February: Time of Renewal
Borland, Hal
While this is a winter of discontent, it is also a time to review and rest and think February: Time of Renewal HAL BORLAND I am of two minds about writing an article just now. Particularly about...
...We, up here in the hills, escaped the ice, got snow instead, and felt almost guilty at being comfortable...
...That can live with an environment that, so far as we know, was essentially evolved for such creatures as woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and huge cave bears...
...In our township the Grand Old Party had ruled the roost for years...
...There was just too damned much to absorb in one year-end accounting...
...But those are the known hazards...
...His most recent book is "Seasons," published by Lippincott...
...That's about the best I can do now, and there's plenty of wood and hay to keep things going quite a while longer...
...No doubt about it, he did a good job, saved the town's money, kept up the town's roads, fought off the commercializers, established a beautiful lakeside park, and kept taxes down...
...Life that can appreciate the beauties of a New England winter...
...That is one reason we stayed here at home— when you have it that good, why risk change...
...But why quibble over the words...
...The meat shortage, for instance...
...Maybe they can be summed up in one or two...
...Unless an author's name is appended, the material represents editorial comment...
...Only here and there do you find such self-sufficiency...
...But he announced that he was retiring...
...Here, it's an old New England custom...
...It's from an old hymn, by Reginald Heber...
...Now their children know that pork chops don't grow in the back room of the village supermarket...
...We had trouble getting in the early hay, a problem that has been as predictable as the Fourth of July these past few years...
...But that's the way the energy crisis seemed to go, utterly without sense or reason...
...Time runs out, eventually...
...And no really hard frost until late November...
...It is snowing, and the snow will spread its clean blanket of innocence over this world...
...I say it again...
...Too bad we weren't as well prepared for February as that old hooded granther of the swamps, the skunk cabbage...
...When the votes were tallied, the earth quivered...
...I won't even attempt to detail the old year as we tried to tally up— it was a weird combination of ITT, burglary in high places, cabinet-level corruption, noisy firings and noisy resignations, repeated denials of guilt with repeated and varied qualifications, the Tapes, the Ervin committee hearings, the Agnew indictment, his denial, resignation, and plea of guilt but also of innocence, the Mideast war and the energy crisis, the new Vice President, the financial report of the man who became a millionaire as President...
...In these odd years we, theoretically at least, take a fresh look at our selectmen and either throw the rascals out or keep the rascals out...
...THE WAY WE SAW IT In this space The Progressive publishes flashbacks to articles and editorials written during its sixty-five-year history...
...It's a beautiful world right now, what I can see of it from here in my study in the valley at the foot of Tom's Mountain in the upper left-hand corner of Connecticut...
...The eclipse of literacy is an unhappy possibility, but one which I think we must take increasing account of, as the tendency to curtail reading begins to make its way into our educational system, along with the digest—which may be followed by the digest of the digest...
...Now I remember: Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile...
...Regardless of equinox and solstice, it is the middle of winter, with January's miseries behind and March's uncertainties ahead...
...And I will bet even money that if I go down to the little bog at the turn of the road I can find the purplish-green snout of a skunk cabbage hood melting its way up through the ice, ready to open the buds on its spadix, the first really mild day, and lure the earliest flying insects...
...Our first snow, in early December, was so bashful it came in the night and on tiptoe, and turned to rain and slush before the sun rose...
...Couldn't or wouldn't, because the boss said not to let the competition get too much of a start...
...Spring and anemones and red-wing blackbirds and sap-flies and the evening trill of the peepers...
...The Democrats nominated a candidate who had shown executive ability on various town committees and as head of the school board...
...That heat in the skunk cabbage can be as much as twenty-seven degrees higher than the surrounding air as it literally melts its way up to the February sunlight...
...Meat shortages might upset townsfolk, in those days, but the farmer had his own meat, just as he had his own potatoes and apples and canned tomatoes and other garden-get...
...Well, this is our winter of discontent, to give it a sweet-sounding name...
...Clean water, which will come down the brooks to the river, which is full of filth, and somewhat clarify the river's water...
...The radio, the movies, comic books, digest magazines, and now television seem well on their way to limiting more than ever the place of the written word in human communication and in our thoughts...
...Valentine's Day...
...Resolved, that this year I will not be a crook, for instance...
...The soil needs the moisture...
...On Thanksgiving Day there were prayers of thanks that the nation had survived executive disarray, political confusion, and public befuddlement without total disaster...
...We had an early spring, with no devastating late frost...
...It was the unexpected ones that threw us off balance...
...In the old days the farmer raised his own meat, kept a few hogs to act as a garbage disposal unit, saved a couple of bull calves from the dairy herd's calf crop, and in September began fattening them on corn from the new crop...
...Time ran out for the dinosaurs...
...That's the way things went...
...Then one frosty November day there was butchering and fresh meat, and hams and shoulders and side meat to be cured and scraps and trimmings and odds and ends to be ground into sausage and hamburger...
...If the present situation continues much longer, Greece will not be able to escape the fate of Franco Spain...
...It will be there simply because somewhere along the way of evolution it learned or inherited the means of being "in heat" when it is ready to blossom, much as the mammals are "in heat" at certain times...
...That can persist in the face of all the hazards we create for ourselves...
...Big Power now can burn high-sulfur oil or coal, or pure sulfur, or even wet hay, for all the "regulations" seem to say, and get away with it...
...I am speaking, of course, of the year as we knew it, here in our own valley of the lower Berkshires...
...Big Oil now can have its way in Alaska and off the California coast...
...Some folk had trouble getting in their late hay, too, and most farmers had trouble getting their silo corn in because it turned wet and muddy before it turned dry and drouthy in October...
...Remember that...
...Winter is the time to catch your breath and ease the cramps out of your legs and the crick out of your neck from tramping the autumn hills and staring at the autumn trees as though you never again would see such a world of beauty...
...I think I shall wait till spring and see if men aren't doing better by then...
...It originated as a time of atonement, for confession of sin and error accompanied by a feast of purification...
...By tradition and statistics, February brings more snow and cold than any other month, particularly in New England...
...New Year's Day was a joyless time of looking back on the records of a dismal year, and wondering about the whimsical way of income tax laws, why some people have to pay taxes and some don't...
...But the week before Christmas a snowstorm that tried to clothe Washington in innocence and only made a slushy mess came on up the coast and turned to sleet and freezing rain over a good part of Connecticut...
...And I can't think of any really good, compelling reason to write about it as long as men insist on holding front stage, center, and doing the things they do...
...That is, expect the worst...
...Sidney Lens January 1954 GREECE ON THE VERGE Athens Greece, in reality, has become the great testing ground of the conflict between the Soviet bloc and the Western democracies...
...Which will flow down to the sea, which is becoming so polluted that even the Antarctic penguins lay soft-shelled eggs...
...We were men, technologists...
...But we weren't vegetables...
...It's a beautiful world...
...Mary Woods' phone call, and so on...
...The campaign was quiet, with no outright mention of Watergate or Nixon...
...Trees came down, and miles of utility lines, and some energy crisis spokesman boasted of how much electricity was saved—while thousands huddled around inadequate fireplaces or were miserable for three days in armories and public schools...
...We had a stormy summer, good growing weather but tornados all over the place, ripping down trees and transmission lines, playing hob with wheat and oats and alfalfa...
...She happened to be a woman, and there were a few smiles but no laughter...
...Or more likely the other way round—those creatures evolved to live in such an environment...
...We had an election here in November, as they did in quite a few places around the country...
...It will smell like putrid flesh, it will have no beauty at all as a flower, but it will be there, the first flower of spring—in February...
...We had the most beautiful fall anyone could imagine, more color in the trees and more prolonged color—it lasted well into November—than even old-timers could remember...
...Otherwise, it is just a normal month, quite ordinary...
...When the meat pinch began, John bought four young pigs and built a pen, and his youngsters, who had never before known swine intimately, began to learn the ways of pork on the hoof...
...Discontent" really underplays the truth...
...For a time...
...The same first selectman had been in office since 1946...
...I don't have to be a skunk cabbage to know this...
...It ran out for the mammoths and for old Saber-Tooth...
...For a time...
...But one of my neighbor families remembers and tries to come as near to the old way as the family can...
...Think Truth...
...We haven't got it all sorted out yet, but time and the seasons won't wait any longer...
...The Editors 'AMERICA MUST CHOOSE* We can go on, as we have, resisting the real revolution of our times, or we can move boldly into the future by offering creative support for those who are fighting tyranny, poverty, and imperialism, and in so doing expose the counterfeit revolution of the Soviets and their false claims to a superior way of life...
...The clearest-cut aspect is the outrageous increase in Big Oil profits and the lightly masked delight of Big Power when hard-won environmental restrictions were let down...
...And now February, with birthdays of such worthies as A. Lincoln and G. Washington, and such memorable occasions as Groundhog Day and St...
...And it only makes a hollow and derisive echo when someone even suggests that maybe that fellow in the woodpile isn't an Arab after all...
...And assorted other matters, such as the wheat deal with Russia, the soy bean deal, Howard Hughes, the stock market, the meat shortage, Rose Hal Borland is the distinguished nature writer and conservationist...
...America must choose...
...Well, it is snowing again...
...Winter is the time of rest for the bright awakening of spring, the happy days of summer, the contentment of autumn...
...It was created as a catchall, to take care of the extra days in an inaccurate calendar of the year...
...John fattened his pigs at the proper time, and when the hard frosts came he and Mary had a butchering day...
...You might not think a farmer would be hurt by a meat shortage, but farmers don't farm today the way their fathers did...
...But there it was, the albatross around the Grand Old Party's neck...
...Christmas almost reverted to its earlier status as a religious holy day, with all the restrictions that had been clamped on lights, power, and gasoline...
...And there were too many appropriate New Year resolutions even to list them all...
...Copyright ® 1974 by Hal Borland...
...Particularly about February, which you have to take on faith if you believe in it at all...
...Victor Larock April 1949 ECLIPSE OF LITERACY Certainly any inquiry into the decline of political writing must take account of the more general decline in reading and writing in our mass culture...
...But why think of all those unhappy things...
...Man, of course, has mastered time...
...Man can stew in his own juices, but the year has its rounds to make...
...Richard Hofstadter December 1949...
...Owls nest now, and gray squirrels mate...
...Its twenty-eight days look like a mistake on the calendar...
...And, Resolved, that this year I will not hide anything under the rug of executive privilege...
...But that old saying, "Have half your wood and half your hay when February comes, or rue the day," tells what to expect in this part of the country...
...That mare's nest, however, has been almost as complicated as the Watergate mess...
...Man, the Technologist, who could send a man to the moon but couldn't find a way to keep himself warm when the Arabs—or whoever it was—curtailed the supply of crude petroleum...
...An able businessman was nominated to take his place...
...That is no longer the way of life on the land, I am sorry to say...
...It is no more mysterious than my breathing, and even as a member of the human species I am not quite sure I know all there is to know about breathing...
...Although the present regime isn't Fascist, it certainly provides the climate in which Fascism can flourish .. . The West must do everything in its power to encourage the democratic socialist groups in Greece—far, far more than anything done up to now...
...It was quite different elsewhere, as we were told from time to time...
...If I were a skunk cabbage, in fact, I probably wouldn't even be aware of it...
...It isn't much easier to sum up last year in terms of weather and the simple country life...
...So we stayed here, put up with our normal aches and pains, tried to be patient with teen-age help that wanted wages but resented work, and eventually gathered enough garden produce to fill the freezer so full that we were frantic when one of our local tornados took down whole skeins of wire and left us without power for twenty-two hours...
...But I should know, and I think I am aware of, the simple fact of life...
...Around here we waited to start the New Year this year simply because we needed January to sort out the old year's events and try to get a line not so much on where we go from here as on what one might call New Year resolutions...
...What is that quotation, "only man is vile...
...Winter is the time to think up new and better words to write in that fresh fall of snow...
...Nobody rang church bells or built bonfires, but quite a few said privately that if it had been a national election, or even a state election, there would have been dancing in the streets and even out along the back roads...
...The Democrats won by almost two to one...
...We have tampered with the original language only to achieve brevity...
...Words such as Truth and Integrity and Hope and Belief...
...And all too tragically the West is playing its hand badly...
...Think Integrity, and Hope, and Belief...
...It can't run out for him...
...It isn't easy to explain this, and I'm not at all sure it is worth the bother...
Vol. 38 • February 1974 • No. 2
