October, and know that the Hunter's Moon will come on November 2 this year...
...Field corn tasseled out early and was somewhat stunted by the drouth, but the ears came on as usual and matured well...
...And that is about where we came out...
...Automobiles, tractors, gas- oline, oil...
...Among his books are "Country Editor's Boy" and "Hill Country Harvest...
...No, even now I can see no such in- terdependence...
...What does the city send to the country that the country- man couldn't live without...
...Flickers nest in their cavities and robins nest in their upper crotches...
...And, over the years, for the "wreckage" of Germany, for Poland, for the dis- placed Arabs, for Mao Tse-tung, for the murders of John and Robert Ken- nedy and Martin Luther King, for Vietnam, for George Wallace, for un- employment...
...Then some im- patient innovator invented the calen- dar, the clock, and the summer vacation...
...The mails still run, at twice the price and half the speed they did twenty-five years ago...
...And I am sure Jason would agree on that option...
...Bucks are in the thicket...
...Bears are fattening on mast and summer-camp garbage...
...And my wife Barbara, who knows a great deal about the early English colonies here, agreed and cited examples...
...Meanwhile we will have Indian Summer and Squaw Winter and maybe Indian Summer again...
...Summer isn't really a good time for a vacation...
...Life would be some- what narrower, but perhaps it would be even deeper, rooted more firmly in reality...
...And perhaps even, "Will you take your vacation in July or October...
...The Harvest Moon is late this year...
...they still grow a good deal of what they eat...
...We have periodic scourges of gypsy moths and linden loopers and now one called the sad- dled prominent...
...Fox- es stalk rabbits, and rabbits are free and whimsical as the morning breeze...
...There are limits to indi- vidual responsibility, after all, as L had to say to Jason...
...The farmer's harvest is largely in, his hasty time at an end...
...He was visiting friends of ours and we (Copyright © 1971 by Hal Borland) asked him over one afternoon...
...He is one of those people who collect view- points, who has an open mind backed up with a firm viewpoint of his own...
...And Septem- ber comes, and then early October, and together, as usual, they provide one of the great, predictable glories of the year...
...Isn't it time," I finally asked, "to let up on the mea culpa theme and admit that people are people...
...Well, the regional and national news blackout would de- prive the countryman of word about war, crime, disaster, economic trends in the markets, big industry, politics, taxes, strikes, and fashions...
...We've had gypsy moths here a hundred years, and New Eng- land has more woodland today than it had when they arrived...
...Power...
...We got rain at the end of July and in early August and later sweet corn was as good as, maybe even better than, usual...
...But when it came to common responsibility for the success of those options of his, we parted com- pany...
...Well, such as these: What do you want to do with your life...
...And that isn't a matter of choice...
...We had light frost, as usual, in mid- September, and we expect hard frost with the Harvest Moon...
...The city, I said, is dependent on the country, but not the other way round...
...But even as you are wiping your eyes, remember the lines written many years ago by Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson: "O suns and skies and clouds of June, / And flowers of June together, / Ye cannot rival for one hour / October's bright blue weather...
...Maybe not in his customary manner, but he can live," I said...
...They are scarred and knot-holed and beloved of all woodpeckers and nuthatches and brown creepers...
...with sky-blue lakes, surrounded by all those trees and flowers, and old, mellowed mountains with white pine and hemlock—well, October is something we take time to see and know intimately...
...If you have children, how many...
...Jason agreed, but with reservations...
...Autumn, which we Americans more often call Fall...
...Spray, spray, spray...
...If he exercised his rightful options, which my friend Ja- son was talking about the other day, he would go, not in midsummer, but in October, when good things abound for man's enjoyment...
...Just a few weeks ago our Congress even decided that we all are responsible for the bumbling, fumbling mismanagement of Lockheed and must pay for it to the tune of a quar- ter of a billion dollars...
...For generations farmers processed their own foods and could do it again...
...The sec- ond cutting was short, but fortunate farmers got a third cutting of alfalfa after the late rains...
...Most of the orchard was cut and turned to pasture before we bought this place twenty years ago, but those old trees were kept along the pasture fence-line...
...We wouldn't starve, we wouldn't freeze, we certainly wouldn't die of boredom...
...But it hurts to see them maimed...
...The telephones still work, far better in the country than in the cities, by all report...
...Rural people," he said, "and urban people are wholly interdependent...
...Oh, it's all right as a time to get away from the tribulations of a job, but a vacation should be more than an escape...
...music includes the opera, probably the least patronized of all art forms, and symphonic music, a close second to opera, and Jazz, Jive, Coun- try, Bluegrass, and Rock...
...And again we were at odds...
...How about the intangibles, news, lit- erature, the arts...
...by HAL BORLAND Ducks are on the wing, grouse and pheasants are in the covert...
...Eventually, even in the world of 1980, that option probably will be there...
...That some will cheat and steal and maim and murder and should be locked up, and some will give and help and build and create and should be praised, but not too much...
...There was a time when almost everyone who pre- tended to deep thought declared, "We are all responsible for Nagasaki and the Bomb and the Cold War...
...But cut the city-to- country line and the countryman still can live almost indefinitely...
...Jason is a charming gentleman who has spent most of his years dealing with people's social and spiritual prob- lems and now is in education...
...But this year we still have such air, and such a sky, and such trees, and this October will be very special with golden sugar maples and red swamp maples and yellow birches and blue-green ashes and burgundy and tan and purple oaks...
...The rains came with their usual bombardment of thun- der and with hearty gusts of wind...
...For weeks afterward that pasture was so neat and clipped it looked like a vast annex to the dooryard lawn...
...Processed foods...
...He doesn't call himself a sociologist, but his approach is primarily sociological...
...Responsible, it sometimes seemed, for every mean, vicious, cruel, thoughtless or careless act of the whole human race...
...After that there would be hardship, probably, but not insur- mountable problems...
...The air lines go from city to city...
...That's what one always is aware of here, in autumn...
...Who are you...
...Wednesday, December 22...
...Shed a tear for him...
...You either accept it and go out and participate, or you reject and deny it...
...And soon there are the blue October sky and the clean, sweet October air—if you are sufficiently out of the urban area and have no chem- ical plant or refinery or steel mill or open pit mine in your backyard...
...It will continue to be autumn, officially, till the winter solstice at 7:24 A.M...
...There is, I insisted, a limit to individual respon- sibility...
...We had a drouth in July and the first planting of sweet corn was rather tasteless...
...Gut off the line of supply from country to city for forty-eight hours and the city be- gins to starve...
...And, to get back to Jason and our discussion, we couldn't quite accept his further suggestion that the individ- ual is responsible for the misfits and mistakes of society at large...
...We smooth and anoint their wounds and hope they will endure a few more years...
...Freed of so much field work, the farmer could fall back on his own domestic animals and his garden and survive, live quite well, in fact...
...The Federally funded superhighways link the cities, not city to country...
...He wanted options for everyone, which no decent person can dispute, though I happen to prefer the word "choices...
...And November, and hard frost, and December and first snow, if we are lucky enough not to have it in November...
...The spray-boys "eliminated" them in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, and here they are again, ready to "eliminate" them once more...
...It doesn't occur till October 4. Some of us countrymen think the Harvest Moon shouldn't occur in October, but we generally agree that you shouldn't have the Harvest Moon before Sep- tember 15...
...And it takes a lot of self- control to refrain from calling them idiots and demanding if they can't re- member what happened eight years ago, and sixteen years ago, since the gypsy moth has an eight-year cycle, explosion to explosion...
...Rain on their leaves, a heavy crop of fruit, and the wind brought down sev- eral good-size limbs from our old ap- ple trees...
...We had ripe tomatoes the first week in August, practically on sched- ule...
...If you inherit money, or earn a great deal, what are you going to do with it...
...What kind of world do you want to live in, an urban condominium, a slum flophouse, a rural commune, a village, or on a farm...
...The whine and bite of winter are still in the distance, over the hill and beyond the horizon...
...As for the arts, the theatre has now degenerated into a pornographic peep-show...
...Over the centuries and the ages, man made autumn his own, so far as he can real- ly possess any season...
...Up here they want to gut a mountain and drown a valley for a pump-storage power plant, and we can't depend on the power commissioners to talk sense or listen to reason if it isn't expressed in kilowatts...
...It is autumn now, by the stars...
...We keep those trees for the birds and for their blossoms in May, and we leave most of their fruit for the birds and the beasts, the wasps and the worms...
...The telegraph system has been virtually embalmed...
...it is a matter of who you are, and where you are...
...Most of the electric power now is gen- erated in rural plants, transmitted to the cities to supplement their own in- adequate supplies...
...Those trees are the remnant of an old orchard and must be seventy years old...
...with asters by the billion and gentians by the hun- dred, sometimes, and bouncing Bet at all our roadsides...
...But for years we have been lectured about our individual culpabil- ity by the breast-beaters...
...That leaves the arts of living, which include the drug scene, the cop-out and the new morality...
...If he hasn't enough sense even to look out the window, let him go on vacation in July, and get on with your own enjoyment of life and autumn...
...Present supplies would last for a while...
...OCTOBER and the Options by Hal BORLAND Ever since the first deciduous tree •"-^ rose from the primeval ooze and there were birds and beasts to live in the woodland, there has been an an- nual time of ripeness and abundance and leaf-fall...
...So we try to keep calm while the trees put out new leaves...
...The first cutting of hay was heavy, thanks to a wet May...
...So forget all the rest of it for a moment and get down to October, 1971, which calls for no such decision...
...The grass in our pastures grew so fast that we kept the cows off the home pasture till mid-June and cut a good crop of grass hay off it...
...Countrymen could live without the cities...
...They chew the leaves, they defoliate the oaks particularly, and someone always rings the alarm...
...Some of those people, he said, a good many of them, in fact, just didn't have the options they should have had...
...He believes the individual can best ex- press himself in terms of the commu- nity, that most of his options should be within that framework...
...What are you going to do, and do with, tomorrow...
...What kind of world do you want them to inherit, a vast metrop- olis, a huge slum, a varied country- side, a green world of clean, flowing water, or a stripped, paved, dammed world of ant-hill barrenness and effi- ciency...
...I couldn't wholly agree...
Vol. 35 • August 1971 • No. 10
