This Hill, This Valley

by Hal Borland

  Star after star—the night is filled with starlight, and the Milky Way is a whole sky-drift of mingled stardust. It is as though the star-studded wind were forever blowing across the deepest darkness, forever and changing only with the repeated seasons. Tonight it is thus, and tomorrow it will be a little changed, but only in relationship to me and my sense of time, and the next day another small notch of change. Yet another December will be the same again, as it has been before and still before.

  I wonder and watch the Winter stars, and there is starlight in my very puffs of life-breath. My shoulders lift toward the stars, for I, too, am a part of this eternity.

  The ice is on the river again. It began in shards and sheets of ice drifting down in the slow current, forming fragile bridges where it massed. Then there was another night of cold and there was slush between the shards and along the bank. Yesterday was cold and today there is a sheet of crystal all across the river which dances with glitter when the sun strikes it. The flow is still there; if I break the ice near the shore I can see the movement in the dark water. But it is a hidden flow. The casual eye sees the river stilled, locked again in Winter.

  It is so clear, so simple, this ice, that one forgets that ice carved these valleys. Ice was the great knife which shaped these hills, ice after the fire had died away. Ice, crystalline water, one of the simplest solids and yet, in crystal, close akin to granite. Raise its temperature five degrees and it flows away. Raise it twenty and, on a chill day, it steams, becomes a cloud. A snowflake, feather light, or a glacier, or a river no longer open to the sky. Ice.

  The river flowed in this ice-shaped valley and Winter night closed down and the river at dawn was only a gleaming highway for the wind. I look at it and I stand face to face with my land’s beginnings, its primal force, its ice.

  Not the least of the wonders we celebrate today was the simplicity surrounding the Birth itself. A carpenter named Joseph went with his young wife up from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the town of his fathers, to enroll for taxation as the governing Romans had ordered. Joseph and Mary arrived late and weary to find that the inn was crowded; so they took shelter in the stable with other late-comers. Second-best, but humble travelers could not choose. It was shelter. And there in the stable the Child was born.

  Thus the simple beginnings. Add the shepherds on the night hills, the appearance of the angel, their journey to the stable, and it still remains one of the least adorned of all the great stories we cherish. It is as simple as was the Man himself and His teaching. As simple as the Sermon on the Mount, which still stands, in its essentials, as the summary of the belief of free men of good will everywhere.

  There were the night hills with the little town among them. And in a stable there was born One who came to speak to multitudes about freedom and justice and fundamental right. One who spoke in a simple tongue, in terms of the beasts of the land, the birds of the air, the lilies of the fields, and man’s responsibility to man. The kings and captains were marching up and down the land, in full panoply, even as He was being born. But it is His simple words that endure, not theirs; and it is the Birth at the stable that we solemnly commemorate, not the gathering at the crowded inn.

  The sun still stands away off there to the south, even at midday. We have passed the solstice, but change comes slowly. This is the time when the ancients checked their measurement of shadows to be sure that the change had come. They performed their incantations, and they celebrated when the length of a shadow had shortened by a finger’s breadth. That proved that the days were beginning to lengthen once more.

  We are wise. We take it on faith, believing that because there was a yesterday there will be a tomorrow; that last year and last Summer are sufficient proof that another year, another Summer lie ahead. In so doing we have lost a measure of the wonder and the deep-hearted thanks for the continuance of our accustomed way. Perhaps we, too, could do with a bit of shadow gazing. Or at least with a little silent speculation. And we might offer consequent thanks.

  Water, we know, flows downhill. But only if it is water. Not necessarily if it is ice or steam. Lower the earth’s temperature by a few degrees and there would be no flowing water. Shift the earth’s axis a trifle and not only would the temperature and the seasons be altered but the atmosphere as well. Change the atmosphere and life would have to change or perish, all life from lichens to the human animal. And this earth has a mental and emotional axis as well as a geographic and celestial axis.

  The ancients wondered and measured shadows. We take it on faith, as we do so many things. Perhaps we would do well, now and then, to take a look at our own shadows.

  We have come into a spell of clear, cold weather with a bright sun and the midday temperature rising to around 20 and dropping at night to the neighborhood of zero.

  We went for a walk this afternoon, up onto the mountain, and we saw again the colors of Winter. It takes time, after the colorful Autumn, to bring the eye back into focus; but Winter, too, has its spectrum, once the eye and the mind accommodate.

  The bare tree trunks show every tint of gray and even shades of red. The grays on an ash bole or a maple or a beech are of infinite variety and shading. The browns on an oak cover the whole range, even to the light tan of the leaves the oaks are so reluctant to let fall. The trunks of the cedars are full of red, if you pause to look. The brightest red of all, of course, is in the seed heads of the sumac, which still stand waiting for the hungry birds.

  The leaf colors in the damp drifts are now leached to a variety of browns and tans which, as Winter progresses, will slowly mat into the slow decay of leaf mold. The brightest tans we find, in fact, are beneath the pines. Up near the spring-house is a clump of white pines which practically tents the earth, and beneath them is a needle mat six or eight inches thick, the accumulation of years. It stands out today an almost golden tan, in part perhaps because the sky is so blue and the cumulus clouds so white.

  There is little snow left down here or in the pastures, but on the mountain there are drifts two feet deep where the shadows lie and the brief sunlight cannot penetrate. They are like miniature glaciers building up to feed the brooks of Spring.

  It is four years today since Pat adopted us. I should like to sing a birthday song for him, or make some appropriate gesture; but I doubt that he cares much whether I do or not. He greeted me this morning with his usual delight, and when he came into the house and Barbara and I patted him with a bit more than the usual warmth and told him we were glad he came to stay, he accepted it with a proper dignity, then went to warm himself on the rug in front of the register at the foot of the stairs. It is no special day to him. All days seem to be rather special to Pat. Which is something other dog folk will understand and nondog folk will probably set down as a peculiarity in us. So be it.

  Each year at this time I have the feeling that if I am ever to have understanding of the great mysteries, this is the season. The Winter landscape, when I look upon it in a glance, seems to have arrived at the ultimate of simplicity, stripped to essentials. Is it possible that life, too, comes down to its ultimates at such a season?

  Then I walk a little way and I recognize the deception of my glance. So fundamental a thing as the wind carves so simple a thing as a snowdrift into ever changing form. Even the blue shadows across the folded fields shift their pattern and color from minute to minute, perceptibly from hour to hour. And I know that the ice is slowly but surely changing the pattern even of the rocks.

  Time does not cease. Change does not end. There is no place where I can stand and say, “This rock is unchanging; this moment is endless.” Nor is there any place in life where I can stand and say, “This is what I am, complete and unchanging.” There are forces beyond our willing that beat upon us, and the best we can do is stand against them, firm in our own faith and conviction. We who would reach the ultimate of simplicity and understanding must first accept our own relationship to change and time. There is our certainty, there the final simplicity, and no calendar’s year-e
nd, no season, no prolonged moment, can ever change it much.

  The calendar’s year runs out. Oil the chart we begin a new cycle, another sequence of days to add up into weeks and months and, in the end, another year. Thus we mark it off, for man must count his hours and days and bring mathematical order, at least, into his life.

  So we come to a place in time where we try to pause for a moment and draw a tally line and, if we would be honest, try to reach some appraisal. But it is no more an ending than is a sunset. Tomorrow comes; and yesterday, last year, hands on its unfinished business. The wind does not pause on the stroke of midnight, nor are the stars altered in their courses. Even the clock which man has made to count seconds continues to tick them off, one by one.

  There are new beginnings, perhaps, but only in the mind of man. I can look back and appraise the past, and I know that here is another unit of my time in which to do some of those things to which my conscience drives. Life itself is change, and here is a means of measuring that change. Because I can think and remember and have the capacity for learning, I look back for comparisons. I need the reassurance, the belief, that comes from such a summing up. I need the knowledge of time ahead.

  But no year ends on a calendar’s page. Change knows no season nor numerical calculation. And even those who would tie time to the sun and the stars must know that the nadir of the year is past. The sun swings slowly north, in our way of seeing it; days lengthen; the season of life renewed, which we call Spring, is already established in the earth as among the stars.

  JANUARY

  WE WALKED THE NEW year in, as is our long-standing custom. New Year’s Eve parties have little savor for us. I still don’t know how it happened, but some years ago we were at such a party and I looked at my watch and it was eleven o’clock. Barbara was across the room. Our eyes met and without a word I knew that we both wanted to be away from there. I turned to our hostess and said, “It’s been a good party, but we have to go.” Then Barbara was beside me and she said, as though carrying on my thought, “You don’t mind, do you, if we leave?” And before the startled hostess could answer we were gone. We drove home and, still in party clothes, we went for a walk, the two of us alone with the night. We returned to our house at the stroke of twelve and stood there in the starlight.

  Thus we set a pattern. It has meaning for us which needs no words of explanation. We usually spend New Year’s Eve at home, but if we go elsewhere we return home before midnight. We dress for the weather and go out for a walk. Sometimes we walk in biting cold, sometimes in snow, and a time or two we have walked in a howling storm. Pat walked with us last night, and it was a brittle night with frost in the air spangling the starlight.

  Indians called this the Wolf Moon, knowing well the time when fangs were eager and hunger drove the pack. Most of the wolves are gone, but the fangs remain, fangs of ice and cold, the great primal forces of Winter’s depth. The wind courses the valleys and harries the hills, and the long nights have sharpened its fangs. The ice lies deep.

  In some lands there are mountain barriers to the Winter wind, but our geography has no such design. Our mountain chains, for the most part, lie with the wind which moves down from the north. The great valleys merely funnel the gales so that they howl unfettered and roar out across the flatlands until they have run themselves down. Our Winter winds have few barriers. Even the trees stand naked, to sigh and moan as the wind whips through them, freighted with snow and ice or merely freighted with cold. And the hills lie open to the elements.

  Ice sheathes the ponds and clogs the streams. It thrusts at the banks with its own fangs. But more than that, it gnaws at the hills. It thrusts a hidden fang into the granite of the hilltop and rips the rocks apart. Ledges that can defy all other elements begin to crumble away beneath the ice, which can come from as impalpable a thing as a wisp of mist or as fragile a thing as a snowflake. Ice, the sharpest fang of all, and the most persistent.

  The Wolf Moon, they called it, listening to the howl of the pack in the Winter valleys. And the howl I hear tonight will be the wolf howl of the wind in those same valleys, the voice of primal forces at work in the Winter world.

  Esthetically, the Franklin stove has little to recommend it. Its antiquity appeals to some, but not to us. It sits there in the living room, a black box with brass knobs and a strange smoke dome which acts as additional radiation. Connoisseurs say it is a rather rare one, but of that I am no judge. It was here when we bought the house and since there was no fireplace and I like an open fire I refused to close the deal for the house without the Franklin stove.

  Ben Franklin invented this stove, or its prototype, no doubt after years of aggravation (B. Franklin himself used that word) with fireplaces. He simply devised an iron box which stood out in the room and radiated heat in all directions—a fireplace, so to speak, open to the room on all sides. I cannot provide statistics on its efficiency, but this Franklin stove throws three times as much heat as the best fireplace I ever owned. Two small oak logs will simmer in it all evening and warm the whole living room. It draws well. This one has ledges in the firebox where one could probably suspend a basket in which to burn coal or coke. This stove and a wood-burning cook stove, I am told, once heated this house all Winter long. It could do the same now in an emergency.

  Last night as I sat in front of its fire I could imagine the shade of Old Ben standing in front of it, with his bald head, his bifocals well down on his nose, his hands clasped behind him, smiling at me. Smiling and saying, “So, my fire-box endures even today. Strange, what a man’s need for comfort will prompt him to devise!”

  Last night brought a light, fresh snowfall, and this morning I went out to see who lives around here. Many of my co-inhabitants had left their marks. Out by the garage were field mouse tracks, dainty as lace. Two of them had met and gone together to investigate the base of a forsythia bush, for reasons obscure. Then they had gone separate ways, one across the road, the other half around the garage, then into some runway beneath the snow.

  Near the corn crib was a maze of squirrel tracks. The squirrels had been up the crib’s side, taking corn. How a squirrel does it I do not know, though I have watched many times, but he can turn an ear of corn tightly packed against the mesh of the crib and get at fresh kernels. I have tried it, thrusting my fingers through the mesh, and I can scarcely budge an ear. But the squirrels had been there this morning, tracks all over the place. I thought there had been a dozen of them until I followed the outgoing tracks and found that there had been only three.

  At the edge of the pasture I found where a skunk had walked, leaving his long-footed tracks. Walked, not run. A skunk can run surprisingly fast, but he seldom does; he has other means of protection. Crossing the pasture, I found rabbit tracks. At first they were leisurely, exploratory. Then they were wary. Then they indicated flight. Not far away I found the reason, the dainty, in-line, catlike tracks of a red fox which had come up the valley, skirting the brush. The fox had seen the rabbit, but too late. He had paused and gone on. Had I followed his tracks half a mile I should probably have found that he breakfasted on field mice. But I came back, instead, for my own breakfast.

  It is snowing again today, and according to the radio they are having a sleet storm seventy miles to the south of us. If it continues, such a storm can do tremendous damage and cause endless inconvenience. Sleet is one of the most insidious of all Winter hazards. It creeps in gentle as rain and twice as treacherous. It coats the roads, creating the first hazard. Then it coats the wires. And finally it coats the trees with ice which increases upon itself. Limbs begin to fall. Wires come down. Confusion and peril mingle. The complexity of our way of life ensnarls itself in its own coils.

  We lived for some years in that area now being sleeted, in a house eight miles from town and wholly electrified. In one sleet storm we seemed to escape unscathed. The sleet ended with our trees intact, our wires unbroken. But two miles away one maple tree was borne down by the ice. It came down across the power line. Wi
res snapped.

  The consequences of that one tree’s fall were enormous. It blocked the road. Those who could have cleared the road were long delayed because of the ice. Traffic itself began to create a jam. Repair men trying to reach the broken wires were caught in the snarl of stalled cars. Within a few hours a truck skidded on the ice and knocked down a utilities pole, severing the wires at a second place. Not only we, but a hundred other families, were without power or phone, and in consequence without heat, without light, without cooking facilities, without water. Then a wind came and brought other ice-sheathed trees down. It was three days before emergency repairs were made. Meanwhile, a thousand families huddled around fireplaces, cooked there, melted snow there for water, suddenly thrown back on the slender resources of their own ingenuity in a kind of neo-primitivism. And all because an unforeseen combination of rain and cold air had coated the trees with half an inch of ice.

  The ice storm to the south continued throughout yesterday and this morning there are reports of damage and distress, power lines down and traffic stalled. We have been fortunate here. We have six inches of snow and no ice, and life goes on uninterrupted.

  We are fortunately situated, even should such an ice storm come. It is not by chance, of course. The people here have known Winter in its worst aspects and have made a compromise between convenience and self-sufficiency. Our house is not unique, yet we have a gravity flow of water, we cook with what is called “bottled gas,” and we have the Franklin stove for heat in an emergency. Should the power be cut off, we could still eat and drink and maintain a degree of warmth. And the same is true of most of the farms round about. The dairymen would have to milk by hand, a long, tiring job but one they have done before. They would have to use oil lanterns and oil lamps, and the chunk stoves would have to be set up in a hurry and fed with billets from the woodpile. But that, too, would only require turning the calendar back a few years.