This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  The sap flies are still here, but I went out today and avoided the woods and found other insects by the hundreds. Grasshoppers are swarming out of the moss clumps, or seem to be, egglings no more than half an inch long. Ants are busy again and on the predatory march. Beetles come ambling from their hiding places to sort over the Winter’s litter, persistent hordes of endless variety and countless number. Most of those I saw are carrion beetles, members of the Scarabaeidae, the scarab family which includes the tumblebugs that fascinated me as a boy. I make no pretense at knowing more than a few beetles. Men have devoted their lives to that study and still not covered the ground, for something like 22,000 beetle species are known in America alone. I am quite sure, however, that if this world is ever inherited by the insects, the teeming legions of armored beetles will be the ruling class.

  But one must look for these groundlings. Just now, when buds are opening and leaflets gleam with pristine wax, it is the winged hordes that make themselves noticed. Winged ants come swarming from rock crannies and earth tunnels to dry their gossamer and test the air. The larger bees hover at daffodil trumpets and myrtle stars and grape-hyacinth clusters. Butterflies not much larger than my thumbnail flash in the sunlight like gray and white and yellow and blue particles of confetti. I feel dazzled, but a bit consoled when I try to look them up in a handbook and find that “they puzzle even the professional,” though most of them seem to be of the family known as Lycaenidae, a strange name for a butterfly since it comes from the Greek for she-wolf.

  We walked in the pasture at the foot of the mountain last night to feel and smell the season, having the notion that those senses are quickened in the darkness. But my eyes accommodate swiftly, and while Barbara was using her nose and her ears I was looking. Finally we sat down on a big rock and waited for the night to come to us. An owl flew overhead, a swift, silent shadow against the stars. In the trees up the hillside a bird called softly, almost sleepily; it sounded like a robin. There was a rustle in the grass ten feet away, and I could make out the small, dim form which watched us for a moment, then hopped away, clearly a rabbit with his white tufty tail. Then there was nothing but the soft wind and the smell of greening grass.

  We watched the stars, still glittering with Winter’s brilliance. The Big Dipper swings higher in the evening now than at any other time of year. We had to look high to find it, the inverted bowl well above the Pole Star. The Big Dipper, Ursa Major.

  Astronomers have called it the Big Bear for thousands of years, but in the time of Homer it was also known as Mamaxa, the Wagon. A little later the Romans called it Septentriones, the Seven Plowing Oxen. Both these names came down through the years to England, where for a long time it was known as the Wagon of Charlemagne, or Charles’s Wain, and where today it is usually called The Plow. Ancient Arabs saw the constellation as a coffin followed by a funeral procession; but the Arabs left little imprint on popular astronomy in the West.

  American Indians had various names for Ursa Major. In one Indian legend it is a bear followed by three hunters, and in one version it is said that the middle hunter—the middle star in the Dipper’s handle—is so sure of a successful hunt that he carries a cooking pot on his shoulder. Anyone with sharp eyes can see both the hunter and the pot, a large star and a small star very close together, stars which the astronomers have named Mizar and Alcor.

  We saw the Indian hunter and his cooking pot tonight, for the sky was dazzling clear and there was no moon, not even a hair-thin line of a new one. Then we came back to the house, pausing at the quiet pool in Millstone Brook to watch the slowly dancing stars reflected in it.

  Millstone Brook had no name when we came here, and it is too small and too seasonal to justify more than a private naming. It rises halfway up the mountain in a series of springs that make a boggy little bottom all the year around, and it comes tumbling down a rocky hollow to spill out across the pasture in a flow that we can step across except after a heavy rain. It cuts across a corner of the vegetable garden, a convenient source of water when we are setting plants, and it goes through a culvert under the road and spills into the river beside a huge old willow stump. It usually dries up in July and August, but the other ten months of the year it makes a continuous chuckle where it plunges from one rocky pool to another on the mountainside, a pleasant night companion of which we are seldom aware in the daytime.

  Two Springs ago, after a heavy snow-melt and a week of rains which made it a minor torrent and spread it over half an acre of pasture, I went up the brook’s mountain bed and found a strange rock there. A rock peculiarly rounded, circular, with a square hole in it. I pried it loose and found it to be a millstone, a small one, only fifteen inches in diameter and less than three inches thick. One face of it still showed the original grooves cut to speed the grinding. It was made of native gray granite.

  I lugged it home and asked everyone I met if there had once been a mill on that brook. None remembered such a mill, even in the old stories. Its size indicates that it was probably a hand mill, or at most a mill for one household. No one around here has ever seen one like it, and I have never found its mate. But from it the unnamed brook got a name.

  Rain today, a slow Spring rain that gurgles in the downspouts and drips from the big Norway spruce outside my window and makes pools beside the road. I can almost see the hourly change in the color of the pasture, which will be a warm green by tomorrow night, at this rate. And I can hear the patter in the maples out front, an index to their leafing out—there are now enough leaves, and enough leaf-spread, to make a patter in the rain.

  I sit and watch the river, the way the rain swishes across its surface, and I see as one seldom sees on land the gusty way even a quiet rain falls. It comes not as a solid sheet or a steady downfall, but in waves which swish first downstream, then upstream, each swish of rain followed by a space of calm, a rainless interlude, then by another swish. These rainless pockets, as I think of them, are constantly on the move. Air currents, of course, which concentrate the rain in certain areas, gusts that whip the drops to one side or another. The action is graphic when seen on the surface of the river.

  When I went down to the mailbox after lunch there was the feel of Spring in the rain itself as it touched my face. March rain is cold, biting, almost sleety. Today’s rain was not warm but it was not uncomfortable, either. It had no sting. Albert’s cows, standing out in the rain in his barnyard, chewed their cuds almost contentedly, not even moving back under the shed to escape it. I doubt that any cow has enough comprehension to know that this rain means fresh pasture soon, but if any cow can apprehend cause and effect, those cows did.

  The rain stopped early last evening, but today the brooks are roaring. Barbara declared she was going to work in the garden, though it was so wet she practically bogged down. Her peas are up—so thoroughly up, almost washed out, that they need attention. She was out there an hour, seeing that the drowned peas had their roots covered again, and she came in beaming, and mud from red cap to blue sneakers. She found new chives and thyme and winter onions, and her parsley bed is full of new shoots. She is certain that the asparagus will soon be up. Right now she is in the bathtub.

  When she gets out of the tub I must tell her about Russell and his beans. Russell was a city man who wanted to know what country living was like. One year he rented a country cottage and planted a garden, by the books. A week later, making his inspection rounds before dashing to the commuter train, he saw all his beans in sight. He didn’t know that a sprouting bean thrusts down a root and pushes up the bean itself which opens above ground to release the primary leaves. He saw all his beans above ground, and he hurried down the row and thrust them all back in. And wondered later why they didn’t ever sprout.

  A flock of Canada Geese went over last night. We had eaten dinner and had gone outdoors to get the feel of the dusk, and I heard the thin, distant gabble. I looked up, searched the sky, and saw them high above our valley, so high they caught the last light of the sun. They were like a th
in, wavering, penciled V against the depth of the sky. We watched and listened, and they disappeared in the thin light before the sound of their gabbling was lost. It came back, a faint echo, even after they were gone. They probably are in Canada today and sometime this afternoon or tomorrow they will begin seeking out nesting places.

  Geese have been persistently maligned. The old saying, “silly as a goose,” has little basis in fact. Few animal groups show more wisdom than wild geese, and few birds have a more strongly developed family sense. My craft, of course, owes an enduring debt to the goose, whose quills were used to set down some of the most enduring words in the language. The word pen comes from the Latin penna through medieval English penne, which meant feather or quill, and the best quills were always those from the goose. Goose feathers also feathered the arrow, and thus indirectly the goose won the battle of Hastings, one of the major turning points in English history. The goose feather on a longbow arrow was, in 1066, as epochal as uranium in a bomb today.

  I am glad to know that the mockingbird is enlarging his range northward, and I hope the report that one was seen a few miles from here proves to be true. I’d like a few mockingbirds for neighbors. Every time we go south we hear the first mockers in Delaware or Maryland. By the time we get to the Carolinas the mocker’s song is loud and persistent. In Georgia the mockingbird sings all night, and in northern Florida he sings twenty-four hours a day.

  As a songster, the mockingbird is a joy and a delight. He is a whole flock of birds rolled into one. He may start off with the piercing whistle of a cardinal, play with it for a time, then go on to the robin’s mating song. From that he may turn to an oriole’s or a grosbeak’s song, and always he makes the imitation a good one, sometimes even better than the original. He may toss in a few jeering notes to remind one of his northern cousin, the catbird, but not too often. The mocker is too full of music for that. But as a mimic he may imitate a cat, a whistling boy, or a surly seagull.

  Twenty years or so ago a pair of mockingbirds arrived one Spring in a little town I know well in eastern Colorado. It is in treeless country, but the townsmen early planted their streets with maples and Chinese elms. The mockers chose a maple and raised a family. The next Spring they came back with friends. For years the mockers came to that town each Spring and made it loud with song. Then a severe Summer hailstorm swept the town. It stripped the trees and killed many nestlings and some adult birds. Those which survived sang sad songs the rest of the Summer, then migrated. And they never came back, not one of them.

  How long the days have become. This evening the sun did not set until almost six-thirty, and that is not strictly accurate because the sun sets here behind a mountain. It rose this morning at a quarter of five. I didn’t see it rise, but I was up soon after. We keep country hours.

  Each man’s schedule should be his own business, if he can so manage. We happen to like the early hours to be awake. The world around us wakens then and gets about its business early. We catch an early-morning news and weather report on the radio and wait for late afternoon to read the morning paper. Weeks pass with the radio silent except for that dawn report.

  I spent a good many years watching news tickers and reading each edition as it came from the presses. Newspapermen do that as automatically as they eat cold sandwiches and drink coffee from waxed paper cartons at their desks. But I eventually resigned that habit, along with the job, and both the world and I seem to continue unimpaired. Whether I have achieved any larger view this way I cannot say, but I am sure I have a longer view than I used to have. And if I haven’t got a good many things, including my own life and place in the world, into better perspective, I have wasted many early morning hours.

  I always knew that news is relative. Now I know that time is relative, too.

  April nears its end and the old poetry about April and Spring seems just as trite as ever. Maybe a little more so, except that of Chaucer. I know that Wordsworth and his imitators rubbed a good deal of the sheen off Spring for me, because they seemed to deal in platitudes instead of with the sweet and sentient season I could see all around me. I doubt that Wordsworth was trite when he wrote, as he seems now, for he was seeing things and saying things that few of his contemporaries saw or said. But he couldn’t really capture Spring, because Spring is a vast and complex poem in itself. The old words have been worn smooth by rubbing against one another, so smooth that only the birds can warble about the season now and not sound like a parody. Man-made poems about Spring seem to be all violets and triolets, May and roundelay, buzzing bees and whispering trees. The birds do it better, much better.

  We went out this evening to welcome May which is just over the hill to the east. The dipper hung so high we had to tilt our heads to see it and Cassiopeia was down on the horizon, half hidden by the mountain. Pegasus was out of sight in the west and Aquila had not yet risen. The evening was young.

  Across the river the hylas were shrilling, with the bass counterpoint of frogs in irregular syncopation. An owl hooted from the first pines on the mountain. A breeze, carrying a sweater-chill now instead of a coat-chill, whispered among the apple trees.

  Our eyes became accustomed to the darkness and we walked out into the middle pasture. We could see the stark whiteness of the big clump of paper birches at the far corner. We came to the place where birdsfoot violets purple the bank of the brook by daylight, and their fragrance momentarily seemed to fill the air.

  From down the valley came the thin voice of a pup proclaiming his right to challenge the mysteries of the night. Pat listened, then turned away, not enough interested to answer. We turned back toward the house and saw the white cloud of apple blossoms in the trees back of the woodshed. When we glanced at the sky again the clock of the stars pointed to five minutes till May.

  MAY

  BARBARA, AS I HAVE said, is the vegetable gardener. I am able enough at it, but she has genius. She talks to her growing things and they listen and respond. Hers is a combination of the practical and the emotional approach to gardening. I take the recommended varieties and grow satisfying crops. She makes her own choices, uses her own methods, and gets awesome results. The Summer we came here, the last week in July, we pulled knee-high weeds from a patch six feet square and she planted lettuce before we unrolled the rugs. By late August we were eating our own lettuce and by mid-September she had head lettuce bigger than a dinner plate. Anybody else would have had pindling little leaf lettuce or heads that bolted.

  This morning she is out in the lettuce bed. She plants her lettuces in a small seed bed of pulverized soil and she plants them thick. As they come up, she thins them sparingly, just enough to give them growth room. As they grow, she thins almost daily, using the thinnings for salad: tiny lettuce leaves, chopped young chives, radishes sliced paper-thin. Then, on a warm, rainy day—the rain is essential—she transplants her lettuces, two dozen at a time, into ample space, setting them at least a foot apart each way. They grow like mad. She keeps her seed bed going all Summer and transplants four to six crops, in succession. She has head lettuce from mid-June into October.

  Of her lettuces, Barbara says, “You can’t buy Oak Leaf in the market because it bruises easily in shipping. But in the garden it heads nicely and has the tenderest flavor of all. Penn Lakes heads magnificently all Summer, heads big as cabbage, and has a better flavor than Iceberg. Bibb, a Southern variety, produces beautiful little rosettes that I like to serve whole as individual portions. Salad Bowl will head if transplanted and given plenty of room; it is the most spectacular head lettuce of all with its delicate pale green. Deer Tongue is crunchy with a fine flavor and has become our favorite. I’ll chance Boston only in Spring and Fall; it’s apt to bolt or fire in hot weather. Romaine, or Cos, heads all Summer long. Most lettuce seems to head properly if transplanted in pouring rain and muddy ground.”

  She also raises garden cress, which has the tang of water cress. And mustard, which she picks as baby stalks to add to her salads. Her curly chicory and escarole grow al
l through the Fall and right up until deep frost and snow; she trusses their leaves when the plants are half grown to blanch them and protect them from early frost.

  The forsythia is now at its peak, the green leaftips just beginning to show, which means the blossoms will soon fall.

  While I was inspecting the forsythia at the corner of the garage I saw the season’s first catbird. He saw me first and began to jeer. It sounded like: “So you’re still here! Well, well! A regular old stay-at-home, aren’t you? How are the strawberries doing? Ha, ha, ha! Hear that robin across the river? He thinks he can sing!” And he went into a travesty of the robin’s song. Of all the birds that ever uttered a note, the catbird shows the nearest thing to a sense of humor.

  Every weekend now and many afternoons I see the young fishermen out, the boys on bicycles pedaling down the back roads to favorite pools on the brooks and rivers. Seeing them, I wonder if that traditional boy with the willow pole, the twine string and the bent pin ever really existed. I doubt it. He sounds to me like the imagining of someone who never caught a fish. Certainly he is gone now, if he ever did live. These boys I see, and those I have always seen, are not interested in being picturesque. The boys today usually have nylon lines, fiberglass rods, know their leaders and flies, and know the waters they fish. They know how to fish.

  Country boys know fish and fishing almost instinctively. It’s a part of their growing up. When I meet a middle-aged man in waders and talk with him five minutes I find that almost invariably he says, “When I was a boy” or “Thirty years ago,” and he begins to tell me the exciting things that happened right over at that bend or at the mouth of the next brook. The other evening I talked for half an hour with a fisherman in his seventies and he spent twenty-five minutes telling me about the bass and pickerel he took, fifty or sixty years ago, in the coves near the mouth of the Blackberry. He also talked about the way the shad-blow bloomed in May, the way the sun came up in the morning mist, the sheen of sunlight on water, the things that only men full of years seem to discuss with little self-consciousness.