by Hal Borland
Old barns, like old people, should have some reason for being. After I had finished the repairs and smelled the fragrances in the loft I went back to the shop. But I turned and looked at the barn and it seemed to lift its slightly stooped shoulders rather proudly. It is full of years, but it still has a purpose.
I am not sure how old my barn is, but I would make a guess of at least a hundred years. When I said that to one visitor he shook his head. “It can’t be. It has a cement foundation.” That man didn’t know that Portland cement was used in the construction of the locks for the Erie Canal, back in the 1820s. Most of the barns and houses which date back a hundred years or so had stone and mortar foundations, but that was for economy, not because cement was unavailable. Stone was everywhere and lime and sand were cheap. My barn also has a cement floor, but that could have been and probably was laid in its later years.
Whatever the age of the barn itself, its timbering is even older than the present structure. It is framed in the old way, with beams a foot and more square, oak beams hewn to shape and mortised and tenoned. They came from an earlier structure, because they have mortises in odd places, where no tenons were ever based in this barn. They were, obviously, good beams salvaged from some other barn, and they are pegged together. The siding is vertical, as on all old barns, and the rafters are shaped only enough to give the roof boards a level support. Some of the floor boards in the loft are old pumpkin pine two feet wide.
A few years ago a passing photographer took a picture of the barn, with a gnarled old apple tree nearby and a broken hay rake near the ramp and won a prize with it under the title, “Abandoned Farm.” We got a laugh out of that, but the next Spring I moved the old rake. Nobody has photographed the barn since. Maybe I should have left the rake where it was and kept the barn picturesque.
I met a man in the village today who said he saw a woodchuck yesterday. A lean and hungry woodchuck who probably got out of bed a little too early. Out of bed on the wrong side, too, I am sure. I have yet to see a woodchuck who got out of bed on the right side.
Coming home I caught up with a collie dog trotting down the road. He heard the car, glanced over his shoulder, moved aside and paid me no more attention. And I thought how completely dogs have adapted themselves to automobiles. Not very many dogs get run over, certainly very few in relation to the total dog population. My guess is that fewer dogs are car casualties, proportionately, than human pedestrians.
Do dogs pass on acquired characteristics? I know it is contrary to laws of heredity; but this is knowledge rather than a physical or mental characteristic. Do mother dogs somehow tell their pups that cars are a strange kind of animal that cannot bark or bite but that kill if one get underfoot? Do they tell the pups that cars stay on roads and that if dogs stay at the roadside they are safe? However they learn it, pups come to know early in life that cars must be given right of way. It seems to me that they learn much earlier now than twenty years ago. It may be, of course, that slow-learning strains fail to survive, an instance of the survival of the fittest.
February is doing itself proud, but I hope it doesn’t get delusions of being April, because I am sure March will not be at all like May.
We walked across the pastures and up the mountain a little way and I found a small gray birch with tiny catkins out, not yet turned yellow but out of the bud. It had cheated somewhat, because it was a very small tree growing on a very small island in the brook. The brook water must have warmed its roots and the air temperature must have been raised a degree or two by the water, thus giving it an extra week or two of growing season. But there it was, with small catkins.
In the pasture we saw a pair of common grackles, their feathers gleaming with that iridescent sheen peculiar to their tribe, green and blue overlaying the black in the sunlight. They strutted and poked their long beaks into clumps of dead grass and watched us with beady eyes. They were quite tame, letting us approach within ten feet before they hopped and flew a little way.
I am content with only a few grackles, a few pairs. When a whole flock congregates, particularly in the Spring, they make a din and an uproar. Later in the season I can accept a din, but after the Winter’s silence I have to work up to the busy noises of Spring gradually. And there’s nothing gradual about a flock of grackles.
This afternoon there were ducks on the river. I thought they were ducks until I got the binoculars. Then they were easy to identify as mergansers, which some call shelldrakes. There was no mistaking the males, with their clean white feathers, their dark markings, and their red-orange beaks. The females are a speckled gray and brown, and it was the females that I saw first.
After I had watched them for a time, down at the bend of the river, they came upstream opposite the house and put on a fine display of diving. The mergansers are splendid divers. I watched one old drake upend himself and go under and stay down a full minute. The river at that point is at least ten feet deep, and he probably went right down to the bottom. He came up forty feet from where he went down, and upstream at that, though the river is high and has a strong current.
There were six of them, three pairs, and they were in the water out here all afternoon. Soon, now, they will be quacking loudly at dawn every morning. We see them—and hear them—every year.
Some of the frost is coming out of the ground. We had reason to take a back road through the woods a few miles from here today and the muddy ruts were treacherous. I thought several times that I was going to get the car hung up on the ridge between the ruts. No wonder that country folk on back roads shake their heads at today’s automobiles with their low clearance.
A good many years ago I tried to navigate the ultimate of such roads in Mississippi. I was driving one of those early high-wheeled Oakland touring cars, which could manage most mud roads. But the road I was on had been used by loggers, the ruts had been cut deep by the laden wheels of their wagons and churned to mire by the hooves of their four-mule teams. I managed to stay on the ridges for about four miles, then slid off into those canyons of ruts and there I was. I waited half an hour and a logger came along. He didn’t even ask questions. He unhooked his team from his log wagon, flipped a log chain around the front axle of my car, hupped to his mules, and skidded me out. He skidded that car on the greasy mud for the better part of a mile, to a hard road, and wouldn’t take a cent for it. “Y’can hep me sometime,” he grinned, “if y’ever come back thisaway. Which y’won’t, if’n you got good sense.”
I went back thataway a few years ago, and that road was a big, broad, blacktop highway. And not a logger in sight.
The afternoon was warm again, almost balmy, and the daffodils are showing their tips all over the flower garden. Also dozens of crocuses. Crocus leaves; not a bud yet in sight.
While we were at lunch I looked out into the pasture and saw birds, dozens of birds. They ran like robins. I got the glasses, and they were robins. I began to count. I counted to fifty and lost all count, for they were darting about, busy. There were sixty or more of them, I am sure, and they were scattered all over the pasture and beside the brook. Apparently they had just arrived, for they were searching the grass for food. Those we saw a week ago were scouts or outriders. I had thought they might be part of a flock that wintered here, but now I doubt it. This is a migratory flock, certainly, the flock that comes to this valley each year. They are a couple of weeks early this year. How red their breasts looked in the February sunlight!
This afternoon we drove over into the next valley and saw sap buckets on the maple trees and the curling mist of smoke from the syrup evaporator. When we came home I got out the spouts and the buckets and got down the tub that hangs in the woodshed and scrubbed it out. Our syrup equipment is simple, but it makes syrup. If the weather holds, I shall tap a few trees tomorrow.
It has chilled off this evening. Perfect sap weather, cold nights and mild days.
I tapped four maple trees today. To tap a tree we drill a hole about two inches deep, drive a metal spout into it, and
hang a pail on the spout. The sap begins to drip. I put two spouts on each tree. That will give enough sap for a gallon or two of syrup and a few cakes of sugar. It takes twenty to thirty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
The sap flows clear as water, though when I get a gallon or two it seems to have a pale amber tint, so pale it is little more than a shine. And the word “flow” is too strong a word; the sap drips, drop by drop. I timed it this morning and it was coming at the rate of fifty drops a minute, a good flow. By midafternoon we had about six gallons of sap and I began cooking it.
The first year we made syrup I thought of boiling it down on the stove in the kitchen. Layton gave wise warning. The steam would fill the house and, since it is a sticky steam, it would film walls and woodwork. So I built a temporary fireplace of cinder blocks in the yard and used an old wash tub for my evaporating kettle. How right Layton was! The steam rolled up from the tub in a continuous cloud.
Today I set up the fireplace, cut kindling, carried firewood, and as soon as there was enough sap I started cooking it in the tub. By dusk I had boiled down six gallons of sap into a gallon of concentrate, which I jugged for more boiling tomorrow. It had a noticeable maple flavor and a straw color. Tonight I smell of wood smoke and maple-sap steam.
It chilled off today and the sap flow slackened, but I cooked down yesterday’s concentrate and today’s scant run. There was about a quart and a half of syrup when I had finished. The first run is supposed to have the best flavor, so we bottled and sealed it, marked it with the date and stowed it in the cellar.
I have been reading Emerson and Thoreau, and having trouble with both of them, as usual. I wish Emerson had been a better writer and I wish Thoreau had been a better thinker. Thoreau was a remarkably able and patient observer of nature and he wrote a firm, tough-grained prose. But when he begins to prescribe for society he speaks from too narrow a platform for me. And he too often reveals his lack of experience with people and with society. Now and then his solutions remind me of the solutions of those moderns who retreat into primitivism and anthropology and find pat answers in a world that does not exist. Today’s answers would be much simpler if life were more simple. But it isn’t. It is complex, and it was complex in Thoreau’s time.
One thing I miss in Thoreau is an awareness of family problems. Emerson largely ignored such matters, but Thoreau just seemed to lack the knowledge one inevitably acquires, not only of self but of interrelationships, in marriage and under the necessity of assuming responsibility for a family. It seems to me that life is only half lived, experience only half known, without this.
February doesn’t end; it frays away, or is blown away, into March. A year ago, February went out with a 10-degree temperature and four inches of snow and a bitter wind. This year it is going out with daffodils up four inches. There was a slight snowfall last night, but it was all gone by noon, though a raw wind persists.
The cold weather has stopped the run of sap, but it will resume when the weather moderates.
MARCH
MARCH CAME IN WITH A CHILL. It Was down to 15 above zero this morning and it didn’t top 25 all day. The calendar shows that it is March, but it might as easily be February. In fact, this day is February every fourth year, which proves the fallibility of mathematics in dealing with the days and the seasons. Even the equinox, three weeks hence and the one fixed point of the season, does not really serve as anything but an index of daylight and darkness. The roots and the buds know what is happening, and it is there that Spring will really come, not in the stars.
We saw February this year from only one side. February smiled on us. It’s just as well that March came in this way, to make us realize that the seasons can’t be too much hurried.
I saw a chipmunk today, his tail stiff as though it were frozen, scurrying from one stone wall to another. He certainly picked a good time to wake up and take his vernal exercise!
Chipmunks do not hibernate, though they spend a good part of the cold months sleeping and are not really active until Spring is well within reach. They build their nests below frost line and they stock up for cold weather with hoards of grain, nuts and grass seed. They eat well and they sleep warm, in nests lined with thistledown, milkweed floss, grass and other excellent mattress and comforter material. I would rather have a few families of chipmunks around—except in strawberry season; they love the red berries—than most of the other rodents.
Foxes and cats are the chipmunk’s worst enemies, and both of them can be defeated by a stone wall. Every chipmunk seems to have a detail map of all the stone walls in his area. Surprise one in the open and he dives unerringly for a wall, knowing exactly where to find the nearest chink.
I hope that chipper today didn’t get his tail frozen. I have seen a few bobtailed chipmunks, but I am sure they didn’t lose them to the frost. They lost them in fights, for among themselves the chipmunks sometimes wage bloody and merciless feuds.
The daffodils have checked their growth. They are cautious—Yankee caution, Mary calls it—and put no more susceptible green surface above the ground now than they can afford to lose. They can take a good bit of freezing without real damage, for if the first shoots are frozen and wither back the bulbs lie and wait for warmer days, then send up new shoots to replace them.
Mary lives on a farm less than ten miles from us, works in the village, and is full of music and pithy talk. She boasts about the severity of the weather in her valley, makes it sound like a northern suburb of Nome, Alaska. When we had our first light snow she had snow “right up to the calf’s belly.” When there was a scum of ice on the river, her brook was frozen solid, “right down into the gravel.” When the last frost leaves the ground and the first Spring rains come she will be out planting peas “in mud up to my knees.” And glorying in it. She is the only person I ever knew who sings classical music while she is doing the morning milking. Why? “I like it, and the cows don’t seem to mind.”
Just enough warmer today to start the sap flowing again, slowly. On the south side of the trees, I am surprised to see. The spouts on the north side of the trees show only a few drops. There wasn’t enough sap to justify starting the fire again, only about two gallons, so I jugged it and stowed it in the woodshed. Maple sap will ferment if not kept cold; but no chance of a fermentation temperature tonight. The temperature is in the 20s.
Two of our friends have gone down to the city for a week. They took along a bundle of twigs from their apple trees, the cherry tree and the forsythia, to put in water and watch the buds open. Today we had a note from Letty saying that the forsythia is out and they can see the color in the apple buds. The same mail brought a post card written later the same day the note was written. It said: “Egg cases on apple twigs have hatched a brood of web worms! Spring indeed!”
Well, that is Spring. Blossoms, and also bugs and worms.
We went out and cut a few forsythia twigs and added shoots of red-osier dogwood for color. The red osier begins to show its strong red, almost a maroon, on all the shoots. In water it will put forth leaves and be bright and vernal green, little leaves veined like those of the flowering dogwood and soft as silk.
This is the time of year when our country grandmothers used to mix sulphur and molasses and prescribe it generously. A Spring tonic was needed, something to lift the spirit and tone up the blood. Winter was thought to thin the blood—some iconoclasts insisted that it thickened the blood, but the result seemed to be the same—so here came the sulphur and molasses, or some other elixir.
There really was a mixture called Elixir. It was dark brown and it tasted so bad it lifted the spirits in sheer self-defense; unless the lift was manifest there was more Elixir.
And, just a bit later, there was rhubarb, pie-plant in the old lexicon. It, too, had magic qualities, particularly when stewed with a minimum of sugar. Then came the first Spring greens. Dandelions were a favorite, because if one didn’t discard the outer leaves they had a splendid bitter taste that must be full of virtue. Any S
pring tonic must be bitter to have any authority. That Winter lethargy had to be driven out of the blood stream somehow.
We still use dandelions. But when we pick them Barbara discards the bitter outer leaves. The young, tender, inner leaves are almost palatable raw in salad or cooked like spinach. Whether they have an elixir quality or not, I don’t know; I suspect they haven’t as much as those tough outer leaves. From my vantage of maturity I now believe that the bitter tonics were less effective as tonics, per se, than as a means of driving youngsters out-of-doors, merely to escape taking them. That was where the real Spring tonic was to be found—out in the urge and liveliness of Spring itself. It still is.
Discounting local conditions of weather, such as March snowstorms, once Spring starts moving north it travels at a fairly regular and predictable pace. The rate is approximately sixteen miles a day. Just for example, if red maples should start opening bud in Washington, D.C., on March 15, which sometimes happens, red maples could be expected to open bud in Baltimore two days later. And, given normal weather during that period, by the end of March they would be open in the area of New York City. And about six days later they would begin to open here beside my river.
This rate of travel, however, is true only for places of approximately the same altitude above sea level. Another scale of calculation comes into effect when you come to a range of hills or mountains. Spring slows up at the foot of a slope, just as most travelers do. Instead of traveling sixteen miles a day, as it does on level ground, it climbs only 100 feet of altitude a day. Spring may creep into a valley with green grass and violets on a Sunday morning and not reach the top of a 200-foot hill bordering that valley until Tuesday noon.