This Hill, This Valley

by Hal Borland

  Those who live close to the land admit the possibility of such emergencies and are equipped to face them. It is those who live midway between the land and the city who are trapped, not only by circumstance but by their own alienation from the simplicities. City living has ill equipped most of us to face the still untamed vagaries of wind and weather. But we are slowly developing a new and considerable fraction of the population which in the not too -distant future will be somewhat at home at the edge of the country. Winter and ice are probably the most rigorous and demanding of all the teachers from whom we shall learn this new way of life.

  Charley has been cutting sawlogs, and when I drove twenty miles on an errand today I saw three other farmers at work in their woodlots. It’s mid-January and the moon is in the last quarter. I mentioned that to Charley, and he as much as said he was cutting logs, not moonbeams. But according to the old lore he couldn’t have timed it better. His logs will be seasoned to make good lumber, straight planks and flat boards.

  I dug this information out of an old book, and I can’t verify it by even the veterans of the sawmill business around here. But according to that old book the original meaning of “seasoning” a sawlog was to make sure you cut it at the right season. And the season was governed by the moon as well as the month. Timbers cut during “the old moon in January”—some said February as well—“will stand straight and true.” But if you cut your logs “when the moon is full, timber fibers warp and pull.”

  Maybe there’s nothing to it. I don’t know. All I know is that the old barns, the really old ones, and the fine old houses indicate that the men who chose the lumber knew what they were doing. The lumber in them is usually good lumber, straight and true, after all these years. How much the moon’s phase had to do with it can only be guessed, but there’s no denying that the wood was seasoned to perfection in most instances.

  Maybe farmers cut sawlogs in January because it’s a slack time and because there’s snow on which to skid them out. Maybe that’s the only reason. I don’t know.

  Nobody seems to know just why the snowbird is called a junco, but junco is the scientific name and is more and more used as the common name. There are various origins for the word junco, one meaning a reed, one meaning a seed. But even the ornithologists hesitate to pin it on the Latin for seed, for many birds are seed-eaters.

  Anyway, there is the junco, the snowbird, in a dark-gray full-dress suit with white bosom, tails neatly piped in white. He is beautiful against a snowy background, and while I hesitate to suggest that an esthetic sense dominates his habits, he certainly thrives in snow country. Sometimes it seems that it takes a snowstorm to bring the snowbirds, for they come wheeling in flocks as a storm approaches. They came to our place last Fall, however, even before the robins had left, well before the first snow.

  Technically, they are of the same family as the sparrows. This is easy to believe when one sees and recognizes the young snowbirds; in juvenile plumage they look, at a glance, like adult song sparrows, streaked and speckled. And the adults have a little song that reminds me of the more melodious sparrows, a trill a good deal like that of the chipping sparrow. It is never a loud song and sometimes it is elaborated into a soft warble with song sparrow echoes.

  The snowbird is congenial but cautious. A whole flock usually winters on our hillside, and they come with a swoop of dark wings to feed on crumbs or seeds. They prefer to feed on the ground, on seeds knocked from the feeder by the sparrows and chickadees. They commonly nest just north of here, and they seldom go far south in the Winter. Western varieties— the ornithologists have argued over twenty or so of them—travel as far as Alaska.

  Even under an overcast sky, a snow-covered night is not a night of darkness. It is a time of black and white and gray, all faintly aglow; and once the human eye has accommodated to it there is much to be seen and even more to be sensed. But it is seen and sensed in different terms than by daylight.

  First, it is a world without shadows, for what light there is comes from the snow-covered earth rather than from the sky, a reflected light. Trees are stark outlines. Bushes are vague shapes. Snowdrifts vanish in a common blur that has no small contours.

  When one has accepted this shadowless world on its own terms, the next thing that strikes the consciousness is the absence of color. True, there is no color to the human eye at night, but in this world of strong contrasts one is more aware of this than on a Summer night. What we see in darkness is seen with other vision than we use in the daytime; the daytime part of our eyes blanks out and night vision takes its place. Our night vision is simplified, color sensitivity sacrificed so that we may gather every bit of the thinner light now available. Our night eyes gather in contrasts so that we can identify shapes, whereas our daylight eyes bring us color and detail. And the best of our night vision is from the corners of the eyes, not straight ahead. On a star night I have difficulty seeing the dim stars if I look directly at them but find them easily if I look a few degrees to one side and use the edge of my vision, as it were.

  We walked last night in a snow-clad world under a starless sky and all our senses were busy. We saw less, but we apprehended twice as much as we would have been aware of at high noon on a Winter day.

  The chickadee is a delightful bird. I speak, of course, of the black-capped chickadee of these parts, which flits about the woodland all Winter, congregates in the pines and makes even bitter days warm with song, twitters near the house even in a snowstorm, doesn’t sulk when caught in a cold, driving rain. The chickadees are regular patrons at our feeding station just outside the living-room window and they sing and twitter between gulps of peanut butter, suet, sunflower seeds and bread crumbs.

  The way of a chickadee with a sunflower seed is marvelous to watch. He holds the seed beneath his toes on a hard surface and hammers at it, woodpecker-wise, with his sharp beak. One slip, one miscalculation by a small fraction of an inch, and he would clip off a fragile toe. But that slip never seems to happen. He simply chips at the seed’s hard shell until he cracks it, then he gulps it, twitters a paean of praise for the good life, and reaches for another seed.

  The chickadee could travel south in Winter. He has close kin who live in the South all year around. But the soft life is not for him. He also has a cousin, the brown-capped chickadee, who lives in the far North, which probably proves that he comes from a sturdy family. The black-cap stays where he is, competes successfully with snowbird and blue jay for food, and survives as a happy companion. He doesn’t even take to the deep thickets for long in the worst weather. He lives all over the Winter landscape, brightens dull days with his modest song, and makes the best of what comes his way.

  The January wind has a hundred voices. It can scream, it can bellow, it can whisper, it can sing a lullaby. It can roar through the leafless maples and shout down the mountainside, and it can murmur through the white pines among the granite ledges where the lichens make strange hieroglyphics. It can whistle down a chimney and set the hearth-fire to dancing. On a sunny day it can pause in a sheltered spot and breathe of Spring and violets. In the cold of a lonely night it can rattle the sash and stay there muttering of ice and snowbanks and deep-frozen ponds.

  Sometimes in January the wind seems to come from the farthest star in outer darkness, so remote and so impersonal is its voice. That is the wind of a January dawn, in the half-light that trembles between day and night. It is a wind that merely quivers the trees, its force sensed but not seen, a force that might almost hold back the day if it were so directed. Then the east brightens and the wind relaxes; the stars, the wind’s source, grow dim.

  And sometimes in January the wind is so intimate that you know it came only from the next hill, a little wind that plays with leaves and puffs of smoke and whistles like a little boy with puckered lips. It makes the little cedar trees quiver, as with delight. It shadowboxes with the weather vane. It tweaks an ear and whispers laughing words about crocuses and daffodils, then nips the nose and dances off.

 
But I never know, until I hear its voice, which wind is here today. Or, more important, which will be here tomorrow.

  I like winter for two gustatory reasons—soup and stew. I can eat soup every day of the Winter and well into Summer, and I can eat stew any time. Right now I can smell the soup kettle simmering. In it, I am sure, is a soup made from a recipe that started out, long ago, as a recipe for minestrone. But it has been altered and expanded, over the years; now it even contains frijoles, Mexican beans, for instance, and it has twice as many onions as it began with. Its base is beef stock, but it usually contains chicken broth too. Sometimes it has scraps of ham in it. But no barley, I insist. It is remarkably savory and it improves day by day, as long as it lasts. I am hungry, just smelling it and writing about it.

  Barbara also makes the best potato soup ever served, and with proper persuasion she makes a potato-and-onion and potato-and-leek soup better than any others I have ever known. And her stews are perfection, based on choice cuts of lamb or beef, not on scraps or leavings. She has even used sirloin steak for stew meat, which may be heresy to some but is luxurious eating to us. Stew is not an economy dish in this household; it is choice eating, made from prime ingredients and seasoned with careful pinches of judiciously chosen herbs, just enough to enhance but never mask the basic flavor. And cooked with the skill of genius.

  I have tried to make stews from Barbara’s recipes, on occasion, but they never turn out like hers, either in look or flavor. She adds a mysterious something. She cooks for the nose and the eye as well as for the palate and stomach, which is the mark of the artist. I didn’t marry her for her cooking, but it is a splendid dividend.

  We are having the January thaw, which comes like a friend long remembered, like a warm greeting in a crowd of strangers. It lifts the heart and strengthens faith, it breaks the Winter cold of discontent. It can also breed a whole week of sniffles.

  No one can predict the January thaw or even say for sure that it will come. That is a part of its delight, the sweet happiness of surprise. Cold has congealed the world. The wind was edged. Then, overnight, change came. It crept down the valley. The sun rose clear and beamed with benevolence. The sky had cleared to crystalline brilliance. The wind was friendly and the air this morning had a palpable warmth. The thaw is here.

  Whether it lasts a day or a week, it is as though doors were opened suddenly and there was Spring in the next room. Spring, and crocuses and red florets on the swamp maples. There is almost the breath of violets on the air this morning. I am carried away. I listen, absurdly, for the hum of bees and look for the flash of a bluebird, the strut of a robin. I wonder if the sap has begun to rise. Are the buds swelling? How about the catkins on the birches and the popples? Will there soon be purple mouse-ears on the lilacs?

  No. I know none of these things is going to happen yet. They’d better not! But Winter, I know again, doesn’t last forever. Through the open window behind me I smell something that is not Winter at all. It is the faintest breath of Spring, over a dozen hills and still far away, but Spring just the same.

  After the first exuberance of yesterday’s warmth I have begun to mistrust this thaw. The pastures are soggy with melt and the brooks coming down the mountainside are loud with leaping water. The river has risen six inches overnight. The roadsides are awash with the melt. The temperature today touched the high 40s, almost reached 50, much too warm.

  But when I went to the garden and tried it with a fork I found hard frost only three inches down. That is reassuring. That frost will not ease away with a few warm days, and it is that frost which will hold trees and bulbs in check and spare them ultimate damage and even destruction. There is too little sunlight yet to lure much activity, despite the warmth of the air. Growth responds primarily to length of daylight rather than to temperature, certainly not to temperature alone.

  Severe damage seldom comes from a thaw in January and the subsequent freeze, which can be as severe as any in the whole Winter. The worst damage comes in March or April when, after the daylight has lengthened and the sap has begun to rise after a week or two of mildness, buds swell and even tentative activity begins. If a severe frost occurs then it may be disastrous. One year March was like April and April like a bitter March. Apple blossoms were caught with their sepals down and leaves with their bud-scales open. There was little fruit that year and many trees suffered. So I am glad to find plenty of frost still in the soil. I hope it stays there two more months.

  The thaw continues, but my testing fork still finds hard frost only a few inches down. The mildness, however, had us going through the new seed catalogues, and before the day was out we had planted and brought to harvest a marvelous garden.

  One thing about a catalogue garden, it is planted, weeded, sprayed, dusted, and even harvested without one substantial ache of a muscle. And there are no failures. Flowers bloom true to color. Every tomato plant bears big, lush, ripe, full-flavored fruit. There are no woodchucks raiding, no rabbits, no squash borers, no bean beetles, no Jap beetles. And no mosquitoes.

  But such a garden is rather unsubstantial, come mealtime.

  The thaw is over. It frosted again last night. The temperature was down to 20 when I got up and it barely reached 30 all day. And just in time, too, for we were getting Spring fever and wanderlust. Now we can settle back and get to work again.

  But the days are growing longer. Sunset now comes nineteen minutes later than it did the first of this month. Sunrise is only four minutes earlier, but that totals up to twenty-three more minutes of daylight.

  The countryman knows the time, but he is already thinking ahead to April. Charley stopped in today and said he and his hired man were building a new trailer wagon to use with the corn picker. That means that Charley is thinking all the way to October, not only to corn-planting time but to harvest time. And Albert came up to say he thought we’d better get some fence posts out now, before Spring work begins to pile up.

  After all, we are past the middle of January and we probably won’t have more than about eight more weeks of Winter. One year, of course, we had Winter right up until May, three of our heaviest snowfalls in April. But that was unusual. We look forward to April as the beginning of Spring, and April isn’t too far away now.

  Fence posts are one of the few harvests for a farmer in the Winter. We grow our own, those slim, straight cedars that fill the open patches in the woods and constantly try to creep out into the grassland of the pasture. The best stands of them are on the brush land just below the rocky ridges, an area that the outlander would consider wasteland.

  The trees are red cedars, technically junipers, and their wood rots slowly. In the Fall they have small blue berries, dark blue with a whitish bloom, and the birds eat the berries and plant new cedars with their droppings. So now, when Albert cuts cedar posts, he thinks particularly well of the birds. They relieve him of one essential job of planting.

  Albert is on the ridge today, and I was up there with him for a time. It’s good to feel the bite of a sharp ax and to hear the lingering echo in the crisp air. As we cut the cedars, the jays began to congregate to see what was going on. Then the chickadees gathered. We had quite an audience. And yet, we were at home there, cutting posts and trimming them, and even the birds seemed to know it. There was less complaint and more companionship among them, as though they didn’t mind having company.

  A farmer is a little like a tree, actually, rooted in the soil and living with the seasons, shaped by the weather and patient with the years. And as we worked I thought that maybe no man should quarrel too much with the world around him. Good things grow in odd places, and what’s poor land for one crop is good for another. It depends on what a man wants and needs. Crop land needs good fences, and fences need posts, and posts grow where crops for market won’t grow. Maybe it all evens out. It seemed to, in a minor way, up there getting out posts today.

  I can think of only one way to improve the order of things. If the birds would only plant cedars along every fence, and if t
he cedars would grow as well there as they do up on the ridge, we could cut our posts where we need them and save time and energy hauling them down from the mountainside. But I guess that’s asking a little too much.

  There is a fiction that living with the land somehow fixes one, mentally and emotionally, in a conservative orbit. The fact, as I find it, is that knowing both Summer and Winter earth and Summer and Winter sky gears one to change. How can one ignore change, deny its inevitability, when faced by change day by day and season by season? No two days are the same, when you face them whole; and facing them, one must himself change somewhat. Trees grow. Valleys deepen. And there is the horizon, the wide blue sky that has no boundaries. In Winter, especially, the boundaries are all here on the earth and most of them are man-made.

  There have always been two major problems—man and man, and man and earth, his environment. Neither problem stands alone. And the false solutions always turn out to be the ones which ignore that eternal kinship. So, too, with the false philosophies. But for those who would understand, there are the times of clarity and simplicity. Especially the times when Winter hills are naked and Winter sky is wide, inviting exploration. There is a time when the boundaries we set up for ourselves are a little less constricting. Man and man, and man and earth, stand forth more clearly.

  The clarity of the Winter sky holds its own challenge. It promises change, and it invites the mind to match that change. Whatever conservatism is bred there is the conservative belief that change may be slow but it is inevitable.

  When I walk now, or even look out the window, I see the trees stripped to their essentials. They stand in bare bones, except the conifers, and I can see the source of their graceful Summer shapes.

  That elm against the sky, which in Summer is a great green feather-duster—see how the sturdy trunk divides some distance from the ground, then divides again and yet again. It reaches upward, widening like an inverted cone, and all its branches point toward the sky.