by Hal Borland
We came up the road to the house, and Pat was still there high on the mountain, and the owl hooted near the rock where we had sat. And I wished I could hoot or bark.
Last night, after we had been in the house about half an hour, I heard something at the back door and thought it was Pat, who had persisted in his own devices up on the mountain. It was late dusk. I flipped on the outside light. Pat wasn’t there, but down the steps at Pat’s food pan was a skunk, eating a few small scraps Pat had left. He saw the light, blinked beady black eyes, and solemnly came up the steps. He came up and onto the narrow back porch to the screen door. I was inside with no light in the kitchen. The skunk came up almost to the door and stood there, staring at me, not eighteen inches away.
There was nothing to do but brazen it out, hoping he took no offense. And make no move that would alarm him. He looked up, seeming to stare at me. His black was black as fresh stove polish, his white stripe and tail-tip were dazzling. And his moist black nose wriggled inquisitively. He stood there for what seemed ten minutes, but perhaps was one long minute. Then he turned, solemnly, and edged away, looking back. I still didn’t dare make a move, or he would have gone into immediate action. I waited, and he crossed the porch and went down the steps, deliberate as a cat. And walked across the yard, unhurried, almost regal in his tail-high leisure.
Pat, fortunately, didn’t return until fifteen minutes later. But I was glad to have met this black-and-white neighbor face to face. That, I may add, is the preferred way to meet a skunk. And I shall see to it that no more scraps are left in Pat’s pan to lure skunks.
The harvest moon is with us; and regardless of the calendar the harvest moon is as Autumnal as a corn shock. Given reasonably clear skies, we shall have four or five moonlit evenings in a row, for the harvest moon is not a hasty moon; it comes early and stays late.
There was a time when the harvest moon gave the busy farmer the equivalent of an extra day or two. He could return to his fields after supper and evening milking and continue his harvest by moonlight. That was when corn was cut by hand and husked by hand, when shocks tepeed the fields and fodder was stacked in the barnyard, when the bangboard echoed and the huskin’ peg was familiar to the hand. But times change, and schedules. Now most of the farmer’s long days come at plowing time, or planting, or at hay time. Corn is cut by machine and chopped by machine and stowed in the silo, or it is left standing in the field till a few fine late Fall days, then picked by mechanical picker, a machine that can outstrip a dozen men.
There’s harvesting to be done now, of course, but much of it centers in the kitchen rather than the barns. The last bountiful yield comes from the garden, the late sweet corn, the last of the tomatoes, the root vegetables, the dozen and one kinds of pickles and relishes. But even there the new machines help, the pressure cookers and canners, and the freezer.
It’s still the harvest moon, though, and we all think it’s rather wonderful. Charley stopped past today and said, “Next full moon should be good coon hunting time.” The next full moon will be the hunter’s moon.
Man has long wished he could fly as a bird does, with no more effort and with no mechanical adjuncts. But the more I learn about birds and their ways, the more doubtful I am about the price I should have to pay for such an accomplishment. Flight requires more energy than the most strenuous of normal human activity. That energy calls for lots of fuel. If I had to eat as much as a bird eats I should consume fifty to eighty pounds of bread, meat and vegetables every day; most adult birds eat more than a quarter of their own weight daily, and some eat half their own weight. Birds still in the nest, growing and feathering out, often require food equal to or even exceeding their own weight each day. That’s why the parent birds are so busy when they have a nestful of fledglings.
To convert all this food into energy, all birds have a very high rate of metabolism. That is one reason they also live with what we would consider a constant fever. The normal temperature of most birds ranges from 105 to 108 degrees. Some birds have a daily rhythm, up to around 108 degrees during the active, daylight hours, and down to 104 at night.
Since a bird has relatively little space in which to store energy in the form of fat, all birds have to be constantly in search of food. Starve a bird for two days and that bird is on the verge of death; every gram of fat has been used up and the energy demands have begun to consume essential flesh and muscle.
The life of a bird is not all carefree song and joyous flight. I’m content to do without wings and live as I do.
Ragwort still shows its rather dusty yellow flowers at the roadside, and soapwort makes a display of pink in the waste places. They are only two of the dozens of worts that thrive and bloom without particular notice or acclaim, since the old-time gatherers of wild herbs have largely disappeared. For the worts were among the prime items on the “yarb” list. The very fact that the syllable wort is incorporated in the common name is testimony to their past. “Wort” goes back to the Gothic word for root and to the Anglo-Saxon wyrt, meaning herb.
Any casual list of the worts will run to at least a hundred and fifty plants, running the alphabetical scale from adderwort to yellowwort. Go through such a list and you find the whole range of human ailments set forth, at least so much of the range as was known and denominated a hundred years ago. Take cankerwort. Go on down to gutwort, which may have lacked elegance but probably reduced many an ache. Nettlewort may have assuaged the sting of the nettle, and if so it was surely potent. Quinsywort certainly was used as a hot infusion for a very sore throat.
There was even a rupturewort. We still recognize soapwort, which is nothing more than Bouncing Bet, a pleasant flower with a root that can substitute for soap. And there is toothwort, there is navelwort, there is sneezewort, there is wartwort. The worts, the persistent herbs in the old back-country apothecary, constitute a kind of lexicon of human aches and ills, of pain and hope and trust, and inevitably of occasional cure.
This morning two members of a road crew working nearby came to the door and said, “There’s a sheep trapped on the island. Could you take your boat and maybe get it off?” So we went, the three of us.
The island is only a hundred yards long and a third that wide. It lies across thirty feet of shallow water from the far shore of the river. We beached the boat and the ewe bleated in fear. She must have been driven there by stray dogs, panicked enough to enter the shallow water. We finally drove her to one end of the island and I caught her, flipped her on her back, and hog-tied her sharp-hoofed feet. We put her in the boat and brought her down here and turned her loose in the big barn. I phoned around and found that she belonged to a farmer up the river, and his son-in-law came and got her in his car.
Before the road men went back to work they asked, “Where did you learn to handle sheep?” I told them I grew up on a ranch. That explained everything to them, everything that could be readily explained. Had they asked, “Where did you learn to handle a boat?” the answer would have been much more complicated. I never saw a boat until I was twenty years old. I capsized the first canoe I ever got into. That I should own a boat now and be able to maneuver it even passably is a marvel to me. But as for sheep, I heard sheep blatting by the thousand before I was ten years old.
The first few maples have begun to turn. The turning of the maples particularly, among all the tree coloration, is individual and often spectacular, not alone in its color but in its variety and unpredictable piebald character. Up at the edge of the middle pasture stands one young maple, not over fifteen feet high, which already is all a fiery red, every leaf. Not ten feet away is another maple, apparently the same age and kind, which hasn’t yet turned so much as one leaf. Down the road last Fall I watched two maples side by side, big, towering trees; one turned a gorgeous red and remained in full color two weeks before its neighbor began to color. The reluctant one turned only at the last minute, so to speak, and both of them lost their leaves in the same rain.
We have a row of venerable maples beside
the river, big trees three feet through at the butt. The two directly in front of the house turn brilliant yellow early, the two just beyond them are always a week or so later, and the two at the far end are still more deliberate. All turn yellow, with just a hint of pink in a couple of them. Just across the road, in the upper pasture beside the old barn, is another maple, probably a seedling from them, that is now turning red at the top. It usually does that and the color seeps down, a flame working down from the tip.
Some maples turn one branch at a time, as though the branches were complete individualists. And I am always pleased to see the way the tiny maples on the mountain, seedlings no more than two feet high, take on color earlier than their big brothers, like children being put to bed several hours before the grownups.
The garden needs a frost. I wish we would have a good frost, though there are those who look at me in horror when I say so. I am expected to brag about tomatoes I still have ripening. Actually, we have ripened plenty of tomatoes for this year. I am willing to call it quits and wait for next May and brand-new tomato plants. By then I will be fed up with canned tomatoes and I know I would then pay a dollar apiece for those greenish-orange tomatoes now on the vines. Well, make it a quarter apiece; I have my Scottish blood. But right now I would gladly settle for one final clean-up job in the garden and a chance to put the hoe away, and the duster and the cultivator.
That’s one of the best things about nature in a land of four seasons—frost comes to put an end to the growth of succulent and growing things. No garden should endure, with all its dividends and demands, more than about six months a year. The other six months one should be allowed to rest and dream and yearn and get rid of the calluses. Six months, as it were, to appreciate.
Albert and I were talking about this late last Spring, when the temperature had been in the low 70s for almost a week. We agreed that it was just about perfect, that we could take a lot of it. Then Albert said, “But not a whole year. I don’t want to grow more than one garden a year or cultivate more than one crop of corn. And one season’s haying a year is plenty.”
So I speak for others too when I say hail to the frost! Let those who make green-tomato pickles have those green tomatoes! The sweet corn stands sere and stripped. The beans are rustling in the wind. The squash are ready to quit. So am I. I want to put away the hoe. Let it frost!
The brightest color in the woods just now is not the leaf of a tree or shrub but that of a vine. It’s that cousin of the fox grape which botanists know as Psedera quinque-folia and which is sometimes known as woodbine and sometimes as Virginia creeper. I prefer Virginia creeper, though Virginia is only one of thirty or more states where it grows wild and in profusion; woodbine is an English name applied, even in this country, also to various honeysuckles.
I see the Virginia creeper this morning on a tall dead popple just across the river. The scarlet leaves make that old tree a veritable pillar of fire. I shall be looking at it for days, every time I look across the river from here, and no matter how many times I see it I shall admire its beauty. And Virginia-creeper vine on the garden fence, which holds its own in competition with the grapes there, is beginning to turn scarlet. Give it a few more days and it will be an intricate wall of color woven on the wires.
Some outlanders mistake it for poison ivy, though identification is easy. As the Latin name indicates, its leaves generally occur in groups of five on a stem; poison ivy leaves grow in threes and are a different shape. And the ivy leaves often turn orange and yellow rather than scarlet. Also, the inconspicuous berries on the ivy are a dull gray, and the berries on the Virginia creeper are miniatures of the wild grape and a lively blue. Country folk never mistake the two.
It was Lowell who celebrated the rarity of June days, and it was Holmes the elder who wrote of “chill September.” Neither of them seems to have noticed that some of the rarest days of the year come in September, days by no means chill and in every way pulsing with life that is only hinted at in languid June. September always brings a few such days, and this is one. If we appreciate such days it is not wholly because they follow the days of August. Such contrast helps, but they would be magnificent at any time.
Today the sky is clear and clean, the air is crisp without being chill, the wind is free of dust and not yet full of leaves. Late cicadas buzz, crickets fiddle in the tall grass, and this evening the katydids will set up their clatter. Crows caw with less than usual raucousness. Bees still hum over nodding heads of goldenrod. Asters, the Fall wildlings, spangle the roadside.
In a properly ordered world we should all go out onto the hills on such days and know that life is innately good. Enough, perhaps, that we take time to see and feel and sense the fundamental strength and continuing hospitality of the natural world around us. This is man’s environment, and ours is, in a broad sense, a way of life that cherishes it. It somehow sums up the things for which we stand, as a race. We find meanings in it that accommodate the best of our beliefs. So we stand in the open, on such a clean, clear September day, and see the bold horizons of our faith, the hills of our strength, the granite substance of our enduring purpose.
We expect frost in this area any time after mid-September, and occasionally before then. It hasn’t come this year, though we have held our breath several nights and it has got down to thirty-four a couple of times. I thought it surely had come this morning, for the lawn was white, but it turned out to be only one of those heavy dews which look frosty, even in July, before the sun has warmed up.
The stated averages assembled by the statisticians indicate that killing frosts will strike us about September 25. It sounds absurd, but it is my experience, not only here but elsewhere, that the weather averages compiled by the meteorologists are usually on the dark or pessimistic side. A year ago I discussed this when I was discussing weather with the Weather Bureau in Washington, and I got my answer. The charts, which is to say the averages, are based on a certain weather period covering about fifty years and ending, as I remember it, some fifteen years ago. I was told that new charts, which will include the major part of the recent fifteen years, are now being prepared.
Weather observers insist that the climate is not changing, yet they admit that the past ten or fifteen years, as a whole, have been warmer than “average.” “Average,” to them, means that base period, a series of years before the warm trend set in. I am not qualified to quibble, but it seems to me it would be more reasonable to say that temperatures now appear to be higher than they were in the past, rather than to say they are “above average.” The whole matter can become technical and involved, but when I see, year after year, charts showing “accumulated excess” of temperature amounting to almost three degrees a day, I wonder why it is called “excess” year after year.
I know it’s a trick of the light and the eye but the leaves of the white ash seem to me to turn blue in the Fall. A strange, indefinable blue with just a touch of pink in it; perhaps violet comes closer to the color I am thinking of. I go along a road and I see an ash which has turned to just the precise point, and its leaves are blue-violet.
I have gone up to such a tree a dozen times—I did so today, down along the pasture fence—and the leaves close up are a mixture of green and yellow and a kind of dirty in-between. I tell myself I am seeing things. I walk away and look back, and they are blue again, that indefinable blue-violet. The wind touches them and they flutter in the light, and they are yellowish green. Then they come to rest and the sun strikes them just so, and I see blue.
I am not completely mad, for Barbara too sees it at times. But not as often as I do.
There is a blue ash, Fraxinus quadrangulata, of the Midwest, but its name comes from a dye extracted from the inner bark, not from the color of stem, twig or leaf. The tree I am speaking of is Fraxinus americana, plain American white ash, which grows all through the Northeast and East and Midwest and even into Texas. The tree books I know say its leaves turn yellow in Autumn, and I agree. They do turn yellow. But not until they ha
ve passed through this blue phase.
Killing frost has struck the low-lying gardens in the village. Tomato vines are blackened and so are peppers, and such garden flowers as dwarf dahlias and nasturtiums. But the frost passed us by. That is the way of first frost; it is spotty, nipping gardens in the open before it touches those hemmed in by hedges or trees, putting a cold finger on those in a hollow, leaving those on nearby knolls untouched. Cold air flows downhill, as water does, and gathers in the hollows. Our garden gains ten days or so of frost-free time by being close beside the river, which gives off warmth and night fog all Fall. A most munificent river. It deposited the garden soil in the first place, it warms the air in Spring, its mists ease the dry spells, and now it delays the frost.
We were out today surveying the last garden get, knowing we must soon bring in our final harvest. Chard and kale will go on and on, and most of the late carrots will remain in the ground, to be dug during occasional thaws all Winter for stews. Parsnips and leeks will also stay where they are. But green tomatoes must be gathered for piccalilli and the squash must be brought in soon. We are through with the corn—the late nubbins can stay where they are, for the raccoons and the mice. Onions are already in. We finished with the beans weeks ago, except the last crop of limas; they must come in tomorrow. One last short row of beets can come in now for beet pickles. But beyond that there isn’t much garnering to be done. Only the clean-up, to remove weeds and drying stalks.
The sun rose clear in the east this morning, and it will sink in the west, by the compass, this evening; there is only a few seconds’ difference between the span of today’s light and tonight’s darkness. Thus ends the calendar Summer, with the scarlet feathers of the sumac thrusting from roadside thickets, symbols of the Indian Summer to come. Thus end all Summers, with the bronze of maturity rustling in the garden, the crispness of Autumn in the air.