July and Independence
Borland, Hal
JULY and Independence by HAL BORLAND After one of the coldest springs on record, we finally achieved something close to the norm in May. New England's weather is notoriously unpredictable, but...
...I hesitate to lay the blame on the stuff accumulating up there, from our chimneys and our jets and our rockets and even our cars, but the science boys have been saying for some time that when we get enough of that stuff up there it will sufficiently diminish the sun's warmth so that a new Ice Age will begin to take root...
...Actually, it is believed in most informed scientific circles that the whole rise of civilization, as we call it, has occurred during a pause between Ice Ages, and that the next Ice Age will be along in due course...
...Anyway, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-three and a countryman, drafted the Declaration of Independence in a hot rooming house room in Philadelphia, and he showed his draft to John Adams, who was forty-one, and to Benjamin Franklin, who was seventy —both of them, by the way, were townsmen—and they went over it and made a few revisions, but not many...
...While we mow the lawn and tend the flowers and sit in the shade when we get ten minutes...
...The money is spent for "sophisticated armament," which is to say rockets and planes and missiles that will be declared obsolete before they are delivered...
...It isn't Independence Day, nor even The Fourth of July...
...The budget, for example...
...They all have votes, remember...
...Have we totally forgotten...
...There's enough national housekeeping to keep all of them, and the rest of the jobless too, busy for years...
...And the ride home, thinking what a wonderful day it had been, how good it was to live in a place where you could have such a day, where you could afford it...
...Livingston opposed independence at that time, had no part in writing the Declaration, and he did not sign or vote for it...
...July is a time for long weekends and vacations and mountain air and seashore cottages that smell of mildew and fish, and lakes that are beautiful and quiet and misty-romantic at sunrise and ghastly with outboard motors and water skiers by 11 a.m...
...Be independent...
...Jefferson wished he was at home, not in a stuffy room in that hot city...
...I think I'll go over to the Lake, which was left here when that last Ice Sheet melted, and either go fishing or just sit on the dock and dangle my feet in the water and get sunburned...
...We had the strange combination of hepatica, bloodroot, anemones, columbines, tulips, and lilacs and apple blossoms showing color, all at the same time...
...George Washington was a major in the militia at the age of twenty...
...How in God's name can anybody spend more than (Copyright © 1971 by Hal Borland) $200 billion dollars for foot soldiers and horse marines...
...It falls on a Sunday this year, so we shall observe it on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and probably on Friday and Tuesday, too, in many places...
...Let them stew in their own expensive juices...
...Age, of course, had little to do with it—look at Franklin, seventy, who was as vigorous and outspoken a rebel as Jefferson...
...I would say that proves that all the Secretaries of War—let's call them what they are, for a change—have been thinking a lot about contingencies no less far-fetched than the next Ice Age...
...You have to call them rebels, after all...
...But I wouldn't bet on it for the long run...
...We love our catbird, at least in part because he drives the grackles and starlings out of our dooryard...
...Of course there are other arguments voiced by the Pentagon for such programs...
...This is far-fetched, I admit, but not much farther-fetched than a good many of the things that come out of Laird's Lair...
...Well, you have to be at least old enough to have been in World War II to remember Fourth of July picnics with cold fried chicken and potato salad and watermelon, and long drinks out of the vacuum jug, and the red canoe, and the lake that didn't yet have even one water skier on it, and the fireflies in the dusk and the sparklers the little kids were allowed to have and the big fireworks display on the big float out in the lake...
...HAL BORLAND, essayist, novelist, and conservationist, lives on a farm in northwestern Connecticut...
...That was away back in the '30s...
...That is what the Declaration of Independence is all about...
...It would lower the oceans again, and that would leave all our seaports high and dry and quite a way inland...
...It's a fine-spun argument, at best...
...Then we had a warm day and a high wind and the ice began to break up on the ponds...
...They led a rebellion...
...Whether you remember or not, it started in June, 1776, at the meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia...
...Independence Day...
...Not down here, this time...
...they will advance it to 8:15 by the end of July...
...It is The Long Midsummer Weekend...
...We simple rustics call such practice stupid, but maybe that's just another word for the same thing...
...Smokeless incinerators, for instance, and re-cycling plants, and water-cleaners, and smoke-cleaners...
...This is summer, after all, right in the middle of summer...
...Right now, of course, with the hounds of spring worn out and panting in the June sunshine, it takes a bit of doing to think of such cold and clammy consequences of our folly...
...Why can't some of those jobless workmen be put to work reclaiming the strip-mine wastelands, the cut-over woodlands, the torn-apart mountains, the befouled lakes, the trash dumps, and old-car graveyards...
...And do you remember how it all started, what you learned in American History, back when everybody had to take a course in American History to get a high school diploma...
...The answer is that nobody does...
...If we don't get it cleaned up somehow, and the ice does come, we will have all that trash and garbage and abandoned cars and beer cans and pop bottles right on our heels as we plod south ahead of the ice—the glaciers will plow it up in vast moraines, the way the previous glaciers did the boulders and the mountain ledges...
...Most of these arguments actually are issued from Senators from big-industry states, but they came from the Pentagon just the same...
...But here we were in a trough of the averages, with April acting like March and everything three weeks late, from migratory robins to dooryard daffodils...
...Remember...
...He doesn't want anyone interfering with him at such a time, and particularly he resents outsiders...
...Our whippoorwills call, promptly at 8:30 now...
...Remember...
...I wouldn't bet on man, for that matter...
...But in those days they didn't prolong adolescence...
...For a time it looked as though the fishing season would have to be launched with tip-ups, the ice was so persistent...
...Boil this down and you come to the plea, "Don't throw all those workers in my home territory out of work...
...But he wrote and revised and built a declaration of a kind any countryman would have written...
...That, apparently, is what is called sophisticated...
...That's the way it went, right up into May...
...Turn off the radio and the television set, forget the daily paper, retreat into your own world...
...Or some other world, if your own is too grim...
...June is nearly always hot in Philadelphia, and that one was hotter than usual...
...And its arrival could easily be hastened by too much of that stuff up there in...
...I know that if my neighbor up the road bought a tractor that was obsolete before he got it home and plowed a furrow, he would be not only bankrupt but under psychiatric care within a few months...
...Why don't we call it that any more...
...July is a time to forget the office, remember to say hello to the kids when they pass you on their way to somewhere else, wear old clothes, and let down for a little while...
...It's only 195 years since the Declaration was signed, and see what a long time that has been, how much has been done, good and bad...
...But they didn't go around bombing banks or burning houses or looting stores...
...Up there, in the stratosphere...
...And very soon after that Thomas Jefferson went home to Virginia and had decent country food out of his own garden, and slept in his own bed in the quiet of the country...
...That's a part of July, like the red canoe and the long drink, and the laughter in the dusk...
...Our evenings are still cool, thank goodness and the mountains, and our birds still sing in the evening despite the firm denial of some didactic bird folk that birds ever sing after mid-June...
...They were building a new nation, and they had plans and purposes...
...Man is a biological upstart, and such upstarts don't last...
...While we have baby beets, boiled and buttered, and new young onions, also boiled and buttered, and while we talk to the tomatoes, urging them on but gently, since plants are supposed to have sensibilities...
...Whenever it comes and whatever brings it, another Ice Age would raise hob with the designs of our municipal planners, among others...
...His book, "Homeland: A Report from the Country/' is a collection of twenty, of his 1964-1968 essays in The Progressive...
...Pay them the going wage they got in their last previous job and we still would be ahead —the total couldn't cost what the Pentagon spends on built-in obsolescence every year...
...While we pick garden peas, and relish them at table, and freeze the surplus...
...The aboriginal Indians got here across that isthmus, and—I wonder if the Prophets in the Pentagon haven't thought of this?—the Communists, both Chinese and Russian, could get here that way too...
...Right now I can't take the late spring seriously, and the approach of the next Ice Age is as deliberate as it has been for the past thousand years, I suppose...
...Remember...
...They presented it to the Congress, and on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted it...
...The most persistent such argument is that the makers of planes and rockets and missiles must be kept busy or they will go bankrupt and won't be available to make planes and rockets and missiles when we really need them...
...Jefferson was a man who could express himself and had ideas to express, a civilized man who had faith in other civilized men and didn't think much of mobs...
...New England's weather is notoriously unpredictable, but the climate has...
...And the only reason for such outlandish weather that we could muster was that common bugbear of today, pollution...
...Things did get straightened out by June, but you don't get over such a spring overnight...
...the stratosphere...
...Retreat—that's the word for July...
...Then Jefferson sat down and did a final draft, and the committee read it and accepted it, all except Robert Livingston, and signed it, again all except Livingston...
...With trimmings, some of them almost vulgar, since the catbird is of all the birds I know the most thoroughly gamine...
...Most of the leaders were rather young, under forty, I believe...
...Livingston the New Yorker, the city man...
...I see it written that way on the calendar on the wall here in my study, but it is printed in very small type...
...There were ship captains at the age of twenty-one, taking cargoes to the Far East...
...A committee was named, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman...
...And it has always struck me as interesting, if not tremendously important, that Tom Jefferson was only thirty-three, and that Robert Livingston, at thirty, was against independence at that time...
...That, of course, was ridiculous...
...been relatively stable a long time...
...While we feast on garden lettuce, the first heads of it and the best lettuce we've had since last summer...
...He has work to do, hard, sweaty summer work, which is preparation for the independence he treasures in the months ahead...
...Maybe this is the sprouting...
...Ours do, our robins and orioles and brown thrashers and wrens and wood thrushes...
...Why can't those ingenious missile-makers and plane-planners tackle the mountainous jobs of national housekeeping...
...We might even get this place of ours in shape to leave when the ice comes again...
...All the waste and discard and neglect that have scarred and blighted our land...
...And went about a countryman's tasks, supervising the cultivation of the crops, the care of the fruit trees, the cutting of the hay, the preparations for the winter to come when a houseful of people and barnsful of livestock would have to be fed and cared for...
...But today I can't seem to work up much of a worry...
...He didn't like the food he got— he would have had fresh vegetables at home in Virginia...
...That's how it happened...
...Climate, of course, is the way the weather averages out over a period of years, and weather is a day-to-day matter...
...Except for Robert Livingston, who was thirty, Jefferson at thirty-three was the youngest of the committee...
...There was enough open water on opening day to launch a boat, but not an ice-free lake by a long shot...
...And that is what some of us are remembering now...
...He missed his family...
...Make things that people need...
...And our catbird, one particular catbird, sings all the other birds' songs when he feels so inclined...
...July is no time to sweat your shirt over last spring's crazy weather or the SST or Rolls-Royce or Lockheed or the Pentagon...
...On June 11a resolution was passed that a declaration be drawn up asserting the independence of these American colonies...
...I say that because I have yet to meet a man from the country who wasn't independent as a hog on ice in July, and usually in June too...
...He is the cop on this bird beat, sassy, truculent, and yet a good citizen and a good neighbor...
...I saw by the papers not long ago that the various countries of the world now are spending something over $200 billion on armament every year...
...The committee met and, like all committees even today, handed the job to one man, a countryman from down in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson...
...Not in White History, or Black History, or Red or Brown or Yellow History, but in American History...
...They weren't tearing an old nation apart in anger and frustration...
...It would open a broad isthmus between Alaska and Siberia again...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
