This Hill, This Valley Read online

  There is a succession in the days, now, that quickens the heart. Whether they are gusty days or days of calm, chill days or days of deepening warmth, they have the air of change. Today is gusty. Yesterday was calm. I await tomorrow.

  The weeping willow beside the old milk barn has an amber glow, as though golden sap were pulsing just beneath the thin outer bark. Beside the river the red osiers are ruddy as though blood were just beneath their cambium layer. The daffodils are well up. Hyacinths and early tulips have broken ground. Crocuses begin to spread their color to the temperamental winds. Flower buds are fat on the forsythia. Iris sends up its green bayonets.

  I walked through the garden, still bare as Winter itself, and I saw these things, and I walked along the river bank and I noted them. I looked up Tom’s Mountain, which rises just beyond the pastures, and I felt the same slow but certain pressure of succession, the slow, certain urge of change. Growth is there in the earth, at the grass roots, at the twig-ends. The green world is in the making, already waiting where the mysterious chemistry of sap and chlorophyll has its origins. April whispers from the hilltops even as March goes whistling down the valley.

  Barbara, my collaborator not only in much writing but also in marriage and living, is a vegetable gardener. She was out in the garden plot today, poking in the soil with her hands. And up the road our neighbor, Charley, who is a farmer, was out in his fields, walking, pausing now and then to take up a handful of soil. Gardeners and farmers must feel the soil, literally feel it, now. They know full well that you must plant in season, but they also know that you plant in the earth; and they must touch the soil, feel its grit and strength and thus renew contact with the source of all good and growing things.

  I watched Charley as he strode across the field this sunny afternoon. He scuffed the soil with his heel. He crouched down and picked up a handful, feeling the fine roots lacing through it. He made a ball of it, a miniature earth. There in his hand he held the stuff that nourishes corn and oats and grass. Out of such soil sprang the timbers of his house, the shirt upon his back. Out of it grew all the flowers that ever pleased an eye or nose.

  It was no mere chance that inserted into primitive folklore the recurring tale of how the first man was created from the soil of the earth. The ancient people knew the soil intimately, even though they were hunters and herdsmen. From it sprang the substance of life. It was Mother Earth. And Mother Earth it remains, no matter how far we travel. When the time of planting comes we shall, as always, bow down to Mother Earth as we plant.

  The chill has returned, a raw, windy chill that ripples the river and whistles and moans in the big Norway spruce outside my study window. It is a proper reminder that Spring takes its time, no matter how the human heart may long for its coming. But I still take comfort in the willows and the osiers, which are as vivid and as vital as they were a week ago. Even though I shiver in the wind, I see new life in them. There is no pulse in them, of course, beyond the mysterious processes by which sap moves from the deepest root to the highest twig; but I feel the larger pulse, the bigger rhythm, which is almost visible in them. I watch them, and I know that this chill wind will pass. But I put my faith not so much in the trees and shrubs as in the season itself, of which they are only a part, even as I am.

  We went to the village today to do a couple of chores, and as I walked down the street and looked in the stores I had the feeling of mid-May. There wasn’t a snow shovel in sight, and the coarse salt and wild-bird seed were hidden by racks of brand-new spades and hoes and rakes and weeders. And bags of patent fertilizer, and grass seed, and clover. And stands of bright new seed packets, pretty as a flower garden in full bloom. And work gloves.

  I went on down the street and around the corner, past the implement store. There was the same thing, on a bigger scale. Tractors, big and little, plows, harrows, seeders, cultivators, hay balers. And busy men assembling, tuning, repairing such machinery. And at the siding near the railroad station were boxcars and farm trucks, men unloading lime and phosphate. Farmers saying, “Tomorrow,” or “Next week,” or “It’s almost dry enough, except in that bottom land.”

  Then we came home and looked at the vegetable garden. And in five minutes we knew it was planting season only in the stores. Maybe we can plant a few peas next week, with luck, but that’s all. I got a spade and tried to turn up some soil, and found it cold and frosty less than a spade-length down. I found two angleworms, tightly curled into pink balls, and they didn’t give much encouragement to thoughts about fishing. It won’t be fishing time till it’s almost time to plant garden and mow the lawn and hang the screens and tend the early flowers.

  Then I remembered that there wasn’t a bottle of muscle liniment in sight at the stores, no sunburn lotion, no mosquito repellent. And I went in for a warmer jacket and decided to stay indoors a few more weeks.

  The ponds were scummed with ice again this morning, but by noon the temperature had risen to fifty. A few more days of this and we shall be hearing the peepers and seeing frog eggs in the shallow woods pools. It is time for the tadpole cycle to start again. Frog life, though brief in the individual, is long beyond belief in the species, and it gains its length by the fertility of the animal in conditions that would wipe out warm-blooded creatures.

  How old frogs may be, as a distinctive form of life, no one can say with certainty. Fossils that seem to be almost identical with the frogs of today have been found in the Eocene deposits of France, and the Eocene era is estimated at fifty million years ago. Certainly the frogs saw the uplift of this land we know as America. They watched it slowly emerge from the sea and no doubt croaked and greeted the season’s change while sitting in the vast marshlands that have become the great valleys of today. How long ago they learned to climb trees, as the hylas of today climb, and to trill their tremulous peeper notes, is anybody’s guess.

  The swamp maples prepare to open their florets, relative newcomers among the world’s trees. Skunk cabbage, a venerable species, unfurls its brownish hood to reveal its primitive flower stalk. Bees, at least as old as frogs in this world’s history, come buzzing for the first taste of pollen. And man, not long here himself, hears the buzz and trill from the bogland and says, “These are the sounds of Spring.” They are, the sounds of Springs untold, of the very Springtime of life.

  Albert, the dairy farmer down the road who leases my pasture land, came up today with his truck to get a few boards. Like most of us hereabout, he takes out a few loads of logs every Winter, lets them season until a slack time, then hauls them to the mill and has them sawed. He stowed a pile of lumber in my big barn last year. My barn is a kind of community warehouse, open to anyone who lacks cover for tools or feed or gear. It now shelters hay, straw, lumber, a wagon, a hay baler, a hay rake, a cookstove and a plow, none of them mine. Albert put his boards on his truck and we sat beside the barn in the sun and talked crops and weather. I asked what he was going to do with the field where he had such a good stand of oats and mustard last year. He smiled. “That is a good mustard field, isn’t it? I’m putting it into corn. That’ll keep the mustard down. This year. But when I put it in oats again it’ll be half mustard, as always. It’s been that way ever since I was a boy. Can’t get rid of it. And it’s the only field on the place that has any mustard to speak of.”

  He got up to leave and looked up the mountain toward where the birches have taken over a whole hollow. “Beautiful stand of birches up there,” he said. “Birches are the prettiest trees there are.” He frowned and got in his truck and drove away. If I hadn’t known him I would have thought he was annoyed at my mention of the mustard. He wasn’t. He’s just sentimental about birches and hates to admit it, even to me.

  It hasn’t really warmed up yet, but when we went for a walk this evening we heard the first few peepers and we knew the silence has ended. The silence which began with the last scratchy note of the last katydid, progressed through the brittle-dry rustle of leaves on the road, deepened into the echo of the owl hoot and the
fox bark. At its greatest depth it was a silence so profound that I could hear the whisper of snowflakes nudging each other as they fell. Now it has ended in the rush of flowing water, the quack of black ducks and American mergansers on the river, and the tentative trill of the hylas.

  These, of course, are only the obvious voices. So, too, are most of the bird songs which precede the great chorus. The robins already sing a little at dawn, and so do the song sparrows, but their songs seem a little hoarse and hesitant. But at the marsh down the road the blackbirds, both the red-shouldered ones and the rusties, newly arrived from the South, are in full voice at midday.

  The subtler voices call for other listening, however. I feel them with all my senses, listening with my skin, as insects listen. Then I am aware of the outriders of the great insect hordes—the ants, the first hungry bees, the first wasps, the earliest beetles, the minute flies which tap the opening buds. They are barely humming, but I know that back of them is the whole season’s insect life and loudness. The silence will not return until frost bites deep in another Autumn.

  APRIL

  I HEARD A CARDINAL’S WHISTLED call this morning, overriding the wind and declaring that this is a good time to be alive. If I had said a few years ago that I heard a cardinal here in this valley the bird watchers would have thought, even if they refrained from saying so, that I didn’t know a bird from a bee. Cardinals just didn’t come this far north. But we have had half a dozen of them here this past Winter, duly authenticated. Cardinals do come here now.

  Birds keep changing their ranges. Forty years ago the evening grosbeaks were unknown in the East; now they come to this area in flocks every Winter. A few weeks ago a man not far from here said he had seen a mockingbird. I was skeptical. I have never seen a mockingbird as far north as Philadelphia. But this man may be right. Perhaps our next unusual migrants will be mockingbirds.

  I am especially glad to have cardinals here, for the red-bird is as good to look at as he is to hear. He is Mr. Redbird, from his cocky crest to his jaunty tail—and don’t forget the Mister! The redstart, who will be along a bit later, is a beautiful bird, but he can’t hold a candle to the cardinal’s brilliance. The evening grosbeak has a vest that would knock your eye out, but he, too, must take a back seat sartorially to the cardinal. The oriole is flashy, and the goldfinch is beauty incarnate, but they, too, are somewhat lesser birds than the cardinal. This opinion, of course, is subject to discount; I am a little like the man who told his wife she looked beautiful in any color dress, just so it was red.

  This is a season when I can listen only so long to a recital of the world’s shortcomings. Then I must go outdoors and see the world itself. Last night I heard a long harangue by a man who is full of the world’s ills, and today I took a walk up the mountainside and found that though a hundred things may be wrong, a thousand things are right and completely in order.

  The right things are so obvious. Water still runs downhill, making brooks that sing and rivers that flow seaward. Grass still sends up green shoots in the pasture. Robins strut the lawn and sing their mating call from the trees. Daffodils come to blossom. Maples begin to open wine-red bloom. Bees are busy at their Summer’s search. The newly turned soil of the fields is full of fertility. Farmers and gardeners prepare to plant, knowing that the earth is still good.

  These are simple, obvious things which I have seen every April of my life. If they happened only once in ten years we would wait breathless and put aside our worries and our quarrels to watch for their coming. Instead, they are commonplaces and taken for granted while men bandy words and dispute ideas. The trouble is that too many of the words are empty and too many of the ideas are sterile.

  The world is all right. The quarrels are among men. Men who forget that ideas have their roots in one of two places, in the earth or in the stars. April invites a conference on the open hillside to investigate the state of affairs at their common source.

  The night turned cold and today is raw and windy. The lead-gray river is as full of wrinkles as an old man’s forehead frowning at the chill. Barbara, who was happily inspecting her garden soil yesterday and talked of planting beans, though she knew such a venture would be absurd, asked me to light a fire in the Franklin stove. That gave the living room a fine glow; but, like so many actions, it had an opposite reaction. The living-room temperature rose. The furnace thermostat, which is in the living room, cut off the furnace. The remainder of the house grew cold.

  One might labor a point and come out with a splendid parallel, but to what end? Our mechanical contrivances give us comfort and convenience, and if we violate their mechanical laws we change our comfortable balance. But we usually can restore that balance by flipping a switch, turning a faucet, replacing a fuse or a light bulb. I have little patience with those who say in direful tones that we have become slave and prisoner of our machines. That is nonsense. Unless nature takes command, of course, and knocks out power lines with sleet or wind.

  To make my study comfortably warm, I turned up the thermostat and the furnace went quietly to work again.

  I doubt that we would have bought this place if electric power and a telephone line had not been available. I see no need to revert to the utmost of simplicity. If that were my purpose I should have moved into a cave on a hillside, a move I suggest for those who harp on the evil complications of labor-saving and exalt complete simplicity as the means of human salvation. I never see these fine theorists taking to a cave to subsist on berries.

  Any country place is somewhat at the mercy of storms. We are fortunate to have spring water fed to the house from high on the mountain. It comes into the upstairs bathroom with enough pressure to knock a glass from your hand. We cook and heat water with bottled gas, another weatherproof system. Our furnace burns oil and is run by electricity, but if it is disabled we can heat a habitable part of the house with a wood fire in the Franklin stove. We have a couple of kerosene lanterns and a stock of fat, utilitarian candles. We couldn’t live comfortably forever without electricity, but we could get along for quite a while.

  Our country road is on a tank-truck milk-collection route, so it is plowed out after snowstorms. Now and then a snow or sleet storm makes it difficult or unwise to get the car out, and I walk a mile and a quarter to our rural mailbox. In any emergency I could walk, cross-country, to the village in less than an hour. We are no more than usually at the mercy of the weather, and when all goes well—as it does most of the time —we live quite happily with our machinery.

  Before the season progresses another hour, I must make an appraisal. Another week and I shall be so engulfed in the season that I shall lose most of my perspective. Spring is one thing that man has never had a hand in, no hand at all. It is as remote from man as sunrise or the phases of the moon. This may be difficult to believe when you have a gardenful of daffodils and hyacinths and tulips planted by your own hand. But none of us can fend off an April frost, and none of us can make a tulip bulb grow and come to blossom by holding it in our hands. We have to commit it to the earth and trust to forces beyond human power or control.

  Spring came before man was here to see it, and it will keep on coming even if man isn’t here to see it some time in the future. It is a matter of solar mechanics and celestial order. And for all our knowledge of astronomy and terrestrial mechanics, we haven’t yet been able to do more than bounce a radar beam off the moon. We couldn’t alter the arrival of Spring by one second if we tried.

  Spring is a matter of growth, of bud and blossom. We can alter growth and change the time of blossoming in individual plants; but the forests still grow in their own way and the grasses of the plains haven’t altered measurably in a thousand years.

  Spring is a magnificent phase in the cycle of nature, but man really hasn’t anything to do with it. He just happens to be here, to enjoy it and benefit from it. This is a good time to admit it. By the time May arrives we shall be in a mood to say that it is all ours, our own achievement.

  Man is an itinera
nt creature. It is a question whether economic necessity—which is to say hunger—or simple curiosity drove him over the hill and into the valley beyond his birthplace when he first began to wander. But I know this: Man didn’t invent the wheel merely to help tote a burden. He made a wheel so he might build a cart in which to carry a few possessions to a new dwelling place. He didn’t hollow out a log merely to go out in the middle of a lake and fish. He contrived a boat in which to go somewhere. He remained a herdsman as long as he did because his flocks wandered the hills and he could follow them. The explorers have all been men consumed by curiosity rather than by hunger.

  What I am doing, of course, is rationalizing my yearning to go somewhere, get out of the house and see what is beyond the bend in the road. I am saying that my foot itches because the sun shines and there is a bright, clean line at the horizon. And I have been a staid householder long enough.

  I went somewhere. I walked up the road a couple of miles with Pat, the dog. We found that the celandine is flourishing and that the rabbits are numerous. Pat investigated the rabbits. I surveyed the celandine.

  Celandine is a perverse and undemonstrative member of the poppy family. It is also cousin of the bloodroot, though you’d never know it at a casual look. Like all its family, celandine flowers bear pollen but no honey, so it lures the bees for its own purpose and sends them away short-rationed. The flower is technically a poppy, yellow and four-petaled but small and undistinguished. It blooms in May and keeps on blooming all Summer.

  The plant’s distinction is in the yellow juice which oozes from any broken stem or leaf, as a similar juice does from all the poppy family. Celandine juice is bitter and astringent, was used by the old herbalists, and still has a place in medicine. It will inflame a sensitive skin, and it was once recommended as a wart remover. It was also used to treat jaundice and as a purgative. In large doses it is poisonous.