This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  The garage is the former milk barn, an old structure with hewn beams and wide boards and a loft overhead that once was used for straw. Until I battened it to keep out the snow it was open to birds as well as wind, and a couple of broken windowpanes made it virtually a flyway. Now I have it so tight that the birds can’t get in except through the doorway. The swallows should know this, but if they do they believe they have property rights which include an obligation on my part to leave the sliding door part way open. They have nested there for years, in their unwieldy mud structures stuck on the old beams, and apparently they continued to find enough insects to make it worth their while even after the cows and the flies departed.

  We welcome the swallows. They are generally quiet, orderly folk, and they must eat tremendous numbers of insects. Of an evening they gather in flocks, both my barn swallows and the purple martins and now and then a few white-breasted tree swallows, and course the river. We sometimes go out in the boat just to sit and watch their amazing flight. To me there is no more graceful bird in the air than a swallow. And they seem to have a sense of fun, for often two of them appear to play tag, competing in aerial acrobatics.

  We seldom think of barn swallows as companionable birds, such as robins or catbirds, for instance, who choose to nest close to human habitations. Yet the barn swallows prefer to nest inside a building, and if there is any choice they seem to pick one which is used constantly by human beings. My big old barn, for instance, offers a hundred good places for barn swallows to nest, and it has enough gaps and cracks to admit a whole flock of birds. But not one pair of barn swallows nests there. The barn is a little distance from the house and I go there only once a week or so. The swallows choose, instead, the garage, despite its disadvantages. I go to the garage every day.

  And at evening if we sit on the front porch the swallows come and perch on the electric line between the house and the garage, choosing a place near the porch. Until we go outside there is seldom a bird on that line; five minutes after we go but and sit down there are half a dozen of them.

  Yarrow begins to open its gray-white heads along the fences, and when I walk there I stir the pungent odor of its crushed foliage, faint but with a sharp tang. The foliage itself is surprisingly delicate, finer cut than that of the daintiest fern and a silvery green unlike anything around it.

  This yarrow migrated here from Europe long ago and found American soil and climate to its liking. There is only one species, a western one, that is native to America; but this imported yarrow now grows almost everywhere. It is often mistaken for the wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace, though they are not even remotely related. Yarrow is a composite and Queen Anne’s lace is a member of the parsley family.

  Tradition says that Achilles discovered yarrow and brewed a tonic from it. The doubtful legend is preserved in its botanical name, Achillea millefolium, and the reputed medicinal qualities were respected by the “yarb” doctors, who gathered and dried it, leaf, stem and bud. The customary infusion was a handful of dried yarrow to a pint of boiling water. The tea thus produced was used as a general tonic and for digestive ills. It has a pungent taste, much like the odor of the crushed green leaves, and is not my idea of a good beverage. Probably, like so many of the old herbal remedies, it was as potent as a threat as it was as a medicine, particularly among children.

  Botanically, an herb is a plant with a certain minimum of woody structure, usually one which dies down each year and sends up new shoots, if it is a perennial, each Spring. The classification, herbs, shrubs, and trees, roughly indicates the distinction.

  The medicinal study of herbs, though surrounded by superstition, led directly to botany. Some of the first printed books were herbals, among the earliest and most famous those of Leonard Fuchs and Otto Brunfels, in German, and of William Turner and John Gerard, in English. The medicinal use of herbs, of course, goes far back into the misty past, to the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and still beyond. And it comes all the way down to the present day, for we still use countless herbal derivatives in our modern pharmacopoeia. Rhubarb and soda is an example, and it was prescribed for me not long ago by a doctor who said his doctor father prescribed it and he hasn’t found anything better for its particular purpose.

  A chemist friend of mine who dug lightly into the subject has a theory that many present-day discoveries are really rediscoveries of old, old remedies, and that much folk medicine of the past was based on a kind of vestigial knowledge filtered down from long-vanished civilizations.

  It rained today and didn’t begin to clear until near sunset. After dinner we went out to walk in the gathering darkness, and Barbara exclaimed how good it was to see the stars in their accustomed places after such a day. And we spoke of how a sky that clears by daylight may be full of radiance, but one that clears in darkness has glittering promise and reassurance in every ray of starlight.

  We walked by starlight, and we remembered a time when we had no daylight leisure to walk. We spoke of how daylight is worktime, but that the great dreams are dreamed by starlight. There is warmth and life in the day’s sunshine, but it is the stars that lure man’s mind to the endless immensity of the universe.

  Anaximander, back in the sixth century B.C., made what were probably the earliest known discoveries about the earth’s movements, and the sun’s, by watching the moon, definitely a nighttime occupation. He watched the moon and drew up his theories, then turned to daylight to apply them by making a sundial. So far as I can learn, nobody ever made a moondial; which may, or may not, indicate that the ancients didn’t want to limit their nighttime speculation on the great mysteries by tying themselves to a clock.

  A garden is compounded, in roughly equal parts, of soil, industry and patience. The facts of garden life are based primarily on cause and effect. And no garden I have ever known was the accomplishment of one season. True, one can achieve a harvest of sorts in one season; but it is the repeated tillage, the compost and organic matter well worked in, the stones removed, the sour soil sweetened and the heavy soil lightened, that make a garden. And none of these things is accomplished overnight.

  Weather is the great determinant in any garden, and there is little anyone can do about the weather except to live with it and make the best of it. We are fortunate here, being close beside the river, which reaches out with its mist even in time of drought to encourage our planting. And the soil is flood-plain soil, the wash from the mountain over the centuries leavened by the silt from ancient floods. It is almost without stones, a rarity in Connecticut and most of New England, and it is rich with care. But Barbara’s peas thrive because she allows the weeds to shade and cool the roots. The carrots grow big because we plant them where the soil is light and deep. Some things we have learned; but perhaps the most important thing is that we shall go on learning, year after year.

  Even Adam must have known in June that banishment from Eden was not an undiluted punishment, for surely Eden spilled its fields and gardens, its meadows and woodlands, out beyond the boundaries. As we walked through the June countryside today I knew in my heart that Eden endures, even today. I knew that faith endures, and reasons for it, and that with faith and hope all things are possible.

  Daisies now whiten the meadows, and the oriole sings, and the slow turning of the earth is a part of the great current of time, which flows everywhere and forever. Change is like the leaf that spreads to catch the sun. The leaves clothe the earth while time flows, here and in Maine and Dakota and the Carolinas and even in the mesa country of New Mexico. The season we call June comes, and comes again and again, in all its fullness. I have seen June on the mountain tops and in the steaming lower valleys, and nowhere that I know of in this hemisphere is it less than a touch of perfection.

  My theology is flexible, and to me Eden may be a memory or a legend; but I know that the Eden of June is very real and is mine for the knowing and the taking. It will be here, waiting, as long as there are men here to enjoy it, and probably long after.

  A fine, w
arm, lazy June day. We went to the village to do some marketing, and the middle-aged woman behind the counter said, “This is a day to make one forget the Winter. I aged fifty years last Winter.”

  “You’ll get them all back,” I said, “before Summer is over.”

  She shook her head and smiled. “Only forty-nine of them,” she said a little sadly.

  I went fishing alone, not caring much whether I caught fish or not, and I caught more than I have any day this season. Not quite alone, either, for Pat went along, to explore the river banks and to swim the river half a dozen times. What breeze there was came from the south, which I have heard some fishermen call “a fishing wind.” It happens to be an upstream breeze here, and it comes most afternoons. I doubt that the fish even know it blows, but by sundown we are grateful for it on any hot day. It eases through the house, clearing out the day’s warm accumulation, and it is a soft and soothing comfort on the porch or down on the grass.

  I fileted the fish, all of them, since we were eating salad and cold meat, and we wrapped the filets and stowed them in the freezer. They freeze well, and in December and January they cook well. That is when that south wind, if it blows at all, is edged like a knife. If I admit that this south wind is now a fishing wind, in January it is a fish-chowder wind, so I am winner either way.

  We are herbivorous people in the Summer and we have an idea that vegetables lose flavor, and probably vitamins, with every minute they spend between the garden and the pot. We like our green beans, for example, plucked at 11:45 and eaten promptly at noon. And preferably very small beans, beans so small they haven’t yet shed their dried blossoms. Fancy fare indeed, and no doubt profligate, for if we let them grow another week we would have twice or three times the bulk. But half the flavor.

  Corn, too, should be hurried to the pot. Barbara says she likes to have the water boiling before we go out to pluck the ears. Something of an exaggeration, but basically sound. But I shall say no more about corn, for mention of it tantalizes me, with the earliest of ours now only knee high. There is sweet corn in the market, but it comes from Delaware and South Jersey and it has been away from the field twenty-four hours or more. It makes poor fare for those who know how sweet corn should taste.

  First of the cucumbers are in bloom. So is Summer squash and zucchini. And so are the big white delphiniums, which are giant and so spectacular that strangers stop and ask about them. There are twenty-two blossom spikes on one clump and only one has opened flower, so we shall have delphiniums for several weeks to come. And another flowering late in the Summer.

  Folklore and fable hold up the ant and the bee as classic examples of industry, but I can’t see why the fable-makers overlooked the wasps. Particularly the thread-waisted wasps, the Sphecidae. Their industry, ingenuity and ruthlessness are something to behold.

  I sat and watched one of the Sphecidae, a burrowing wasp, for an hour this morning. She had dug an egg cell beside the driveway to the garage, and she was stocking it with caterpillars. I found her near the end of her job, apparently, for she added only two more, then went inside and stayed long enough to lay eggs in the caterpillars which she had already paralyzed with her poison sting. Then she came out and closed the nest entrance, pushing soil into it and finally grasping a small pebble in her jaws and using it as a tamp to pack down the earth. That done, she flew away. Her eggs will hatch into larva in that well-provisioned cupboard and eat their fill of caterpillar.

  Other members of the burrowing wasp tribe stock their egg cells with spiders, beetles, common flies, and even cicadas. And the mud-daubers, technically Sceliphrons, build multiple-celled mud nests for their larvas. There are several such nests in the garage, and I occasionally see one of those wasps stuffing a spider into one of the cells.

  The wasp known as Chalybion also likes mud nests but has no notion of building one. It carries water to a mud-dauber’s nest, softens its wall, tears it open, lays its eggs in a spider-filled cell already occupied by mud-dauber eggs, and closes the cell again. Presumably there is trouble in that cell when both kinds of eggs hatch.

  Solstice, we call it, the Summer solstice, when the earth begins to swing back on its trunnions and the longest daylight of the year is at hand and the creeping abbreviation sets in once more. Solstice, and Summer, and bee-drone in the clover field. First fledglings out of the nest, corn almost knee high, brooks dwindling, rivers slowed down as if in pace with the green along their banks, settling into Summer’s tempo.

  Thus always in any land of changing seasons. The leaf, the spread of chlorophyll, has hastened to reach its maximum for the time of maximum sunlight. Now it settles down to work, its function for the year, to use the sunlight and promote growth. In the year’s plan there is relatively little time for such work, only a few months; and into that span must be compressed the whole year’s growth. There is little lagging. Once the earth has come to the solstice, Spring’s preparations must be consolidated in a Summer of completion. The solstice is the year’s meridian, not its resting place.

  Call it what you will, order or plan or mere succession, there is an unmistakable clarity in the process. And meaning, even if only the meaning that comes from the orderly procession of events. Budding, and blossoming, and fruiting; sprouting, and growth, and seed; beginning, and continuation, and conclusion, over and over and over, so that it becomes continuity. It is on so grand a scale, so universal, that we miss the larger meaning in seeing only the detail. But there it is, a rhythm greater than that of the day or the season, greater even than the year. It is a rhythm of ages, of an eternity of past and future, all compressed into any Summer.

  The number of birds seems to vary from year to year, but I am sure this is an illusion. Their total number probably doesn’t vary more than a few per cent, for the balance of nature as far as they are concerned is fairly stable. Richard H. Pough, of the Audubon Society, estimates the number of birds that regularly spend a part of the year in the United States and Canada at twelve to fifteen billion. That would be almost two thousand to the square mile, or three birds to the acre.

  The average human population in the United States is about fifty to the square mile, so there are at least forty times as many birds as people. The people, however, are concentrated in the towns and cities, and the birds are concentrated in the open country. Even so, I should guess offhand that New York City stands very well up in its total bird population which, on the basis of the national average, should be around 760,000. Central Park, on that basis, would have around 3,000 birds, and I will venture that there are more than 3,000 English sparrows alone in that island of urban greenery.

  Our place here, with its woodland, its pastures and its river banks, is an ideal place for birds. I am sure that we have, even in the depth of Winter, at least three birds to the acre. Last January I counted one flock of thirty-seven juncos which regularly fed here, and with that flock were a dozen or fifteen tree sparrows, four or five song sparrows and a dozen chickadees. I hesitate to estimate the total number of our chickadees, for every time I go up to the pine woods on the mountain I see them by the dozen. How many birds we have, of all species, I cannot even guess. The national average entitles us to around 300, and I am sure I heard half that many robins this morning.

  In all, about 1200 species and subspecies of birds are known in the United States. I have just turned up a list of species seen by qualified observers in the various states. This list is from some years back and it seems that no similar census has been taken since. No such list is all-inclusive, and to an extent it represents the activity of the observers as well as the number of birds, but it does, give some index to the distribution of the species.

  Almost half the total number known in the country, 546 of them, have been seen in Texas, which is not surprising if one considers the size of the state, the variety of climate and the length of Gulf Coast in Texas. California comes next, with 541, also understandable with California’s long coast and varied climate and terrain. But number three surprises me. I
t is Nebraska, with 418 species reported. Nebraska, of course, extends from the Missouri River well onto the High Plains.

  Number four is New York, with 412. Number five is another surprise, Colorado, with 403 species; but again there is a wide variety of climate and terrain, from High Plains to the Continental Divide, from grasslands to pine and spruce forests.

  Illinois comes sixth with 390, Missouri seventh with 383; then Kansas, 379, just ahead of Washington with 372. And following come Arizona with 371, Massachusetts with 369, Florida with 362, and New Jersey with 358. I am disappointed to find that Connecticut, with 334, stands sixteenth, behind North Dakota with 338.

  The remainder of the list tapers off to Idaho with 210 species. But the thing that surprises me in the list is the placing of the “desert” states, Arizona ahead of Massachusetts and Florida, New Mexico just behind Louisiana. I would have expected Louisiana to be near the top, not halfway down the list. And I certainly didn’t expect to find Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas in the first eight.

  In the next few weeks I can drive down any road and see which gardeners are really gardeners and which are only planters. I will know who can tend as well as harvest, who can take sunburn and backache, mosquitoes and deer flies, who is a weeder, who is a duster.

  The first good crop of weeds now either has its foothold or has been mastered. The first of the corn is threatening to tassel. Green beans are setting on. Chard is ready to cut. Early lettuce is threatening to bolt. Beets need thinning. So do carrots. The beetles are threatening squash and cucumbers. I don’t have to budge from home to know that. But whenever I go anywhere I can use such matters as a gauge of character.