This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  They, too, got Winter-weary. They had their troubles, and they were impatient about them, down in their hearts. But, partly because they lived close to the land and understood the leisure of changing seasons, they put up with them and saw them through. Spring was not only a relief from Winter; it was also work, hard work and long hours, planting for the Summer’s growth. No year, no season, was without its pains and worries. But there was comfort, even security, in the knowledge of change. No troubles lasted forever, nor did any weather, good or bad. Winter ended, eventually, and Spring came. Thus it was and thus it always will be.

  I hear that the social planners are after us leisure-wasters again. We seem to be a menace to society. And our reformation depends entirely on our adopting hobbies. It’s a sin to loaf. Not a moral sin, maybe, but a sin against society. Besides, the social planners need something to do or they will have leisure to waste.

  I have tried to run down the origin of the word loaf in the sense of taking it easy; but even the lexicographers seem unable to trace it. I have a hunch that it goes back to some language even earlier than Sanskrit, and I also have a hunch that the cryptographers who unravel the mysteries of ancient hieroglyphics will eventually find a clay tablet, perhaps from ancient Sumer, with a social planner’s complaint about loafers. The planners and the loafers have been at it for a long, long time.

  The heartening thing about it, to me, is that man continues to cherish his leisure and to insist on using it as he wishes. Also, I get great comfort from knowing that some of the best thoughts of all time have been generated by men who would be classed by the social planners as loafers and leisure-wasters. I’d as soon be a member of an ant colony as of a society in which a man didn’t dare loaf now and then, just sit and think or, if he chose to, just sit.

  From time to time I have theorized about new-fashioned Winters and climate changes, but when a cold air mass moved in from the Arctic last night and found a warm air mass with plenty of humidity in its way my theories were left shivering and up to their knees in snow. Winter is still Winter. Now I know.

  Some of the hill farmers said last Fall that we were just about due for a bone-chiller. They said it rather dourly. And I noticed that most of the folks around used the mild days of December to replenish the woodpile, just as Albert used last June to cut hay on one of the pastures where the cows couldn’t keep up with the grass. It’s something of a local habit, to make hay and cut wood when they’re available. “Hay keeps,” as Albert says succinctly.

  Folks are using those woodpiles and their extra hay today, and glad they have them. They shivered plenty on their way to do the morning milking, and they frowned at the thermometer at dawn, as I did. But back of the shivers and frowns a good many of us have a feeling of elemental propriety, a feeling that things even out. That droughts end, floods subside, ice melts, and Winter is Winter.

  That evening-out process is probably more important than the day-to-day temperature or the total snowfall, for it tends to put a good many things back in perspective. For a time, at least, we know without a doubt or quibble that a good furnace, plenty of oil, and a snow shovel are more important than a machine that can fly to the moon or Mars.

  I have been wasting my leisure again. I’ve been out at the shop going over some planks of native black cherry which Jerry gave me, thinking about turning a few shallow bowls on the lathe. But mostly I was doing nothing constructive, nothing more worthwhile than admiring the wood, looking at the grain, speculating on the seasons that tree knew during its lifetime.

  Those planks came from a big tree that grew where someone wanted to build a road. It was on Jerry’s land and Jerry liked the living tree, but road-builders would rather cut down a tree than draw a curve. So the tree was cut. But Jerry got the log, had it cut into lengths and carted to a sawmill. The planks from it have been seasoning in his garage for several years. And I was thinking today that a few individual salad bowls might be a pleasant reminder of that tree on Jerry’s and Letty’s dinner table.

  Black cherry is a hard wood. I have turned it before. It is harder than maple, but with a somewhat prettier grain and color, to my way of thinking. These planks are nicely variegated, light wood and dark, the dark the heartwood. I laid out the blanks for half a dozen bowls, in pencil, but I hesitate to cut into the wood. A plank has an entity all its own. But as I looked at one I knew that it had several bowls in it, awaiting only the sharp chisel to free them from the surrounding wood. What sculptor was it who said the same thing about a block of marble?

  I laid out the bowls, then went out and watched a tree sparrow for twenty minutes. Maybe I should have cut into that plank and got started on something really constructive.

  The sparrows make late Winter a pleasanter time for any countryman. Not English sparrows, the raucous little city gamins, but American sparrows, the song sparrow, the tree sparrow, the whitethroat, the pine siskin, the field sparrow, the occasional chipping sparrow. Finches, all of them, in the big classification of the ornithologists, but sparrows to most of us. They come to the feeding station, they are busy as bees on the hillside where the weeds still stand with a few seeds, and they chatter eagerly in the most untoward weather. On warm days they sing a little, foretaste of the lively songs they will be singing after March has made its turn.

  In its old meaning, the word sparrow meant “to flutter.” They are flutterers, all of them, adept on the wing. See a flock of them sweep up the hillside, wheel into the wind against a gray sky, and it lifts your heart. In such a flock I see the speckled breasts, the solid gray breasts, and the breasts that seem striped, for the sparrows do not persist in groups of only one kind. I even see a flash of yellow among them, that bright little patch at the base of the pine siskin’s tail.

  They are seed-eaters, all of them. They flock happily to our feeding station. There they eat millet, mostly shucking off the outer shell with quick, tongue-rolling, beak-chomping motions. Those papery shells cling around their beaks, like a small child’s oatmeal around its mouth. They eat, and at no visible sign they all take frenzied wing, fill the air with their chatter, and swoop up the hillside.

  The river flows faster now and the brooks coming down the mountainside leap and gurgle all afternoon. The river is still black, however, in contrast to its icy banks where snow still lies in the brush. But it is live water, refusing now to be confined by ice. And all the water is carrying away, hour by hour, the deep frost of the long night of Winter.

  When I walk beside the river I feel the tang of sharp air, morning and evening; but when the sun rides high I know there is warmth ahead. And when I walk beside one of the brooks I know not only the quick movement of water but the surge of forces that will be livening all the earth in a few more weeks. Even the trickles that seep from beneath the drifts on the mountain are live waters, the sustenance for buds and shoots that await a warmer sun. The persistent ice is eaten away. The earth itself gives up its frost to the waters that make their steady way down all the seams and crevices toward the valleys where brooks join rivers.

  I stopped past the marsh today and there is a movement of water even there, a slow flow that creeps among the reeds and eases past the root tangles of willow brush. It is there, in the sluggish waters, that Spring will come first, for the marshes generate their own vernal warmth. Frogs’ eggs will lie milky in the pools, skunk cabbage will spread its leaves, and dogtooth violets will put forth their mottled leaves and golden blossoms.

  But such matters are for later. Today the waters ooze and flow and the ice recedes. The grass beside Millstone brook begins to quicken, but the green is for tomorrow. Today the waters are alive and moving. That is enough for today.

  There have been bluebirds around all Winter. I haven’t seen them, but Glen and Su, who live just down the valley, tell me they have seen them near their house almost every morning. They come soon after dawn, they say, and perch in a tall tree, as though watching for something—for Spring, perhaps. Then they leave, and if they appear again that day it i
s at dusk. They return and perch in that same tree again, and look.

  Both bluebirds and robins often spend the Winter this far north, finding shelter in the brushy tangles and foraging for food. They almost never visit the feeding stations, yet they survive the storms, the bitter cold, and the icebound feeding grounds. Nobody seems to know just why these particular individuals out of the vast numbers of robins and bluebirds disobey the summons to migrate. It could happen, of course, that from them eventually will evolve a nonmigrating subspecies which will adapt its diet to whatever food our Winters afford. But that is something for the geneticists to ponder.

  I noted last Fall that we saw bluebirds here after the juncos had arrived. Perhaps they were of that group which has wintered just down the valley. But we haven’t seen them here since November, and I never get down to Glen’s place at dawn as I probably would if I were a dedicated bird watcher.

  The beech trees still cling to their brown papery leaves, or at least to a share of them, and March is only two weeks ahead. So do some of the white oaks, making russet splotches in the woods. But when I look closely at the beeches I see lance-tip buds half an inch long, and there are bud clusters at the tips of the oak twigs, more reluctant in their growth.

  There is a theory that the clinging leaves shelter the new buds from the rigors of Winter and, indeed, the oaks do cup their buds with the leaf stems. But there is little shelter in the clasp of a beech leaf. Yet it is the beech which swells its buds earlier, so the theory sags under the weight of what I see with my own eyes.

  When I peeled back a beech bud today I stripped off layer after layer of soft brown tissue, and at its heart I found a feathery tuft—a twin tuft, in fact—of white, silky catkin-to-be. This will become the staminate flower of the beech, which will appear in May along with the first leaves. The pistillate flowers will also open at that time, but they will be small and inconspicuous; their time of display comes in the Fall, when they have fattened into soft-prickled burs enclosing sweet-flavored beechnuts.

  The reluctant oaks are more chary of their secrets. The buds are very small and tightly closed. Even if I could pry into the green mystery I should need a strong glass to identify the nucleus of leaf and flower. They bide their time. But meanwhile both oak and beech cling to last year’s leaves, rustling in the wind and keeping their own conservative counsel.

  On this mild afternoon the ladybirds were out sunning themselves on the walls and around the windows of the house. Ladybirds, of course, are those small orange beetles with black polka dots on their backs. They have been around all Winter, sleeping in cracks and coming out, even in January, to warm themselves from time to time. If we had ivy on these walls the ladybirds would be twice as numerous, for they feed on aphids, and aphids feed on ivy among other things.

  Ladybirds, which technically are Coccinellidae, have strange Winter habits. In California they migrate to the mountain tops for the cold season, gathering there in such vast numbers that horticulturists sometimes gather them literally by the bushel, take them to the lowlands, keep them in cold storage until the growing season, then release them to clean the aphids from the fruit and vegetable crops. Brought out of cold storage, they soon return to full life and appetite. And in a minor way they do the same thing here, creeping out of their hiding places, warming themselves in the sun, and starting their Spring cycle of life much earlier than most other insects.

  In a way, it is a sign of Spring when they become active. But not an infallible sign. They can and do go back to sleep when the sun goes down or a chilly wave strikes. They can sleep for days, even weeks, as late as March.

  Ladybirds are quite harmless to humans and most helpful to gardens. Not as much can be said for some of their cousins. The bean beetles, for instance, and the squash beetles. They, too, hibernate. But not long enough, not nearly long enough.

  I say that I hear the voice of change in the sound of running water. Yet this ancient, inevitable shift and change of the elements that comes to any land of changing seasons is basically an inanimate process.

  I think of it in animate terms because out of it comes new life rousing from a period of dormancy. The time of rest is a time of silence, and the time of life stirring is a time of sound, so I think of this change in terms of my own living. We give voice to the inanimate wind and song to flowing water, probably because we would hear voices and listen to music. We are a talkative race and we somehow evolved song out of our emotional heartbeat. If the growing leaves and opening buds made audible sounds we would no doubt hear words and music in them.

  We have had a mild February thus far, and we have waited, almost holding our breath, for it to change. This morning there was the change. I wakened to find four inches of snow. It came in the secrecy of the night. But the temperature was just 30, and it stayed there most of the day, so there was little melting. So I must defer my hope of seeing the first bulb-tips. I have been expecting them to poke through almost any day, at least the white-veined little spears of the crocuses.

  Those who lived here before we came gave us a welcome inheritance of bulbs, to which we have added year by year. What a game of it we played, at first! Nondas had said, with one of those encompassing waves of her hand, “Watch for crocuses there, and daffodils there, and tulips over there. I put in quite a few of them.” As it turned out, “there” was a most indefinite area. Daffodils came thrusting up in the grass ten feet from the flower beds. Beside the front porch, where we had thought there were dozens of bulb’s, was a thin fringing of crocuses. Beneath the pear tree, where we knew there was a lily of the valley bed, there were also tulips. And squills were mixed with the roses.

  The strangest thing of all was to see a patch of lawn turn green before the last snow melted. It turned out to be over the septic tank and it was warmed, like a hotbed, by the hot water from the kitchen sink. Daffodils bloomed there two weeks ahead of those anywhere else. I had expected to find those daffodils up by next week; but now we are snow-covered again.

  Up in the attic today, looking for a book in the overflow from the downstairs library, I heard a wasp out and buzzing. The sound of a wasp buzz is completely characteristic, far different from that of a fly, for instance. The difference rises from the speed of wing vibration, which sets up sound waves.

  The sound waves made by insect wings are the means of measuring the number of wing strokes they make in flight. Some ingenious researcher, with a knowledge of physics as well as entomology, matched the sound of a flying insect with that of a musical tuning fork. Tuning forks are carefully calibrated, the number of their vibrations known. Once the insect buzz was matched with a definite tuning fork, there was the answer to how fast that particular insect moves its wings.

  Out of that research came the knowledge that a common house fly makes 330 strokes a second, nearly 20,000 a minute. A wasp makes less than a third that many wing strokes, around 6,000 a minute. Dragonflies, the strongest fliers among insects, are much slower, only 1,600 strokes a minute. All these wing-beats or vibrations are well within the range of the human ear, which can distinguish sounds with as few as 30 vibrations a second and as many as 20,000. Both above and below those rates the vibrations are inaudible to most human ears, though an occasional person is sensitive to sounds above that range, as dogs are. I know one woman whose ears are so sensitive in the ultrasonic ranges that she is physically distressed by the vibrations of a noiseless dog-whistle.

  But we can all hear a wasp. And take warning.

  This afternoon the truckman came to fill the oil tank for our furnace and said that his mother, who is in Florida, reports that the robins which have been numerous there all Winter now seem to have moved out. She hasn’t seen a robin in a week. The oil man said, “I guess they’re on their way up here. A day like this, you begin to look for them.”

  Not an hour after the oil man had left I glanced out the window into the side yard, and there was a robin! I went to the window and saw two robins. While I watched, two more came, drifting down like ligh
t airplanes to a graceful landing. They looked around, stretched their necks, and made short, quick runs, so typical of robins. Then another. Then two more. And there we had seven robins on our side lawn.

  I called Barbara and we stood for ten minutes watching them. You might have thought they were rare, exotic visitors. They found something to eat, though obviously not angleworms, and they ran about the grass as though merely looking over a remembered place, putting it once more in their frame of reference, as the current phrase has it. Then they all took wing, as at a signal, and flew past the apple trees and into the middle pasture. We watched them there for several minutes, then said to each other, “It’s coming. Spring is really coming.”

  It isn’t really Spring; it’s only February on somewhat better than usual behavior, and if I were a robin I doubt that I would stay here and wait for it to warm up. I haven’t seen the robins today, so maybe they feel the same way about a raw day.

  Being a man, not a bird, I went out to the shop this afternoon and turned a couple of cherry wood bowls on the lathe. I was sanding them when I heard a door slam at the big barn nearby. A gusty wind had come up and a latch had come loose. I repaired the latch and while I was there I went up into the loft.

  The loft is full of fine fragrance for anyone on a raw February day, mostly the smell of hay and straw. Albert had forty tons or so of hay in there this year, but he has used more than half of it. The hay smell takes me back to boyhood, for it smells of June and hay fields I knew years ago. There is also the smell of oat straw, which I cannot describe but which I can identify anywhere. There are a few tons of baled oat straw there, too.