This Hill, This Valley

by Hal Borland

  Indian Summer will come, and the thin, far haze on the hilltops; but this is even less substantial. The haze of Indian Summer will be day-long; this is morning mist, sunrise magic that vanished even as I watched. It is a curl of shimmer, the very essence of impermanence, a swift glimpse of Autumn already around the bend of the river and waiting there beyond the hills.

  We speak of night as being black, and in a sense we are right, for at night we are all but color-blind. That part of our eye which gives us night vision, such as it is, lacks the ability to distinguish red from green. But the night sky is not black. It is blue, a deep, deep blue, much more like that color which was once known as midnight blue than any other color in the spectrum. For proof, if you care to have it, take a camera loaded with color film and expose it to the night sky when there is no moon. When the negative is developed it will show you this intense blue, seen through the impartial eye of the camera and recorded on the color-sensitive film.

  We think of night as black because it lacks the distinguishing colors of daylight. Go into a flower garden on a moonless night and you can’t distinguish a blue petunia from a maroon dahlia. You can make out the white flowers, which pick up enough light from the stars or even from the remote glow in any night sky to become obvious. But yellow loses its identity in the darkness almost as completely as does red. Only in strong starlight can yellow be distinguished as such.

  We walked this evening under a moonless sky and in an all but colorless world. The maples were gray, trunk and branch and leaf. So was the big popple, though some of its leaves turned a shimmery side which caught the faint starlight. The white birches were stark and ghostly. Queen Anne’s lace at the roadside was a drift of puffy white, smoky. Black-eyed Susans were invisible. And Pat was a most peculiar shape, only part dog, the white part.

  The winds of August are particularly painful to some people, not because they are winds but because they are laden with pollen. To those susceptible to hay fever such winds are poisonous. They carry pollen of ragweed, plantain, certain grasses and certain trees, and that pollen is in a minor way as poisonous as a snake’s venom. Wind-blown pollen contains proteins that are poisonous to the human system, particularly those pollens which can penetrate the mucous membranes. Some persons are more susceptible than others, and some are almost critically susceptible.

  The likeness to snake venom is no mere figure of speech. Venom is a concentrated form of lethal proteins, with other ingredients. All pollen has a large amount of protein, too. But the pollen of most plants contains a type of protein not readily absorbed by human membranes, and therefore not so poisonous. And a good deal of pollen is not wind-borne, being either too heavy or designed, in the peculiar scheme of plant life, for more direct transportation, such as that provided by bees.

  Generally speaking, no plant with conspicuous flowers or strong fragrance will cause trouble for hay fever sufferers. Such plants have pollen designed to be carried by insects. The petals of showy flowers, or their fragrance, is usually proof of this, for both petals and fragrance are the flower’s means of attracting insects. It is the lesser flowers or grasses and weeds that do the damage, for they are wind-pollinated.

  What a dull place the flower garden would be from now until deep frost if all the petunias were still in Brazil! These descendants of a native South American flower come to bloom at just the right time to fill those gaps where earlier blossoms finished their season’s work and departed. Given any kind of encouragement, the petunias bloom like mad, to the delight of the hummingbirds, the moths, and me, until only the chrysanthemums remain to defy the frost.

  The petunia’s name comes from the Brazilian word for tobacco and is a cousin of nicotiana and other variants in the tobacco family. It comes in too many colors to list, and self-sown seed is seldom true to its parenthood. Petunias are among our most persistent self-seeders, and we do little to discourage this trait. We let them grow unless they interfere with other flowers, and every night and on damp, cool mornings we are surrounded by sweet, faintly spiced fragrance, so powerful it pervades the whole garden side of the house.

  Plant breeders have done strange and surprising things with petunia blossoms, adding frills and flounces and even furbelows to the original trumpet. They have varied and variegated the colors. The results do not always please me, but they must please someone. When I want to transform a bare corner of the garden in a hurry, I scatter a light peppering of run-of-the-mill petunia seeds and they flourish mightily. But that is seldom necessary. We restrain the idealistic impulse in June and let enough volunteers grow to have plenty to move around later. Meticulous gardeners frown on such practice, but I’m just a country boy who likes flowers.

  I heard a man called biased today, as though bias were a sin. To be sure the man was biased, and will be all his life. Show me an unbiased man and I will show you a man not only without character but without convictions or beliefs. I suspect that the most biased of men we know are those generally regarded as admirable members of society—preachers, and judges, and even teachers. The preacher is biased in favor of the good and moral life, the judge is biased in the direction of justice, and the teacher’s bias is in the direction of knowledge and its intelligent use.

  It’s the direction of the bias that is important, not the fact of a bias itself. We all have our likes and dislikes, in food, in dress, in books, in ideas, in people, and that is as it should be. Take away those and you take away the individuality and the inherent right of all of us to think and believe. A bias is a positive thing as well as a negative. How can you go through life without taking a stand? If you are against something, you must be for its opposite, and you can’t be in favor of one proposition without finding its reverse distasteful or objectionable.

  I am biased in many ways, and there are times when there is no alternative to taking a stand. I register my bias every time I cast my ballot. Each day I live some bias or other. And every time I write a letter or a piece for the public prints I must reveal some of my biases. Otherwise I would have nothing to say. God preserve the bias in us; but God also give us the wisdom to know bias, including our own, when we see it. Give me an honest bias any time in preference to a dishonest impartiality.

  The shrill sound of the cicada rises to a crescendo on the quiet air this afternoon, then dies away in a diminuendo that is the voice of the season itself, a little tired, a little satisfied, slowly coming to the inevitable end.

  It was for this that the year turned, the ice melted, the seed sprouted, the new shoot opened bud and the blossom opened petal. This is the sequence, certain as sunrise, and there is a quiet triumph about it, a feeling of completion.

  There is a small patch of horse balm or rich weed, as some call it, in the thin woods at the edge of the middle pasture. It is a member of the mint family and one of the few mints with a yellow flower, a small flower that blooms at the tip and has a strong lemon scent. As a flower it is inconsequential, but its botanical name, Collinsonia Canadensis, is a reminder of Peter Collinson, an English amateur botanist and naturalist of the eighteenth century.

  Peter Collinson was one of the group of inquiring minds which poked into all kinds of natural phenomena and, by the very act of inquiry, helped lay the groundwork for natural science. He had a number of American correspondents and exchanged not only ideas but plants with them. He had a part in introducing into this country the culture of hemp and flax and silkworms, and he introduced many American plants into England.

  I find no ready reference to correspondence between Collinson and Jefferson, though they were of kindred minds. But in another part of the broad field of natural science Collinson had an eager ally in Benjamin Franklin. It was Collinson who gave Franklin his first information about electrical experiments being made in Europe. Collinson, the man for whom the horse weed in my woodland was named, thus had a hand in Franklin’s experiments. Indirectly, it was Peter Collinson who helped put electric lights and electric power into my house. I should thank him every day.
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br />   I wonder what happens to highway engineers when they get a commission to build a road. Something happens, because one of them lays a ruler on a map and draws a line, another one gets behind a transit and runs that line through whatever is in the way, and still another gets on a bulldozer and rips out a gash across the countryside. Trees fall, houses are torn down, villages are bisected, landmarks are obliterated. And they call it “Highway Improvement.”

  Last year a comfortable old road up in Massachusetts was doomed to “improvement.” True, it was a somewhat winding road, but a driver with any prudence could drive there in safety, shaded by twin rows of fine old maples. When the “improvers” were through, those trees, which had been seventy-five years growing, were gone in smoke. Now one can lunge across the devastated countryside there at sixty or seventy miles an hour on a long concrete slab. To what end?

  Today we drove on a broad strip of new highway just fifteen miles from here which extends only ten miles or so, between two villages, and is not in any sense a main traffic artery. It was completed only a few months ago. Before the engineers went to work on it, for whatever their mysterious reasons, it was a pleasant, tree-lined road. Today it was a barren strip of new highway, without a tree, a scar on the landscape.

  It happens all the time and everywhere. Devastation is wrought in the name of The Highway, and the devastation is excused as a necessity of progress. Progress whither? I have yet to drive along one of these stark new highways without seeing a crew at work planting grass and trees and bushes. First the devastation, then the repairs, the strange apology for the stupidity of those who drew a line on a map, ran that line with a transit, gouged it out with a bulldozer, none of them able to avoid an irreplaceable grove or a fine old house or even a quiet, peaceful village.

  Now comes the time of rich purple in the fields and meadows, denoting not only a time but a maturity. It is as though the whole Summer had been building toward this deep, strong color to match the gold of late sunlight and early goldenrod. And this is, in a sense, what has been happening.

  Flower colors are mysterious in origin. It is generally accepted that the full, hot sun of the tropics produces the strong colors, the brilliant golden yellows, the deep oranges, the full-bodied scarlets. And it is also understood that the lesser sun of the temperate zones produces lesser colors, for the most part. Cultivated flowers, of course, are excepted in this theorizing.

  Our early Spring brings us, except in the violets, the weaker shades, the whites, the pinks, the thin yellows and the light blues. Early Summer warms the landscape with stronger yellows, deeper blues, some orange, and a variety of reds. But it takes late August and the accumulation of sun and warmth to give us the strength of purple in showy mass.

  The thistles flaunt it. Burdock, troublesome weed that it is, reveals purple flower tufts that will ripen into hook-spined burs eager to hitch a ride to new fields. Ironweed, standing tall in the lowlands, lifts massed heads of deep purple to the sun. And the asters now approach their season, not only the white and lavender ones but the rich purple ones that carry New England’s name.

  Summer begins to fray away toward September, but it does so in purple majesty, strong, full-bodied, full of sunlight.

  I wish I knew the man to thank for the magnificent Norway spruce which grows just outside my study window. It is more than three feet through at the butt and it towers a hundred feet into the air. I know its height, for I have measured it by triangulation. It has been kept trimmed twenty feet up from the ground, but its long, sweeping branches droop so low I have to stoop when I go beneath it. It shades a circle almost forty feet in diameter. In Summer it is a canopy in light showers, a vast, cool, green tepee where we lie or sit in comfort. In Winter it has a wind-murmur that is pleasant to sleep with. It provides me with bushels of resinous cones to tinder my fire.

  A man in the village, a man in his eighties, remembers it as a big tree in his boyhood and says it must be two hundred years old. I see other such trees scattered through this region, but few of them as big and venerable. Someone must have passed this way, long, long ago, with a cartload of seedlings and swapped them for butter and eggs. The pioneer farmers planted them and no doubt disease and storm and thoughtless ax took a good many of them. But those that survived have thriven mightily, though I see no young groves of them.

  I share my tree with the birds and squirrels, as we share all trees. House wrens nest in it, and an occasional robin, and the squirrels explore its heights. But it is the Winter birds which most love it, for it shelters chickadees from the storms and provides endless employment for nuthatches and brown creepers.

  Looking at the treetops now I begin to see again that no Summer lasts forever. Change sets in with the shifting sun. The brilliant green of active chlorophyll begins to fade, the bulk of its work done. True, the change comes slowly and it is essentially a difference that has been there since Spring opened the first leaf buds, but one does not see those differences earlier in the overwhelming greenness of a fresh, new world.

  I went up the mountainside today and looked down, and the elms along the river looked weary, their leaves definitely rusty. The apple trees, always a yellower green than the maples, for instance, are now yellower still and a few completely yellow leaves have begun to fall. All shagbarks tend to an early sere, and their rust creeps across the leaves now, though they are still a deeper green than the white ash which grows plentifully among the hickories.

  Maples still are lush green. They vary in leaf color all season long, and the row of sugar maples beside the river is a study in shades of green, some dark as oaks, some almost as light as birches. The giant poplar, the maverick in that row of maples, is the yellowest green of all, the green I knew best as a boy for it is almost identical with that of its close cousin, the cottonwood.

  The brightest greens, it seems to me, are on those trees that will flaunt the most brilliant reds and yellows in another month or six weeks. The Autumn colors, of course, come from acids and sugars left in the leaves when their Summer’s work is done; but it may be that those which face Fall in a blaze of color are those which have put in the busiest Summer. Certainly those which are greenest now will be brightest later, the maples, the oaks and the lesser dogwoods.

  The cows have cut a path across the pasture with their cloven hoofs. It runs from the lower gate diagonally to the fence, then out toward a wild cherry tree, around the tree, back to the fence, across Millstone Brook and, by a winding route, to the far end of the upper pasture. They take this path going and coming, single-file, each time cutting the path a little deeper.

  I have walked that path repeatedly, wondering why a cow should have chosen that particular route. It wanders, and for no reason that I can see. I think that if I had laid out that path I should have fixed my eye on the destination and gone straight to it. Then I look back on my own life, to where I started and where I went in my journey before I arrived where I am now, and by contrast with mine this cowpath is ruler-straight.

  My path was more like that of the river at my door, which loops upon itself. And yet, even the river made its way around major obstacles. I, stubbornly human, persisted in climbing over hill after hill even though, as I now can see, there were ways around. But each time I climbed a hill I told myself that I had strengthened my muscles and seen a new vista.

  I suppose the whole matter turns upon the question whether the objective or the journey is more important. My theological friends insist upon the objectives, and yet I find that even they tend to the belief that theirs is the only true road, thus confounding their own argument. And I know that when I meet a man, either a temporal or a spiritual man, who has gone directly to his objective, I too often find him a narrow man with little range of experience. He has climbed too few hills, for my taste, seen too few unfamiliar vistas. He is a one-track man.

  The goldenrod is early September’s flower, but it livens late August too, the golden spray that lines the fence rows and the pastures and meadows, yellow as the
late Summer sun itself. Even its foliage partakes of the season, a dusty green rather than the pristine green of June when the world was new and shining; and its flowers are Autumn-generous, fulfillment in multiple, as becomes the season. Only the asters, which come to their full glory just a little later, are as beautiful now, stem by stem.

  Solidago is the botanical name of the goldenrod, reminder of its herbal qualities. The name, from the Latin, means to strengthen, allusion to the general and generous healing qualities once attributed to it. So it is Solidago, the strengthener, goldenrod the strong and generous. We no longer deal much in infusions of goldenrod, but the plant is unchanged; and it certainly remains a symbol of strength and persistence in the face of all odds. Give it a roothold almost anywhere and it makes its own way, coming up to September with a spray of bloom.

  Most of the goldenrods—they belong to the composites and are of a large family with an amazing number of variants —are natives of America. The distribution is broad, evidenced by the fact that such widely separated states as Alabama, Kentucky and Nebraska have chosen the goldenrod as their state flower. It grows at the seaside and in the Midlands and even in the mountains. But best of all it grows with the purple asters and the Joe Pye weed and the ironweed, gold for their blues and purples when the days themselves turn blue and gold.

  I respect the chemists. They have accomplished some remarkable things, for my convenience and my comfort and for the public welfare. But now and then they and their allies and sales promoters reach right over into the field of vandalism. The latest example is the development of a spray to kill roadside weeds and shrubbery. It no doubt has its legitimate purpose, but when it is promoted as a boon to highway maintenance men it is time for someone to shout, “No!” The proposed plan is to spray all roadsides, particularly such secondary and country roads as I live on, which lace the whole nation with pleasant escapes from the roaring turnpikes.