by Hal Borland
Here in my corner of New England the annual rainfall averages forty-seven inches. On the western plains that much moisture would mean flood and disaster, ruining the dry-land crops. But if you take ten inches off that total here, we are in trouble. Up to now we are running about four inches short, and we are fearful. Should August continue as rainless as July was, the situation would be acute. We could have a year with thirty inches of moisture, twice the allowable minimum for the plains, and still suffer from a distressing and costly drought.
I am fortunate—as I have said before—being so close beside the river. The night mist from the river waters my pastures and the garden, thus relieving both. But we need rain; the whole countryside needs rain.
We had a shower today; not enough, but a kind of promise of what may yet happen. The rain ceased around noon, but the clouds still hang low, a thick overcast without thunderheads, so we probably shall get more tonight or tomorrow.
We were on our way home from the village this morning when the rain began. We were passing a corn field when it started pelting down, and it was one of the few times I ever saw a rainstorm raise a cloud of dust. The rain, huge drops which spattered big as silver dollars on the windshield, struck the dry soil of that corn field and each drop was like a blow on the powder-dry soil. The dust leaped. I could see it rising, even as the rain fell. It rose in a cloud and hung there, in the rain, for fully a minute before the rain brought it back down. There was so much dust in the air that we could smell it, and for a time the rain on the car was muddy brown. Then we had passed that field and the rain washed the car clean.
Not much water ran at the roadside, and the brooks didn’t seem to rise half an inch. The rain went right into the soil. And this evening the pastures look fresh and green again. But we need more rain. What we need is several days of it, slow and easy, to fill the soil again and soak down to the roots of things.
It is now dusk, and even as I write the rain has started to fall again. The birds are singing happily. They, too, like the rain. This isn’t a shower; it is going to continue into the night.
It rained all night, the slow rain that is good to sleep with, and it continues unabated today. We went out this morning and picked cucumbers, and got soaked, and brought the cukes indoors and have been busy at the pickling kettle. A good occupation for a rainy day, one that pays dividends for next Winter—pickle in the rain, relish them in the snow.
Each time I smell the pickling kettle I am glad that man did not invent refrigeration too early. If he had he might have neglected the art of using spices. The great demand for spices, which was a prime factor in much early trade and exploration, rose from the difficulty of preserving meat. Meat could be dried or pickled or smoked or salted, but it lost much of its savor. Then it was discovered that spices helped to preserve meat and to make it palatable even if it were somewhat less than fresh. I am sure that many an aging joint of beef was gagged down only because pepper and other stout condiments had dulled the taste buds into acquiescence.
Spices were more than delicate flavorings when Marco Polo was a lad. Had there been such a thing as mechanical refrigeration, Europe’s traffic with the East would have been of much less consequence, and it is quite possible that the voyages of Columbus would never have been undertaken. Kings and their courts were less interested in the shape of the earth than in the taste of their meat.
But out of that fugitive phase of history has come the savor of my pickling kettle, with its dill and mace and allspice and pepper and cinnamon. And out of that kettle will come, next Winter, dills and spiced sours and bread-and-butters and relish.
The house smells wonderful tonight.
The rain let up last night, but it began again soon after dawn. The river runs high, though not in flood; but I took down the Bible a little while ago and have just read Noah’s story again. It’s a wonderful story, and the majesty of the language always thrills me.
Someone once asked William Allen White who had been the most powerful influence on his writing style. Mr. White looked at his questioner in surprise and said that the Bible had been the basic influence on most of the writers of his generation. He might have gone further, for the Bible has been the strongest direct influence on writing in the English language ever since the sixteenth century. Shakespeare probably is the one great writer we have who was not directly influenced by the King James Bible. It wasn’t published until 1611, five years before Shakespeare’s death. But the same influences which shaped the King James Bible must have influenced Shakespeare. And the Tyndale Bible, from which much of the King James version came, was published twenty-two years before Shakespeare was born; so even Shakespeare’s language and wonderful sonority cannot be said to be Bible-free.
It wasn’t until I read John Selden, a contemporary of Shakespeare who long outlived him, that I understood some of the amazing sentence structure of the Bible. Selden, who knew many of the men who helped compile the King James translation, pointed out that it is in many parts essentially a translation, almost literal, of ancient Hebraisms. Thus we have such sentences as: “It is my mouth that speaketh to you…His bowels did yearn for his brother…God ended the work which he had done.” The language is long familiar, though the idiom remains strange even after all these years.
The rain has ended and we have a new world, clean and bright and almost as fresh as it was in early May. The river runs high, but we haven’t been flooded. It was precisely the kind of rain we needed, slow, steady, gentle, so there was a minimum of washing in fields and gardens and a maximum of penetration. The weary look is gone from the pastures and the corn fields look as they should, fresh and green and properly revived.
The way the lively green returns even during two or three days of overcast—rainy days, this time—convinces me that those actinic rays of the sun cut right through even heavy clouds and supply the chlorophyll with energy. Dust is more of a mask than clouds, more difficult for the sunlight to penetrate. That is one reason that even a light Summer shower is so helpful. It supplies little moisture, but it washes away the dust from the leaves and allows them to get to work again. It helps the plants to breathe.
I notice that the professional gardeners urge that the ornamental evergreens be sprayed with water, on the foliage, during the hot weather. It’s the same idea, and it obviously works for the deciduous shrubs too.
The smell of corn pollen is like no other fragrance in the world, and here in America it is as typical of August as the crunch of tooth on the roasting ear. It is a fragrance, however, that predates European settlement here by untold centuries. It hangs heavy now over the land, but it was here when Rome was young.
Despite research and exploration, the origins of our corn are still misted in the remote past. The most we can say is that the American Indians must have developed it, in one of the great botanical achievements of all time. It undoubtedly stems from a wild grass, but even that grass has been only tentatively identified as Central American teosinte. Indians of both Americas were growing sweet corn, pop corn and meal corn of various strains when the first Europeans arrived. Long before that it had passed that stage where it would revert to the wild type if left untended. Botanists can make only very rough estimates of its age.
The developments of corn since Europeans came here have been notable, but in comparison to the original development even they remain minor. We have altered its appearance somewhat, greatly increased its yield, changed its milling qualities. But nubbins found in ancient cliff dwellings of the Southwest can be matched, feature by feature, by nubbins from almost any back-yard patch of today.
The pollen smell I smell here in my valley today is at least as old in this area as the occasional flint arrowheads we find. Now it is an odor known almost all over the world, in Australia, the Argentine, Asiatic Russia, most of Europe’s flatlands, for Indian maize has become a staple foodstuff for the whole world. But its history is as elusive as the pollen smell itself.
The sumac catches my eye each time I drive
down the road, for at a certain bend there is a big clump, the humble smooth sumac intermingled with the tall, airy staghorn. Just now their leaves form sworls and star patterns that delight the eye, and I wonder why no photographer has caught the beauty of their soft lines and the elusive play of light on their leaf and stem.
About a third of the way up my mountain, on a benchlike plateau, there is a gnarly stand of sumac, too, which I have thought from time to time to cut and burn, since it has no real purpose and only takes up room that pines might better use. But I walked up that way last evening as the full moon was rising, and I knew that I shall never lay an ax to it. In the moonlight it was like a grove of white-blossomed shrubs, dazzling in its beauty. All it was, of course, was the moonlight reflected from the shimmery underside of the pendant sumac leaves, but the effect was pure magic. It was silvery white moonlight multiplied and magnified.
I shall leave those sumacs for Fall, too. When Fall begins to creep across the land the sumac is the first to know it. Some impatient stems will take on a touch of scarlet before this month is out, but the full color will not come until the birches turn to tarnished gold. Then that benchland will be pure magnificence with its slow turn from faint scarlet to red orange and deepest crimson.
And when Winter comes again it will be dark and beautiful against the snow, with its grotesque stems and its fat candle-flame heads of deep red berries for the birds. Even in Winter nakedness it is a lovely thing to see.
Looking at the squash plants this morning I thought that the Indians of the Southwest had an eye for beauty as well as meaning when they chose the squash blossom as a symbol of fertility and plenty. It has a generous grace of form as well as a richness of color ranging from golden orange to sun yellow. On one of our Hubbard plants the bloom is a hand’s breadth across, so big it is almost rank, yet the petal texture is tissue thin, easily crushed by a careless finger.
The modern botanist speaks of the family as Cucurbita and includes in it the pumpkin, the muskmelon, the cucumber and the squashes of all sizes and shapes. The Indians called it askutasquash and contributed the syllable we apply to one branch of the family. The Indians’ askutasquash were primarily the tough-shelled pumpkins and the tough-skinned squash that mature late and keep well into Winter. Squash and corn were usually grown in the same field, and squash blossoms and corn tassels were twin symbols of fertility in Indian ceremonies over much of this land.
Look at a classic Navaho silver necklace and you will find the squash blossom, stylized in the white metal with open petals and round fertile ovary beneath, for it is the female flower. In silver it is conventionalized to a fine simplicity, but there it is, the August blossom of the squash vine which crept along the sandy soil and opened its petals to the sun, the rain and the four-winged bee. And there it is in our garden, askutasquash or Cucurbita, as you will, symbol of the soil’s fertility, live in color and open to the sun, the rain and the bees.
The urgency that was midsummer now begins to relax and September comes in sight over the land. I see it in the trees, at the roadside where uncut weeds begin to reach maturity, and in the fields and pastures. Oat fields are stubble now, the golden grain harvested. Corn stands taller than I do, the ears in silk and filling day by day. The first goldenrod begins to gleam in the fence rows where wild asters will be taking the place of daisy and black-eyed Susan before long.
Spring is sprouting, and early Summer is the rush of growth and the competition of blooming. But late Summer is more sedate; it is fulfillment of time and purpose, the seed, the fruit, for which growth itself was destined. The time of haste is past, the pod, the capsule, the nut, the seed-head already formed and coming to completion. The egg is hatched, the fledgling now on the wing. Even the bees are less urgent in their rounds. Small rabbits scurry at the roadside, well past the nursling stage; and woodchucks, full of sun and succulence, begin to lay on the fat for hibernation.
Hot days are still upon us, but the sun’s nooning is from a different angle; and nights lengthen, dusk to dawn. I heard the owl last night, and today the crows are restless and full of noise. All a part of the pattern, the maturing change that has its own calendar. For who can stay the wind or hasten the apple? Time flows with the season, not the other way around, and the season flows like a river, from its own springs. Summer ripens and matures, even as the fox grapes on my river bank, and August leans toward September and equinox and Autumn.
I walked down to the bogland at the bend in the road today, where stagnant backwaters from the river form a pond and a swamp. It is largely scummed over, full of algae, and I had the feeling that anything could happen in such waters, any kind of life arise from them. Here in the dead heat of August was the marshy margin and the primordial ooze, black and mucky, with cattails standing rank. I felt, in approaching it, as if I were walking backward in time toward remote beginnings.
Even the pond creatures and those along its margin belong to another age. Of the reptiles, the snapping turtle that lay on a rotting log and glared at me was one of the ancients, armored like a creature of the Silurian age and eying the world as from the midst of a tree-fern jungle. The frogs, too, are primitives, tadpoles which have shed gills and tails and crept up onto the land in the venerable cycle of living things from the ooze to the rocks. The water snakes were still slithering through the vanished age when pterodactyls had not yet grown wings.
The birds, too, had an other-worldly air, the gaunt herons with their beady eyes and darting beaks, the bobtailed kingfishers which have little grace or actual beauty for all their quick, spectacular efficiency. They, too, might be creatures from that ancient in-between time when the dry land was still rising from the swamps.
The water was green with algae, tepid with mud warmth, a kind of protoplasmic soup full of strange and struggling uncertainties. But the hills looked down, and the hills were certainty itself, land risen from the muck, the maturity of an ancient age.
The sentimental view of nature is strangely twisted. It gives to birds and beasts, even to the elements themselves, attributes which they not only lack but are totally unaware of; and it sees morality lessons in the birds, the bees, the trees and the flowers. The fact is that nature has no morality and draws no morals. Nature rests on a solid basis of cause and effect, but neither the causes nor the effects are moral or immoral in the human sense. Spring is in no sense a reward for those who have endured Winter. The gorgeous spectacle of Autumn has a botanical and a chemical reason, but not an aesthetic one.
When I hear someone talk about the happy little birds and the delightful little animals I wince. Animals do play, or seem to, at times, and there seems to be a sense of happiness in birds sometimes; but I am not sure even of that. Birds and animals are not noticeably tolerant and life in the woods and fields is a constant round of attack and competition. When I see the way the birds squabble at our feeding station, gluttonous and ill tempered, I wish some of the sentimentalists would pause and look. Life among the birds is a grim matter of survival, and those who get pushed around too much do not survive.
Even in the plant world the same basic truth exists. Competition is constant, for root space, for sun, for moisture, for attention from the agents of pollination, for the means of survival. And the wars are even more pronounced and evident among the insects.
Man is really the only creature, probably the only living thing, which tempers the competition and possesses compassion to any degree. Examples of it elsewhere are extremely rare.
We were eating dinner on the porch this evening when we heard a large splash in the river. I looked up, but the long shadows made dusk on the water. I saw something moving there, something the color of a tan Great Dane, and I wondered for an instant whose dog was coming to visit us. Pat, lying on the grass, looked up but without the alert interest he would have shown for an intruder. Then Barbara exclaimed, “A deer!”
It was a large doe. She came up the steep bank and looked at us, not fifty yards away, and crossed the road and went around th
e garage, unhurried, quite without fear. She paused inquisitively at the old horse trough, then leaped the barnyard fence, light as thistledown, and walked with dainty, unhurried steps to the next fence and leaped it with ridiculous ease. Her big ears funneled for alarming sounds, and twice she turned to look at us; but she was still unhurried as she crossed the pasture, so confident she stopped to pluck a few mouthfuls of clover. Then she sailed over the far fence as easily as I would have stepped over a log, and went into the woods and up the mountainside.
There had been no yelping of dogs on the other side of the river, no sign or sound of a chase. She wasn’t frightened. She merely came down to the river, crossed for her own reasons, and went on about her business, which obviously was up on the mountain. And Pat, who bristles and raises an alarm at the sight of a heifer outside the pasture, gave her but that one look, then lay back content and dozed again. He knew, and she knew, that she was no intruder. She lives here, though we seldom see her; this is her land even more literally than it is mine.
Dawn comes misty now, as with a foretaste of the chill ahead. Over the river the mist is like smoke, curling and wreathing in the sunrise air as the mysterious little currents of breeze play tag. White smoke, the incense of fading Summer, which vanishes as the sun reaches an hour above the horizon.
This is not the haze of high humidity which clouds the hills on a sultry midsummer morning; this is the shimmery gauze of the changing season, the dew which washes the dust from the Summer-weary leaves along the river and keeps my valley green beyond the season’s prime. This is the blown breath of Autumn long before there is even a hint of frost in the air.
It was here this morning, though the sky was clear and the horizon clean, a brilliant morning full of blue and green and the long shadows of sunrise. It was not a gray mist; it was white, white as daisy petals, whiter than cumulus clouds, shimmery white and so thin it shimmered of silver as the sun struck through it. It was like a spider web jeweled with dew, and even less tangible. I could wave a hand and see a swirl and a quick gleam of sun in the momentarily mistless air.