SPRING: A REITERATION
Borland, Hal
SPRING: A REITERATION HAL BORLAND I will be seeing the first red-winged blackbirds any day now, and hear them chattering in the leafless trees at the edge of the little bog down the road where I...
...Melt from the winter's snow was everywhere...
...everything except pelicans, it sometimes seemed—upland plover, killdeer, brant, geese, ducks of a dozen species, snipe, sandpipers, gal-linules, rails...
...There is a newness, a remaking of remembered detail and a reshaping of hilltop and meadowland...
...The hemoglobin in my own blood, the chemists tell me, is chemically close kin to the chlorophyll in the leaf...
...The difference, substantially, is only an atom or two of iron...
...One April we went down the Shenandoah Valley...
...And that's not wholly a figure of speech...
...If I had been skeptical or really curious about when spring was going to arrive here in the lower Berkshires I could have watched the isotherms on the weather maps...
...Spring didn't happen overnight...
...But it takes a seed to perpetuate life, some kind of seed...
...But this is not exactly teeming spring...
...Up on the ledges, where the rocks catch and hold the sun's warmth, wild columbines are beginning to thrust their first gray-green rosettes of leaves through the pockets of leaf mold...
...It recapitulates the ancient past, before the arrogance of humanity was even dreamed of...
...The first blackbirds will be the males, with those red epaulettes, some of the red faded to a yellowish white, as a matter of fact...
...It began before there was such a creature as man on earth, and it will continue after he is gone...
...Ducks came in flocks, mostly blacks and mallards, and found nesting places on the banks of ponds and in brush along the rivers...
...Nights stayed chilly, and days were cool with only an occasional hot afternoon...
...There was no such teeming rush the first spring we spent in these lower Berkshires, some twenty years ago...
...Spring if Genesis, year after year after year...
...But for real accomplishment we have to wait, with the bees, for May's florescence...
...They can't calculate such matters as our astronomers can...
...And that is spring, that thought, that belief...
...That's the sum of it...
...There is a man who has no conception of reality, who thinks he spins the world and sets the time for sunrise...
...May is the time when spring achieves its real bounty, its lilacs and apple blossoms and columbines and wild geraniums...
...In December, maybe, or even in February...
...But certainly not now...
...But it does come to the surface now and then, especially in the spring...
...Just recently I read a complaint about critics of urban life by a man who was so insular that he was almost incredible...
...It doesn't exorcise devils or sanctify the impulses of barely human beings...
...the man who turned his back on Vesuvius, and died under the lava...
...I can sing all the praises I wish, but the real songs of spring are sung by the robin and the oriole and the tanager...
...Once it learned that tremendous lesson, it populated the land with hordes that are incredible today...
...If I didn't believe in spring I would have to wipe the slate clean and say I didn't believe in life...
...Then it was June and summer...
...Spring is the land emerging from water, the ice retreating from the lowlands, the amphibians emerging from the mud of hibernation, the leaf bursting from the bud, the bird returning from the tropics, the silence of winter ending in birdsong, beehum, chirp, chitter, and all the variations on the mating call...
...The more springs I experience, the more certain I am that man may huff and puff, storm and demand, and not change by one iota the timetable of spring or any detail of its achievement...
...Even the greening of the pasture grass and the leafing of the maples was a gradual process...
...Spring is more than the bloom of a new fashion...
...when dry land was something new and amphibian life was in its first stages of learning to live there...
...On second thought, I am not even sure it is intellectual at all...
...Actually, spring invites participation, even though it does not need human help...
...But it does make life worth living, if you know life when you see it...
...But by the time they get here the hylas, the spring peepers, will certainly be out and yelping...
...The night hawks arrived to seine the evening sky...
...There is the man who said that Rome would live forever, just before the Barbarians took over...
...Sap rises in the trees, and human beings who are not urbanized beyond redemption feel something like the urgencies of sap rise in themselves...
...They won't sing much for two weeks or so, till they get settled here in the valley, but after that they will waken me before sunrise...
...There the green of spring fringed the shallow water and burgeoned beneath it as under a greenhouse roof—buffalo grass, grama grass, upland bluestem, all warmed by the sun and watered by the melt, all growing like mad...
...SPRING: A REITERATION HAL BORLAND I will be seeing the first red-winged blackbirds any day now, and hear them chattering in the leafless trees at the edge of the little bog down the road where I saw skunk cabbage poking its green-purple hoods up through the ice a month ago...
...And in all of us there is the newness and the oldness renewed...
...It is instinctive as well as intellectual...
...Especially when I see a crocus shoot up and come to bloom...
...The squirrels are capering...
...They will appear in silvery coats of fur, and in another two or three weeks they will mature into blossoms...
...Including such minor matters as crocus blossoms and anemones and hepat-icas, and such major matters as maple trees and oaks and new leaves all through the woodland...
...they were there, birds that we plainsmen wouldn't see again till next spring's melt made the uplands a vast wading pool for herons again...
...By May everything from the pine trees to the bluets will be in full bloom...
...Maybe the first full moon of spring, which comes on March 29 this year, will be the same old familiar moon, but how long since we have really seen it...
...The old earth slowly heaves over so that we in the Northern Hemisphere face the sun more directly, and all things are believable again...
...it crept in, slowly, on wary, hesitant feet...
...It would be amazing if they don't, for we are all a part of that mysterious, universal stream we call life...
...Man has enough trouble getting along with himself and his own kind...
...The seasons of the mind do not wait upon the equinox —the bloom of a new fashion and the eclipse of a celebrity's glow are small parts of a man-made world spinning far faster than the leisurely pace of our planet...
...Name them...
...It was late April and a mild season, and all day we drove through a vast garden of apple blossoms...
...It is ooze and wetlands, melt and seep and watery margins...
...The pools dried up, leaving only the grass and the wild onions and the resin-weed and the little red mallows we called cowboy's delight...
...But there was no quick, warm rush of birth and reawakening...
...Maybe the apple trees in my back yard are the same old trees, minus a couple of branches that came down in winter storms, but when they burst bud and appear in full blossom they are as new as sunrise—and as old...
...There were new pups in the prairie dog towns, and newly hatched burrowing owls, looking like wads of gray lint...
...But spring is the beginning of things so new, so pristine, so absolutely fresh from the Source that they have the very look of Genesis...
...Vast lagoons were spread over the shallowest of hollows on the uplands, acres broad and inches deep...
...Brooks flow freely again...
...Spring brings its own renewal after the winter of attrition...
...And one April we went down the Delmarva Peninsula in the midst of peach blossoms, pink as a maiden's cheek, sweet as peach jam, and again loud with bees...
...Copyright © 7972 by Hal Borland Hal Borland, the distinguished nature writer and conservationist, lives in the foothills of the Berkshires in northwestern Connecticut...
...The trees, we say, aren't aware how the earth and the stars line up for the vernal equinox...
...I suspect that plants and birds and animals and people have something of the same reaction...
...By late April there will be promises everywhere, and the human heart that knows the difference between a museum exhibit and a rural hillside can begin to sing with the robins and the orioles in the morning...
...And so on through as myopic a demonstration of imperception as I have ever read...
...And I don't see how anybody could do that in late March or early April...
...I know that if a crocus can happen again, anything can happen...
...Spring travels north, for all practical purposes, with the thirty-five-degree isotherm...
...And only in the buffalo wallows and the deep-hollow waterholes was there enough water to hatch tadpoles and mosquito wig-glers...
...Or the fruiting, for that matter, which is so largely a consequence of the bees...
...When I see and hear the redwings I don't think I will wake up tomorrow morning to a teeming world of sudden vernal achievement...
...Fruitful spring, each of those, with the music of Pan hanging like a shimmer over the orchards...
...Frogs trilled...
...Even the much later hordes that lived at the foot of the retreating ice sheets must have been stupendous, for there was an urgency about life in that geological springtime that we can scarcely comprehend today...
...But some things need no documentation, and spring is one of them...
...Not if you are aware of this world of reality...
...But, especially in the spring, I am convinced that man really had nothing to do with the blossoming of those orchards...
...I know that, down deep in my viscera, even more firmly there than in my brain...
...When the redwings arrive I can begin to watch for pussy willows, those tiny wild ones...
...Toads shrilled...
...When all is said and done, anyone can chart an equinox, if he tries and if it is as important to him as a hit show on Broadway, and recognize the arrival of the seasons...
...Impatient, I asked an oldtimer if we weren't ever going to have spring, and he said with a smile, "We had spring last Thursday...
...If I seek them out, I can find hepaticas in bloom...
...The females, which look so much like big sparrows they often go unidentified, lag behind the males ten days or so...
...I think, when March ends, of spring as I knew it in my own early springtime, when I, too, was young and lived on the High Plains of Colorado...
...But now I know what to expect...
...We traveled slowly, stopping many times to smell the air, to hear the hum of God only knows how many bees, to see the slight, subtle variations and combinations of pink and shimmering white that marked one orchard from another...
...And in those vast lagoons and around them were the waterfowl of the whole West and Southwest...
...Yet he said, "There is an abiding sense of isolation, insularity, and anachronism about rural life and rural people," and he went on to proclaim that in the city "spring occurs every time there's a new museum exhibit or hit show or pennant race...
...Then the migrants moved on, in vast flurries of wings and with loud honking and quacking and chattering...
...Give a seed a place to grow, light and warmth to inspire it, and anything can happen...
...If it achieves a handful of violets by May Day it will have kept pretty well to its usual schedule...
...Flowers have bloomed, seeds and fruit have been borne, the plants and their produce have matured, for a long, long time...
...On the warm side of an old stone wall I can find jacks-in-the-pulpit coming up like rounded green spear points, and nearby are the first furled leaves of bloodroot...
...It is gradual spring, reminding me of the long, gradual springtime of life on this planet...
...They come out of the mud and start yelping for mates when the temperature gets up to fifty and stays there at least three days in a row...
...Men planted those trees, of course, and tended and cared for them...
...It is winter ending, spring beginning, a reiteration of the oldest statement we know, but a reiteration with infinite variations...
...if he would only pause and see how absurd is his dream of omnipotence...
...The wheat grass and valley bluestem quickly got their growth, pushed by snow melt and April rain...
...One reason we react as we do is that there is chlorophyll in our blood...
...We are not exactly as the grass, but when the green comes again to the pastures and the lawns, we too are renewed...
...And the migrant robins, which should arrive this week, will be all over our pastures, chattering but not yet singing...
...Didn't you notice...
...Peepers made their shrill clamor, frogs trilled, and all the migrant birds came back and saluted the mornings with a great jubilee of song...
...April here is a time of slow preparation...
...On a warm south slope I may even find a few brave anemones in flower...
...It doesn't put an end to wars or to want or bias or greed or envy, and it doesn't clarify political double-talk or justify official chicanery...
...The equinox is merely a figure on a chart, something that accompanies change and gives it a point of reference...
...And that's another thing about spring: it brings the half-forgotten back for a remembering, and the longer one lives the more springs have been half-forgotten...
...It doesn't do much to improve either the cities or their sanctimonious disciples who disdain any contact with the earth, the very rootbed of life...
...Geese came over, arrowing north, great skeins of them with their high-distant gabbling...
...Or I might have charted the afternoon temperature here and forecast the appearance of the peepers...
...There is something in the very air, out beyond the pall of smog, that seems to say anything is possible...
...His many books include "Borland Country," "Country Editor's Boy," "Hill Country Harvest" and "When the Legends Die...
...Meadow larks and horned larks and lark buntings fluttered and sang, but they were natives and went almost unnoticed while those vernal hordes of exotic aliens were there...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
