This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  He was right. Modern hybrid seed corn has raised yields to phenomenal levels. Ours isn’t an outstandingly good corn area, but last year Charley had one field that produced 200 bushels to the acre. The corn we were picking today, on average soil and with an average season, was producing more than a hundred bushels to the acre. When I was a boy and had uncles growing corn in the best part of Nebraska, eighty bushels to the acre was a top yield.

  But, as Charley pointed out, in those days a farm hand’s wages were about twenty dollars a month and good corn land sold for no more than seventy-five dollars an acre. Production isn’t the only thing that has changed.

  Some things remain, though, much as they have always been. Before I left the corn field Charley asked if I’d like, to go coon hunting one of these nights.

  There is a deep scuffling of leaves in the woodland now, and I see Taurus and the Pleiades in the eastern sky at evening. Orchardists have all their apples in, somehow symbolic of the whole Summer’s yield. The pressure is relaxed. Country folk can mend walls and tidy up fields and gardens and snug the place for Winter.

  The pace changes. It is not exactly a time for leisure, but there is occasion now to look at the far hills and think thoughts not bounded by a cornstalk’s height or a pasture’s breadth. The big rhythms seep into the soul, the rhythms of the seasons and the years rather than the rhythms of long days and short nights.

  I can look at a white oak now and see the beauty of a stout tree in late October. I can watch the early flight of teal and marvel at the instinct which compasses them north and south. I can watch a squirrel at his hoarding and hear the sweet whispering of the chickadees in the pines above the middle pasture. I can feel the world about me, and see it, and somewhat understand.

  Autumn is for understanding, for the longer thoughts and the deeper comprehensions. How well it is that the year should bring such a time, to rest the muscles, yes, from the Summer’s tensions, but even more important to relax the mind and give it time to span the valleys of belief. Now a man’s mind can reach beyond himself.

  October is the fallen leaf, but it is also the wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hill once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above that hill once again.

  This is the time to find the lesser fruits of Autumn, the wild berries that are too full of seeds, too bitter, too insignificant, for man’s fare. This is the time to seek out the blue-black fruit of the fragrant honeysuckle and the scarlet clusters that top the jack-in-the-pulpit’s dying stem. Black alder, the brilliant winterberry, is at its prime, and bittersweet is beginning to burst its husk and reveal its red-orange fruit. Snowberry, white as milkweed floss, shines now on its slender branches, and gray-silvered bayberries cluster along the stems with their warm fragrance.

  Witch-hazel fruits are ripening, even as the perverse Autumn blooms of the same shrub flaunt their yellow-ribbon petals. Benzoin, the spice bush, is dropping its yellow leaves and revealing its red, spicy berries. Seedy little apples, too tart for human taste, turn rusty on the hawthorn. The wild roses, second cousin to the hawthorn and the apple itself, offer their own little lacquered haws. And overhead are the brilliant dogwood berries and the slate-blue sassafras fruits on their crimson stems.

  The viburnums fill the underbrush with their assorted berries, all of them purplish in color. The huckleberries, both high and low, are mostly stripped by now, but a few of the fruits, black and shriveled, will remain among the richly colored leaves until the sparrows have passed by. Like most of these berries, they are bird fare. They have their own surprising beauty, though, which is seldom seen until the maples cease demanding attention.

  A chill, drenching rain this morning brought leaves down in showers, but it stopped by about nine-thirty. We had an errand that we had been putting off because it would take most of the day, and the days have been filled with Fall chores. So when the rain stopped we got out the car and went, driving sixty-odd miles under a sullen sky, doing the errand, and heading for home again. We got halfway home and the rain began again, a slow, gray rain. We didn’t like it. Then we approached the ridge fifteen miles from home, a long, rugged upthrust with several high points close to 2,000 feet which is called Canaan Mountain. The highway crosses Canaan Mountain at Norfolk, and if there is bad weather anywhere around it is to be found there. As we climbed toward Norfolk snow began to fall, fine spitting snow that slanted at us and bounced off the windshield. It increased to quite a flurry. Until then our spirits had reflected the day, but when the snow began we felt our own spirits lighten. It was the season’s first snow. It had its own glow. It offered a faint challenge. We laughed and began recalling trips through snowstorms and over icy roads, and for ten minutes we had a fine review of Winters past.

  Then we topped the ridge and dropped swiftly down on the homeward side, and the snow turned to rain, then to mist, and finally ended completely. We came on home under the same gray sky we had known most of the day, but we felt uplifted and brightened. We built a hearth fire and had a hot drink and knew it had been an exciting day. We had seen the first snow! It still sparkles in our memory this evening.

  It cleared during the night and today it was smiling Autumn again. We went out in the car and drove close to a hundred miles, and we saw how bountiful the season has been, how good the harvest…

  A few years ago, after I had been all across the country and seen the plenty of our land I wrote a magazine article about the bounty of the American harvest. When the article was published I received a handful of letters criticizing me for my “satisfaction” in American plenty. Why, they asked, should we be smug or complacent in our plenty when so many other places were in need?

  It seemed to me then, and it still seems so, that these dissenters were basically wrong. One need not be smug or complacent to be thankful for abundance. Nor can I see why one should regret abundance or feel guilty about it. Surely there is neither comfort nor sustenance for any hungry man in the knowledge that others are also in straitened circumstance. Want must be relieved from the plenty somewhere else. Hunger is never relieved by scarcity.

  The notion that plenty is a sin stems back to a philosophy to which I cannot subscribe. It is essentially the philosophy of universal sin and punishment. It puts a moral value, somehow, on matters quite outside the scope of morality. Morality is a matter of mind, not of things, and especially not of the earth. There is neither morality nor immorality in a harvest; the moral factor enters, if at all, only when the harvest is distributed. The earth has again been bountiful, and I am thankful. I may not be proud of what some men do with that bounty, but that is another matter.

  There is another phase of that morality which for a long time baffled me. I come from pioneer stock and am not far removed from pioneer life. Those I knew best in my childhood had undergone pioneer privations, and out of that experience often came an assumption that ease was sinful and comfort was a device of the devil. There was even something immoral about spending money for anything but the bare necessities of life. Money took on a kind of moral value, all by itself.

  Only a few years ago I visited and had a meal at the home of such a person, the widow of a pioneer who had sweated for every penny he earned. She lived in a comfortable home, but the food was skimped, even makeshift. At the dinner table this woman said, “We don’t eat fancy. Meat is so high I say it’s sinful to buy it. Why, I can remember when you could buy a whole panful of steak for fifty cents!” There was both indignation and unction in her voice. She was saying that she was a righteous person, spiritually right, morally rectitudinous, in not buying meat, although I knew she had an ample income.

  There is a peculiar echo of monasticism here, and asceticism, which I recognize but which I cannot quite understand. I can see no moral satisfaction or spiritual virtue in privation. To me, virtue lies in the middle road between asceticism and sybaritism. Virtue, but not morality.

  The witch hazel is one of the few shrubs on which one can find leaves, flowers and ripening seed
pods all together. The leaves are now a rusty gold and ready to drift away, their year’s work done. The seed pods are the result of last Fall’s flowers, and in the weeks to come they will pop open with uncanny force and fling the seeds twenty or thirty feet. The flowers are October bloomers and their tufted yellow petals straggle like the unkempt hair of some blonde young witch. Among the shrub’s eccentricities is the fact that staminate, pistillate and bisexual flowers appear at the same time and even on the same twig.

  Botanically the witch hazel is Hamamelis virginiana, kin of the sweet gum tree. The popular name goes far back and its origin is uncertain. Some say it comes from “wych” or “wythe,” and some say it comes from “witch.” But there is some agreement that it has a relation to the use of a forked branch of Hamamelis as a divining rod, or dowser, to locate underground water. Many a good back-country well still offers its sweet plenty as proof that a witch-hazel branch, properly held in the right hands, could show a man where to dig. This peculiar form of searching for water was often called witching, but even there the source is uncertain, whether it referred to supernatural powers or merely to a wythe or branch from the bush of the strange name.

  Where the “hazel” comes from is anybody’s guess, since witch hazel is no kin to the hazelnut or filbert, which belongs to the birch family. There is some similarity in the leaves, however. Witch-hazel extract, made from bark and twigs, has long been used to ease sprains and bruises, but that explains nothing except the commercial value of the shrub.

  Charley phoned this afternoon and said, “It’s going to be a nice night for a coon hunt. I’ll stop by.” And at early dark he stopped and picked me up in his car. There were Charley and Bill, the boy who works for him, and myself, and Poochie, Charley’s dog, who was a cat-killing mongrel condemned to death in a pound before Charley heard about him and saved his life. “Any dog that kills cats,” Charley says, “will make a coon dog.” Poochie is getting old, but he was a notable coon dog in his prime.

  We drove a mile down the road, to one of Albert’s corn fields, and parked the car. We started through the corn under a half-moon. Poochie sniffed the air and vanished in the shadows. Charley began recounting Poochie’s past triumphs. We walked across the field in the crisp night, and Poochie yelped twice. Charley listened, shook his head and said, “Rabbit,” and we moved over to another corn row. Twice Poochie came back, looked at Charley questioningly, and was sent out again. We came back across the field. No coons.

  We drove on to another corn field. Poochie put up two rabbits, but no coons. Bill went to the far corner of the field alone and Charley and I sat and waited, talking little, smoking quietly, feeling the night. Poochie came and looked at us once and went away again. No coons.

  I spoke of the old buck coon I’d seen several times last Winter at the bend of the road just below the swamp. “I know that old boy,” Charley said. “I’ve run him half a dozen times. He always gives a dog a good run.” So we called in Poochie and Bill came back and we moved again, back to the big bend in the road.

  Poochie took off once more. We trailed him across a little corn field, and just as we reached the far side Poochie began to talk. Charley said, “Coon!” and all the excitement of remembered boyhood was in his voice.

  We sat down and waited. The coon ran all over that corn field, then out across the alfalfa field beyond, then back toward us, and Poochie’s voice was music in the night. Then Poochie’s cry changed and Charley said, “He’s treed him!”

  It was a towering maple in a clump that grew at the corner of a fence row of smaller trees. Poochie danced at the foot of the big maple, trying his best to climb it. Charley called him good dog and turned on his big flashlight and swung the beam upward. Bill held the .410 ready. Up near the top Charley found a dark shadowy mass about the size of the big buck coon. Charley said, “There he is!” And Bill said, “Shall I shoot him?” Charley hesitated. Poochie was more frantic than ever. “Can’t disappoint the dog,” Charley said.

  Bill fired a shot. Small bits of leaf and twig pattered down. Poochie yelped frantically, but Charley’s flashlight showed the shadow still there. Bill fired another shot. That time he brought down almost half the litter of a big crow’s nest and I remembered that the crows had nested there, with great to-do, last Summer.

  Charley said, “Damn!” Bill laughed. Poochie stopped yipping. “Guess he got away,” Charley said. “Must have gone down the fence row.” So we went back to the car, and it was one of those beautiful Fall nights when it’s a privilege just to be alive. Charley talked about three years ago, when Poochie treed four coons in one night. Then we stopped at my place, and as I got out Charley said, “I’m kind of glad it wasn’t that old boy. Aren’t you?” And I was.

  The temperature was down to 20 when I got up this morning and there was a thick scum of ice on the watering trough. But deep frost has delayed long this year. Normally we would have had it three weeks ago.

  When I look up the mountainside now I see the pines and the hemlocks standing in vivid green above the ranks of naked boles of maple and birch and ash. As I look at them I think that Fall is the evergreens’ season too. They come into their own in less colorful fashion than their broad-leafed companions, but they are like patient patriarchs whose virtues are best seen when more spectacular citizens have spent their energies. The deciduous leaves fall, and there the conifers stand, a stout phalanx against the mountainside, ready for Winter.

  Below the pines and the hemlocks, reaching out into the pasture, are the cedars. We call them pasture cedars, for they creep into the open at every opportunity. They seldom grow much beyond good fence-post size, but where they are left undisturbed they form minor thickets. The cedars are colorful, but nothing like the other evergreens; they are rusty, not a clear green at all after September. Their scale-leaves begin to wither, not all of them but enough to take the brightness off the green. Those scale-leaves have a life of three or four years after which they wither and shed, some of them every year. And in April and May the new leaves appear, bright and shining. But by late Fall they are always a bit drab, to me, dull green and often with a purplish tinge from the berries which are such a treasure for the Winter birds.

  A flock of geese went over today, flying south and flying high. I don’t know how high a goose can fly, but I am sure he can go much higher than most observers believe, and do it without distress. Any bird can.

  During World War II I spent some time at the Air Force Tactical Center in Florida. One day I stopped in at the high-altitude laboratory where they were running tests on the effect of decompression on pilots. One young pilot turned to a flight surgeon and asked why carrier pigeons don’t need oxygen or pressure at high altitudes. The surgeon gave a snap answer, “They do.” The pilot laughed. “No,” he said. “I took a pair of message pigeons up to 35,000 and they just fluffed up and went to sleep. I put them in paper bags and dropped ’em overboard, and when the bags opened the birds just spiraled down and lit out for home. Got there all right, too.”

  The surgeon was unconvinced. He sent for a pair of message pigeons and put them in the decompression chamber. He watched as pressure and temperature dropped to the levels of 30,000, 35,000 and finally 40,000 feet. Nothing happened. The birds showed no discomfort. They dozed. He took them up to a simulated altitude where their bones should have exploded. Still they didn’t seem to mind. He brought the pressure back to that of sea level and the birds wakened and hopped about, cooing.

  The flight surgeon had no explanation. I wrote about the baffler for a national magazine, and none of its readers volunteered an answer. So I suspect that geese, too, can and probably do fly at times two or three miles high, maybe even higher, with no trouble.

  It snowed for a time today, just enough to whiten the grass. Then the clouds thinned, the sun came out, the snow vanished and it was a comfortable day. By noon the snow was gone and all but forgotten. This afternoon I went fishing on the river and caught a fair enough string, including a big rock bass that fou
ght like a largemouth. The chill gave him added energy, just as the cold water makes a brook trout twice as gamey on a line in April as he is in June.

  But Fall fishing isn’t half the fun that Summer fishing is. I don’t like to fish with a jacket on, and today I had a sweater beneath a windbreaker. I prefer to fish with nothing on but a pair of khaki shorts or stagged-off dungarees, with the sun hot on my back. Half the enjoyment of fishing, for me, is in the feel of sun and air. When I have to bundle up, I’d rather walk and let the fish go their own way. So today was probably my last fishing day until next Spring.

  Two of the farmers on the hill road have been putting Winter bustles on their houses. They put up low fences of chicken wire two feet out from the house and packed the space between with leaves. Thus they have insulated against the cold that otherwise would creep in at floor level. In earlier days every farmhouse was so insulated in the Fall, sometimes with sod heaped at the sills, sometimes with sawdust, most often with leaves. Even so, the floors were often cold and drafty, and if anyone doubts it let him examine the antique kitchen chairs. Most of them show well-worn front rungs, where Grandmother hooked her heels to keep her feet up out of the floor draft.

  Long before rock wool and other manufactured insulators were on the market, men in cold climates learned to use natural insulation. Some were laughed at when they filled the space in their walls with sawdust, but that worked fairly well; it was the method used in building icehouses, and it could keep cold out as well as in. When I was a boy an eccentric sheep-rancher built himself a frame house and packed the space in the walls with well-dried sheep manure. In that dry climate the sheep manure dried into pellets of cellulose with little odor. That sheepman’s house was as warm as a “soddy” in Winter and just as cool in Summer.