This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  The strangest thing about the basswood is its flower and the eventual fruit. The flower is small and creamy white and so full of nectar that it literally drips. If we anchor the boat under an overhanging basswood now we are soon dewed with little specks of nectar, colorless and sticky and fragrant. The flowers grow from a pendant stem that springs from the center of a leaflike wing. This wing, which is long and slender and a slightly lighter green than the tree’s big cottonwood-like leaves, eventually provides a glider for the seed. When the seed has ripened the seed wing loosens like any leaf and is borne away by the wind. Thus are new groves of basswood started.

  Our river, like most streams hereabout, is intermittently lined with basswoods. They hug the stream bank, liking the wet footing, and they make deep, cool shade. They are good neighbors, especially on a July afternoon full of blazing sun.

  One of the most difficult of all sounds to put down on paper is the song of a bird. The reason is that vocal music is primarily a matter of vowel sounds with their consonants giving a familiar form rather than a sound of their own. Try to translate bird songs into words and you run into all kinds of stumbling blocks. For instance, even the familiar song of the chickadee is nearly always transcribed as chick-a-dee-dee-dee, but it might as accurately be set down as sip-o’-tea-tea-tea.

  The whippoorwills are calling every night now. It is generally conceded that although individual whippoorwills have a sharp variation in voice quality they all make sounds that translate as “whip poor Will.” An allowable variant is “whup-poo-ree.” But I can with equal plausibility say that those on our mountainside are serenading my wife, saying over and over, “Bar-bar-ree, Bar-bar-ree!”

  It was Thoreau, I believe, who translated the call of the Baltimore oriole as, “Eat it, Potter, eat it!” A change of consonants makes that, “Beat it, rotter, beat it!” Another of the local orioles’ songs is quite obviously, “I’m an oriole, suh!” uttered with a fine Eastern Shore of Maryland accent.

  When I was a boy I was quite sure that the meadow larks of the Colorado plains said, most melodically, in mid-June, “This is the time of the equinox.” In April they said, “Now is the time to build a nest.” And in September it was, “Summer is gone and now it’s Fall.”

  The night skies of midsummer get little attention, unless there is a full moon and a cool breeze. Besides, full-leafed trees and mosquitoes get in the way. But the stars are still there, though at first sight it may be difficult to find familiar groups.

  Last night we had a brilliant, clean-washed sky and the Little Dipper, which pivots on the Pole Star, stuck straight up, in the early evening, its bowl turned earthward and obviously empty. To the left the Big Dipper hung straight down, for all the world like the old tin dipper that hung on its nail beside the water pail in my grandmother’s Summer kitchen. Cassiopeia was far to the east and near the horizon, the irregular W which outlines the lady’s chair and which was high in-the sky a few months ago.

  Other familiar groups lay near the southern horizon. Aquila, the Eagle, flew rather high, in the southeast. Below it was Sagittarius, the Archer. But last night it wasn’t an archer at all; it was a teapot sitting on some hot spot on the horizon, its handle to the left, its spout to the right. And directly to the south, equally near the horizon, was Scorpius, with the train of stars in its hooked tail particularly bright.

  Overhead the stars have now thinned out. What has happened, of course, is that the major constellations are in other parts of the sky. Hercules and Bootes ride high, but they are the only ones that make me crane my neck. That’s one virtue of the Summer star pattern, and one reason there seem to be fewer stars in the evening sky of July than of December.

  I don’t like crows. A man is entitled to some biases. Particularly, I don’t like those crows who have chosen the trees just behind the barn for their dawn conventions. I don’t mind getting up at five, but four-thirty is too early.

  Those who have looked into the matter professionally insist that crows eat beetles, bugs and worms. That’s all right, and I’ll go along a certain distance. But must they eat the early beetle, bug and worm? Crows get up much too early and much too full of noise. How a crow can eat anything and still make all the noise he does is beyond me. He doesn’t pause long enough, at sunrise, to swallow a gnat. Squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk! Three crows can keep anyone awake within half a mile. Four crows can rouse the countryside. We have at least a dozen crows.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if a crow could sing. All birds have a vested right in song at any hour. But the crow is simply the loudmouth of birddom, the antithesis of song. If his diet were keyed to his voice he would subsist on coarse gravel, cockleburs, rusty nails and broken glass. Instead he eats sprouting corn and ripening fruit and little birds and small chickens and eggs —and a few beetles, bugs and worms. On such a diet he manages the roughest, toughest sound on wings.

  I am thankful for one thing. Nature saw to it that crows can’t crossbreed with owls or whippoorwills, or any other night birds.

  Summer squash, the little yellow crookneck variety, is now at its prime, and the green zucchini will be ready in a few days.

  Barbara grows her squashes thus: I start a pit as though I were going to transplant a tree, a good thirty inches in diameter. But I go down only six or eight inches. In the bottom we put a layer of well-rotted manure and a handful of chemical fertilizer, 5-10-5 or its equivalent. On top of that goes three or four inches of soil. In the soil Barbara plants the squash seed, fifteen or so. The seed sprouts and grows, and we fill the pit to deepen the roots. A side dressing of phosphate goes on. When the plants are six inches high she thins out all but the strongest four or five. Those left grow like mad, making a cluster of squash plants five feet in diameter and, on occasion, five feet high. I never saw such plants. They bloom, they set fruit, and we begin to eat.

  We take our Summer squash all ways. Sometimes we pick very small ones, four inches long, and eat them raw with mayonnaise or oil and vinegar. Sometimes we let them get ten inches long and slice and boil them in a minimum of water and eat them with a maximum of butter and salt and pepper to taste. Sometimes we slice and fry them, dusted with meal. Zucchini we either boil in bits or fry with peppers, Italian style. But always we pick them young, all Summer squashes, for we have a theory that they achieve all the flavor they are going to have in their first few days. Picked small, that flavor is concentrated.

  Every time we go anywhere at this time of year I look at the gardens, for one of America’s unheralded sights is its back-yard or kitchen gardens. Not flowers, but vegetables. I have seen them in the little towns and all through the farmlands, coast to coast, but I remember them particularly in the Midwest, green and fresh and neatly weeded, often bordered with poppies or petunias. Many of them are as pretty as the pictures in the January seed catalogues, for this is a country of practical gardeners.

  There are the morning garden and the evening garden. The morning garden belongs to the women. I see them, in house-dresses or dungarees, in straw hats, in sunbonnets, bareheaded, doing the fine weeding in the rows or picking beans or cutting lettuce for the day’s salad. The evening garden belongs to the men. You see the men there after their day’s work is done, with a wheel hoe or a hand hoe, or with nothing but a pipe and an air of pride and contentment.

  It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote, in a letter to the painter, Charles Wilson Peale: “No occupation is so delightful as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continuing one through the year.”

  Jefferson wrote that in 1811, at the age of 68.

  The great mulleins stand majestic at the edge of the pasture and along the roadside, gray-green in lonely grandeur. They are of no consequence as flowering plants, not half as pretty in bloom as a Canada thistle, which also grows in the pasture, or even a wild sunflower along the road.
But there is a classic beauty in the mullein’s symmetry and its tall, straight stem and carefully graduated leaves. There is a smaller cousin, the moth mullein, with very different leaves, smooth and glossy green, and with pretty yellow or white flowers in a loose head. But the moth mullein is only a flower; the great mullein is a kind of apotheosis of simple plant perfection.

  Last January I was walking on the mountain a few days after one of our lesser snowstorms, and I came to an opening in the woods and found the broad rosette of a great mullein standing in the open and clear of snow. It was as though the plant had generated warmth to melt the snow around it for a foot in all directions. The broad, rounded, hairy leaves were green, though frost-crisped and withered at the edges. Its central stalk was gone, but it looked ready to start growing the next day. It waited, however, until May.

  I saw that plant again today, and it had sent up a stalk as tall as I am and two inches through at the base. The rosette of base leaves was almost the same color it was in January, and up the stem, regular as though calibrated, were acute-pointed leaves clasping the stem and graduated from a foot long at the base to only about an inch at the top, where the flower head grew, a dusty green mass of buds of which only one or two at a time will open into yellow florets. It has no flowering beauty, except for moths, butterflies and bees, which pollinize it. It is simply a plant grown to the kind of perfection a sculptor might have dreamed.

  When we went fishing this afternoon four dragonflies followed the boat and supervised my line. They seemed as interested as though they were fishermen themselves; which they are, in a way, for they are seiners of the air. They live on small flying insects which they catch on the wing by forming a seinelike net of their legs and swooping after gnats or whatever quarry. These were big fellows with clear, dark wings and dark, striped bodies, the kind that boys used to call snake-feeders, or devil’s darning needles, or horse-stingers, though they never stung a horse or anything else.

  We see them every time we go out on the water, for they find all kinds of insect food there. And, of course, water is their natal element. The females, when they are ready to lay eggs, swoop low over the water, skimming it and occasionally dipping the tips of their bodies into it. At each dip they eject eggs, gelatin-covered with a protective coating. The gelatin dissolves in the water and the eggs sink to the bottom. There in the silt they hatch into nymphs a good deal like the damsel flies treasured by trout fishermen. The nymphs climb onto grass and sedge at the edge of the water and there slowly grow their wings.

  Dragonflies are among the strongest-winged of all insects, and on occasion they migrate long distances, though even entomologists don’t know why. And they are among the earth’s venerable creatures—fossil dragonflies, millions of years old, are much like those of today except that some of the fossil ones had two-foot wingspreads.

  Those which accompanied us today were males, simply out for a good time. They darted and spiraled and played tag over the boat for an hour, and we caught some very nice perch.

  There are laws of nature that I doubt we shall ever understand. Take such a simple matter as the twining of vines, bindweed or bittersweet, for example. They climb by twisting their limber stems around a stronger support, even as our pole beans climb the poles we set for them. In this northern hemisphere they twist, with few exceptions, from right to left, clockwise. Why is this so?

  There are other examples. Smoke rising from a chimney also twists, when it rises in still air and has any twist to it, from right to left. Cyclonic storms, such as hurricanes, move in the same direction as they come whirling up the coast from Florida and the Caribbean. And water whirlpooling down a kitchen sink or through an outlet at the bottom of a dam usually makes the same clockwise motion.

  It is all very well to say that it is a result of the turning of the earth, and to find other parallels; and it even lends a kind of reasonable air to say that in the southern hemisphere the twist is in the opposite direction. These are facts, not ultimate answers. That is the way things happen, not why they happen.

  Is a bindweed, a wild morning-glory, aware of the turning of the earth? Is a pole bean so endowed with this knowledge that I cannot force it to twist the other way? Is such knowledge embedded in the seed itself? Winds I can understand, and their inevitable direction. Vines are something else. Vines are living things, not air forced this way or that by outside forces. No, there is some law beyond, some way of life, some necessity in nature that I can recognize but not wholly understand.

  A sweet serenity now possesses the land. The struggle is now the measured reach toward growth and maturity. The green world is now fully green. The early rush for a place in the sun is over. Grapes fatten on my vine. Earliest apples show reddening cheeks. The pasture which Albert cut for ensilage is lush and green again. Wild blackberries ripen.

  The frantic frog chorus that was so loud a little while ago has relaxed and now only the slow roll of the frog grandfathers echoes drowsily in the night. The brook, so loud in May, now whispers. On ponds and backwaters are large patches of green algae, and cattails lift green bayoneted ranks from the mucky margins.

  The heat of midday brings the cicada’s shrill drone, one of the drowsiest of all Summer sounds. When the cicadas rasp I know that the insect horde is out of the egg and the pupa and moving toward that stage again. Beetles swarm the grass, ants are on the march, grasshoppers launch from the grass before me as I walk the pasture. Green hornworms gnaw at the tomatoes, strange creatures that in turn become broad-winged sphinx moths and haunt the flower beds at dusk.

  The struggle for life goes on, but the great haste of the green world is past. Even in the insect world a balance is struck. It is as though I were being bidden to watch and listen and understand, to relax the little worries and know the big ones for what they are. It is as though I, too, were bidden to strike a balance of serenity.

  AUGUST

  CHICORY BLOOMS ALONG ALMOST every roadside, and if it were less of a weed, less common and persistent, it would be considered a beautiful, hardy blue flower. But it is a weed and unwelcome in field and garden, even though it has its virtues. It came from Europe originally, quickly naturalized itself, and now has spread well over the country. I have seen it at the roadside in Kansas, on the Continental Divide, even on the Pacific Coast. It may yet rival the sunflower in distribution.

  I am sure I have drunk plenty of chicory masquerading as coffee. The brew is made by drying the roots, roasting them, and grinding them into a powder, then steeping the powder. Pure chicory makes an acceptable drink, but it is no good when mixed with guileless coffee. If one must go to the point of substitution, one of the cereal beverages is better, to my taste.

  But chicory, even the wild variety, has its virtues as a salad or a cooked green. We have tried the young, tender shoots in early Spring, both raw and cooked, and I prefer dandelions, which are available at about the same time. We grow the cultivated variety of chicory and like it in a salad, particularly when it is well blanched; unbleached, it is bitter to my palate. But it does belong with romaine and endive and crisp lettuce and a precise amount of oil and vinegar in any Summer salad.

  Just now, though, I can forget the taste of wild chicory. Its flowers are such a wondrous blue that I can forgive the plant almost anything. Just as long as it doesn’t invade the garden.

  A hoe is a simple tool. What is it but a blade set across the end of a handle? The size of the blade may vary, and the length of the handle, but there it is, a sharpened blade on one end of a stout handle—and you on the other end.

  The hoe has been used repeatedly to symbolize drudging labor and serfdom, but to me it stands for man’s communion with the soil. Certainly there is no disgrace nor any deep degradation inherent in the hoe. It is the stand-by of the gardener, and you can usually tell the quality of the gardener by looking at his hoe. Is it sharp? Is its blade bright with use? Is its handle polished by its owner’s palm and calloused fingers?

  You plant with a hoe, if you are a ga
rdener, and you ply it all Summer long. Between weedings you loosen the soil and give encouragement to the plants themselves. Even the name comes from a race of gardeners, from the old French. But the tool is older than the French. Primitive people used a hoe, in one form or another, before there were towns or cities. The first Europeans to reach America found the natives here hoeing their maize with such an instrument, bladed often with the shoulder blade of a deer. It goes back to the Stone Age.

  It is embedded in the common speech. The independent person hoes his own row, tends to his own business and gets the job done. The good worker hoes a clean row, does the job well. Old-fashioned, to be sure, but clear in its meaning. And, so far as I can find, it was the theorists, not the doers, who made the hoe the symbol of drudgery and oppression.

  We have had a minor drought and the field corn is firing, sere at the base. Unless the rain which threatens today comes and settles down for a day or two we shall have short crops. The pastures, except those close along the river, are dry and turning yellow. The woods are tindery. The river itself is low.

  In terms of water, drought is relative, but not in its effect. On the plains country of the West a total annual rainfall of twenty inches is considered generous. That much moisture will raise a crop and keep grasslands grazable. It is possible to get by with fifteen inches if it is well distributed. But let the year’s total fall below fifteen inches and there is trouble. Drought, which means no crop and little grass, also means dust storms on the plains. Five inches of rain can mean the difference between desert and farmland.