This Hill, This Valley Read online

  The boys are rather bashful about such matters. But they are accumulating memories just the same. I see it in the gleam in their eyes, I hear it in the tones of their voices. They, too, know that fish are only a part of the fishing.

  Fiddleheads uncurl and bright new fern fronds begin to spread themselves in the corner of the garden and on the mountainside where Dutchman’s-breeches and violets are in full bloom. There is something venerable and touched with mystery in the uncurling of a fern, probably because the ferns are literally as old as the hills. Their beginnings go back millions of years. Fern fossils found in the ancient rocks show little difference from those on my own mountainside. Counterparts of lady ferns and maidenhair and wood ferns and cinnamon ferns grew here in the days when Tom’s Mountain was a mud flat washed by a young, restless ocean.

  For generations men were baffled by the ferns, which bore no flowers and had no visible seeds, yet throve and multiplied. They were magic plants, and those who dealt in magic believed that if only they could find the seed of the fern they would have the ultimate in mysterious power. They never found a fern “seed,” of course, for ferns multiply by a complex of spores and intermediate growth in the form of prothallium, a process that takes seven years from spore to mature fern. And the process goes on so quietly and so unobtrusively that few are aware of it.

  The ferns were the only vegetation on earth between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 years ago. Flowering plants, which probably evolved from ferns, didn’t appear until about 30,000,000 years ago, or even less. So the ferns are really the ancients, the old-timers, the venerable ones.

  Some places are overrun by sunflowers, some by burdock, some by mustard. Our area is overgrown by dandelions. They yellow the pastures and gild the roadsides for a few weeks at this time of year, and we all seem to feel the same way about them. They’re beautiful, but they are a curse and a nuisance. They can ruin a lawn and they crowd the grass out of a meadow in only a few years. They can be cleaned out by dusting or spraying with a 2-4-D mixture, but a good many other plants, most of them desirable, are killed by the same procedure. Clover, for instance. So the farmers suffer them to grow, and plow and replant the meadows every few years and are rid of them for a season or two. Then back they come.

  The dandelion, viewed dispassionately, is a beautiful flower, pretty as a calendula or an aster. But a dandelion has so many offspring! How can so flimsy a little puff of down and so minute a seed possess so much vitality? Let one beautiful dandelion go to seed at the far corner of a lawn or garden today, and the next week you have dandelions all over the place. A dandelion will grow in a crack in a cement sidewalk. It will grow on an ash heap. Neither flood nor drought seems to discourage it. The lawn mower merely encourages it to greater effort. I spend a week every year dosing the dandelions on the lawn, individually, with a weed killer, and thus I keep them fairly well in check. But the pastures are full of them, and each year they seed the lawn again. Albert and Charley and all the other farmers curse them and fight them from time to time, but there they are, beautiful and as vigorous a pest as you will meet in a week of Sundays.

  Barbara calls him Mr. Daffodil, but I call him Mr. Spring. Barbara called to me this morning, “Mr. Daffodil is here!” and I went to my study window and saw him on the garden fence, brilliant yellow and shining black, the first of the season’s goldfinches. He sat there, preening in the sunlight, then came down on the lawn and strutted and took the attention from every other bird in sight.

  The goldfinch comes to us just ahead of the warblers, which are the only other birds with so clear a yellow and so much of it in their plumage. He does, as Barbara says, rival the daffodil in color, and his color is heightened by contrast with the black of his forehead, his wings and his tail. On a dark day, he is like a burst of sunshine. And when he sings to his more sedately colored mate it is with all the sweetness and fervor such a bird should possess. He is one of the relatively few brilliant birds with a really rich song. The name “wild canary,” occasionally applied to him, comes from his song as much as from his color. And he sings a good part of the season. With the coming of Autumn he changes his plumage to a kind of olive green, much like the color of his mate, and thus he travels to his wintering ground, full of seeds and throbbing with life. Friends tell me that goldfinches winter on Long Island, but I still think of them as long-range migrants. But migration and traveling clothes are far away from him now. Here he is, resplendent and busy and full of song. He wouldn’t need to sing a note, however, to get our admiration. He even looks like Mr. Spring. Or Mr. Daffodil.

  The apple trees are in bloom, and a magnificent sight, breathtaking in their expanse of profligate blossom. Downwind I can smell their fragrance a quarter of a mile away. When I walk down the road and look back I think nothing can be more beautiful than this place with its dozen apple trees in full flower.

  Once the pasture closest to the house was an orchard, I am told. But the trees, judging by the size of a few stumps remaining, grew large and old and perhaps a little weary. And the apple market waned. I am sure the deer enjoyed the windfalls and the grouse came down from the mountain in snowy Winter to feed on the buds. But the economic reason for the orchard vanished, and the trees were cut and burned and the orchard became another pasture. Someone, however, had the good sense to leave a dozen of the trees here at the edge of the yard. They are big trees, and they would make a modern orchardist turn away in disgust, for they have gone unpruned for years. But they are beautiful, especially now.

  There was a small peach orchard, too, up the mountainside. The peach trees died out, all but two, long ago. Those two stand now in a natural open space among the white pines beside the path that leads to the springhouse, and in a few days they will be lush with pink. They never seem to bring fruit to ripeness, but their blossom is a delight, though one has to climb the mountain to see it.

  And there were pears. When the orchard was cut down the axmen left four pear trees at the far edge of the home pasture, and they, too, are in blossom now. About one year in three they come to fruit. Last year I picked two bushels of fine, large, red-flushed pears from them. But the pear tree beside the garden is of another generation, younger and of a different variety, a small green pear that ripens to a faint yellow, halfway in size between the Seckel pear and the big Bartletts in the pasture. Our garden pear bears prodigiously, and just now it is opening into a blaze of spicy white bloom.

  I would have fruit trees around me for their blossoms, even if they bore no fruit. Just now it is like being surrounded by giant bouquets, and Barbara says it is better than living in a florist’s shop.

  We heard the season’s first whippoorwill last night. The earliest I ever heard one here was April 24, and sometimes they don’t seem to be around until the last week in May. The one last night sounded off only a few minutes, but come the warm June nights and he will make the darkness echo.

  If the whippoorwill uttered its call as most birds do, pausing for breath and looking around between phrases, it would be only another bird. But it doesn’t do things that way. It starts that three-note call and keeps on going with what must be the most repetitious bird call ever uttered. I listen to its start and wonder how long it will continue. I count, and just as I am almost hypnotized by the rhythm the bird skips half a beat, then goes on and on. One night, just before midnight, I lay and counted 187 calls without an interruption.

  Maudie, who once had a whippoorwill nest in her side yard, tells me that the fledglings have to be taught the call, note by note. She listened to this educational process and says the youngsters got the notes backward at first, muddled the tones and became so confused that they merely gurgled. Then the parent birds, who set the initial example, set it again and the youngsters started all over. It was a week before the youngsters managed two or three successive “whip poor Wills,” at which there was much parental to-do. After that came long practice sessions, which almost drove the listener mad. It was six weeks before the youngsters learned to say “whi
p poor Will” ten times in a row without a mistake.

  The one we heard last night was so close we could hear the faint “uh” before each “whip” in the call.

  Trilliums are in bloom, if you know where to find them, the purplish red wake-robins, the shy nodding trilliums with white petals and long sepals, the large flowering trillium, and the painted trillium with wavy edged white petals with a crimson V on them. Farther south there are dwarf whites, too, the earliest to bloom, but in my area there are only these four; and in the woods I know I find only two, Trillium erectum, the wake-robin, and Trillium cernuum, the nodding variety.

  There is an inherent trinity about the trilliums that made them of special interest to early herbalists, who credited the number three with special significance. Each plant has three leaves whorled about its stem, broad, intricately veined leaves of rich green. The flower, no matter what its color, has three long sepals which open to reveal the three petals. And the flower in all its parts is threefold. The flower withers, in its time, and a berry, usually red, takes its place; and the sepals remain, brownish, papery ribbons at the berry’s base.

  Any of the trilliums are exotically beautiful on a sunny afternoon, their petals wide, or on a damp morning after a slow rain, the petals closed and the long sepals like protecting green fingers around them. But if you want fragrance with your color, keep the trillium at arm’s length. The odor it has was designed to attract carrion flies.

  The lilacs’ heady fragrance comes in the open windows from all directions this morning, for we are well shrubbed with lilacs, some of them bushes ten feet high which grew beside the old house that was torn down when this one was built.

  Yesterday I saw the flash of lilac color on a brushy pasture hillside several miles from here and half a mile from the nearest house. It was an old bush, older than our oldest ones, and it grew beside a shallow depression, the almost vanished trace of a cellar hole from a house long gone. It was testimonial to a New England farm wife who once planted a lilac sucker beside her house and watched it grow and smelled its sweetness and probably died in her early thirties. She is long gone, but her lilac bush lives on, seen only by the placid cows and curious passers-by like me.

  All across America lilacs are perfuming the air. We took this shrub to our hearts long ago and have kept it there through the years. In our latitude it is practically symbolic of May. It sweetens the breath of Springtime.

  There were desk chores this morning, but I hurried through the pressing ones and left the others and went out of doors. There is so much to see out there! I went down to the apple trees, with the bees, down to see my little roses, the apple blossoms, which are going fast.

  Prehistoric man ate apples, on accepted evidence, and even cultivated them in Europe. And, being human, he no doubt enjoyed the beauty of their blossoms. I shouldn’t be surprised if prehistoric woman wore apple blossoms in her hair.

  Examine an apple blossom. It is, indeed, a small rose, five-petaled and full of fragrance. Its bud was almost the same as that of the wild roses, the pasture roses which grow beside the fence up at the foot of the mountain. As the apple blossom’s sepals opened, the blossom had the same soft, lovely color on its furled petals that marks the wild rose which will be blooming next month. It, too, has many stamens, like the rose, each cinnamon-tipped. Its fragrance is like that of a wild rose slightly spiced and—perhaps I am imagining—faintly touched with cider. And when the petals fall this blossom too forms a hip, a bulbous fruit, but far bigger and sweeter than any rose hip that ever reddened.

  Our roses won’t be opening for another month, but this morning I have had a special rose festival with my little beauties, my gigantic rose bouquets, my apple trees in blossom.

  There are more conspicuous flowers, plenty of them, but of all our wildflowers I think we look forward most eagerly to the showy orchis, orchis spectabilis, as the botanists know it. It blooms just after the big trillium, with the crab apples and when the bloodroot begins to fade. We found a dozen orchises in bloom today.

  Anna, who knows all the wildlings and where they grow, showed us our first orchis on a hillside ten miles from here. But today we went to a rocky hollow on our own hillside, where hemlocks grow and where last year’s ash leaves lie deep and moldering. Bloodroot grows there profusely, and the dainty wood anemones, and the ground is thick with the heart-leaves of wild ginger. Nearby is a patch of moccasin flowers. Even though we knew the orchises were there, we had to search. Last year they were beside this rock, close to that tree, over at the edge of the trickle from the seep spring. But still we had to crouch and part the bloodroot canopy to find them. There they were, the deep green twin leaves, broad and rounded and much like small moccasin-flower leaves. Between the leaves rose the flower stem bearing the purplish magenta hood, the white lip, the perfect flower, more dainty than a hothouse orchid. This orchis is small, no more than three-quarters of an inch across, and by no means spectacular; the casual searcher will overlook it completely, particularly if a few moccasin flowers are in bloom. But it is beautiful, a precious gem of a flower.

  The best way for an outlander to find the showy orchis is to know someone familiar with every nook and cranny of the hills. And even that person must love the wildlings. You find such a person and ask about showy orchis. The talk pauses. The prospective guide sizes you up. If you have even a hint of the flower vandal in your look or manner the whole venture is hopeless. But if you are fortunate, if your integrity is obvious, you will be expertly guided to the place where the orchis blooms.

  “What did you say your name was? Where are you from? Are you sure you mean orchis, not orchid…? It’s quite a climb, and maybe they aren’t out yet. You’ll probably get scuffed and muddy…Oh, you want a bouquet. Come to think of it, there’s a big tree down over the only path. No, you couldn’t possibly find the place yourself. If it’s a bouquet you want, take some of that yellow rocket over there. Or some violets. They’re much prettier.”

  It rained this morning and brought down a snowstorm of apple blossoms. The yard looked as though a fragment of January had struck it, leaving drifts of petals. But it cleared by noon and we went fishing. I forked up a plot where Barbara wants to put her next lettuce transplants and got a canful of worms.

  Some fish by ritual, but we fish for fun and for the pan. We make it an excuse to get out on the water, relax in the sun and watch the slow flow of the river. As I say, we frankly fish for the pan and the freezer, though when we hook a trout or a big bass or a pickerel we have our excitement, too. Most of our catch, though, is rock bass and yellow perch, both good eating. They keep us in filets for chowder or for a baked-fish dish Barbara makes most of the Winter, thanks to the freezer.

  With the boat, a 12-footer built for comfort rather than for speed, we fish several miles of the river. And our section of the river is a comfortable, hospitable stream, 200 feet or more wide, almost free of surfacing rocks, and six to twelve or fourteen feet deep. Its current is only about a mile an hour, for our part of the stream is leisurely, much different from what it is ten miles lower down; with us it meanders over the flatland of the broad valley, but lower down it hurries and whitens through rugged hills and sharp valleys.

  Because the river is so slow up here it responds quickly to storm, its level rising a foot after half an inch of rain; and in Spring and Fall, when the hard rains come and the snow melts, it sweeps majestically along in semi-flood, three feet over our dock.

  The river’s swift changes, its temperamental ways, keep altering its bed somewhat, scouring it here, lodging new snags and brush there, cleaning out one hole and gouging out another. So each Spring we have a new river, in a sense, to explore, at least in terms of fishing. One year the perch swarmed at Dead Cedar Hole. The next year we didn’t catch a perch there. One Spring there was good bass fishing at Deep Hole; by midsummer it was deserted. So we have to investigate, see what is the state of the fish world and the underwater feeding, at the Big Bend, at Sunday Cove, at Snag Hole, at The Roc
ks, at King Bird Hole, and all the other places we have named.

  Today we went up to Deep Hole, caught two big rock bass there, then drifted down to Dead Cedar Hole, and Barbara took two seven-inch bluegills. Drifting again, we came to the Channel Behind the Island and rock bass bit like mad, most of them little ones to be thrown back. On down to Apple Blossom Hole and the perch began to feed.

  Trout fishermen will laugh in scorn at the perch fisherman, but we like perch, fileted and fried exactly right. That’s the way they were tonight, and I am content with my world. A bit sunburned, too, on the back of the neck.

  A few years ago I wrote a piece about a remote spot in Colorado that I have admired since I was a boy. Today I had a letter from Jim, who is a judge and has lived there for years. “Last week,” Judge Jim wrote, “I went up to Lost Lake, the country you wrote about, and flicked a few flies over the water. Not a strike. I wonder what happened to all those big trout.”

  I first knew that country as a boy when I went with my father to Lost Lake, in the high country. We went in by saddle and pack horse and it was early dusk when we reached the lake. Father said, “I’ll make camp. Suppose you see if you can catch something for supper.” I jointed up a fly rod and strung a line and took the first leader in the box, one that had a Royal Coachman on it and a bare snelled hook on the second loop. In my haste I didn’t even take off the snelled hook. I ran to the edge of the lake, cast, and instantly there was a rush that almost took the rod from my hand. I played my fish and was lucky, and since I had forgotten a landing net I dragged my catch up on the sloping bank. I had not one lake trout, but two, both good size though I am sure not as long as my arm, as I remember. One had taken the fly, the other the bare hook. The lake swarmed with trout and they were ravenous.