This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  NOVEMBER

  IF THE BLUE JAY were one of those migrants who stop in for only a few days each season, he probably would be known as an exotic bird of unusual beauty. Some jays do migrate a little way, but few places in their range are ever without them. The jays and the crows keep the Winter landscape alive and lively.

  I watched a jay this frosty morning and he was the perfect caricature of the pompous alderman of the old school. His feathers were fluffed against the chill and he sat and scowled. His vest was snug across an ample breast. He even seemed to have a series of chins, and his crest was a kind of avian topper which lent a degree of dignity—until he opened his big mouth. A jay rasps, always indignantly. The climate, the landscape, the meals, or the company always seems to be demanding criticism. He flocks with his kind, but he seems to quarrel incessantly.

  But there is this to be said for the jay: he has an immaculate air. The white cravat at his throat, the white bars on his wings, the white edging on his tail, are crisply white. The blue of his wings is a clean, rich blue, particularly against a gray Winter sky. He has an air. He can sit stock still and strut.

  Yet, for all his pomposity, he does have frivolous moments. On a lively morning I have seen jays play tag in the tangled branches of an old apple tree, a fascinating game to watch. And when nobody is in sight a jay will occasionally whisper a sweet little song, soft, melodious and almost sentimental. At such times a jay seems to me a character actor, always cast as the colorful villain but with a deep, secret yearning to play the young, romantic lead.

  It was a cold and drizzly day and Pat spent all morning dozing here in my study, luxuriating in comfort. But after lunch I sent him packing. I told him to go out and get some exercise. He went to the door readily enough but when I held it open he took one look outdoors, looked at me and seemed to shake his head. But out he went, just the same. Ten minutes and he was back, wet and muddy, asking to be let in. He practically accused me of cruelty when I said “No!” and to save my own face I put on boots and a raincoat and went for a walk with him. When we came back I let him in, just as he had expected I would.

  Dogs are inveterate optimists. They confidently expect the best of life. Yes, I know there are whipped curs that dodge and wince and slink away; but they are broken dogs with no spirit left in them. The country dog that has had even normal care expects the world, his world, to be a pleasant place. He will accept short rations, if need be, but he continues to expect the full meal. He will suffer rain and cold, when forced to, but he approaches the door with confidence, no matter how wet or muddy he is.

  I do wish it were possible to train a dog to shake himself, when he is drenched, out on the porch instead of waiting till he gets indoors. But that is expecting too much. He probably wishes we had more appreciation of the wonderful odor of ripe woodchuck, in which he rolls from time to time during the Summer. But we make our compromises, both of us, and live comfortably together most of the time. Right now he is in front of the fire, drying and cleaning himself and waiting to see which brand of dog food he gets for dinner tonight.

  November nights are long and chill and full of stars and the crisp whisper of fallen leaves skittering in the wind. November nights are good for walking down a country road, when the world is close about you, a world drawn in bold charcoal strokes against the sky.

  I suspect the reason is that night and darkness simplify the world to a point of understanding. The hill across the way is any hill, with substance but no detail. The valley has depth but no contours. The river is a path of sky with a handful of stars wavering in the rippled footsteps of the wind. The pines on the mountain are a thick, restless shadow leaping like a hound at the horizon. The house, from a little way off, is nothing but blinking yellow eyes, windows with no walls around them.

  This is no complex world. It is a world of simple things, now brought to rest. Who can make complexity of wood smoke, so sharp on the night air? Or the barking of a dog announcing footsteps and leaf-rustle on the road? And what is so simple as a tall maple, all its leaves shed, silhouetted against the sky?

  To walk on such a night is to know that the only mysteries are the great mysteries of all time—the stars, the heavens, the restless wind-tides, the spinning earth, and man himself. Daylight and suntime are the time to explore these matters; nighttime and darkness are the time to accept them and build dreams and poems upon them. Night, when the cool of the year has come, is the time to walk with them and know intimately the bold simplicities.

  We have been out picking cranberries, in a bog by the lake. They are a little late this year, and we were later still. We could find only a couple of quarts where there usually are several bushels, enough for the whole countryside to have wild cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  When I was a small boy I thought cranberries grew in wooden barrels, or perhaps on trees like cherries. When I first came East and drove past New Jersey’s cranberry bogs I mistook the scattered blueberry bushes for cranberry bushes. It wasn’t until we came here to live that I went into a cranberry bog and found the plants.

  The cranberry grows on an insignificant little shrub, less than a foot high. How that plant manages the crop of fruit it often does is one of the marvels of the vegetable kingdom. Sometimes, in a good year, the berries will be so big and so plentiful that the branches are weighted to the ground; and the whole cranberry bog has a bright red gleam beneath the green of the slim little leaves.

  You wear boots to go cranberrying, and old clothes. Sometimes you slip into the bog muck up to your knees. We were wary today, though. Professional harvesters use wooden scoops with long fingers to glean the berries, but we use the scoops we were born with, our hands. The berries picked now, with a touch of frost on them, have a sharp tang but nothing like the acidity of those in the market, which are picked greener. We store them in a cold corner of the cellar and they will keep well into February.

  We don’t live off the land directly. We buy most of our food and all our clothing. We don’t even keep chickens, which some consider heresy; but I cleaned enough chicken houses in my youth to last me a lifetime. Nor do we keep cows, though I can still milk a cow; much of the strength in my hands and forearms came from milking cows and wrestling a walking plow before I was fifteen.

  But, living here, we do get a sense of origins and of time and growth, as well as a moderate share of the earth’s bounty. When I go to the freezer in January and take out filets of fish I caught in the river last June I feel both wealthy and fortunate. I can go to the cellar now and see jars of raspberry jam, grape jelly, canned pears, apple sauce, strawberry preserves, which came from our own fruit, ours for the picking. The corn in the freezer, and the limas and the asparagus came from this soil, planted by our own hands. The squashes in the cellar were tended by Barbara and me all last Summer. There are a few jars of maple syrup from our own trees. There is even a flitch of bacon, cured and smoked in the old manner by a man I know. It came from a hog we bought and had butchered, not from Iowa by way of Chicago and the butcher shop.

  Living close to origins here, we are seldom unaware of cause and effect. It seems to me that any way of life remote from origins has a weak spot in its foundation, just as any way of thinking which deals with effects without knowing causes is at fault.

  Now come those mornings when buckwheat cakes belong on the menu, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup and home-made sausage. The New England grandmother knew it and had her special crock for buckwheat batter, a crock that came out in November and stayed out till April. So did a good many grandmothers elsewhere, including one of my own who was a couple of generations removed from New England. She saw to it that one corner of the buckwheat field grandfather grew for green manure was left to ripen and was threshed and milled. The grayish flour with the unmistakable tang was there waiting when the first hog was butchered and the first sausage made, which was just as soon as the heavy frosts came.

  When a farmer grew practically everything he ate, buckwheat was one of
his regular crops. It was good for the soil and it didn’t take much of a patch to cover his needs. Farmers had been growing buckwheat more generations than you could count. It came, long ago, from the shores of the Caspian Sea, and it was known as a dark breadstuff all through Central Europe in the Middle Ages. From there it went to England, and the first colonists brought it here.

  Few farmers can tell you the origin of the name unless they had a German or Danish grandfather. The buck comes from an old Germanic word for “beech,” probably because the buckwheat seed looks like a miniature beechnut. When it came to this country it followed maize into a batter baked as a thin cake instead of into dough and a loaf. And here it came to that wondrous union with maple syrup and sage-tanged sausage. Nowadays most of it comes in a package, mixed with many other things and labeled buckwheat pancake flour. Few victims of such ready-made mixes know what a real buckwheat cake tastes like. Sic transit gloria Monday morning breakfast.

  The larches, or tamaracks, stand in the woods now like giant candle flames of yellowish tan, tall and slim and symmetrical. They are about to shed their needles, for they are the woodchucks of the conifers, the only ones in our area which “hibernate” in the Winter. Their tufted needles will soon fall in a yellow shower and the bright tan of their branches will stand out against the grays and browns of the Winter hillsides.

  As a species, the larches are among the oldest trees of the chilly northlands. They have seen ice ages come and go; the earth has wrinkled and convulsed beneath their roots. And in the briefer time of man the larches have given their strength and warmth to his house and his fire. Their trunks are long and slim and their wood is hard and resinous; they resist rotting and they burn with a long, hot flame. Small wonder that man learned long ago to build on sills of larch and to keel and frame the longboats of adventure with timbers of larch.

  Those who would personify it call the larch a cautious tree; but it were better described as stoutly individual. Though it belongs to the family of evergreens, it sheds its needles. A conifer, its cones are inconspicuous and its seeds so small that they tempt only a very hungry squirrel. A tree of the rocky upland, it occasionally invades the lesser swamp and thrives there. In Spring it blossoms inconspicuously in March or April, but it takes its time about putting forth any new needles. All Summer long it is a beautiful spire of green, but by November it is resolutely deciduous. In Winter it shrugs off the snow. Thus it lives to a stout old age.

  Up in the edge of the woods, safely remote from passers-by, bittersweet dangles its clustered berries, their orange husks now open and the still brighter orange berries within now vivid. They are like late November flowers in the leaf-crisp evening of the year, brighter than the haws of the wild roses, far more generous than the lacquer-red berries of their creeper neighbors, the partridge berries. Bittersweet berries and sumac heads are the baubles and bangles of the brushland.

  Bittersweet is a shrubby vine that coils and twines its way up any handy support, but particularly up the seedlings of birch and wild cherry, strangling its supporter but lifting its own head high. Its flowers are of no particular consequence, small, greenish white and lost among the neighbors in flowery June. Its color is saved for the time of ripeness, when neighbors have bowed to the frost. Then the bittersweet comes into its own.

  The common name seems to have been borrowed from the nightshade, which came from Europe, is not really a twining vine, and has poisonous berries about the same size but redder than those of our native bittersweet. Those who have tasted them say that nightshade berries are first sweet to the tongue, then acridly bitter; hence, bitter-sweet. But nightshade is Solarium dulcamara, in botanist language, and distant kin of the potato. Our climbing bittersweet is botanically Celastrun scandens, a Greek-Latin combination meaning an evergreen that climbs. Our native species is no evergreen, but it has an Asian relative which is. Since nightshade is poisonous to cows, we root it out; since bittersweet is beautiful, we let it grow where it will in the woods.

  Last summer’s oriole nest hangs high in the elm, in plain sight now that the leaves are gone. The orioles, too, are gone, and after a frosty night the nest sways in the morning sun like a gray purse spangled with brilliants. Snow will come, in due time, and fill the pouch where eggs were hovered and hatched. Winter gales will whip at it, and still the nest will remain, anchored to the slender twigs, a fragment of Summer gone and a reminder of Spring to come, of bright plumage and rippling song.

  This morning the blue jays were busy pecking seeds from the frosted apples still hanging in the tree beside the woodshed, pausing now and then to proclaim themselves possessors of this November world. Two of the jays flew from there to the elm, perched near the oriole nest, surveyed it from all angles, and began to jeer. Perhaps not at the nest, but that’s the way it appeared. A jay builds no such nest, and it is useless to speculate on why a blue jay lacks the nest-weaver’s skill.

  I watched those jays for ten minutes, and the temptation was strong to draw broad conclusions about art, industry, envy, song, raucous noises, and the habit of jeering. But such conclusions are not justified. Birds are birds, and men are men, presumably with their own reasons for being. The orioles came and wove their nest and raised a brood and sang sweet songs, and now they have gone away. The jays did the same thing, in their own way. Who am I to draw conclusions about them? But I do have my preferences.

  The leaves have fallen, except on the reluctant oaks, and the hilltops lined with ash trees and maples have a strangely trimmed and hair-cut look. Walking up the valley today it seemed to me that the ridge might have been clipped with gigantic shears, so even was its fringe of trees. So I climbed among the rocks for half a mile to reach the top and see for myself if all the trees up there were of an age. They weren’t. When I stood among them I could see that they were the customary growth, young and old and of varying height.

  Then I came down the hillside to the valley and looked up once more. There they were, shorn smooth and even against the sky. And I looked around at a dozen other hilltops. All, every hill in sight, had a crew haircut.

  There was a heavy white frost last night, and here along the river we had a spectacular sunrise. Every bush and weed stem was outlined in crystal, every blade of grass was crisp and gleaming white. The posts of the pasture fence were studded with brilliants and the wires between them were barbed with jewels. The garage had a roof with a wondrous geometric pattern, the shingles outlined in frost. The rail which carries its sliding door was crystal from end to end.

  Thus was this world at sunrise, dazzling, with the dark, slow flow of the river almost inky.

  The sun climbed swiftly. Within an hour the frost began to turn to water drops on the goldenrod stems. The sunward side of the garage roof darkened and there was a drip from the eaves. The grass turned wet and glistening green. But not all the grass. For several hours there were long white shadows across the lawn and out into the pasture beyond, a strange November reversal of the usual pattern. Where the sun did not strike directly the frost remained. The blocky pattern of garage and house and woodshed and barn and corn crib lay on the west side till midmorning. Even more spectacular, the white shadows of the trees, leafless though they were, lay like white ghosts across the grass.

  By eleven o’clock they were gone, all those shadows and all the hoarfrost. But for a time we had the white shadow of days to come, the cold, glittering forecast of December and January.

  I watched a crow go winging past this morning and he looked twice as black as he did two months ago. But it was the same crow, or at least one of the same flock, that has been here all year. Maybe its plumage is new, but it is the same color. The difference is in the background, which is now gray and brown and slightly misty today. The crow is no blacker, but he looks so in this new setting. When the snow comes, he will look blacker still.

  The same is true of the blue jays which spend half their time filching from the corn crib. They are bluer than the bluebirds were in May. But the blue jay’s color
doesn’t change either. Again, it is a matter of background. The eye is no longer dazzled by the brilliance of a tanager or a goldfinch, and there is little green and no bright blossom to dim the jay’s feathers.

  Come snow time and the red crown of the downy woodpecker will look brilliant, simply because I can see it so clearly. And the pine siskin’s little yellow rump patch will stand out like a yellow warbler in early Summer.

  Color becomes relative as the seasons shift. Brilliance is less a matter of color itself than one of contrast. The less there is to see, the more one sees of it. The eyes sharpen as the days turn chill and the woods turn gray.

  The gray wind of November today whipped the low scud across the sky and sent the fallen leaves swirling through the woodland. Had it been a bright day I could almost have seen a silvery sheen to such a wind; but it is a dull day and it moans and whispers in the big spruce outside my window. There is a chill in the air and the wind has a whetted edge.

  This wind of November is almost as restless as the winds of March. But it roars and whistles over the hills from another direction. March wind sweeps up the valley, with a promise of April and blossom. This wind whoops down the valley, with the weight of oncoming Winter behind it.

  Put rain in a November wind and it has the lash and bite of a sleet storm. Put a warm sun behind it and it is somewhat tempered, but I know it is only biding its time, waiting for reinforcements. At its best, I never mistake it for the gusts of September or the breeze that brings April.

  The pines lean before this wind and make the whole mountainside sigh. Dead branches are torn from popple and ash and hickory; tomorrow there will be a fresh litter all through the woodland. The woods are being strewn with outworn limbs, to be snow-buried and rotted into the soil whence they sprang. And here on the river the wind piles up an unnatural surf, eating at the banks and gnawing at the rooted soil. It flattens the tall grass at the edge of the pasture, and if the hills were less firmly rooted it would flatten them into the valleys. It is a primal force, this wind of November, one with the tides and the ice and the very spin of the earth.