MAY: The Real Greening
Borland, Hal
MAY: The Real Greening by HAL BORLAND May Day used to be a springtime festival, a time to celebrate love and life and nature's vernal wonders. Then it was taken over by jackboot crusaders and made...
...We need May Day in the old, hopeful sense, whether that is rational and reasonable or not...
...And in reaching that point I begin to wonder again about the human predicament...
...We have them here in the Berkshires now, a few, since they began moving north ten or twelve years ago...
...and that is what is happening right now...
...A celebration of life and love and nature's vernal miracles...
...Well, habit is an acquired behavior pattern, and tradition is a cultural continuity...
...A particularly difficult situation at any time, but almost intolerable at that time of year when the outdoor world, the world of ultimate reality, is alive with new beginnings and old continuities, all of them inviting to a receptive man...
...And those meanings of May Day, the occasion for celebration of the season, and the desperate summons for help—are they typical of two current viewpoints, or are they an example of changing habits and traditions...
...Maybe we should move Washington out into the great Midlands...
...That is the greening of America, the real greening...
...Now there seems to be some acceptance of traditions, of the cultural continuity...
...HAL BORLAND, conservationist, essayist, and novelist, lives on a farm in northwestern Connecticut...
...Then it was taken over by jackboot crusaders and made an international Labor Day with truculent overtones...
...Luck and hard work...
...It's not that simple, no matter which "consciousness" you believe in, if any...
...Those who have thought things through, who challenge the urban-technology tradition and the military-behavior habit...
...Back of it are the despoil-ers, all of them—the oil-spillers, the strip-miners, the park-exploiters, the dam-builders, the forest-strippers...
...I thought of the coming May Day this morning, first of all in this third sense—man surely is beleaguered, in desperate need of help to save him from his own follies...
...We have a few messes of boiled dandelion greens, the best blood-toners I know...
...I waken in the night and hear them and wonder if what they say makes the brook chuckle as it does...
...On the willows, the catkins have given way to yellowish-green leaves on all the limber withes...
...Barbara's lilies of the valley under the pear tree are still in tight bud, so yesterday I went up to the edge of the woods and picked a handful of Canada Mayflowers, which some mistakenly call wild lilies of the valley...
...And it is this recognition of tradition, of origins, no matter how dim that recognition may be, that is important now...
...It is nettles and wild onions and chickweed and quack grass, top...
...It is grass in the pastures and the meadows, and on the riverbanks and at the roadsides...
...It is going to be sugar maples tapped in March, blooming in April, and in full leaf by May Day...
...Happy May Day...
...And we eat milkweed...
...Then there were wars, and the rural idea of self-sufficiency and non-interference was defeated on the battlefield...
...but they have been in Nebraska for many years...
...Spring...
...In another month the floss from poplar and cottonwood will shimmer the air all up and down the valley...
...His most recent book is "Country Editor's Boy," an autobiography of his Colorado boyhood...
...The grass is green again...
...There is mottling of morning shade in the dooryard for the first time since September...
...But perhaps it was necessary to lose ourselves to find our origins, to remember the past, the history of men and institutions, the dreams and hopes and ideals...
...A festival, of sorts, out where the sky is big and blue, where the hills are green with spring...
...Lured from the country to the urban maze where no birds sing, no leaves whisper, no clean brooks flow...
...Old traditions faltered...
...Some people, particularly newcomers to the country, make a fetish of wild greens, especially wild salads that take a whole morning to gather...
...This no longer was a world of individuals...
...at least, it gives a sense of background, of human origins...
...and it began not in April or March but last summer, when the buds now turned to leaf and blossom were formed...
...It is both traditions and habits, and we will keep on changing habits and strengthening traditions, with any kind of luck, for a long time to come...
...It is going to be the leisurely opening of buds on a lilac bush, after weeks of tantalizing hesitation...
...Back of the springtime reality of grass and trees and open country is what a five-star general called "the military-industrial complex," now both a habit and a tradition, now taking the major part of every tax dollar...
...That is one rather simplified way to define them...
...But mostly we "tone up our blood," as my grandma used to say, the simpler, back-country way...
...And the maples are (Copyright © 1971 by Hal Borland) in leaf...
...It doesn't make sense to me, but I prefer fallible tradition to none at all...
...Even as I put down those words, I wonder what is the difference between tradition and habit...
...It is wild mustard and the dandelions and wild geraniums and buttercups and moccasin flowers...
...Maybe more of us should get back to the land and learn patience...
...Then for taste, we gather yellow rocket before it comes to flower...
...Is it being smothered under acquired behavior patterns...
...There have been fresh bouquets of violets on the kitchen window sill since the first week in April, pickings from the banks of Millstone Brook, which borders the vegetable garden...
...But traditions evolve slowly, even more slowly than the evolution of the year...
...So, happy May Day...
...New habits came into being...
...this spring greening of the earth where we live is an object lesson . . There is all this just back of that vast complex of war and machines, of exploitation and plundering and greed...
...the maze of the bankrupt cities where welfare costs run to the billions and still are inadequate, where a city that can't afford to kill its rats and clean its streets buys a $25,000,000 sports stadium, where substitute school teachers get $56.25 for a four-hour day, where prize fighters get $2,500,000 for one bout...
...But also back of it, and with at least some comprehension of what is happening, are the makers of new habits, perhaps of new traditions—the Simpli-fiers, the Protesters, the New Crusaders...
...We have been in a kind of rootless, war-worn groove of habit much too long, a kind of urban paranoia that ignored the area west of the Hudson and east of the Sierra...
...It was a world of races and nations and racial and national rivalries...
...then nothing in the world is as good as asparagus...
...And, as usual, we said, "Never again...
...The mockingbirds are back, there in the Nemaha valley...
...That is a part of our own minor tradition, I guess...
...Professor Charles Reich at Yale, who wrote The Greening of America, had a good title, but what he wrote in the book didn't make very good sense...
...And finally, in desperation, a new movement gained momentum—dissent, which was an acquired pattern of behavior...
...There are signs that the peak of protest for protest's sake has passed and that the wish to resign from the world of today has matured into what may be the groundwork for a new structure on the old tradition of conservation, of saving and security, of work and reward, of peace...
...And there is fishing up the brook, here in New England, fishing down the creek, there in the Midlands...
...A year ago about now we were crossing those Midlands, going and coming, by car...
...I don't have to go into detail, do I? The greening of America isn't going to be, any year, simply a dance of overage adolescents around the Maypole, with everything they disapprove automatically wiped out by the very breath of their disapproval...
...We consider it as good as asparagus—until our asparagus is ready to cut...
...They brought an elusive sweetness, a wild, woodsy perfume, to the whole living room...
...For generations this country had its tradition of rural values, of work and reward, of saving and security, of industry and peace...
...But back of all this burgeoning, this leafing and flowering and sprouting, this bird-song and brook-chatter and leaf-whisper, is the rumble and growl of urban man who can't seem to find his way out of the maze, to whom spring means only income taxes and strikes by police, firemen, garbagemen, and school teachers...
...It began five years ago, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, when a seed sprouted and a slender shoot began to grow into a seedling, a sapling, a tree...
...Every year we watch this magnificent greening of America, this object lesson for all who will so much as pause and look and try to understand...
...It is good either as a boiled green or in a salad...
...Then I went out and had a look at the young day and exposed myself to the subtleties of spring, and I came back to the original meaning of May Day...
...The rise of corporate business and scientific technology challenged that tradition and made money and techniques the foundation of a rival tradition...
...Or are we simply going through a basic, and undoubtedly perpetual, conflict between habit and tradition...
...The Dissenters, who would take to themselves the status of public defender, of protector of the people and their environment from the whole complex machinery of war and of peacetime spoliation...
...That is May Day, and all of May...
...We indulge in such a salad once every spring, just to prove we can still do it...
...Back of it are the utilities that see nothing but power resources in the environment...
...Nature isn't in the teaching business and doesn't give a damn whether man survives or perishes, just so some species, even salamanders or crayfish, survives and carries on the life process...
...Hair, beads, fringe, invective, protest, denial, renunciation — they were behavior patterns...
...I know that if I were to go down along the creek —-it is a creek out there, not a brook —I could find the spotted leaves and golden bloom of dogtooth violets right now...
...And last week we squandered most of one morning picking the makings of that annual mixed wild salad, when we should have been transplanting lettuce or planting beets and carrots...
...There are men in waders with glass rods and spinning reels, and there are boys with cane poles and cork bobbers...
...But this spring greening of the earth where we live is an object lesson, just the same, simply because anyone with a grain of sense and a smidgen of conscience must see what it would mean if there wasn't any greening...
...We need a sense of festival, perhaps even a degree of celebration over the fact that we aren't yet quite overwhelmed by the consequences of our own reckless stupidity...
...And robins, there as here, will be stalking the dooryard today, catching worms in the grass, looking fresh as new paint in their springtime plumage...
...It is dawn and dew and more birds singing than you can count, and noon and pools of shade, and evening, and the vesper chorus of the birds, and starlight...
...And we have been having our wild vitamins...
...Our pastures are ready for the cows, though they won't be turned out to grass until May 10 simply because of tradition—Albert's father never put his cows out to pasture till May 10...
...The big cottonwood just up the road is in full leaf and hung with long reddish-brown catkins that look like huge caterpillars...
...And along the riverbanks and back in the woodland the foamy white of shadblow in bloom stands out like huge jets of steam...
...When it is just right, before its buds open, we gather marsh marigold, known to many countrymen as cowslip, which makes a delicious boiled green and an excellent green salad...
...What has happened to our cultural continuity...
...Crows will be cawing from the hickory trees in the valley and stalking newly plowed ground, looking for corn not yet planted, just as they are doing here...
...And then, in World War II, it became a rallying call among airmen, a desperate call for help...
...Dissent, with a long, thin, persistent line of tradition back of it...
...We have been so battered by the irrational and the unreasonable that the terms have begun to lose meaning...
...It is going to be an apple tree in full, fat, pink buds—and spectacular with a male cardinal perched on the topmost twig—and then white with opening blossoms, loud with bees, deckled with green leaf tips...
...War, and war again, and more war, until war itself became at least a habit, with a war machine that perpetuated itself and began to create a grim, ironic military cultural continuity...
...and since spring is spring, in Nebraska as in Connecticut, I can see right now, from where I sit in New England, the bright new green of grass in Nebraska pastures, the shine of new leaves on the willows that line the Platte and the Nemaha and the Big Blue and the Republican...
...gigantic bouquets that scent the whole hillside, that shed their petals like a fall of February snow, then proceed to make a crop of fruit...
...This week the long-stemmed, big-flowered violets that took over the old strawberry bed came to full flower and have their turn on the window sill...
...The aspens and birches have leaves that twinkle in the starlight and whisper in the darkness...
...All one has to do is look and smell and feel and hear to be alive and sentient...
...So here we are, caught between old and new habits, old and new traditions...
...Not quite all is lost, yet...
Vol. 35 • May 1971 • No. 5
