by Hal Borland
I was out fishing this afternoon and caught few fish; but I did catch a song sparrow taking a bath. I was anchored near the bank and had sat quietly for perhaps ten minutes when I heard this sparrow in a clump of red osiers. It sang twice, then came down the steep bank and perched in the brush and sang again, not five feet from me.
At the water’s edge was a branch of osier sagging from its root so that the water lapped over its tip. The sparrow hopped onto that branch, out near its swaying tip, and flirted its tail. The first movement was tentative. Then the tail whipped the water in what seemed almost a rotary motion. It threw up a spray, like a spinning propeller half out of water. Thoroughly wet, the sparrow ruffled its feathers and shook itself, for all the world like a wet hen in the barnyard. It preened, carefully laid a few feathers in place again with its beak, then started all over again, whisking water with its tail in a motion too fast for the eye to follow. This time it spread its wings before it shook itself.
Three times it did this, drying itself each time. Then it went back up the bank and sang again. It sang two songs and watched me, then it came back and bathed again, as though displaying its technique.
All this happened in the shadow, the sun already so low that the river bank hid it. The air temperature, when I came to the house a little later, was in the low 50s. The water temperature certainly was no higher. Clearly this was not a matter of cooling off. It was a bath.
Since the first deciduous tree rose above the primeval ooze, since birds and beasts first peopled the woodland, there has been this season of leaf-fall and abundance. When man came along, in the slow sequence of evolution, here was October, his for the taking. And over the centuries and the ages, man has made Autumn his own as far as he can ever make any season his own. Then he invented a calendar, a clock, and a Summer vacation.
Summer really isn’t the ideal time for a vacation. It’s all right as a time to get away from the tribulations of a job, perhaps, but a vacation should be more than an escape. Every October I wonder why, if man is as wise as he thinks he is, he orders his life in this way, why he is content with a brief escape at a time when the most enduring thing he can acquire is a sunburn and perhaps a case of ivy poisoning. Now, not in midsummer, is the time when good things abound for man’s enjoyment. If ever there was a season for man to savor this earth and know it intimately, October is its peak and prime.
Winds forever blow, rivers forever run, birds forever fly. But one doesn’t have to look to know that now ducks are on the wing, and grouse and pheasants. Bucks are in the thicket. Bears fatten. Fox stalks rabbit, and rabbit is free and whimsical as the wind. Harvests are in, the hasty time is at an end, the whine and bite of Winter are still in the distance, over the hill, beyond the horizon.
And man? Man, the ingenious, the adaptable, the industrious, the discoverer and perfector of the twelve-month calendar—man is at his desk, tied to his own clock, with only a few brief glimpses of what might be his outdoors if he only had time by the horns instead of duty by the tail.
There was a white frost last night, but when I got up this morning, before the sun touched it, there were unfrosted circles under all the bushes on the lawn. It was as though the frost had settled, like dew, from above, and each bush sheltered its own small area.
When the sun rose it was a sparkling world. The sun had been in the air only an hour when a shower began from the big poplar. Its leaves had all turned gold, but at least half of them still hung on the branches. This morning as I watched them come down they came in a veritable rain, though there wasn’t a breath of a breeze. At times their sound was like the patter of heavy rain.
I have seen this happen many times, and I have a theory about its cause. When the leaves are being shed, a corky layer forms at the base of their stems, like a tiny cork closing the sap channels through which the leaf juices have been withdrawn. This corky layer turns hard and brittle, and then the leaves are cast loose, usually in a wind or rain. But sometimes we come to that precise moment with several clear, calm days which lead to a night of frost.
During such a night, moisture seeps into that corky layer. Frost comes, the moisture freezes and becomes a kind of adhesive holding the leaf to the branch. Then the sun rises. The sun melts the frost crystals at the base of the leaf stem. The formation of the frost pried the leaf loose, but as long as the frost remained the leaf was still tied. The frost melts, and down come the leaves of their own weight, hundreds, thousands, pried loose by the frost and then cut loose by the melting sun.
Give a man a free hand and he builds himself a house with running water, several bathrooms, a two-car garage, telephones both upstairs and down, automatic central heat—and a fireplace. He wants no stable, no carriage house, no dug well with old oaken bucket, no outdoor privy. But he insists upon a fireplace. And on October evenings he, personally, arranges the kindling and lights the fire before he settles down to watch television or read a book.
The hearth fire is as antiquated as the stone arrowhead, yet we cling to it, generation after generation. The further we get from the pains of primitive living, the more we cherish it. Not long ago I inspected a supermodern house with glass walls on all sides and no partitions—and a fireplace in the middle! Give a man from a hearthless apartment a whiff of wood smoke and he groans with envy. Show him a leaky-roofed cabin forty miles from nowhere and if it has a fireplace he will buy it, or try to.
The reasons are all twined with intangibles as thin as wood smoke. Man is a natural fire-tender, has been since ancient times. There is a race pride, something reaching back to the cave man who first tamed fire. There is the instinct to bask safely in front of a fire while a hunk of buffalo meat simmers and wolves howl outside.
That makes it complicated. But it certainly can’t be explained by saying that the man who builds a hearth fire wants to warm his hands. He seldom does. What he wants is to see the flames leap, at his command, and feel the glow and hear the simmering log. Don’t ask me why. I’m a prejudiced witness. My hearth fire is going right this minute.
We walked up the road this evening, Barbara and Pat and I, and I came back full of questions.
Why are so many barns painted red? Why do robins scold in October exactly as they scold in May, and what are they scolding now? Why are dandelions perennials? Why do house flies congregate at the windows at this time of year? To get out? Open the window and they retreat in panic, scared to death of the open air. How cold does it have to get to shut up a frog? Is there a cleaner yellow anywhere, after the golden-rod is through, than the last, lingering evening primroses? Doesn’t the woodpecker ever get a headache? Is there a more friendly sound in the woods than the chirring of a flicker? Why do we forget, year after year, how beautiful an Autumn day can be? Or an Autumn night, with the stars practically within whispering distance?
Who can enumerate all the sweet and pungent smells of a country woodshed? Who, for that matter, can describe a woodshed? Woodsheds differ more widely than houses or barns; their chief similarity is that they shelter firewood, among other things. And their pungence varies with their homeland.
My woodshed is a snug structure just five steps from the back door, four walls, two windows, a roof, and a dirt floor. When I moved here it contained a jumble of everything from firewood to chicken wire, old paint and broken garden tools. I brought order out of it, in an initial burst of energy, and the firewood still is stacked neatly enough. But it is something of a jumble again, my own jumble now. And it doubles as a garden house, at least in Winter.
When I first brought order out there I unearthed a fine old chopping block, which is still there and is still used. It is a section of a splendid old oak a good thirty inches in diameter, and it was used for years before I found it. It is hollowed out at the top from a million hatchet blows, and down one side is a deep brown stain where many a chicken must have met the guillotine. I cut kindling on it.
My woodshed smells of birch and oak and maple and ash and poplar, and somewhat of apple. It also smells o
f cedar, for in one corner is a great heap of old shingles stripped from the garage roof when I put asbestos shingles there. They make excellent kindling. From one rafter dangles a pail with rat poison in it, safe from dogs, cats and children, but accessible to rats. There are several bushel baskets full of spruce cones, also for kindling. My woodshed is savory with the timber smells of this farm. It is a way station, midway between the flourishing tree and the flourishing fire.
Even as the Autumn days shorten they increase in height and breadth. It is as though there were a constant ratio which keeps the days in balance. The leaves are thinning out. The eye can reach. New vistas open. The horizon is just there beyond the trees on the other side of my river, now that the leaves have fallen. The sun slants in a window where two weeks ago there was thick maple shade.
The hills are no longer remote, and at night I can look up from almost anywhere and see the constellations of Andromeda and Pegasus. Even in a land of trees, we are no longer canopied from the sky or walled in from the horizon. The earth’s distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons.
True, they are not new horizons; they have been there always. But the very fact that they seem new now, if only because newly seen, is human reason enough for the seasonal succession. Men blind their lives and thoughts by too many walls and canopies, at best. It is good to have the walls and canopies thin away, from time to time, and reveal the broader scope. It is good to be reminded that not only have the days changed, but life itself is a matter of more than two dimensions.
Autumn is an eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of completion; but it is also breadth and depth and distance. I challenge anyone to stand with Autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.
Barbara saw two bluebirds today, and within an hour she saw a flock of juncos. How the birds and the seasons overlap!
The peony leaves have turned purple with the first frosts. I moved the peonies three years ago, when I was trying to clear the lawn for ease of mowing; they had been in a double row along the walk from the road to the house, but I put them at the back of the flower garden, for a background, and they have loved the change. All the bushes I have moved have liked their new homes, too, including the barberry. Why anyone would put barberry bushes in the middle of a lawn is a mystery to me, but there they were; so I moved them out to the pasture gate, where they continue to provide spots of color—they are a wonderful crimson now, loaded with berries—and continue to grow and feed the birds.
I have neither love nor great respect for barberry— except respect for its thorns. This is a purely personal matter, without good reason, I suppose. But when I move barberry I give it no coddling. I dig it up, thrust it into a new hole, tramp down the soil, and forget it. And it seems to thrive. One year I left a barberry bush unplanted and with little soil on its roots for a week before I put it into the ground. It grew wonderfully. If I had tried that with any of the bushes I admire they probably would have curled leaves and died.
One cynical observer commented the other day that barberry bushes are like women—they like neglect. That man is a bachelor, an aging bachelor.
I found a small patch of honeysuckle today by following my nose. A honey fragrance was in the air, sweet and haunting, for that honeysuckle was in bloom. The green bank was speckled with the little twin-lipped trumpets, quite a number of them, though it is now mid-October. And they seemed twice as fragrant as they did in June.
Honeysuckle in October always seems like an Autumn bonus, though it can be found in green leaf, if not in blossom, as late as December in most years if one knows where to look. There are other flowers, too, that persist well into the frosty season. Some of the mints, for instance, I have found in bloom in December. And bouncing Bet and chicory and some of the lesser bur-marigolds as well as Fall’s own asters often bloom well into November. But they are weedy blooms, in any lexicon, and they have little fragrance. Honeysuckle is something else again. To find it now in bloom is like finding a sweet fragment of June four months late—or eight months early. It is almost as good as opening a fresh comb of honey on a dreary February morning and smelling June when Winter is full of slush.
We are having a few days of Indian Summer, and I wonder who gave it that name. The Indians don’t seem to have; the name appears not to have been used until after the Revolution. The first mention of it I can find was in 1794, and then it was used by a Caucasian New Englander.
There’s no fixed date for Indian Summer. It comes in the Fall, and that’s about as close as anyone can come. Sometimes, as now, it comes in October, sometimes in November; sometimes it waits for the first hard frost, the black frost, as some call it, and sometimes it just appears over the hilltop and settles down while October is young and innocent. Some partisans insist that it can never come this early, but even they cannot set an arbitrary date. It isn’t a calendar season; it makes its own rules.
When Indian Summer comes early it coincides with the best color of the year, the magnificence of maple and oak. Then it is doubly wonderful, as now. When it comes late it relieves a dull and frosty November and makes us forget, for a little while, that Winter is close at hand. Now and then—and this will stir argument, no doubt—it comes twice in a season, both early and late. Such years are memorable. This could be such a year, but whether it is or not I shall take Indian Summer now and know it is wonderful.
The woolly bears, the caterpillar phase of that insect known as Isia Isabella, are humping their way about the grounds, hurrying somewhere to curl up in semi-darkness for the Winter. They remind me of busy little women hurrying about in fur coats. When, in due time, they shed their coats, these creatures too will emerge as resplendent beauties, winged with yellow and pink and fragile as any lovely moth.
Last November I looked for a woolly bear to examine its coat, which is believed by some soothsayers to forecast the Winter by its proportion of dark fur to lighter. This superstition, I must add, is ill founded. In any case, I searched for two hours without finding a curled-up caterpillar anywhere. But that evening I opened the outside cellar door and there, on a cold concrete step, I found my woolly bear, curled into a sleeping ball. The temperature was 28 at the time.
I took my caterpillar indoors, put it in a jelly glass, and waited till it warmed up to room temperature. When that happened it uncurled, lifted its bare black snout and looked around for something green and succulent. Not to tantalize the creature, I put it, still in the glass, on the ledge outside my study window. It remained there until April, roused of its own accord, ate a few apple leaves I gave it, and transformed itself into a pupa. A few weeks later it emerged as a moth with a beautifully speckled orange body and yellow and pink wings and flew away. And now its children are back, fur-coated and cameling across the lawn, hurrying to some dark Winter bedroom.
Curious about the speed of caterpillars, I once timed a woolly bear as it made its way across the lawn. It had to go around a good many tall grasses and it detoured several times for reasons I could not understand, but it still traveled fifteen feet in five minutes. That was one yard a minute, or about one-thirtieth of a mile an hour. Then I estimated weights and decided that I weigh at least 5,000 times as much as such a caterpillar. And I found that if I could walk as fast as that caterpillar, ounce for ounce, I could walk 170 miles an hour. Which merely proves the absurdity of all such comparisons.
This month’s full moon is called the Hunter’s Moon, as last month’s was the Harvest Moon. In both instances we have a series of nights when the moon rises only a little later each night, soon after sunset, giving the feeling of a full moon several nights in a row.
There is a complex reason which, as I interpret my astronomer friends, simmers down to the fact that the moon’s orbit is elliptical rather than a true circle. The earth’s own motions are also involved. As a result of these factors, the moon’s rate of retardation—the lag in time of moonrise from one day
to the next—varies considerably. Where I live, this lag may be as little as 23 minutes or as much as an hour and 17 minutes. It is at its maximum in Winter and Summer, and at its minimum in Spring and Fall. The long full moons of March and April, September and October, are no illusion. Nor are the brief full moons of December and January, July and August.
For example, during the current five-day period surrounding the full moon the time lag of moonrise amounts to only three hours and 15 minutes, an average of about 38 minutes a day. Last June’s full moon had a lag during the five-day period of six hours and 26 minutes, one hour and 17 minutes a day.
So we have the Hunter’s Moon, a time of full moonlight for several evenings in a row. It is a magnificent moon tonight, and if it should be clear tomorrow it will be almost as magnificent. All the rest of this week, in fact, should be a time of moonlit evenings.
We were husking corn today. The corn picker was supposed to do it, but the husking rolls were a little worn, so we helped out. Albert was driving the tractor and Charley and I were going along for a ride in the wagon into which the picker delivered the ears. We worked, after a fashion, stripping the occasional ear that the picker didn’t husk. There were just enough to occupy our hands, not enough to stop our talk.
We discussed the old days, when corn picking was done afoot and by hand, with a huskin’ peg and a bangboard wagon and a team of horses that knew their job. And Charley, who has been growing corn a good many years, agreed that he preferred today’s methods, even though a mechanical picker isn’t as picturesque as a team and wagon. “With today’s yields,” he said, “it would take you all Fall to pick your crop by hand.”
