This Hill, This Valley

by Hal Borland

  Last year we saw this happen on our own mountainside, though not as vividly as it did on Canaan Mountain, which we see every time we drive to the village. On Canaan Mountain we could watch the line of opening leaves on the trees climb from ledge to ledge and shoulder to shoulder day by day. Since the mountain rises more than a thousand feet above the valley, the bottom was green almost two weeks before the green reached the top.

  The spring trend of a week ago has reversed itself. Days are raw, nights are cold. We drove around the mountain today, past Lake Washining which should, to my way of thinking, be rippling and sparkling in the sunshine. Instead, it was still half iced over and the open water was sullen and leaden.

  Despite the chill, I noticed as we came home that the white birches up the mountainside show a touch of red at their tips. There has been a kind of ruddy cast to them all Winter, but the color begins to warm up now. The birches look like long-handled paint brushes that have been dipped ever so lightly in crimson pigment. It is a heartening sight, and it seems twice as colorful against the background of pines and hemlocks.

  My thermometer showed just six above zero this morning. And I heard that not far from here someone had a reading only two above. How we like to boast of our extremes!

  I was once caught in an early September heat wave in the Imperial Valley of California, which can be hellishly hot. On the streets of El Centro there was a thermometer under the wooden awning in front of every store, and the natives were walking along the street looking at every thermometer. I did likewise and found a variation from 128 to 135, the result of varying accuracy in the thermometers. But when I went into a restaurant a waitress exulted, “I hear it’s up to 135!” The town’s official temperature, apparently, was the highest anyone could find.

  But I suppose that once the temperature has risen above 120, a few degrees more or less don’t matter much. As for me, the same applies to temperatures in the neighborhood of zero. I have seen it eighteen below zero here in this valley, and it didn’t seem one whit colder than it felt at a mere ten below. And this morning I am as unhappy about six above zero as I would be about a mere two above.

  I have resolved to pay no more attention to the weather. I will note that it is warmer today, and the sun is shining. But I am looking for Spring now, not statistics. Well, just in passing, I did happen to see the thermometer and the temperature seemed to be up around 30.

  One Winter I kept a weather chart for three months, making notations of temperature and barometric readings three times a day and charting them on graph paper. It became such a chore that I finally gave it up. I was going around, just waiting for the hour to take my readings, and I was wishing for sharp changes in the weather to make big peaks and valleys on my charts.

  I wasn’t cut out to be a meteorologist. But I did find that, over that particular period—and it seems to be true generally—the movements of temperature and barometric pressure are closely in accord. The pressure goes up and the temperature goes down. This is a broad generalization, and there are exceptions; but my chart showed an almost constant relationship. There was, however, a twelve to eighteen-hour lag of temperature movement behind the changes in barometric pressure. This, of course, applied to Winter weather; there are other and more complex relationships for Summer.

  The simplest weather forecasts I ever made were from the weather maps. I found that, generally speaking, the weather in Bismarck, N.D., would reach the East Coast in thirty-six to forty-eight hours. All I had to do was read the Bismarck report and predict that we would have some variation on the same weather late tomorrow. It was about 60 per cent accurate. Then my newspaper discontinued the Bismarck report and I was left to my own guesswork again.

  Almost mild today and the sap has begun to flow again. So I collected a few gallons and started the fire under the tub and began making syrup once more.

  This afternoon we went down the road to the swamp and I found pussy willows out. Not the big domesticated ones, big as my little finger-end, but the moderate-sized wild ones. The pussy willow pretty well sets the pace for all the Spring shrubs. The “pussy,” of course, is not the blossom of Salix discolor, to give the shrub its botanical name; the true blossom comes a few weeks later. This is the bud from which the outer scales have fallen. It will change into a ragged tuft of yellowish miniature flowers. Staminate and pistillate flowers are borne on different trees, as with all the willows. When the flowers have done their duty, with the help of the early bees, then the leaves will appear.

  All willows have catkins in one form or another, and many of the lesser willow trees, particularly those on the fringe of ponds and streams, can compete in a lesser way with the pussy willows. Even the bearberry willow, which creeps on the windy slopes of the Eastern mountains, has fuzzy little catkins. So does the even smaller dwarf willow, Salix herbacea, which lives on the mountain summits. The really big willows, white, black, crack and weeping, have catkins that vary from furry little tufts to long, slender plumes. And all bloom early.

  If pussy willows didn’t bloom until May they would hardly get a second glance. In March we seek them out and give them hearty welcome.

  We finished the last batch of maple syrup today, bottled it and stowed it away, and we have made four cakes of maple sugar, just enough for flavoring when Barbara needs it.

  The sugaring is a simple process, once you have the syrup. We put a couple of quarts of syrup in a big saucepan and cook it on the kitchen stove until it begins to thread from a spoon, keeping the heat moderate to prevent scorching. Once it is cooked to the right point we take it off the heat and beat it with a spoon. I tried using the electric beater on it once and achieved an astonishing mess when it suddenly crystallized, even before I could shut off the motor. No doubt it can be done that way, but I prefer the old way, with a spoon, because I can feel the change in texture at the critical moment. At that point it must go at once into the pans for molding. I can almost hear the crackle as the crystals take shape in a kind of chain reaction. With luck, we get it all out of the cooking pan in a couple of quick gestures. There it cools and sets and within half an hour we have neat cakes of golden maple sugar. The color really isn’t gold; it is more of a buckskin, a very light tan.

  The sap is still flowing, but we have all we want. I removed the spouts and whittled plugs and drove them into the holes. That will keep the insects out and protect the trees, and when the moisture of the sap swells the plugs they will cut off the flow and send the sap up the tree where it belongs, to make new leaves and new growth. I am always amazed at the quantity of sap that moves up a tree. We take about seven gallons from each spout, and each spout taps only one small area of the tree trunk.

  Watching and sensing the slow, persistent efforts of the green world to achieve leaf and blossom and seed again, I am aware once more of my kinship with all living things. That compulsion for life which animates the world around me created humanity as a species. We all have a kind of racial desire to live. Leave purpose to the theologians, if you wish, and you still face the biological fact. But there is something more than this animate compulsion in man, something which has endowed the species with powers of reason and emotion, thought and speculation. As much a part of man as his powers of vision and locomotion is his impulse to create; and I speak not only of procreation, but of that rarer impulse in the world of living creatures, the impulse to think, to build, to record, not for oneself alone or for now only but for tomorrow and for others of this human race yet to be born.

  This attribute is probably unique in man. The bear marks a tree with his claws only to prove his existence here and now, not to help or impress future generations. The wild mother, mink or robin, feeds her young that they may survive, not as extensions of herself but as individuals; and she does it by instinct, not by reason or by social pressure. But man creates his works and sets down his records at least in part because he hopes that life may be easier or better or more purposeful for his own kind after he is gone. Whether he succeeds in his purp
ose or not is beside the point, which is the innate aspiration of the species. And those who call this pointless and futile are the exception to the race thought, the race impulse, the racial compulsion. They are at war with their own kind and they deny their own racial inheritance.

  Two things mark humanity as a species to me: this impulse to build and perpetuate and improve, and the emotional quality which we know as compassion. As I have said before, I find little compassion among the beasts or the birds, except where it relates to the mother instinct and occasionally to the protective instinct of the group or the pair. And I find almost no impulse to improve and perpetuate knowledge beyond basic impulses of self-preservation.

  The ironic thing to me is that among my own race the most pessimistic of the intellectuals recognize these impulses but belittle them. They, like the damnation-crying theologians, are a product of this peculiar human possession, yet both the pessimistic thinkers and the damnation-warners refuse to accept its big implications.

  There was a raw, slow drizzle, but Willis and Bobbie drove up as they had planned and Bobbie changed into outdoor clothes and went up the mountain, she and Pat. They were gone an hour and came back glowing and wet to the skin. They had communed with the universe and found everything still in good order. We ate and sat by the fire and talked, the quiet talk of close friends.

  Acquaintance is one thing, but friendship is quite another, just as pleasantry is one thing and understanding is something above and beyond. The one is the casual currency of human contact, but the other is a special mintage reserved for exchange between you and only a few choice people. The one is there, always at hand; the other must be earned and then carefully invested or wisely spent.

  The rain has slacked off this evening. But it has not been a dismal day. The house still has a glow, and so have we.

  The rain returned, but now it is a Spring rain that slants down in silver streaks and hangs in silvery gauze over the hills. The river lifts a million hands as the rain falls and the brook tumbling down the mountainside and across the pasture has been talking all day. The grass along that brook is now noticeably green, and when I walked across the pasture in the rain I saw the clover green again, small green triumvirates of rounded leaves close to the ground among the brown stems of last year’s grass. As with so many other manifestations of Spring, I have to walk across the land and look down, my eyes humbly downcast, to see them. But my humility was periodic today. When I looked down, the rain pelted the back of my neck and ran down my back beneath my raincoat. Perhaps that is the way it should be—not too much humility on a Spring day.

  Barbara saw the season’s first bluebird today. It came and perched in the apple tree that overhangs the woodshed, the one where she saw the wood duck two years ago and couldn’t believe that it was a duck, it was so beautiful. She called to me about the bluebird and said, “Now I know that Spring is really coming!” A little later we went out and found the first crocuses in color, not yet open but furled and waiting for the sun to break through the clouds left over from the rain. And the daffodils are in bud. Some of them got nipped in the frosts of ten days ago, but they have come along swiftly since. And the fat-budded big hyacinths are in sight. The grape hyacinths, which do so splendidly, are also well up and budded.

  I also found the red first shoots at the base of the clumps of deep red phlox, including a clump I moved last Fall to give a mass of color. And when I took away some of the mulch around the delphiniums I found new leaves there, that delicate yellow-green that is so tentative and so hopeful. The columbines have small rosettes in sight, that deep blue-green that is the coolest green in the spectrum. There are also the reddish green tips of the big tulips, which remind me of skunk cabbage when they first break ground. But how different are the results!

  Our Spring is on the way.

  We heard the peepers last night when we drove past the swamp. They always rouse first down there and begin to peep here by the river a week or ten days later.

  You can hear the peeper chorus half a mile away, but you can scarcely see a peeper three feet in front of you unless you see him inflating his bubble-throat. The peepers, which are Hyla crucifer, have big voices and little bodies. Some of them are no more than an inch long and most of them blend so well in color with their background, be it white bark or brown, smooth or rough, that they become all but invisible. But, come this time of year, you don’t have to see them. You hear them, and you try to find some simile for their voices—chime of silver bells, sweet whistle notes, chirps, none of them quite suffices.

  The peepers for a time now will be to the dusk what the robins are to the dawn. The robins chatter and scold and whistle and are all over the place. I heard them at five this morning. But the peepers neither chatter nor scold. They simply trill, and their metallic notes have a penetrating ring that is distinctly musical, though the rhythm may be eccentric. Even that is more likely the broken rhythm and the overlap of a dozen peepers piping at once. And though they seem to be all over the place, they are not exploring. They have found the place they want and there they will remain until they have completed their spawning. Thus they have lived their Springtime lives since the world was young.

  The peeper’s song is only one note in the vast vernal chorus now beginning. It is primitive and ancient, just as Spring itself is very old and very simple.

  I wrote that Spring is very old and very simple, and when I had set it down I wondered at the word simple. Yet that is what I meant, and there is nothing paradoxical about it.

  There is a vast and detailed quality in any Spring, just as all life is teeming and various, in its origins, its processes, its achievements. Yet basically there is an enduring simplicity in which all living things participate. It is essentially the fact of life. Life persists. It reproduces itself. It animates growth. It evolves into a million different forms. Yet there it is, in a microscopic fleck of matter, in a seed, in an animal. It is a force that has thus far eluded our analysts and researchers, yet it is the very force which animates that search. Life.

  And Spring is the periodic resurgence of life. It is the world around us burgeoning with life renewed. It is a season, an astronomical consequence in which we are fortunate enough to participate. The reasons for it may be complex, but the fact itself is so simple, so obvious, that we overwhelm ourselves seeking answers.

  Spring is life renewed and made evident to any witness who happens to be there to see. It is as simple as that.

  We came to Weatogue seeking a place where we could live in close and constant touch with simplicities and realities. We came not to escape but to return, to find and to know things of which we had been aware all our lives but from which we had been remote for too long. I remember thinking, as we first drove up into these hills from the lower flatlands, of the Hundred Twenty-first Psalm, and thinking that one’s eyes should more often lift unto the hills. And every day since we came here we have looked up unto these hills and known a feeling of renewal and freshened strength.

  Tom’s Mountain is all across the world from the hills the psalmist knew, but it, too, lifts the eye, refreshes the soul and reassures the heart. Living here at the foot of the mountain I have partaken, in some part, both of the mountain’s enduring substance and of the constant change of the river which is the mountain’s companion. Some of the grit of this soil has gone into me, and some of the sweetness of this water; and some of the patience of the trees, too, I hope. This has become home, my root soil, and I have become a part of the very seasons, which is good.

  I look at the mountain now, and I look at the river, and I feel the change of another season. It comes with the deliberateness of time and with the certainty of eternal matters. And here am I to participate in another Spring. Spring, which returns as a promise. And that promise is life and renewal so long as there shall be hills on this earth and a sun to shine upon them. What more can a man ask than life to be lived?

  About the Author

  Hal Borland (1900–1978) was a nature w
riter and novelist who produced numerous bestselling books including memoirs and young adult classics, as well as decades of nature writing for the New York Times. Borland considered himself a “natural philosopher,” and he was interested in exploring the way human life was bound to the greater world of plants, animals, and natural processes.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1957 by Hal Borland

  Copyright © renewed 1985 by Barbara Dodge Borland

  Cover design by Neal Heacox

  978-1-4532-3238-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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