The owl hoots among the hemlocks up the mountainside occasionally, and now and then we hear the fine-spun yapping of a fox. But their voices only punctuate the silence, which lies deep in the valley where the frogs, not so long ago, thumped the darkness. Even the brooks are muted, frozen into inaction.
The woodchuck sleeps. Chipmunks drowse in their fluff-lined beds. Gray squirrels go chatterless about their treetop rounds. The silent rabbit avoids even the rustling leaf.
December’s sounds are earth sounds and the sound of the chilling wind, the swish of drifting snow. Sometimes in the night I waken and hear a faint groan far up the mountainside, as though the rocks were moving in their beds, nudged by the slow expansion of the silent frost. And often I hear the slow crunch of ice on the river. The year wanes, but it does not creak on its hinges.
Of all the winter birds I know, the clown of the lot is the nuthatch. Not that he shows any sign of conscious clowning; far from it! The nuthatch is as serious a bird as you will meet at any feeding station. That is a part of his absurdity. He is short and fat. His bill is ridiculously long, esthetically speaking, and upturned. His tail is too short. So is his neck. And his beady black eyes are set so close together that he looks nearsighted. To cap it all, he doesn’t know that a bird doesn’t go down a tree trunk headfirst. Not knowing, he turns his stubby tail to the sky and blithely walks down headfirst, searching for bugs in the bark as he goes. Maybe other birds can’t do it, but the nuthatch can and does.
And his voice! Technically, and by ornithological definition, the nuthatch is a songbird. He has vocal organs. But what does he do with them? “Yark, yark, yark.” Slightly petulant, questioning. No melody. Just “Yark, yark, yark,” always in the same key, always the same note, whether he is gloating over a fresh piece of suet or warning a chickadee to stand off. In Spring the nuthatch does have what passes for a song, something like “Too, too, too,” but as toneless as the yark-call, though in a different key.
None of this is to belittle the nuthatch, an exemplary bird if there ever was one. He is not quarrelsome or noisy or pilfering. He is a good neighbor and a welcome Winter guest, and he eats his full share of noxious bugs the year around. But he is a funny bird, nevertheless.
We grow a few herbs, and when I go to the attic now I meet fine old fragrances, the tang of sage and rosemary and thyme, principally, but also the essence of dill and basil. Thus we preserve, on a small scale, some of the arts of the old herbalists. It is nothing like the drying rooms of an herb grower not far from here who makes a business of such flavors; but even there I miss some of the old standbys from the open fields. The old art, and much of the old knowledge of useful wildlings, fades and vanishes.
Who gathers yarrow today to dry and steep for a stimulating tonic? Who dries hoarhound to brew a tonic tea in April? Boneset once provided a hot infusion relied upon to break up a cold or ease malarial fever. The wild cherry can be found in the woodland, but few gather its bark to dry at home and steep for a mild sedative. Pennyroyal once provided a remedy for colic. Who uses it now, fresh from the field or attic? And dittany—once it was the cure for “anything in anyone.” Dittany is now an all-but-forgotten herb.
Unknowing, we do get some of the more effective herbs from the drugstore under new names. Science does catch up with the old arts, even though it does leave some pleasant trappings behind. Science makes the best of the old herbalists look like fumbling amateurs. Grant that. But what sweet-scented memories can be roused by a shot of penicillin? There was a time when just the smell of boneset tea could cure a cold. Can the smell of antihistamine do that? The answer is no, and both Dr. John and Dr. Jim agree, though they have little faith in boneset tea. But I find that both of them prescribe rhubarb and soda for an upset stomach.
Our snow is almost gone and the ice has broken up on the river. The weather has settled down to gray cold, night temperatures in the low 20s, the brief sun warming the day lit hours just above the freezing mark. The low places in the pasture are heaved by frost which crunches underfoot and the brook near the garden is a leaping thread of black water between its ice banks.
I have been calculating and have proved to my own satisfaction that December is the shortest month of the year. True, December has thirty-one days; but can you call days those hurried little spans of daylight? By generous total, December has only 288 hours of daylight, and that includes those times when the sun sulks behind a mass of clouds all day long. Even March can muster that many hours of daylight in twenty-four days. And June does that well by us in its first nineteen days.
What is a December day, anyway? Nine hours of daylight, with a few minutes left over at each end to turn the lights on and off. And fifteen hours of darkness. With a moon, to be sure, and a great many stars. But darkness, just the same. The countryman does all the morning chores by artificial light and does the same in the evening. The city worker or commuter sees his home only in darkness or at best in the murk of dawn or dusk. Only on four weekends, most years, does he have a chance to watch the sun dart across the southern quadrant of the sky.
Here it is the tenth of December, and by sundown tonight we will have had only ninety-two hours of daylight, about the same amount that June will bring in its first six days.
Of all the leafless trees in my Winter landscape, the most eye-catching and spectacular is the white birch, particularly when seen against the grays, and browns of a snowless hillside. It has a grace of line, a slimness of bole, a clean, sleek look that is sheer beauty. I have one clump, at the far corner of the middle pasture, that has seven trunks growing from a common root, and each trunk is at least a foot through at the butt, several of them a foot and a half. (This birch clump, of course, doesn’t really belong to me at all; it belongs to a family of gray, squirrels and has been theirs for years.)
From the earliest days, the white birch has been, a warehouse and source of elementary necessities for both the settler and the woodland wanderer. Its bark makes usable paper, tinder for fire in the wet woods, provides nourishment enough to keep, a man or a beast from starving; and from it came the canoe, shaped and sheathed by the tough, enduring bark itself before man adapted cedar and canvas and, eventually, aluminum, to the same purpose. Wigwams were roofed with that bark, by whites and Indians alike, and buckets and boxes were made from it. In springtime the rising sap of the white birch was boiled down, like maple sap, for a syrup and a sugar that sweetened the woodsman’s diet and disposition. The white inner wood, easily worked, provided a whole cupboardful of wooden ware for the pioneer and is still used for everything from spools to bowls.
I can’t imagine these hills without the white grace of the birch against the gaunt Winter hillsides. Other birches have their own virtues, but the white birch is the noblest of them all. In Spring it rouges the gray hillside with its buds, in Summer it is a whispering canopy of shade, and now in Winter it is simply beautiful, white beauty in a drab gray world.
I had to go down to the city on a bootless errand and it would have been a lost day had I not met a dour stranger on the train. He was my seatmate and he asked my business, and he said sadly but firmly that there could be no worthwhile writing or art or even philosophy in this era of trouble and uncertainty. Rallying to dissent, I cited the days of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, which were not only a time of tremendous ferment and achievement in the arts and in human thinking but were also times of tremendous troubles. The Spanish forces were overrunning Europe and threatened momentarily to land on the English coast. War was a matter of daily concern and London was a hotbed of speculation and seditious plot. Old moorings of religion and simple certainties were gone or going. The universities were full of dissident talk. The royal court had its doubtful loyalties.
Yet out of this ferment came strength and greatness, and out of it came lasting art created by big and questing minds. There were those of uncertain faith, certainly; there were also Shakespeare, Spenser and Bacon, and there were Frobisher and Drake. Industry throve. Bondage of human beings
diminished. Human rights were increased. True, there was cruelty and poverty and neglect; but by the standards of that day, the only way to appraise the period, great achievements were made. There were tremendous challenges, and there were those to meet them.
I did not persuade my unhappy seatmate, but it was good to have to rally these facts for myself. Too often we forget the substance of the history we once knew without pausing to find its meaning.
Last night we went out to walk on the frozen roads and when we came back I looked at the charts and found what I had suspected. Daylight now is almost at its minimum for the year. It will shorten only another two minutes or so between now and the Winter Solstice. The evening change, in fact, has already begun, for the year’s earliest sunset is now past. Sunrise will continue to lag for another two weeks.
Thus the year balances its accounts, and what I said a few days ago about December’s daylight stands only as a facetious comment. In our latitude we know that each year brings the time when not only the candle but the hearth fire must burn at both ends of the day, symbol not of waste but of warmth and comfort. It is for this time, if we live close to the land, that we lay up the firewood and the fodder. Now we pay for the long days of Summer, pay in the simple currency of daylight. Hour for hour, the accounts are now balanced.
And yet, the short days provide their own bonus. The snows come, and dusk and dawn are like no other time of the year. We come to a long Winter night, as last night was, when the moon rides high over a white world and the darkness thins away. The full-moon night is as long as the longest span of sunlit day in midsummer. And the snowy world gleams with an almost incandescent shimmer.
Year to year, we remember the short days and tend to forget the long nights when the moon stands high over a cold and brittle white world. Not only the moon nights, but the star nights. Who would not cut wood and burn a candle for a few such nights each year?
The Christmas ferns remain green in the woods, bright patches of foliage which tempt the gatherer of holiday greens and remind me that anemones whitened a certain place last April and that violets purpled a particular spot.
There are a number of evergreen ferns but this one, usually called Aspidium acrostichoides by the botanists, belongs in the old legends about the Nativity. Among the other wonders of that night, all the plants mingled in the hay in the holy stable put forth their blossoms in celebration. All, that is, except the ferns. And, say the legends, because the ferns failed to blossom and add their fragrance to that holy scene, they were condemned never again to bear flowers.
Thus the legends. But there must be more to it than that. Still thinking in terms of legendry, I believe that there must have been a frond or two of fern in the stable that tried to bloom that night, a few fronds which managed to turn green in celebration. It was the best they could do, being ferns. And since the utmost one can achieve is all that is ever asked, shouldn’t the lowly ferns have been rewarded, even meagerly?
No legend of the Nativity should dwell on punishment, not even the legend of the ferns. They tried. They did their best. And that is why, it seems to me, some of them, like the Christmas fern, have their green fronds to offer in celebration now.
We went out today to gather greens to deck the doorway, the green of life in the midst of Winter, symbol of hope and faith reborn.
One need not go into the history of the custom or investigate its adoption as a part of the Christmas ritual to understand the aptness as well as the beauty of the evergreen tradition. The pine, the spruce and the hemlock, as well as their more venerable kin, the ground cedar, ground pine and club moss, know no leafless season. For them, there is no time of naked exposure to the gray winds and the white frosts. On their boughs and branches the green of life and continuity remain for any eye to see, throughout all the months and all the years. Small wonder that the ancients turned to the evergreen when the day shrank to a few hours of feeble sunlight, finding in its undiscouraged green new strength for their own belief that no Winter lasts forever.
And even the most ancient of the ancients must have known this, for the pines have been on earth more years than I can count without turning to the charts of geology. Fifty million years, some say, and others say a hundred million years, dealing in numbers which, in terms of one man’s life, lose all meaning. The first man saw the pines; put it that way. And when man first saw them, the pines were already old.
So we went forth today and brought in the evergreen boughs of pine and hemlock, and festoons of partridge berry and ground cedar, feeling a kinship with enduring things. They help us to remember, and to believe, and to catch, if only fleetingly, a sense of hope and understandable eternity.
Another light snow came in the night and this morning Barbara saw two grouse at the feeding station. She couldn’t believe her eyes, but there they were, the two of them pecking away like barnyard hens, fluffed against the cold. They looked as big as Leghorn hens as they sat hunched in the feeder, crowding its ordinarily ample space.
They had come down from the mountain where we occasionally see them, driven down by the snow, no doubt. Friends of ours twenty miles from here have grouse in their woods that come down to their house occasionally in Winter but never feed there. They prefer to perch in the apple trees and feed on buds, to the detriment of blossom and fruit. But our friends prefer to have the grouse, and I notice that they always have plenty of apples, too, when harvest comes.
Our grouse are skittish. Not because they are hunted, for we never hunt them; they are too rare a bird in this area to be taken for the pot. They came this morning and fed, and when Barbara moved, there in the living room, to get a better look at them, they saw her motion and flew away. Now the chickadees and tree sparrows are back in their usual place. But now that the grouse have come once, they will come again. This is the first year they have come to the feeding station, though we have occasionally seen them out at the corn crib searching for kernels the jays and the squirrels left on the ground.
One of those strange, violent little storms swept across the lower end of the valley yesterday and took down half a dozen trees. One of them was in a dooryard, and when we passed there this morning the whole place was changed by the absence of that one tree. We lost no trees here, but I am remembering the time when we lost a big maple from another dooryard in such a storm.
There is something about the loss of a tree that almost defies explanation, particularly if it is in a dooryard or at a familiar roadside. We were far less aware of that tree standing than we were after it had gone. Yet everything around a tree is affected by it, the grass, the bushes, the birds, even the insects. Even the paths we used had adapted themselves to the tree’s presence.
Then the tree was gone, and every time we looked out the window or passed that end of the house we were aware of the absence. The sound of the wind was subtly altered. When snow came, it drifted differently. The next Summer’s shade had an unfamiliar pattern. The next Fall’s colors were altered. Yet when we walked we still followed, by habit, the path around the spot where that tree once stood.
It made good firewood, but there are few subtle memories in an armload of split maple for the hearth. There is no shade, no Summer sigh of the wind, no oriole or robin song. There is nothing but firewood, and eventually ashes. And we went to the window again and looked out and saw strange stars through the gap where the tree had stood. It was almost as though we were looking through a hole in the roof of the house.
As far back as the race memories and ancient legends of mankind run, the Winter solstice has been a time of questioning and wonder, followed by rediscovery of basic certainties. To see the daylight steadily shorten and the nights lengthen and deepen with cold, was to feel the approach of doom. To see the sun stand still and then swing north once more was and still is to know that the cold gray of Winter must pass, that hope and belief are neither futile nor foolish. Hope is easy and belief is simple in a warm green world. Winter is the time when man most needs the securities of unshaken ce
rtainty, whether it is the Winter of the soul or the harsh Winter of the year. And as surely as the Winter solstice brings some understanding of his universe, the spiritual solstice brings to man some understanding of himself. He seeks securities, and the more he seeks the more he must know that there are no new securities anywhere, but only the old ones rediscovered.
So comes the time of rediscovery. For though I may define security in a dozen different ways, the ultimate definition leads to the inner man, to myself. There must lie that certainty which gives life its meaning; and there also lies doubt, the depth of cold and darkness. I must know Winter if I am to know Spring and Summer. And here is Winter, with its own wondering and its quiet and its own discoveries, its solstice and its turn.
Winter starlight has the deep fireglow of eternity, the unending gleam of wonder. To walk abroad on such nights is to walk in the midst of infinity. There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things; for the wind itself is full of starlight, even as the frosted earth underfoot, starlight and endless time and exalted wonder.
My eye is caught by the red-gold star we call Arcturus, and wonder grows. Even as the ancients, I strain for a closer look through this peephole, this spark-burn in the blanket of night, hoping for the slightest glimpse into the dazzling brilliance of Beyond. I turn to the star called Betelgeuse, even redder than Arcturus, and I accept the factual truths of the astronomers and yet wonder if they constitute the whole, the ultimate truth. Time, and distance, and wonder—and I walk up this valley in the midst of eternity.