FEBRUARY: A Time for Purification

...I would be inclined, though, to move it on over to the week before the vernal equinox...

...To get back to something real, something substantial...

...I am not drawing judgment, understand...

...What did an adding machine know about the phases of the moon or the vernal equinox...

...In fact, it is said in some places that folk hope the groundhog will see its shadow, because that will insure only six more weeks of winter...

...Mind you, we folk up here in the hills are not complaining about our isolation or the distance to our nearest neighbor...

...What could a stock market table tell you about the call of the wild goose or the way a brook trout leaps in the Konkapot...

...but the stakes for misfeasance and malfeasance have become so large that the consequences are almost disastrous...

...The nearest I can come to the date of the change is not long after the turn of the century, when migration from farm to city was still at its midpoint...

...And that was enough of an answer for me...

...There was a rural culture, based on work and its reward, even on the virtue of work for work's sake...

...Out here in the ninety-eight-plus per cent of the country that is not yet metropolized...

...And he was only partly wrong...

...Even the wood-chucks didn't hibernate when they usually do...

...The old advice about still having half your wood and half your hay if you would come safely through to May is still quoted here and there as a greeting to February...

...I am not sure what, but certainly something different, something affirmative...

...They want truth...

...Maybe—arid I mean perhaps—we could start the world back to a state of rational thought and discrimination if we decreed that the cities must observe Februarius, the feast of purification, with all its original trappings of penance...

...But—and quite apart from the fact that those eighty-odd per cent would starve if the farms all closed down—the figures also show that a bit more than seventy per cent of all the people in the United States live on less than two per cent of the total land area...

...It is ironic that we now observe St...

...Nor are we bidding for an influx from the cities...

...He obviously had been asked that one before...

...That is when there was a clear-cut clash of two fundamental cultures...

...The old Romans knew a good deal about human frailty at first hand and figured that a time of penance and public piety, especially when combined with a bit of feasting, was good for a man's body and soul...

...Remember the old-time aphorisms...

...You might think that at least half a dozen of the urban social planners could look out of the window and see the far side of the city, see something of the open country beyond, Or even two or three of them...

...And he didn't seem to care...

...So Februarius was added to the calendar of rites and public rituals...

...That leaves some ninety-eight-plus per cent of the land as more or less open country...

...Country Editor's Boy," an autobiography of his Colorado boyhood, was published last year by Lippincott...

...I am trying to clarify...

...For the cities sink deeper and deeper into bankruptcy month by month...

...They want an end to war...

...But historically February is a rite of purification...

...It was not too much concerned with cause and effect except in terms of machinery and business...

...The ground was littered with windfall pears, which seem to potentiate their juice much like the juice of the grape...

...Honesty is the best policy...

...That could be worth while if it didn't go to extremes, if there were feasting and gaiety after the admission of sin, the purification...

...But now a good many of the old virtues can be seen back of the "new" ideas and demands of these young idealists...

...But there they sit, isolated in their artificial "reality," mistaking their own crowds for the total population of the world, believing their own neuroses are the ultimate of sanity...

...He lives in the mountain West, a transplant from New York City...

...Why is it that a man in a high-rise apartment surrounded by concrete and steel and glass, and other people equally isolated from the elements, thinks he can analyze the state of the total population and prescribe the conditions of life for all of them...

...it doesn't get ugly until late February or March...

...There are some who would be entrepreneurs, of course, who would happily sell their acres, acre by acre, to those who think of a whole acre as a miniature ranch and are willing to pay three times the going rate to buy it...

...I could go along a good part of the way with him...

...Valentine's day of sentimental nosegays on a date closely approximating the original Februarius...

...young man with a full beard and a clean shirt came to see us and discuss an idea he had for a documentary movie about the outdoors...

...I think I can always keep my family from starving...

...What's so important about money as money...

...Two cultures clashed, and by sheer weight of numbers the rural culture was overwhelmed...

...Actually, in rural terms and historically here in the hills of New England, February's start marks the middle of winter...

...Maybe we could work it into February some time between Valentine's Day and Washington's birthday...

...When it found no produce there it came into the dooryard and spent the better part of an hour under the pear tree...

...Be sure your lies will find you out...

...There are a good many things you can do with money that makes it worth getting, if you don't have to connive too much...

...They strangle themselves in their own traffic, choke themselves in their foul air, snarl themselves in strikes by taxi drivers, dock workers, garbage collectors, teachers, postal workers, even police and firemen...

...But this young man was kempt as well as literate and articulate...

...There are ways to make it better, I am sure, especially for that seventy-plus per cent of the people who are totally urbanized...

...I'll take what I can see just the way it is...

...And he works just enough to meet his expenses, those of himself and his wife and small daughter...

...At least, it was relegated to the past, to a bygone time of naive simplicity...

...And it was overlaid with a hedonistic aura, dominated by a mechanical demand for instant answers regardless of the sun, the moon, and the seasons...

...And all through January I have been looking at this beautiful outdoor world and thinking that life can be pretty good the way it is, out here in the hills...

...And there is more laughter than apprehension about the fabled groundhog...

...Winter is the time when we have enough leisure to ponder such matters, especially if we aren't trapped in the city...

...And the urban majority keeps crying about how crowded it is where they live, and about the intolerable aspects of the metropolitan life they live...

...We had one of the longest and mildest autumns I can remember, with a season of color in the woodlands that was simply spectacular...

...I saw one rooting around in the vegetable garden in mid-November, looking for a carrot or a head of lettuce...

...Not all of the generation, to be sure, but some of them, the hopeful ones...

...Public and private dishonesty certainly are not new...

...So there is a basic paradox—the complaints of the crowded, who choose to live in the midst of the crowds although they could escape by going forty or fifty miles in almost any direction...

...That was the last I saw of him...

...True, something like eighty-odd per cent of the people of this country today live in communities of 5,000 or more, which makes this an urban nation...

...What's so important about getting ahead financially...

...Political skulduggery and official chicanery are not new, either here or elsewhere...

...But as one of my less energetic and ambitious friends said just the other day, "What can you do with money that is worth all the trouble of conniving to get it...

...And he said, "By watching it," and he smiled...

...Yes, it is time for a change...

...but the moral and ethical standards which condone them as inevitable weaknesses or as diseases of the social structure are indications of something more insidious than we like to admit...

...I think," and he did pause a moment now, "I think I had to go out there and find out exactly who I am, what I am...

...But right now I leave that to the youngsters...

...I admit I was disappointed, though, when our young visitor, asked what new and shining ideas and ideals should be put in place of the tarnished old ones, said, "That has bothered me...

...A good many of them want to return to the land and live there...

...I keep wondering if, one way or another, we won't eventually get back to some approximation of the old ways...

...About a month ago an earnest (Copyright © 1971 by Hal Borland) HAL BORLAND, conservationist, essayist, and novelist, lives on a farm in northwestern Connecticut, in the foothills of the Berkshires...

...They want honesty...

...He probably was still sleeping it off when we had the first hard frost...

...There never was a good war or a bad peace...

...We got another snow, that one white and deep and beautiful—snow is always beautiful in December...

...Among his sixteen books is "Homeland: A Report from the Country," a collection of twenty of his essays in The Progressive, 1964-1968...

...He didn't even seem to be suffering or in want...

...That would find most of us with lowered resistance after enduring February, willing to admit our faults...

...After all, the story of this Twentieth Century is a pretty sorry story almost any way you look at it...

...Change is inevitable...

...And there we were, face to face with the simplest outlines of the new culture...

...If you do your part, it will feed and clothe you...

...He was, he finally admitted, twenty-nine years old —"just under the line...

...The old values didn't create lasting satisfaction, or values my generation can respect, or anything much but money...

...But that rural culture at that point encountered and began to be overwhelmed by the urban culture...

...I want to make the best pictures I am capable of making," he said...

...You can't out-talk things there, or out-smart them...

...And that urban culture was based on an industrial society, on work-saving devices, on efficiency, on cost, on functional rationality...

...The river froze over lightly, melted clear, and froze again...

...Then it was December and we got a dusting of snow...

...In the terms of the sociologists and the national welfare pundits this young man was well under the poverty line...

...Now, in these short, snowy January days, I have been thinking of what he "We have come very close to a state of ethical anarchy and moral nihilism . • •" said and wondering what happened to the old ways and what shape the new ways will take...

...You can't kid a mountain, or a wilderness area...

...And he said a good many things I hoped someone of his generation was thinking...

...And I asked, "Why did you take to the country, go out there to the western mountains...

...I know the old has to be changed, but changed for what...

...The land won't love you, but it won't hate you, either...

...He didn't hesitate...

...Most of us aren't...

...This fellow staggered in circles and wandered all over the yard before he found his den...

...Then we could go ahead with the festivities at the turn of the year, when daylight again surpasses darkness and spring is about to happen...

...It established its own time and rhythms...

...He mentioned a figure as his annual income, and I said, "How can you get by on that...

...Heretofore it has been hard to see or listen to because it was so poorly articulated or so unkempt that all one could think of was that the person at hand was surely as socially and economically illiterate as he was lingually, or that all that dirty, uncombed hair and unwashed garments and dirty neck couldn't possibly conceal a worthwhile prophet of the New Age...

...Meanwhile, here we are, still in the midst of winter, which came rather late to our particular valley...

...I had seen pear-sucking wasps so inebriated that they flew barrel-rolls and loops, but I never before saw a woodchuck absolutely stinko on pear wine...

...Of life," is the way they put it, evidently thinking theirs is the only way of life that intelligent creatures would think of living...

...But I wonder when and why the old virtues were put away—actually, smiled away, indulgently...

...A little dancing in the streets, preceded by just the right amount of penance, might clear the air in more ways than one...

...Money has become a drug on the market, what with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and even a free village psychiatric center...

...True, the fouling of our air and water and the waste of soil and other natural resources didn't start with this century...

...We have come very close to a state of ethical anarchy and moral nihilism, and nobody seemed to care enough to say more than, "Tut, tut," until these young adults began shouting, "It's time for a change...

...We might even get back to the old idea of Februarius...

...And there was a belief in time and the seasons, in ultimate cause and effect...

...But by the time it got into the almanac of months the Romans, and nearly everyone else, had decided that penance was for the birds, or at least for the savages away out there in the provinces, and the old feast of purification had become just another feast...

...Anyway, here it is almost February again, and the only major difference is that the obbligato from the cities is louder and now consists almost entirely of wailing and self-pitying sobs...

...We sat and talked for perhaps an hour, and Barbara asked him if he didn't want to get ahead for the sake of his family...

...And he said that depended on what one meant by getting ahead...

...but they certainly increased at a terrific pace...