by Hal
On this day a few years ago we drove west from Denver to Mesa Verde, with California our ultimate objective. It was one of those superb mountain days, a wondrous deep blue sky with a few cumulus clouds sailing high and far away. We drove up Wolf Creek Pass and topped the Continental Divide at an elevation of 10,850 feet, more than two miles above sea level. We parked at the crest and went on foot among the rocks and dwarfed trees, looking for wild flowers. Walking only a few hundred yards, I found the trickling waters of two tiny brooks, one of which ran west, toward the San Juan and the Colorado River, the other east, toward the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi.
Within fifteen minutes there we found yellow rocket in bloom, a personal delight for it is sometimes known as Barbara’s Cress; and Indian Paintbrush, and a dwarf milkweed, and a very sweet wild rose, and Elephantella groenlandica, commonly called Little Red Elephant because its small flowers are like miniature elephant heads. Cinquefoil was also in yellow bloom, and of all things there was a dwarf purple aster, an Alpine version of the familiar purple aster of New England’s Autumn.
Time is telescoped in all mountains, and so are the seasons. Those were not only Spring flowers, but Summer flowers and the flowers of early Autumn. The mild seasons come close together, crammed into a few weeks, at that altitude. We got into the car again and went on, dropping swiftly from early May on the divide into July again in the valley twenty miles farther on.
I am being difficult today. I am an old bear with a sore paw and a growl. A carload of strangers came up the road in midmorning and parked on the river bank only fifty yards from the house. I went outdoors a few minutes later and an assertive young man from the party announced, “We are going to have a picnic here.” I said, “There’s more shade on down the river.” He said, “This is all right.” I said nothing more. I came back in and tried to work.
They picnicked. But before they picnicked they prowled up and down the river bank, got into my boat, inspected my garage and barn, leaving doors open to the wind, got a drink at the trough and left the water running, all with whoops and hollering and loud laughter. Pat barked and tried to warn them off, and I finally brought him indoors to stop his noise. But there was no working for me. The picnickers tried the echoes, and my patience. They broke branches from a tree, they tried unsuccessfully to build a fire where there should be no fires. Finally they left, without so much as a thank-you, and I went out and picked up their paper bags and paper plates and paper napkins.
I shall say no more about this now, for my sore paw is very sore.
My annoyance has eased somewhat with a night’s sleep, but this morning I am wondering why yesterday’s incidents happened. There probably will not be a repetition all Summer, but something of the kind happens every year. Unless they are faced by a sign saying, NO TRESPASSING, POSITIVELY!!! there are those who invade a man’s privacy with the utmost callousness, to act like fools and vandals.
Most people are friendly and courteous and considerate. They know how to act when away from home. But for the sins of the few, the loud and boorish minority, all roaming strangers are suspect. I know that for a few days my hackles will rise a little when any strange car stops along my road, even though its people only want to watch a bird or look at the mountain.
And even more than the intruders, I shall resent my own reaction. A man should not feel that way toward anybody. A man should live at peace with himself and those around him. I resent having to fight for that privilege.
There is an awesome majesty about a July thunderstorm such as came this afternoon. It has been a hot day, almost sultry, with one of those steely blue skies that seems to have no clouds yet refuses to be honest blue. At about three o’clock the sky darkened, though with only a hint of cloud. Ten minutes more and the clouds were here, rising like a mist over the hills. The hush was so deep that even a bird call seemed overloud. The trees waited in the breathless air, leaves unrustled.
The clouds spread to cover half the sky. There was a swish, far off, a sudden wind in distant trees. Lightning flashed, back near the eastern horizon, and the cloud banks were black in its glow. Another flash, closer. Thunder rolled back from Tom’s Mountain, bumping, echoing. A gust of wind swept down the river, dancing water advancing like a wave. A hush, a pause, and the birds all were silent. Another flash, so close I winced, and thunder rattled the panes.
The darkness turned to gray on the woods up the mountain. The gray marched down the slope and we could hear the rush of rain, the pelt and swish and lesser roar. Still not a breath of wind here, but we could see the trees swaying, hear the wind-roar.
Then the rain came down the river too, a gray curtain. The whole valley quivered, the trees trembling. Then it was here, in a rush, and the whole river leaped to meet it in answering spatters. The maples roared, rain on leaf, and began to stream, silver trunks blackening. The apple trees behind the house were roaring too. The darkness was gone. It was a silvery, soft-glowing world, the rain sheeting down. The lightning had passed, the thunder was ended. It rained a torrent for twenty minutes.
And now we must go out and straighten up the corn.
Thunderstorms and hurricanes do strange things to Barbara and to Pat. Not the storms themselves, but the air pressures or the atmospheric charges, we don’t know which. All we know is that when, in Summer, Barbara frowns at the sky and gets uneasy, and when Pat comes and asks to be let in the house and is restless and uneasy, something is going to happen. Barbara talks to Pat, and Pat talks to Barbara, and they both look at me as though asking, “Don’t you know it’s going to storm? How can you be so calm about it?” And as the storm approaches they simply can’t be still; they have to prowl. Barbara sometimes gets a headache, and maybe Pat does too.
Then the storm comes, with lightning and rain, and they look at me as though to say, “We told you so!” As though I didn’t know it. And they begin to relax. Five minutes of rain out of such a storm and either of them can sit down again. Barbara’s headache vanishes. Pat looks out the open doorway a few minutes, sighs, and lies down and goes to sleep.
Come late Summer and Fall, hurricane season, and the same thing happens. They feel it coming. They talk about it to each other, not needing words. They say, “There’s a hurricane down off Georgia or the Carolinas,” and I say, “Weather report says we may get a blow tomorrow.” But they don’t need the radio to know it. They are tuned in direct. And they stay tuned in till the storm passes or vanishes a thousand miles out to sea.
Our house used to be green, a green-shingled farmhouse. We didn’t like it green, and it needed paint. We thought of painting it white, though it would be difficult to cover the green with white. Then Alice, who is an artist at many things, visited us and said, “Wait and see what the house wants.” That was good advice and in no sense fey. Too many houses never had a chance to indicate the color they should have; too many owners impose their own whims. A house can be made uneasy, not only to look at but to live with, when the basic needs of house and setting are ignored.
We waited. At last we knew, or thought we did. The house should be red. A quiet, weathered red, mellow. So we told Layton, who is painter and carpenter and machinist and many other things as well, and Layton came. We bought paint and started work, spraying the weathered green shingles with a warm, red paint. We painted every building on the place red except the beautiful old silvery gray barn which has never had a pint of paint on it and never shall. And the green-shingled house became a mellowed, weathered red house.
It was the color the house wanted all the time. It looks the way it should look, at ease in its setting. And a farmer friend who shook his head skeptically when we started with the red paint stopped past this morning and asked, “Just what was that paint you used? What make, and what’s the name of the color?” I told him and asked where he was going to use it. “Well,” he said, “I thought I’d start with the barn. But the house needs painting too, and it’s cheaper to use all the same kind.” Which was his way of saying he liked this c
olor.
I have no objection whatever to what the plant culturists have done to and for domestic raspberries. I have a patch of them that are both beautiful and full of flavor, and so big that a dozen of them make a handful. But when I go fishing now or just walking down the valley or up the mountain I find it a prime satisfaction to find unreconstructed wild raspberries.
I think my favorite is the little black-cap. It doesn’t grow any bigger than the end of my little finger, and unless it is ripe, almost to the hour, it isn’t worth picking and throwing away. But when I find a bush festooned with terminal berries at that prime moment, ready to drop off at a touch, I pick a handful of honey-sweetness that is wonderful. Now and then we pick a few quarts of them—a tedious business, I admit—for a very special jelly, one served only to connoisseurs. But usually we just pick a handful and eat them and walk on.
Up on the mountain there is also the little cloudberry, which grows scarcely ankle high and has a pale, winy, delicate-flavored little berry. I could pick cloudberries half a day and not gather two quarts. But when I am walking the hills they come at proper intervals for picking, and eating, and resting.
The beauty of the lot, of course, is the purple-flowered raspberry, which has a crimson-pink blossom big as a wild rose. The fruit hasn’t much flavor, but one can’t have everything. And a man out walking or fishing can look at one bush and eat from another, can’t he? That’s why wild raspberries are still wild.
Hawkweed blooms beautifully, but it is a pest in the hay fields and pastures, where it proliferates mightily. It is another example of an import which adapted itself too well. Originally it came from England as a garden flower, but it escaped and began to wander. A few years ago I saw it yellowing one hay field after another in Maine, and it is a nuisance through much of New England.
There are two common varieties, the bright yellow one called Canada hawkweed, Hieracium Canadense, and the orange one called tawny hawkweed, H. aurantiacum. The yellow one has flowers the color of dandelions, borne on a tall, smooth stem rising from a cluster of dark green, notched leaves. The flowers are in small clusters, each individual bloom like a scant-petaled dandelion about an inch in diameter. The orange one has a shorter flower stem rising from a ground clump of untoothed leaves, and the flowers are a deep, rusty orange, a warm Van Gogh color. The stems and flower cups of the orange variety are covered with brown hairs like a beard stubble. In England it is called Grim the Collier, for this stubble-bearded reason. Some here call it Devil’s Paintbrush.
The yellow variety is common through southern New England and seems to be making its way south and west. The orange hawkweed is a hardier plant, flourishing in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, but it, too, is working southward. We have it here. The common name, hawkweed, springs from a legend that hawks drink its juice to sharpen their eyesight. Barbara picked a handful of the orange kind yesterday and put it in a vase in the living room, where its color is warm and faintly exotic.
This has been one of those rare, dazzling, blue days, without a cloud. Not skim-milk blue, which is a sky full of moisture that neither goes up nor comes down; but the blue of flax flowers fresh at dawn, which marks a sky to be lived with and enjoyed.
We have a good many such days here, far more than in the coastal area, and that is one reason this feels like home; for the blue sky is typical of the High Country where I grew up. I lived too long, in later years, where such blue skies came only after the violence of a thunderstorm, when it seemed that the smothering gauze of humidity had been ripped by the lightning and washed away by the rain.
Today there has been the blue of infinity; and there is no illusion about that. Blue light is there, my physicist friends assure me, the blue end of the spectrum filtered out of the sun’s rays by dust particles that float high in the upper atmosphere. Above that layer, in the upper atmosphere itself, the sky is a deep purplish gray. And the murk that masks the blue sky lies below, earthward, in layers of smoke or mist or scud clouds gathering for a storm. Clear the sky, as with a rain or a gentle wind, and it is as it was today, healing to the heart and easing to the senses.
The botanical name is Asclepias, honoring Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing. The everyday name is milkweed, and the two best known members of the family, butterfly weed and common milkweed, are now in bloom. Butterfly weed lifts its showy orange flower head only in favored places, but the common milkweed is everywhere with its tassely tufts of lavender and white florets which are full of sweetness, a subtle mixture of tuberose and honeysuckle fragrance.
Roadside weed though it is, the milkweed has virtues beyond a pretty flower and a sweet scent. Its milky sap contains caoutchouc, the raw material of rubber, which periodically attracts rubber researchers. Fibers of its stem have been used for cordage. Fluff from the pod has been used to stuff pillows; the silky fibers lack the natural twist, however, that would make them valuable for thread or yarn. Both roots and juice have been used by generations of herbalists, particularly for respiratory ills. And the young shoots make excellent cooked greens; we eat them like asparagus and call them a delicacy.
The common milkweed’s florets are fertilized chiefly by the bees. The florets occur in tufts of seventy or more, each less than a quarter of an inch in diameter; and each, by one of those quirks of nature, is an insect trap. One misstep and the ant or bee fertilizing the flower is caught by a leg and doomed to a starving death. Yet for untold centuries ants and bees have fertilized the milkweed bloom, never learning. Insects never learn, it seems, perhaps because their lives are too short to do more than obey simple compulsion and instinct. And so the milkweed survives and multiplies, and the world is a somewhat sweeter place.
The hollyhocks are in bloom, and they seem very New England to me. That is simply because my first trip through New England was in July, and I saw hollyhocks in every dooryard. They belong, in my mind, with stock and candytuft and stone walls and Seth Thomas clocks and white church spires and elms. All those things are found elsewhere—I have seen them in Ohio, and in Illinois, and even in Kansas, in villages that might have been lifted bodily out of Connecticut or Massachusetts—but to me they are native here.
The hollyhocks are as old in this country as New England itself. They bloomed in dooryards here when settlers were tending maize in the Indian way and still living in wigwams they patterned on those of the Indians. The name goes back to medieval English: holihoc, the holi for holy, the hoc for either leaf or mallow, more likely the latter since they belong to the mallow family, the altheas. They are said to have been native to India and the Near East, and the Crusaders probably brought them back to northern Europe, as they brought other beautiful things.
They have botanical kin in the New World, however. In the marshes just back of the dunes along our Middle Atlantic coast grow the giant mallows, shrubby plants with flowers big as the span of a man’s hand. I have seen great patches of them along the New Jersey shore.
These domesticated mallows, our hollyhocks, persist beside old cellar holes, abandoned and forgotten for at least one generation. But in a garden, tended and cared for, they have the crisp beauty of tulle and lawn and bright, cool China silk.
Sometimes they are called “escapes,” sometimes “volunteers.” The name doesn’t matter. They are tough, hardy independents which have adapted themselves to a hard way of life and which thrive and reproduce not only without the help of the gardener or farmer but often in the face of his opposition. Most of them are flowers—petunias, phlox, balsam, flowering tobacco, day lilies, an occasional hollyhock; but some are vegetables and shrubs—stray lilacs, barberry, even asparagus lifting its plumes beside a country road. They are many, and they are persistent, and I admire them for their vigor and independence.
To the neat gardener and the methodical farmer they are weeds. They don’t belong where they are and they don’t reproduce true to type or color, the type imposed upon them by the hybridists. They revert, as phlox does to magenta. But they develop a hardiness, a resistance to
drought and insects and disease, that the plant breeder sometimes finds useful; and on occasion they produce sports, new variants, and back to the gardens they come. Thus they have occasional value even in the eyes of those who disdain them.
To me they are welcome symbols in a world of insistent conformity. They go their own way, meet conditions as they are, and survive by sheer persistence and rook-strength. They need no coddling. They choose their own soil and climate. They fight their own battle of survival. It does my heart good to see a rejected phlox or hollyhock or even a petunia blooming in a place where all the odds seem to be against success.
Charley stopped in today to see how the muskmelons are doing. They are doing all right, and if the season doesn’t get frosted too early we shall have all the melons we can eat.
Charley gave us the seed, and in a way it is a homecoming for those melons. Twenty years or so ago a friend from up in Massachusetts gave a handful of muskmelon seeds to the farmer who lived here. Our season is short for melons, but these seeds were of an unnamed variety the Massachusetts man had developed. They were grown locally, handed about from gardener to gardener, and he suggested that they be tried here. My predecessor tried them and they flourished. He gave some of the seed to Charley. Charley and Elitha have grown them ever since; and after a proper time of watching, to see that we were really gardeners, Charley gave us some of the seed.
As I say, they are doing fine. Charley inspected them and nodded approval. “They still like this soil,” he said. Not a word about the care they get; that is taken for granted.
Whenever we go out in the boat now we smell the basswood blossoms. And we hear the bees, which swarm to them.
The basswood is a linden and our native basswood is close kin to the famous European shade tree. The name “bass” comes from “bast,” or fiber, the reference being to the tough inner bark of the tree, which was long used in making cordage and nets. The wood itself is soft, fine grained and easily worked into wooden ware, occasionally into furniture. Indians once made dugout canoes from large basswood trunks, and now many chopping bowls are turned from basswood.